I’m tired of this maddening stupidity. The Washington Post doesn’t answer its own questions.
What if Mr. Gaddafi chooses to meet U.N. terms and then attempts to keep power indefinitely over the sections of Libya his forces control? Mr. Gaddafi’s announcement of a cease-fire Friday, swiftly brushed off by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, suggests that he is already probing the limits of U.S. and allied resolve. Might he end up with control over the capital of Tripoli while eastern Libya becomes a de facto opposition state, protected by Western air power, as Iraqi Kurdistan was for many years during Saddam Hussein’s era?
Mr. Obama’s eloquent words Friday make clear why this cannot be acceptable. “Left unchecked, we have every reason to believe that Gaddafi would commit atrocities against his people,” the president said. “Many thousands could die. A humanitarian crisis would ensue. The entire region could be destabilized, endangering many of our allies and partners. The calls of the Libyan people for help would go unanswered. The democratic values that we stand for would be overrun. Moreover, the words of the international community would be rendered hollow.”
The president has been right to weigh U.S. options carefully and to work diligently to assemble a coalition. The United States cannot fight a war on behalf of Libyan rebels. But there can be no satisfactory outcome for Libya that includes a part for Mr. Gaddafi and his inner circle. As Mr. Obama said Friday, “Moammar Gaddafi clearly lost the confidence of his own people and the legitimacy to lead.”
If we cannot fight a war on behalf of the Libyan rebels then we can’t very well topple Gaddafi militarily, can we? After all, the rebels are being routed in the field. Airpower may drive Gaddafi’s forces back to the west, but it can’t seize Tripoli. This is no way to fight a war. And what if Gaddafi complies? I think the clear implication of our policy is that his mere existence in power equals a lack of compliance. There isn’t anything he could do that would be recognized as compliance. Regime change is the policy. The terms of this UN resolution tie our hands.
I get that lives are being saved right now as the French work to dislodge Gaddafi’s troops from Benghazi, but it will take a long time to organize and equip a fighting force capable of taking over the whole country, and it might wind up causing a lot more loss of life and destruction than would have happened otherwise.
And why doesn’t the Post even ask what victory might look like and what our responsibilities will be then?
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."There is lots of oil in Libya. That pretty much provides all the answers we need about the situation.
I am paying attention to the BBC and AP online. They are really doing a bang up job reporting the action in Libya.
Complete with Bush’s “shock and awe”. Because it proved so successful before.
So…nu???
Is this situation any different than it has been for the last 50 years or so?
Did they look thoroughly into the ’60s/’70s domestic assassinations?
The Reagan era CIA/IranContra/Crack Trifecta?
The 9/11 farce?
The Invasion of Iraq?
Why would you expect anything different?
“Stupidity?”
The’re running a game.
And you’re still biting.
Hmmmmm…
Maybe they’re not so stupid after all.
But noooooo…
That definition of insanity?
Repeating the same action over and over again even though it simply doesn’t work?
Hmmmm….
Look in the mirror, Booman.
Look in the mirror.
And wake the fuck up.
AG
War # 3. First we have air strikes. Then we move in ground forces and game on. For a country that poses ABSOLUTELY NO THREAT TO US. I guess Obama has the sole right to bomb whoever he wants with zero congressional overnight whatsoever.
But then there’s that old pesky oil and oil companies to protect. The worst part is even if 10 million of us showed up in DC, it wouldn’t stop anything.
Which are we talking about the laziness of the Village Gazette or the risks of failure of the mission to enforce UN Resolution 1973?
AG is right about the Village media (or most other for that matter). Even Al Jazeera is constrained by Qatari politics. And the BBC is under attack by the Murdoch empire in Britain.
What we do know is that by next weekend we will know whether the situation in Libya is a popular uprising or just a opposition-establishment civil war. And it all turns on exactly who Gaddafi is arming as his “popular resistance” against Western aggression.
We will also know whether the financial condition of the US has changed the geopolitical environment for US policy. Obama really is going hat-in-hand to South America looking for customers for US exports. Brazil had to do with the US construction industry’s participation in the construction going on to prepare Rio for the World Cup and the Summer Olympics. It occurs in a trade environment in which China is Brazil’s largest trading partner.
The US needed the Arab League’s request before it signed on to the UN Resolution, but it also needed buy-in from the US military before it could commit. The UN resolution pushed through by France had to navigate between those interests. No doubt both the US military and the Arab League agree on this: no foreign (meaning out-of-region) boots on the ground.
This situation is likely much different than Americans or the world are used to. Public reactions in the Middle East and in the US are very confused. Republicans, Democrats, progressives–all are split over whether US action is the right thing to do. No one in the US really has been stampeding action except the senile knee-jerk Cold Warriors like John McCain (it’s over John, for 22 years, over).
Whatever it turns out to be it will not be same old, same old. And it likely will not affect Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Palestinian unity, or whatever happens in Syria. But it could hasten the transformation of Morocco and Jordan into constitutional monarchies — or not.
Wait, what? Who said anything about Victory? No one wants a ‘victory’, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, and not in Libya.
The War Profiteers that the White House works for (it makes no difference which man is in office, the White House is controlled by the Pentagon) never want to hear about ‘victory’.
The War Profiteers use the White House to create perpetual war, for perpetual war profits. They thank Mercury every day that the libyan people rose up against G’daffy. Before that is was only oil profits that were made safe by the Bush Administration’s blessing of G’daffy’s murdering his own civilians.
But now, they get the oil profits AND the war profits! It’s win-win!
Mass murder is America’s only profitable business. That’s why the Pentagon announced that American WILL be in Afghanistan for at least 8 more years, no matter what the ‘President’ has to say about it.
