I’m not a big fan of the argument that if you don’t intervene everywhere, you can’t do something about Libya, because it is just a nonsense attempt to derail the debate. It is fundamentally no different from the clowns who, when you mention Bradley Manning, lash out and scream “Yeah, but what about all the other prisonders held in isolation! Why aren’t you speaking out about them?” So I swear I am not trolling you all with this, and it is a serious question. Why Libya, and not the Ivory Coast:
As rebels swept across Ivory Coast in a rapid advance last week to oust the nation’s strongman, Laurent Gbagbo, hundreds of people were killed in a single town, the United Nations and aid groups said Saturday, in the worst episode of violence during the four-month political crisis that has plunged the country back into civil war.
The exact number of dead was unclear. The United Nations said that 330 people had been killed, while aid organizations put the death toll as high as 1,000.
The “town was full of bodies,” said Patrick Nicholson, a spokesman for Caritas, a Catholic charity whose staff members visited the town, Duékoué, in western Ivory Coast. “They saw bodies in the city, in the bush, mass graves.”
Humanitarian workers did not say who was responsible. But the United Nations said that more than 100 had been killed by Mr. Gbagbo’s fighters, while about 200 had been killed by forces loyal to his rival, Alassane Ouattara, the man recognized by the United Nations, the African Union and other international bodies as the winner of the presidential election last year.
Mr. Ouattara’s government issued a statement denying responsibility for atrocities in any part of the country, saying its forces had discovered mass graves in other towns that were the result of massacres by Mr. Gbagbo’s forces.
But the killings could call into question how much control Mr. Ouattara has over his forces and, if further investigation proved their involvement, tarnish his reputation overseas, where he is perceived to hold the high moral ground in the standoff with Mr. Gbagbo.
Throughout most of the crisis, civilian deaths have largely come at the hands of Mr. Gbagbo’s forces, eliciting threats of criminal charges from international prosecutors. Human rights groups have also accused forces loyal to Mr. Ouattara of some extrajudicial killings, but neither side has been implicated in a massacre even close to this scale. The total death toll previously estimated by the United Nations was about 500, over four months of tensions and sporadic violence.
A strongman loses an election recognized by the international community as legitimate, refuses to step down, and then starts to massacre his citizens. Is this not as clear cut a case as Libya? Why are we doing nothing if we are acting in Libya? Why is Libya in our national interest but the Ivory Coast is not? Wouldn’t it be EASIER to intervene in the Ivory Coast than Libya? Wouldn’t it be just as easy to make the case for intervention there, and to garner international support? So why Libya and not the Ivory Coast?
*** Update ***
Somewhat related, this made me laugh:
it’s amusing that it’s okay to say “war on drugs” and “war on poverty” but once the military is involved it sure can’t be a war
Gin & Tonic
Oil. SATSQ.
Sportello
One of the brakes on intervention would appear to be cobbling together a coalition. Italy has a lot of investments in Libya, and Sarkozy was looking for something with electoral value.
I don’t think the same cards were in play with the Ivory Coast.
Cain
I think because of
1) Saudi Arabia running around screaming
2) the overall middle east seems to be plunging into revolutionitis.. and that does affect our way of life.
3) Africa in general seems to be having this problem.. they have an African union, those guys need to identify themselves as “African” and start working on curbing these people..
cain
Davis X. Machina
It’s a lot harder when you’re not within a few hundred miles of NATO bases in Crete and Italy, and NATO naval forces already in the Med.
What you should do, and what you can do, don’t always completely overlap.
Any air intervention in the Côte d’Ivoire would be almost all US, and slow to arrive. Fast carriers are fast only in comparison to other surface ships, and working out land-based air logistically requires a lot of cooperation from a lot of people.
Mnemosyne
I missed the part in the story where the UN voted on a resolution to create a no-fly zone over the Ivory Coast that would be managed by an international coalition. Can you link to that part for me?
I don’t actually think it’s a self-evidently bad idea for the UN to set up a no-fly zone over the Ivory Coast to prevent these massacres since it sounds like the UN peacekeepers who are already there are overwhelmed, but I think it should be an international action agreed upon by the membership. You know, like Libya was.
scav
Well, I’ve a sneaking suspicion that an all too solid chunk of this nation can’t distinguish the Ivory Coast from an unfortunate accident involving two brands of soap.
RinaX
Coincidentally, I read this excellent piece over at WEESeeYou giving some more background on what’s going on:
http://weeseeyou.com/2011/04/01/whatsup-in-ivory-coast-a-primer/#more-24497
Based on my non-military expert opinion, this seems to be something that would absolutely require BOOTSONAGROUND, which the current situation in Libya has (so far) not required from the U.S. And given that there’s absolutely no way that I can see the American public wanting any ground troops going anywhere else right now unless someone directly attacks American forces, that leaves it up to other countries willing to invest what would likely be a lengthy ground campaign, i.e, BOOTSONAGROUND!!!!
kdaug
Nobody uses ivory anymore. Polysynthetics are cheaper.
RinaX
@Davis X. Machina:
Yeah, that too.
Turbulence
@Mnemosyne: But the UN security council established a NFZ in large part because the US and its allies worked hard to get one. If we’re willing to seek consensus, beg, bribe, and cajole in order to get votes for a Libyan NFZ, why won’t we do the same thing for an Ivory Coast NFZ?
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
Aside from the obvious (OIL), there is also a geopolitical motivation. Libya is on the Mediterranean coast, and borders the European zone. That doesn’t necessarily put Libya in the zone of our national interest, but it does put it in the national interest of a lot of our allies.
.
Lori
As far as I can tell, neither the rebels nor the African Union have asked the U.S. to step in. The rebels are working at least the diplomatic angle through the U.N. – I’m curious if the U.N. is providing military assistance, or if it even could, given its rules.
Interestingly in a reverse-mirrored kind of way, Ggabo is trying to enforce a no-fly zone against the United Nations and France over the Ivory Coast: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/20114116296998447.html
Mako
Goldman-Sachs is shorting chocolate.
Gus
@Mnemosyne: Good point. so the next question would be why isn’t the UN working on a resolution to protect Ivorians?
MeDrewNotYou
@Gin & Tonic: Exactly. And besides, black ‘people’ aren’t really people, they’re just hairless apes. It sucks when a bunch of animals die, but sometimes shit happens.
/snark
Seriously, though, I think the fact that the Ivory Coast is in Africa is the 2nd biggest reason. For a resource neutral comparison, look at Rwanda vs Bosnia. There wasn’t any danger of the whole Balkan mess spreading, no vital resources were threatened; the only reason to intervene was for humanitarian purposes. Pretty much the same with Rwanda (although I’m not too clear on whether there was a threat of destabilization). So why did we save Europeans and not Africans? It might not be outright racism, but there’s certainly a bit of ‘they’re savages, we can’t change them’ at play.
Also too, as little as Americans know about Europe and their history and current events, they know even less about Africa’s (I’m guilty of that as well). So while it isn’t too hard to explain why the Balkans are the way they are, doing the same for Africa would be futile.
Sleeper
I think that’s part of John’s point. Why isn’t our UN ambassador pressing for the same kind of no-fly zone for the Ivory Coast? The answer, obviously, is that no one particularly cares if the world’s number one cocoa producer is engulfed in civil war and genocide. Nobody’s rooting for it, everybody feels terrible about it, but come on…we have to be “grownups” about this, or something.
