How many bombs and rockets did NATO unleash on Libya?
NATO won't tell you, and you can google and google all day without finding that number.
The closest approximation is 14,402 "strike sorties," compiled by the tireless researchers at the Guardian's DataBlog.
But on the raw data page, we also learn that "Strike sorties are intended to identify and engage appropriate targets, but do not necessarily deploy munitions each time."
So what can know for sure?
Nothing.
Then what's the best estimate we can make, when we ask ourselves...
How many bombs and rockets did NATO unleash on Libya?
And my particular answer is...
I have no idea, not even within a margin of error on the order of 10,000.
And isn't that miserably disappointing!
But wait!
What I have instead is a lower bound!
And that lower bound is 14,402, and it's obvious enough to anybody who ever met a fighter pilot or ever saw an air strike.
Let's ask ourselves two simple questions:
A: How many times does a fighter pilot fly out with a target assigned and then fly back without hitting anything?
B: And how many times does an air strike involve releasing multiple munitions?
Those jets are bristling with munitions!
Is B greater than A?
Is an elephant bigger than an armadillo?
So assuming for a moment that an elephant is bigger than an armadillo, and the average "strike sortie" struck at least one target, we can ask ourselves a slightly more important question:
What the heck did all those bombs and missiles hit?
Isn't Libya a very big country, the 17th largest in the world, extending over more than 600,000 square miles?
Yes indeed! It's a very big country, but human beings mostly dwell on the arable one percent of it.
They don't live in the desert!
They live in the cities or clustered around oases like Marzuq...
....embedded (along with a couple of nearby oases) in a vast sea of nothing.
NATO didn't bomb the nothing.
NATO bombed the inhabited part of Libya, which is just about the same size in square miles as Massachusetts, and with just about the same population of 6,700,000 human beings.
So if you want to imagine what happened to Libya, imagine 14,000 bombs and rockets raining down on Massachusetts.
And what would Harvard Square look like today?
Hillary Clinton led the charge to send US planes to join this party, and President Obama rode the NATO war-wagon to the bitter end in spite of strenuous objections from Congressional Republicans.
Why?
To support an Islamist insurgency that nobody even remotely understood in 2011 or understands today?
When a group of Islamic terrorists with links to al Qaeda assaulted the American consulate in Benghazi killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, many Libyans hoped it was an aberration. But 18 months later, religious violence is growing and the emerging government seems paralyzed.