The War Profiteers set up a Tar Baby and the American People are Brer Rabbit.
I’m confused by the domestic politics of this and the actions of the players involved.
Going back to the 2007-08 primary campaign, foreign policy seemed to be one of the substantive differences between Obama and Clinton, with Clinton seeming more hawklike and more a creature of the establishment. Obama had new voices like Samantha Power and Susan Rice.
But now Power and Rice have teamed up with Clinton, and it’s Robert Gates on the other side.
So did I misinterpret the policies those Power and Rice advocated in the first place, or have they changed, or is something going on in this situation that explains why both of them helped push us into this?
This is actually how it’s supposed to look like.
The US not the one leading action, allies or those in the war themselves asking for intervention. US reluctant so that when it goes in it looks like bowing to pressure. Using allies resources instead of our own. Getting UN support. Moreover the intervention was against a head of state with few international friends who was vocally declaring his intention to genocide his people and showing evidence he was doing just that.
If you think humanitarian intervention is ever warranted absent other interests, then this is a pretty good example of it.
Also Power is married to Cass Sunstein and has been for the last two years so who knows? Obama himself has always been a creature of the establishment. To succeed in politics without being stuck in the “black politician” hole he had to be, but it’s who he always was in the first place.
I don’t mind a principled blanket anti-interventionism–it’s principled. And if the world were a better place, it’d be the better option
What I do mind is a factitious `Intervene here, here, and here, and then you can intervene in Libya, having proved thereby your oil-free bona fides‘ position thrown up purely for debating purposes.
To listen to some people on, e.g. Baloon Juice, and Democratic Underground, it seems like the primary requirement for an unobjectionable use of force is that it has to involve some country Bono’s visited.
Humanitarian war is an oxymoron, as anyone knows who has ever lived in a war zone. But, then, how many Americans have even the remotest clue what war is really like for those innocent civilians you claim to be protecting by adding your violence to the violence already occurring?
Humanitarian war is an oxymoron. No great an oxymoron than a pacifist massacre.
This is not a rhetorical question.
What do you think should have been the international reaction with regard to events in Libya? Leave aside the American involvement for now.
What should the US do when an authentic deliberation of the United Nations Security Council concludes that a ruler should be referred to the International Criminal Court for “crimes against humanity”? Should it stand by (as it did in Rwanda) or should it join an international force to intervene?
For Americans who have seen the results of action and the results of inaction, these are hard decisions to make when US interests are not directly involved. And because US oil companies already benefit from Gaddafi’s reliability, oil interests are not involved. And few American personnel remain in the country. And the only strategic interest has to do with the stability of Egypt and the security of the Mediterranean for shipping.
More Americans that you think know what war is like for innocent civilians. That is what the propagandists appeal to by “waving the bloody shirt” in front of the TV cameras. What most Americans do not realize is how much life still goes on in war zones.
That really is why public opinion is split on the American decision to assent to the Libyan National Council’s request for a no-fly zone. Conservative opinion is split, centrist opinion is split, and progressive opinion is split. But public opinion no longer directly shapes US foreign policy, domestic political processes do. And the public has been systematically been excluded from having effect on even domestic policy over the last decade.
You could be content to have the individual nation-state be the top of the violence-and-coercion totem pole, with no entity or entities over and above it, or beside it, and everything that takes place within it immune to more than gestures from the outside world.
The consequences of having something, however imperfect, besides individual nation-states at the top of the violence-and-coercion totem pole haven’t had a chance to make themselves very clear yet — the UN, NATO, EU, OAU, OAS, etc regime is only 65 years old, or less, and clearly not the optimal solution. Its consequences aren’t automatically less grim than the alternative, but they aren’t inherently grimmer either.
The consequences of the status quo international regime are pretty well known, are also potentially quite grim, and there are a lot of people who are happy with it.
All of the different international and mutual security agreements exist precisely because the system of individual nation-states produced colonial and imperial conflict that resulted in two major meltdowns of the international system.
It might be a good time to reassess how effective that international system has been and see what needs to be done. The problem is that the doctrine of “self-determination” is the self-determination of populations, not self-determination of their leaders. Some authoritarian leaders understand that and do just enough to avoid international sanctions. Others don’t.
But I am authentically interested in Hurria’s opinion on this. What actions would Hurria recommend and who does he think should undertake those actions? And an estimate of the capabilities of those entities to actually reduce the number of civilian deaths.
No one should do anything who isn’t Libyan, is my surmise.
People power. The rest takes care of itself.
Except in this case it was pretty clear that taking “care of itself” would result in significant killing and the Colonel being more willing than ever to use violence on his own people.
And that, of course, justifies piling massively more violence on top of the violence already occurring.
Depends on which is the worse alternative. I’m sure we disagree on that.
“And why doesn’t the Post even ask what victory might look like and what our responsibilities will be then?”
because then there readers might be all “wait a minute, what the hell???”
also, what comrade rutherford said.
Let’s keep this simple.
There are officially over 1 million US troops in 175 countries world wide. Officially. Counting covert operations and so-called “civilians” and the numbers are in the many millions in probably every country except the tiniest Pacific Islands.
The business of the United States is War. PERIOD. The purpose of our taxes are to feed the war machine. The purpose of our news media is to support the endless war.
Eisenhower warned us.
In that context, Libya is just the War du jour.
Silly me, I thought that since Gates opposed getting into another quagmire it wouldn’t happen. But an amazing development has occurred – the War borg has grown so powerful that even the leaders of the War department can’t stop it from finding new victims.