Baud
RE: Ivory Coast. Intervene on behalf of whom? In Libya, there seems to be an international consensus on who the good guys and the bad guys are.
Davis X. Machina
It’s oil.
If Qadaffi had just played ball with the multinationals, and allowed in exploration teams from other countries, and pumped about as much as he could — say as much as at any time since 1980 — we wouldn’t be trying to overthrow him.
It’s his own damn fault — we can’t get the oil from anybody but the rebels. This is what doomed him.
Or not, as the case may be.
Baud
@MeDrewNotYou:
IIRC, there was concern about the conflict spreading, especially on ethnic grounds with the Russians being sympathetic to the Slavs and the Greeks with the Macedonians, or something like that.
jheartney
One other argument would be that Ghadaffi (sp?) has shown staying power, having outlasted numerous U.S. administrations. Gbagbo, OTOH, might be gone in a few months to years even if we do nothing.
(I was ambivalent-to-opposed to the Lybia intervention, so I’m not especially endorsing the above argument, just placing it in the ring, so to speak.)
Also, we really know nothing about Gbagbo’s opposition. They might be just as bad.
John Cole
Way to completely miss the point. The UN resolution for Libya just happened! No one lobbied for it! They just all showed up at the UN one day, and there it was! Woah! What is that? Where did that come from?
Christ.
Pretty much the entire national community recognizes the President-Elect.
meander
Thinking only about resources: Libya has lots of oil, but Ivory Coast has something that Americans value too: the raw material for chocolate making (cacao plants). Wikipedia cites data from the International Cocoa Organization (but doesn’t give a solid link to the source) that shows that the Ivory Coast produced more than a third of all cacao in the 2006-7 season.
The U.S. foreign policy and military apparatus has trouble with humanitarian calculation, as our insane amount of spending on the military vs. our tiny spending on anti-malaria, anti-HIV, development, and so forth clearly illustrates.
Bob Loblaw
1. “Flow of commerce” (cough) largely unaffected.
2. Long standing political instability a given no matter what happens. Ivory Coast has been divided/warring within itself in this current iteration for a decade now.
3. UN already has a significant presence there. There’s been no flashpoint of crisis.
4. Largely seen as within the French sphere of influence, not the American.
5. Gbago loyalists do not have access to air/artillery power like Qaddafi. No capabilities that require US military force to degrade. It’s a militia street war.
6. And most importantly. There is no such thing as a humanitarian war. Do you really think that the UNSC or NATO involve themselves over any old backwater butchering? You think the GCC actually gave a shit about the Libyan people? No, they have their own competing strategic interests that are prioritized. Quite simply, the Ivory Coast meets no strategic objectives for anybody except the Nestle corporation.
Martin
What can we do there that doesn’t involve putting people on the ground? This isn’t tanks vs AK-47, it’s AK-47s vs AK-47s. So who do we bomb? This Toyota pickup full of guys with assault rifles or that Toyota pickup full of guys with assault rifles? Once Libya gets down to that stage, we’re not going to be doing shit any more.
And the UN is in Ivory Coast. They have been since May 2003.
Cole, didn’t you drive a tank? Didn’t they tell you anything about desert vs jungle warfare? Air power is vastly more useful in one than the other.
MeDrewNotYou
@Baud: Mea culpa. I kinda slacked off at the end of the semester of Habsburg history when we covered it. But a bit of research on Rwanda says that it was kinda messy for the whole region, especially for the DRC. Mostly a refugee problem, but there were political implications as well.
Ed Marshall
@John Cole:
You pull apart who lobbied to no-fly zone Libya and it clearly wasn’t an American idea. Once the Arab League asked for one, it is impossible for the U.S. to veto it (or we would be practicing a different form of imperialism). For the record, Cote D’Ivory is swimming in oil for all the geniuses up there shouting that.
Karen
For the same reason we got involved with Iraq. Oil.
Also, for the same reason we didn’t do anything about Sudan. Rwanda. Do you see a theme here?
Add those both together and can you see this country backing military action in the Ivory Coast?
We have used military action in Africa before (Somalia). That didn’t go well at all.
Baud
@John Cole:
I read that in the article, but the article also suggested that both sides were engaging in civilian massacres.
Mako
@Baud:
It is a tough one…
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/o/alassane_d_ouattara/index.html?inline=nyt-per
Bob Loblaw
@Baud:
And the winner for most ignorant comment goes to…
Spencer
well no one has given the correct answer yet.
Laurent Gbagbo is a christian crazy with many friends on the american right.
Alassane Ouattara is muslim. ergo…
Davis X. Machina
@Karen:
China will be shocked when they realize there’s no oil in the Sudan. All that money and technical assistance down a rat-hole.
Mnemosyne
@Turbulence:
So you think there’s absolutely nothing going on diplomatically at the UN and everyone is just standing around with their thumbs up their asses ignoring the Ivory Coast even though there are already UN troops there?
It took at least three weeks to get everyone rounded up and the no-fly zone put into place in Libya, and that was, as people have pointed out, in a region where a no-fly zone is relatively easy to set up since you have lots of access to airbases and other support. Take a look at a map to see where the Ivory Coast is and tell us what your plan is for getting aircraft carriers within a useful distance by tomorrow.
OzoneR
1.) Because they haven’t asked the UN to help them
2.) They’ve asked the French and the French are already there.
Bill Murray
@Gus: You mean other than the one passed last Wednesday that said in part
UNOCI is the United Nations Operation n Cote d’Ivoire which has been operating since 2004 along with Operation Unicorn which is a French force in Cote d’Ivoire
Karen
@meander:
You think maybe if they said that the world’s chocolate is at risk and the price of chocolate will rise enough to be unaffordable that this country would support military action?
Baud
@Bob Loblaw: That’s what I get for participating in a thread full of Ivory Coast experts. BTW, my followup comment is @here.
joe from Lowell
I’m all for sending blue helmet peacekeepers to the Ivory Coast, like, yesterday. The world’s inattention to Sub-Saharan Africa is appalling. What we need is a standing UN peacekeeping force.
However, I recognize that an intervention in the Ivory Coast actually is a much harder project than Libya, because it would mean Boots Onna Ground (TM). Hundreds at a minimum, maybe thousands, there for an indefinite period of time that will probably stretch for years, like the other blue helmet peacekeeping operations.
barkleyg
“Why is Libya in our national interest but the Ivory Coast is not? ”
Because the black is under the ground, and NOT on their FACES!
I am not a racist, and this is just calling a spade a spade in regards to what is “one” of “our” national interests.
OzoneR
@Turbulence:
We didn’t do shit, it’s because France and Britain wanted one…also, the Libyan rebels. The defection of the UN Ambassador also helped.
Angry Black Lady
oh mah gah.
UNITED NATIONS CHARTER! CHAPTER VII! SECURITY COUNCIL!
also, international intervention in the Ivory Coast would likely require Boots Onna Ground™.
when you say “why are we acting” i really hope you mean “we” as in “the international community” and not “we, these united states.”
imma blow a gasket, ferreals.
Davebo
It seems a lot of commenters are confused about the ivory coast.
Lots of oil there offshore. Probably more so than Libya.
FlipYrWhig
I would incline towards Doing Something in Cote D’Ivoire. I have no idea of what the Something would be.
But I think that if we’re going to have a mighty military force, the best conditions for using it will always be to stop people from massacring each other. That’ll always be constrained by what’s possible, conditions on the ground, etc. But that’s where I begin with all of these cases: make it international, have the objective be to stop the warring sides from slaughtering each other, and try to keep it as limited as possible. Yes, I’m aware that that’s idealistic and would probably lead to a few fiascos along the way, like happened in Somalia.
joe from Lowell
Neither case represents a vital interest of the United States. Asking this question misses the point of humanitarian intervention, that it involves taking action in the absence of, or for reasons other than, the pursuit of national interest.
MeDrewNotYou
@barkleyg: That’s a nice succinct way to put it.
Sleeper
@Ed Marshall:
uh…palm oil, sure.
General Stuck
Is this all you can come up with after being completely fucking wrong about Libya? You may not be trolling your own site, but that is no pass for putting up yet another epically stupid post on national security, foreign affairs issues. You sound like a 6 year old running around asking everybody WHY? just being a child. Stick to domestic issues and what the wingnuts are up to. You are good at that.
Mnemosyne
@John Cole:
As several of us have pointed out, there is already a UN resolution regarding the Ivory Coast and UN peacekeepers are already stationed there because of the ongoing civil war.
But clearly the situation is identical to Libya, so it’s hypocritical for us to not do the exact same thing the UN is doing in Libya.
/eyeroll
Angry Black Lady
@joe from Lowell: i swear i did not even see your use of “Boots Onna Ground™” before i employed it.
::snaps to eemom::
Davebo
OK, less than Libya, but still….
They’ve lost a lot of foreign investment do to political unrest.
MikeF
I’m skeptical of the Libya action, but one big difference is that the ‘bad guy’ in Libya was on the offensive when the UN took action, whereas the ‘good guy’ in the Ivory Coast has had the momentum for a while. Successfully halt the ground war in Libya and if things go well, you get rebels in the west gaining some degree of autonomy and not suffering brutal reprisals. Stop the fighting in IC and you cement Gbagbo’s illegitimate control over part of the country.
Of course, you could question the actual legitimacy of the Libyan rebels, and who knows if Ouattara’s forces are going to behave decently towards Gbagbo supporters – this stuff is hard, and that’s one reason I’d like to see us become less willing to get involved in these conflicts.
Davis X. Machina
@joe from Lowell:It’s 1952, and in the BJ primary, Sen. Robert Taft beats Eisenhower for the nomination, going on to trounce Stevenson in the BJ general election, due to his adamant refusal to use American military forces for anything other than the defense of the national territory against invasion by a foreign power.
Angry Black Lady
@Davebo: and africa is not a country. (just in case people don’t know.) it’s hard to tell who knows what over here as of late.
Fuzz
Ivory Coast actually has a lot of UN peacekeepers there, the guys with the blue helmets, and there are French army units that have moved in too. The blue helmets just have terrible mandates wherever they go, they’re in Darfur and the Congo too but mostly unable to do anything because of ROE/diplomatic issues and even language issues (a lot of peacekeepers come from Asia and the Indian sub-continent and have little ways of communicating with the locals)
Phoenix Woman
@Davis X. Machina: Yup. Plus, the forces fighting Gbagbo are actually winning despite his doing everything he can to ignore the election and stay in power.
Another reason the Europeans wanted us to help them against Gaddafi: They’re hoping to stem the tide of refugees flowing out of Libya and into Tunisia and elsewhere. And so far, their plan seems to be working:
During the eighteen days from when he started bombing protesters to the time the NFZ was implemented, 300,000 persons fled the country, most of them to the already-overstressed UNHCR-supported camps for Tunisian and Egyptian refugees in Tunisia, a country which is doing its best but is still unstable itself. During the eighteen days since the NFZ was established, that number has dropped by two-thirds, to around 100,000.
One of the things that until now had made the European nations that make up NATO be relatively friendly to Gaddafi was his self-appointed role as the gatekeeper between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. Playing on European racist fears, he worked to all but end unsanctioned African migration through Libya to Europe, he also has warned that “Europe will become black” through a torrent of uncontrolled refugees if he’s allowed to fall. However, since (as noted above) three times as many persons had fled Libya in the eighteen days before the NFZ as have fled in the eighteen days since the NFZ was established, his gatekeeper argument doesn’t carry the weight it once did among European leaders.
So again no, it’s not about oil or imperialism or cuddling up to Al-Qaeda. It’s about racism in large part, but it’s also about legitimate fears of seeing UNHCR efforts to keep Tunisian refugee camps, already swamped with Tunisian and Libyan refugees who can’t go home just yet, collapse under a swarm of Libyans fleeing Gaddafi’s crackdown, should he have been allowed to continue it uninterrupted. (In fact, when the rebels do well, many Libyan refugees take it as a sign they can come home; on the other hand, when Gaddafi does well, it increases refugee flow. That’s a big hint to European NATO leaders that the NFZ is the right thing to do.)
Davebo
ABL,
Where did I infer that Africa is a country?
OzoneR
@Sleeper:
crude oil too…there are untapped oil reserves off the coast of Cote D’Ivorie. They’ve been bickering with Ghana over who controls them.
Don’t forget, this country is only a few hundred miles west of Africa’s largest oil producer; Nigeria.
FlipYrWhig
@joe from Lowell: Frankly, I think it’s much more offensive to use military force to advance the “national interest” than it is to use it to advance human rights. If you only intervene when the nation in question offers something tangible to gain… I guess it’s coldly practical, but it’s a bit like only helping catch a mugger because of the promise of a reward.
Angry Black Lady
@Davebo: oh, you didn’t.
i was thinking about some politician who, with respect to libya, said that we’d be going into africa soon. derp.
it was a flip remark to add to your point that people don’t seem to know much about the dark continent.
Citizen_X
@Spencer:
Bingo. Including Sen. Inhofe, Pat Robertson, and–surprise!–The Fellowship/C Street House.
barkleyg
” Davebo – April 2, 2011 | 4:18 pm · Link
It seems a lot of commenters are confused about the ivory coast.
Lots of oil there offshore. Probably more so than Libya.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oil_reserves
Got me worried there, with that FALSE statement of yours.
Almost blew my ugly, but TRUE theory of what is important to “our” country. I love my country, and think Obama will go down as one of the greats, if the REPUGS ever let him Govern
Davis X. Machina
@Sleeper: It’s offshore. Ghana, Sao Tome and Principe, other countries in the region are in the midst of an offshore oil boom.
Sly
Libya is the first real test case for the R2P principle that has anything close to resembling broad international consensus and a commitment of force. The West is intervening because “it can,” for lack of a better phrase.
For what its worth, I do think intervention in the Ivory Coast (and Congo as well) is warranted and necessary. The question no one wants to answer is who is going to do the fighting if military intervention becomes the only option left, and this no one in FP establishment wants to talk about it.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@MeDrewNotYou: Yeah, it was kind of messy for the whole region. However, you seem to have missed the correct answer even though it was offered up top with regards to Libya and the Ivory Coast: proximity of forces. In the former Yugoslavia, NATO bases were practically right there, and even more so once Romania was in NATO. The logistics were comparatively easy.
How do you plan to support an intervention in Rwanda? Where do you plan to base the air units? How do you plan to get those air units into Rwandan airspace? Rwanda is landlocked; you can’t just fly in over the sea. So, you need to have someone next door agree to let you fly combat missions in their airspace.
Given the nature of the conflict, it also isn’t like air power alone would have made much of a difference. It would have taken significant ground forces. How do you plan to supply them, given that Rwanda has no sea ports? How long would it have taken to set up workable supply lines, and would there have been much of anything to intervene in once that was accomplished?
Intervening in Rwanda would have been a much more difficult task than either Libya or Bosnia. More like Afghanistan.
MeDrewNotYou
@Davebo: Man, I suck today. Ivory Coast does indeed have plenty of oil. They don’t quite have the infrastructure of the major oil producers, but they’re nothing to scoff at.
I think this only strengthens my racial argument, though. Helping out the rebels in IC would be a great way to help ensure access to their oil later on, so it would definitely be in our national interest to get involved.
RE: The boots on the ground argument- I don’t think that carries too much weight, since I’m convinced we’ll eventually be doing that in Libya. At least if we really want to accomplish our goals there. Granted, this is speculation on my part, but I think John’s talk about mission creep a while back is going to lead to greater involvement. So ultimately, we (international we, that is) would end up with boots in both places.
Bob Loblaw
@Davebo:
This is true, but for the moment, irrelevant. Ivory Coast has little current production capacity to disrupt on a global scale. It’s a regional supplier, and especially, refiner. Offshore capacity is a longer term project.
If Libya stops selling to Italy, the world’s got a big problem. If Ivory Coast stops selling to Ghana, less so.
Phoenix Woman
@Mnemosyne: Thank you!
FlipYrWhig
@Angry Black Lady: What’s even worse about that remark (I saw it on TPM but don’t remember the name either) is that it reveals how “Africa” to him means “black Africa.” North Africa doesn’t really count.
MeDrewNotYou
@Angry Black Lady: That reminds me. In my first comment, I intimated that IC was African while Libya wasn’t. Of course, I know both are on the same continent, but I was thinking more along the lines of North Africa vs Sub-Saharan. Or, to be blunt, brown people vs black people.
BombIranForChrist
It sure would be nice if we lived in a country where a Leader, perhaps one even dedicated to Change, would actually tell the citizens the real, no bullshit reason for bombing one country and not another. It’s pretty pathetic that Obama’s rationale is so obviously insufficient to every one with the slightest bulb on his brain stem.
Unfortunately, we’ll never know what this Magical Leader might be like because OMG Palin / Newt / Huckabee are crazy, so Broderism Forever.
PaulW
Intervention in the Ivory Coast is not as high a need because there seems to be an organized and effective opposition that is working against the dictator. Whether or not there’s a human rights violation committed by both sides needs to be investigated. Meanwhile, intervention in Libya was necessary because the Libyan rebels are about as well-trained and organized as the Three Stooges…
Davebo
Wow, is everyone drunk commenting today because if so I’ll need to pour a scotch.
Production doesn’t equal proven or possible reserves. Chad had no oil for decades until the World Bank financed exploration and now it’s roughly doubling output every two years with more wells being drilled.
The oil that Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana are arguing about is in extremely deep water. We’re talking drill ships here with 10k feet capability. But they are pouring drill ships out of Korea and others of late. Between TransO and the Pride/Ensco merger we’ll bee seeing many more off West Africa.
Just a tip. Wanna get rich? Buy an old freighter and hire some certified inspectors then run up and down the west coast of Africa inspecting riser floatation. You’ll stay busy year round and make a mint!
IM
It seems to late now anyway. The good guy is winning and the civil war will be over before anything can be done.
As far has I remember this has been brewing for months and there was the mistaken hope that Gbagbo could be pressured into resigning.
The similar situation in Kenya was resolved by a compromise after all, if only after much bloodshed.
RinaX
@MeDrewNotYou:
“Our” is a tricky thing. Gates made it pretty clear that he’s ready to be done with the whole thing and was not interested in expanding the US’s current role, and he and President Obama seem to be on the same page. It appears to me that in relation to the current action, the US was primarily interested in making sure that Gadaffi did not mow down an entire city of people and to give the rebels a chance. The US is going to be grounding its planes by next week and simply providing logistical support. Now, they’ll continue to do the boring stuff of cutting off Gaddaffi’s money supply and pressuring other countries to do so, but I still have yet to see that the US has any interest in using much more than diplomatic means to bring Gadaffi down, unless he tries to destroy an entire city again.
Now, other countries like France want to go a lot further, which again makes the “our” a complex thing.
General Stuck
@MeDrewNotYou:
As of today, we are no longer even flying missions over Libya, and every major player in our government that has to do with “putting boots on the ground” has put their boot down on no US ground troops. So how in fuck are some of you still blathering about putting troops on the ground, at least while obama is president? Stop it. Just goddamn stop it. It is sounding like YOU WANT there to be troops on the ground so you can protest it.
Sleeper
Ivory Coast does have some significant offshore oil resources, but both their production capacity and proven reserves are dwarfed by those of Libya. Their economy is almost entirely agricultural.
Comrade Luke
Because Samantha Power isn’t interested in the Ivory Coast?
MeDrewNotYou
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): I kind of agree wrt Rwanda. It would be tough to get people in place there. With the Ivory Coast, though, even though it’s pretty far from NATO, it does have ‘Coast’ in its name. Moving some carriers out there might be a pain, but is doable. If we really cared about saving civilians, overcoming the logistics of sending in a fleet shouldn’t be too tough to manage
General Stuck
We can’t save everybody, there are not the resources for us to do that, and certainly not the political will. Libya is close to Europe, and if we are going to get involved in saving people, it might be a good idea to use our limited resources IN A COUNTRY AND REGION WE HAVE SPENT THE PAST 70 YEARS PROPPING UP BRUTAL DICTATORS WHO HAVE MURDERED, TORTURED AND IMPRISONED THESE PEOPLE WE ARE NOW SAVing. Just a thought. discuss.
John Cole
Breathe deep. Inhale, exhale. Yes. Why is the international community acting in one case, and not the other, when the latter is quite clear cut.
I’m not sure what exactly I was wrong about. We’re still there, there is no end in sight, there is no end game, the rebels have no chance without more involvement, and oh, by the way, we just fucking accidentally killed a bunch of the “good guys.” I was never opposed to saving lives, I’m just not sure how the hell we get it done or ever get out of there.
You should stick to openly fellating Obama- it’s what you are best at. Really, there is no competition there. Anything that is seen as even mildly uncomplimentary to Obama (even inaccurately, in this case), and you get the vapors and lash out like this. Calm down, mister. I’m going to vote for Obama in 2012 and do my best to raise money for him.
Speaking of- you know who can’t handle differences of opinions? Six year old kids. Sometimes they
issue weepy GBCW posts and stop commenting on a fucking weblog because someone was mean to Obamaeven run off to their room and cry.Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Comrade Luke: I think that’s what’s called Power projecting.
BGinCHI
@Citizen_X: Yep, you guys nailed it.
Optics. Can’t help the Muslim fight the Christian or Inhofe and others will poop their Jesus pants and the world will become safe for Sharia law which I bet <1% of Americans can name 2 tenets of.
Mnemosyne
Of course, the reason this story made it into the NY Times is right here:
It’s not that there’s a sudden humanitarian crisis in Cote d’Ivoire that must be dealt with immediately as there was in Libya. It’s that the “good guy” who is supported by the UN may now be implicated in massacres, which would be a big problem if he wants to continue to get UN support.
Citizen_X
BTW, doesn’t the name “Ivory Coast” simply scream, “Named by imperialists!”?
Not that other places weren’t (e.g. “America”).
joe from Lowell
@Davebo:
Lots of people are confused about the oil in Libya too. The dictator there was happily selling it to the west, and all we had to do was politely avert our eyes as he made the streets run with blood in order to keep that oil flowing. Like we’ve done so many times before.
But, instead, we told him to stuff it, prevented him from crushing the rebellion that interrupted supplies, and committed to an operation that could keep the uncertainty going for years, or result in the dictator staying in power and cutting us off.
Yet somehow, the above situation adds up, in some people’s minds, to an oil war.
I’ve seen how this reacts when our
crack dealersoil partners crack down on their opposition. This ain’t it.IM
@Comrade Luke:
Yes this Power woman has never written anything about africa. Well known fact.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Davebo:
YES!
oh. I’ve got an old Saturn. Will that work?
joe from Lowell
@General Stuck: Dude, WTF?
This is a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry, and there surely is a whole hell of a lot to discuss about both when the world should stage a humanitarian intervention, and when it actually does.
ETA: Admittedly, there are a whole lot people (like the majority of this thread) who don’t take the question seriously, but as a chance to shout their little slogans and congratulate themselves on how simple their storyline is, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real discussion to be had.
Comrade Luke
Given that the Obama Doctrine (man, I hate that phrase) seems to be that we’ll support humanitarian intervention when asked by other countries, the better question might be: why isn’t the Ivory Coast or half a dozen other places in that region as important to the international community as Libya?
Selective humanitarian intervention is a bit of a contradiction in terms, isn’t it?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@John Cole:
Probably because, as has been pointed out to you multiple times on this thread, you are factually incorrect. The international community *is* acting in Cote d’Ivoire. That’s why there are both French and UN troops on the ground.
Don’t let reality get in your way, though.
IM
@Citizen_X:
Would you like ebony coast better?
Everybody picking on white nowadays…
Loneoak
I find the racism explanation spurious. After all, Libya is: A) in Africa, B) Arab.
The need for an explanation for the difference between Libya and Ivory Coast charmingly assumes that the US/other military powers have consistent policies regarding the use of force.
Maude
@General Stuck:
Heard on Rightie Radio this morning that the self determination in the Middle East is because of the Bush Doctrine and Obama is following the Bush Doctrine. Smar station that another Rightie said Obama is arming the rebels and putting troops on the ground. I have given up.
Bring it on is not a Doctrine.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@IM: Would it count as humanitarian intervention to throw Paul McCartney out of an airplane at 10,000 feet without a parachute? I’m tempted to throw Stevie Wonder out with him, in the interests of racial harmony, but I do love “Superstition.”
AAA Bonds
France’s uranium supply?
Lockerbie vengeance for the greyhairs?
The perception of a fumble on Egypt and Mubarak?
There’s a lot of possible reasons. My guess is, though, it has something to do with an absolute terror of getting involved in ‘black Africa’. None of the elites have to be racist for this to apply. All they need are racist constituents, which USA, UK, and France all have in droves.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@John Cole: a no fly zone only works for airpower and ATR ground armor.
You can think of Obama’s new doctrine of Limited Humanitarian Intervention as derivative of Just War Theory…..Just Intervention Theory.
Cote d’Ivoire doesnt check all the boxes.
Those include multilateralism, in America’s interest, no ground troops ever, limited goals, limited costs, democratic uprising in the population, and high probabilty of success.
As awful as the Obama doctrine is, it beats the hell out of the Bush Doctrine/COIN….aka Pre-emptive Missionary Democracy.
burnspbesq
@Baud:
I would think the default position would be that the international community would intervene on behalf of the guy who won an election that was as free and fair as anyone has any right to expect in that part of the world, but who has been prevented from taking office by the incumbent.
Your question would be entirely fair if we were talking about Zimbabwe. Mugabe is a miserable, evil piece of shit, but there is no obvious person to take over if some outside force were to get rid of him. Which is eerily reminiscent of Iraq, circa 2002.
Mnemosyne
@Maude:
I was wondering how long it would be before the Republicans started claiming that the revolutions in MENA (Middle East & North Africa) prove that Iraq was a stunning success. Didn’t take them long.
General Stuck
@John Cole:
I swear Cole, i have wondered about you for a long time. And now we get the answer. You are Corner Stone, or just like him. He could have written this post and no one would know the difference. The GBCW was done a long time and since I have cleaned your clock on about everything you got the nerve up to challenge me on. From wikileaks, to Manning, and now. Your clownish rantings on Libya were fucking wrong, we are not on a FITD situation, there is not going to be ground troops, and we stopped flying missions today, and I don’t give a shit who you vote for. No, scratch that, PLEASE don’t vote for Obama, as he does not need whackjob bloggers like you on his side. Why don’t you go fellate your loonitick pals Jane and Glenn. They are about your speed in the wingnut department. Better yet, sell the motherfucking blog before you destroy it completely which seems what you are trying to do each day..
MeDrewNotYou
@RinaX:@General Stuck: I’m pretty much thinking of “our” to mean NATO’s interests. As for further involvement, I think the likeliest scenario is that the rebels eventually start to falter, Gadaffi threatens civilians again, and we have to ramp things back up. I don’t know how effective the non-explodey methods will be, but if Saddam Hussein is any indication, not very.
On the other hand, Obama’s a smart guy, as is Gates. If anyone can deal with Libya without getting into another quagmire, it’d be him. I’m really conflicted on how things will turn out (not to mention whether the US should even be involved), but the hope I do have that things will turn out right rest on Obama and Co.’s ability to handle problems.
John Cole
Is this really what counts as debate here these days? Christ, what a bunch of worthless sophists. From the article I blockquoted heavily in this post:
We are ALL aware that the UN is there. However, it is also quite clear that the involvement of the international community in Libya is far GREATER than in the Ivory Coast.
mclaren
John Cole is making exactly the point I’ve made repeatedly. If we’re going to intervene in Libya for humanitarian reasons to save the lives of innocent civilians, why shouldn’t we send the U.S. army to the Ivory Coast?
And then why not send the U.S. army into Darfur?
And then why not send the U.S. army into the Sudan?
And why not send the U.S. army into Mauritania, where human slavery is still practiced? And why not send the U.S. army into the more than 20 countries where female genital mutilation is still practiced, including the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Eritrea, Mali, Sudan, Uganda, Zaire, Djibouti and Somalia?
Look, like Cole I’m concerned about violations of human rights. America is not God, though. We can’t be the entire world’s policeman. Even if we wanted to…it’s not physically possible.
What’s actually going on here in America is that we’ve got a gigantic useless military that we’re hopelessly addicted to pissing away 1.45 trillion dollars a year on, and ever since the USSR imploded and disappeared, Americans and their leaders have been frantically searching for some use for our grotesquely bloated pointless gigantic military.
Well, folks, here’s a wake-up call for you: there is no use for America’s grotesquely bloated pointless gigantic military.
The U.S. military is led today by incompetent careerist cowards and manned by misfits and rapists and gang members, and most of the money we waste on our military is spent for weapons that don’t work.
So instead of running around the world making everything worse by selling “democratic rebels” a bunch of overly complex ridiculously expensive weapons that don’t work and then sending in our army to help ’em out when the weapons we sold ’em break down and prove useless, and then using even more weapons and even more of our own troops to kill off those “democratic rebels” we formerly helped out because (like bin Laden) after winning against the so-called `bad guys’ those supposedly democratic rebels refuse to kowtow to American foreign policy demands and start attacking us…
…Instead of all that, why don’t we just downsize our goddamn military and not intervene at all unless some other country directly attacks us?
How about that?
How’s that sound?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Maude: The Bush Doctrine/COIN was pre-emptive Missionary Democracy.
COIN is still going on in A-stan at a taxpayer cost of one billion dollars per month.
General Stuck
@Maude:
We have an insane former wingnut, now different kind of wingnut right here running this blog. He can’t face reality either.
John Cole
@General Stuck: Oh, you poor delicate flower. Act like a total dick, someone responds, and you melt down.
SaminMpls
It is the downside risk that matters here. Pols can’t fuck up an intervention in the Ivory Coast without taking political damage at home because they don’t see a future payout and have to enter the domain of losses in order initiate the intervention. Libya, at this specific time, is viewed by some as worth the risk of intervention either because success would move them from the status quo to the domain of gains. Alternatively, a pol may have fell into the domain of losses when their contracts and arrangements with Libya were put at risk.
If you perceive yourself to be in the domain of losses and you are not willing to accept the new status quo, you are more likely to take greater risks than if you are in the domain of gains.
My guess: Obama sees a the possibility for a historically large payout with Libya and is taking what he believes to be a risk that is no worse than the escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I just hope he isn’t really expecting 1989-1991 all over again or an Israeli peace deal with a more-democratic Arab world.
General Stuck
@John Cole:
I am still here dude, and a fully erect flower. You are a lying sack of shit. Your move.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@mclaren: see above.
None of the countries you are suggesting for intervention fit the Obama Doctrine’s requirements.
Martin
Man, the ‘blood for oil’ thing on the left is just as pernicious as the union goon thing for the right, isn’t it?
If it wasn’t for what was happening in Tunisia and Egypt, we never would have gotten involved in Libya. It’s not like this was our first opportunity to do this. In fact, it’s far from our best opportunity. Why didn’t we do it in response to Libya’s nuclear program, or its terrorist actions? Nobody would have questioned those moves, even with boots on the ground.
How is picking a fight in Libya in which we have no control of the outcome an oil play? Now we have access to Libya oil. After this? Who the fuck knows.
RinaX
@MeDrewNotYou:
Well, you and I are on the same page as far as being conflicted about the entire situation. What I don’t have much tolerance for is crap like this post which refuses to acknowledge that there are in fact some concrete differences about the two situations. Just like the situations in Yemen and Syria, for example, are completely different and we still are trying to see how all of that’s going to shake out. Unfortunately, not everything’s going to go the way Egypt did, that was pretty much the best-case scenario that the world could have hoped for. Unfortunately, the Libyan army didn’t break with Gadaffi the way Egypt’s did, though that situation may be changing now, at least with individual troops.
IM
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
See? Picking on the white man.
Maude
@Mnemosyne:
Thank you. They were indeed Republican Talking Points. I listen for a three minutes, as much as I can take and that’s how I hear the morning drivel that will continue for the day.
They are trying to rehab Bush’s image.
I am sick of the lies.
Oh, the day after the guy talked about arming and boots, the news cast had the no boots or arms to rebels. The host, my, my, my, said nada about it.
I have to look it up, but someone said that Beck is off 4 radio stations in Connecticut.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
ATTENTION ALL JUICERS:
You can think of Obama’s new doctrine of Limited Humanitarian Intervention as derivative of Just War Theory…..Just Intervention Theory.
Cote d’Ivoire doesnt check all the boxes.
Those include multilateralism, in America’s interest, no ground troops ever, limited goals, limited costs, democratic uprising in the population, and high probabilty of success.
As awful as the Obama doctrine is, it beats the hell out of the Bush Doctrine/COIN….aka Pre-emptive Missionary Democracy.
Obama SAID this in his speech.
burnspbesq
Stuck,
Your dickishness is forcing me to respond in kind. You’ve done the seemingly impossible. You’ve made me root for UConn.
General Stuck
@John Cole:
The way I see it, you have acting like a dick for weeks now, and I have defended you some, but mostly tried to stay calm. I just reached my limit with your bullshit, that is all.
It’s the truth. You are completely fucking crazy when it comes to anything about national security. Probly like that when you cheered on Iraq and Bush.
Mnemosyne
@John Cole:
Yes, because the Ivory Coast is not a crisis. The problems have been ongoing since at least 2003. In fact, it looked like the problems were starting to wrap up with the 2010 election, except that Gbagbo refused to step down when he lost.
The point of the story you linked to is that the guy who is supported by the UN is now implicated in massacres, which would make continued UN support problematic, to say the least. But you keep insisting that it’s just like Libya! no matter how many facts we point out to you.
Davis X. Machina
@Martin:
In the blogosphere, it’s always 2003.
Martin
@Davebo: Well, no. Most of Ivory Coast’s oil is tapped out. They still have some, but not even enough to meet their domestic needs. Libya has a decent amount of oil.
Bob Loblaw
@Angry Black Lady:
So is Boots Onna GroundTM like a thing now? It even has a little trademark. How adorable. Which luminary came up with that talking point?
@joe from Lowell:
This ignores the actual timeline. I’ll give you a hint, which UNSC members recognized a new, legitimate government of Libya before they had actually, you know, toppled Qaddafi? It wasn’t the United States, but it was ultimately why the West was forced to act.
How exactly do you think they would’ve walked that back? The Europeans jumped the gun on the rebellion because of what happened in Egypt and Tunisia and then got caught out on a limb when Qaddafi’s real army came to play. European-Libyan relations would have been devastated if Qaddafi had been able to retake the eastern holdouts.
General Stuck
@burnspbesq:
A dick responding to dickishness from another dick, who happens to be the blog owner. It may not be noble, but it ain’t out of line either. Someone needed to do it.
John Cole
What? Link, pls? I think this is the first post I’ve ever even discussed the IC, and I’m reasonably certain that nowhere in the last two hours have I said it is “just like Libya.”
Good grief.
Mnemosyne
@RinaX:
But the situations can’t be different — they both have oil!
/snark
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@mclaren:
what is wrong with you? Obama couldn’t even let the Bush tax cuts for richies expire. We are still living in Distributed Jesusland, not some hellenic/enlightenment fantasy world.
IM
There is a acute crisis since the election in CI. But to repeat myself, the International community miscalculated, hoping they could defuse the election crisis like 2008 in Kenya. Diplomacy does works sometimes, after all.
General Stuck
@joe from Lowell:
LOL, that’a a hoot coming from you.
Mnemosyne
@John Cole:
So the reason you’re comparing the situation in the IC to the one in Libya and asking why the UN is not taking the same actions in IC as they are in Libya is because you realize the two situations are completely different? Huh?
Different situations require different solutions. The solution that may help in Libya would not help in the IC. Asking why we’re not doing airstrikes in the IC when we’re doing them in Libya is just plain ignorant at this point in the thread.
ETA: Just to refresh your memory, and because I’m an asshole:
That looks a whole lot like you comparing the two situations the way I’m reading it. Did I read it wrong?
IM
@Mnemosyne:
Or in this case, no oil.
John Cole
Just a refresher, here are the horrible questions that make me absolutely insane and crazy and obviously a horrible person who hates Obama:
And after asking those HORRIBLE NO GOOD QUESTIONS, after explaining I’m not trolling and want serious answers, I had the unmitigated NERVE to sit back and let people respond. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?
Clearly I must be DESTROYED. STUCK! MAN YOUR KEYBOARD! FIX THIS WRONG BEFORE THE BLOG IS DESTROYED!
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Mnemosyne:
But they dont have–
multilateralism
high probability of success
limited goals
limited costs
American interests
Also, my hypothesis is that Obama will not intervene in any country that borders Israel, because of the high probability that the local tyrant will try to play the Israel card and draw Israel into the fight.
I think that is an additional criteria. No border with Israel.
John Cole
No, I think both make equally compelling arguments for humanitarian intervention. That doesn’t mean they are THE SAME.
Fuck it. I give up.
General Stuck
@General Stuck:
Okay, for those of you with the vapors on my dickishness toward Cole, here is my first comment. And it is a tough one, but not over the line on dickishness or insults. imo.
And here is Cole’s response to that comment, the money quote
@John Cole:
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@John Cole: do you still not understand what I am saying?
A NFZ would be useless in Cote D’Ivoire, sorry.
mclaren
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
What you just said is contradicted by the facts. You claimed that none of the countries I mentioned fit the Obama Doctrine whereas Libya does. That’s provably false.
Source: CNN: How the `Obama Doctrine’ Compares With Dredecessors, 29 March 2011.
The so-called “Obama Doctrine” is so vague that every single one of the countries I mentioned fits exactly and precisely in the “Obama Doctrine.”
Slavery is against American values, therefore the Obama Doctrine requires we send the U.S. army into Mauritania. The potential slaughter of civilians is against American values, therefore the Obama Doctrine requires we send the U.S. army into the Ivory Coast. The genital mutilation of innocent young women is against American values, therefore the Obama Doctrine requires we send the U.S. army into the Central African Republic, Egypt, Eritrea, Mali, Sudan, Uganda, Zaire, Djibouti and Somalia.
As Cole keeps pointing out, nothing you pro-intervention people say makes sense. You can’t even come up with a superficially credible argument. Everything you people say falls apart the instant someone examines it.
You claim the Ivory Coast is somehow meaningfully different from the sitution in Libya but it obviously isn’t. Civilians are being slaughtered in both countries. The humanitarian concern is the same for both populations.
You people claim that the Obama Doctrine somehow selectively singles out Libya, but it clearly and obviously doesn’t because the Obama Doctrine is so hopelessly vague (American interests or American values threatened: therefore we intervene) that the Obama Doctrine would allow us to invade Arizona (their racist new law) or Australia (they refuse to extradite Assange) or Spain (they just indicted CIA operatives in absentia).
You people contort yourselves into pretzel-like knots of verbal calisthenics to try to distinguish this kind of wild military adventurism from Bush’s cowboy antics, when the plain reality is that there is no difference. Cowboying around the world with the U.S. army blowing shit up and recklessly killing the world’s poorest people with no exit strategy and nothing but a poorly-thought-out vague incoherent gung-ho “Let’s liberate ’em!” rationale prompting your actions is a piss-poor idea. Regardless whether the drunk-driving C student Bush or the Harvard Law Review editor Obama does it.
I swear, you commenters on this blog are the exact mirror image of the tea party. If the other party’s guy does some insanely stupid thing, you foam at the mouth with rage. If our party’s guy does some insanely stupid thing, you swoon with rapturous delight and confect bizarre incoherent paroxysms of illogic in a failed and futile attempt to justify America’s unjustified military cowboying.
Mnemosyne
@John Cole:
Dude, the only people bringing up Obama here are you and
m_cHermione Granger-Weasley. The rest of us are comparing UN actions in Libya vs. UN actions in Cote d’Ivoire. Calm down.Hawes
I think some of the thinking behind Libya and not Ivory Coast, is that Libya has the potential to destabilize Egypt and Tunisia. Ivory Coast is part of an area already destabilized.
Put another way, if Libya was happening without Tunisia and Egypt, I don’t think we would be intervening.
General Stuck
@John Cole:
I didn’t bring Obama into my first comment. You brought him into it with your response ie “fellating”. So you are still a lying sack of shit, on almost every thing you are writing here. My first response was that you are crazy on national security matters, that has zero to do with Obama.
Mnemosyne
@John Cole:
There already is humanitarian intervention there. UN troops have been there since 2003. Is your question about the scale and why, after 8 years in Cote d’Ivoire, we’re not throwing the same resources at it as our two weeks in Libya?
IM
The somewhat different actions or demands of he African Union and the Arab League probably do matter too. The AU did not demand intervention, as far as I understand.
joe from Lowell
@Davis X. Machina:
Disagree. Henry Wallace beats Harry Truman. It’s misleading to pretend that military isolationism is only a creature of the right.
Linnaeus
John Cole is asking legitimate questions about intervention. I don’t read what he’s writing as “Ivory Coast = Libya” but rather he’s asking about what criteria are used when deciding when and where and how to intervene and what that may reveal about a country’s policies, values, etc.
If humanitarian considerations are the overriding factor in making a determination to intervene in a particular place in a particular way, then it’s perfectly fair to ask if, using humanitarian considerations as criteria, other places don’t warrant the same level of commitment. And if they don’t warrant that commitment, despite a compelling humanitarian rationale for intervention, then it stands to reason that there are others factors in the decision and we should ask what those factors are and how much weight they play in making such decisions.
joe from Lowell
@FlipYrWhig:
So the people against this operation. That’s why they believe, or pretend to believe, that it’s Blood for Oil – because then they can make their comfortable, easy arguments against a national-interest-based foreign policy, without having to take up the much more difficult (for us liberals) questions surrounding humanitarian intervention.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@John Cole: I don’t know how much clearer I can make this. We are very, very good at bringing the rain–at airpower force interdiction.
In Cote d’Ivoire BOTH SIDES LOOK THE SAME FROM THE AIR.
John Cole
I think that is the real difference.
John Cole
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: I UNDERSTOOD THE FIRST 10 TIMES YOU SAID IT.
John Cole
@General Stuck:
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Wrong. Lots of people are bringing up Obama. And for an obvious reason.
The president of the united states just went on TV and enunciated the Obama Doctrine.
When a president does that, people tend to discuss it. Now, we know you want to avoid that inconvenient fact, and we know that inappropriate logic and inconvenient facts are things you’d really seriously prefer to avoid…
But, sad to say, the Obama Doctrine falls apart under even the most trivial examination. Justifying American military intervention anywhere in the world where America is not direclty threatened, but our interests or values are, is a stupid policy so hopelessly vague and so poorly thought out that it would justify America invading Switzerland.
How so?
Switzerland is the HQ of the European bureaucracy that recently ruled against American companies in a bunch of economically damaging world trade cases. This threatens American interests — so send in the marines!
That’s stupid.
You know, I used to have some respect for Obama. But if this is the kind of dumb-ass shit Obama comes up with, then he’s just stupid. Pure and simple. There’s no getting away from it. Sending the U.S. military anywhere America’s “interests or values are threatened” is so moronically vague and so half-wittedly reckless that it’s the kind of thing you’d expect from a three-year-old…not a former editor of the Harvard Law Review and a summa cum laude scholar.
Moreover, the kinds of incredibly weak arguments we’re getting from the pro-intervention commenters on this forum sound like something out of a kindergarten. They don’t even begin to make sense.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@John Cole:
Point me to any international troops on the ground in Libya. Point me to repeated international involvement in a Libyan civil war between 2003 and now. It’s not just a question of what is going on right this instant, but also what has gone on over the last eight years. French troops actively intervened twice over that period. The UN (and ECOWAS) involvement has been large. We’re already to the point where intervention has been a failure, rather than just speculated upon as in Libya.
It’s also the case, unlike with Libya, that the most important neighboring country, Ghana, is adamantly opposed to any intervention. That complicates things quite a bit.
joe from Lowell
@Comrade Luke:
Samantha Power’s book was largely about Darfur and Rwanda.
So, no.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@mclaren:
no, you are a foo’.
The Obama doctrine is deliberately amorphous.
It is quite brilliant in that.
The intervention criteria are SITUATIONAL.
So you can’t force an intervention.
Obama is much too slippery for you.
;)
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Linnaeus: Except there are already interventions in both nations. Libya, what with the metric shit-ton of ex-Soviet hardware Gaddafi’s accumulated over the years, got the no-fly zone. Cote d’Ivoire got the blue helmets. Different crisis, different solutions.
IM
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
Why?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@John Cole: well jeez give me an ack then. You have repeatedly told me you don’t understand anything I say.
so…
What do you think about my hypothesis that Obama will not call a Humanitarian Intervention in any country that borders Israel?
mclaren
@Hawes:
More incoherent logic. More scrambling thinking and garbled reasoning.
Logically, if the Ivory Coast is part of an area already destablized, that makes it even more urgent that we intervene military there.
The Domino Theory!
Jeeeeee-zus. You people are dense. Did someone put something in the water? Did you pro-interventionists get hit in the head with a ball peen hammer?
Are these weak-ass illogical exercises in scrambled thinking really the best arguments you can come up for getting America mired in another 10-year-long trillion dollar unwinnable endless war in some third-world hellhole?
Hawes
@mclaren: Because we didn’t (and won’t) send the army into Libya? Is that it?
joe from Lowell
@Comrade Luke:
I think there is a lot of truth in this. Letting the UN Security Council serve as the arbiter of when the use of force for reasons other than self-defense is legitimate is the worse possible system, except for all the others.
Angry Black Lady
@John Cole: okay. i’ll go sit quietly and have a beer now.
/sits quietly.
/has beer.
although, i do point out that karen or somebody up there said something about “our country” and not “a buncha countries.”
muddled discussion going on here.
see what i did there? i didn’t sit quietly.
/has beer.
Mnemosyne
@Linnaeus:
Here’s the thing, though: putting boots on the ground is a much higher level of commitment than bombing tanks from the air is. As HGW has pointed out, airstrikes would do absolutely no good in Cote d’Ivoire, because the two sides are armed at the same level. The only thing that would help would be to flood more peacekeepers into the country.
I think some people (not you) are confused about the difference between a financial commitment and a troops commitment. Bombing from the air is a bigger financial commitment (at least up front), but it only requires a few hundred troops at best, and most of them are safely away from the battlefield. Putting boots on the ground is a smaller monetary commitment initially, but it’s a huge commitment in terms of how involved you’re going to be in that country.
Yes, we’re spending more money up front in Libya than we are in Cote d’Ivoire. That’s because it’s ultimately less expensive for us to bomb from the air than it is for us to fight a ground battle. A ground battle would entail all kinds of other expenses, from feeding and housing your troops to taking care of the wounded veterans created by the battle. It is a much bigger commitment than airstrikes would be.
BGinCHI
Seriously? Saved thousands of people in Benghazi and now NATO takes over and perhaps Khaddafy leaves and they have a chance to make a go at not having the boot on their neck? That’s not worth a try? Is the alternative to hunker down and play with our iPhones and wait till the GOP is back in power so that there would REALLY be something to bitch about?
If you’re mad at Bush, don’t take it out on Obama.
General Stuck
@John Cole:
In all seriousness Cole, I think you are a good decent person and it is painful to watch your meltdown the past few weeks and months. I have no stake in this blog, so it has limited effect on my mental health. Please consider selling, or at least letting someone else manage it, before you give yourself a nervous breakdown. I’m really saying this in all sincerity. I got to walk the dog now, and get ready for the game. You take care. GO CATS!!
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@John Cole: @Bob Loblaw:
Conservative saber-rattling governments in western Europe see a chance to stake their foreign policy reputations by kicking out an unpopular dictator. Bonus points considering everyone else in North Africa hates Gaddafi’s guts too. If it leads to military action, so what? They’ll just go crying to Uncle Sam to cover their asses.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
Oh, mclaren. You’re such a comedian.
mclaren
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
TRANSLATION: The Obama Doctrine is bullshit to cover up the fact that the president of the United States is now a king and can do anything he wants anywhere in the world.
Aside from being the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, that’s a gross violation of the constitution of the United States, which states that only congress has the power to declare war.
Making the president a king with limitless powers is stupid because, obviously, we can’t predict what kind of president we’re going to have. Remember the drunk-driving coke-snorting halfwit we used to have in the Oval Office? Remember his torturer sidekick who used to run Halliburton?
Making the president a king with limitless military powers is dumb as a sack of rocks, lady. That’s why the constitution limits his powers. And that’s why your argument is so hopelessly stupid.
Seriously.
Has there been some kind of infectious brain parasite destroying peoples’ frontal lobes? Can’t you people come up with even a momentarily credible rationale for Obama’s ill-advised cowboying around the world?
Hawes
@mclaren: Look, Egypt is an absolutely VITAL country to the whole world, sitting as it does astride the Suez canal. If Ghadafy/Khaddafi forces an exodus of refugees into an already unstable situation, what happens in Egypt? The same is true for Tunisia, which matters more to the Italians and French than any one else (aside from Tunisians).
West Africa sees shit like this all the time. It doesn’t make it any less horrific, and that’s why the UN is there.
But the strategic necessity of protecting the democratic transition is essential to global security. It’s already going to be hard enough without 200,000 Libyan refugees.
Which, by the way, is why the Arab League was behind the NFZ.
joe from Lowell
@John Cole:
Greater in what sense? The are actual Boots Onna Ground (TM) in the Ivory Coast. There’s actually a chance that the international forces will take some non-negligible number of casualties.
On the other hand, Odyssey Dawn (which sounds like Honda came out with a hybrid version of its minivan) is much more expensive, and also, much more effective.
So, what are you actually asking here?
mclaren
@General Stuck:
This from a crank who came unhinged a couple of years back and begged Cole to ban him because the crank couldn’t control his own internet addiction.
Dude, stick a fork in yourself. You’re done.
Linnaeus
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
And that’s a reasonable argument to make. The point I’m getting at is that one one end we have the (emerging) general principle that “the world should stop potential crimes against humanity” and on the other end we have, as you say, “different crises, different solutions”. It’s good to ask what makes different crises different and why that requires different solutions. And what that often reveals is that interventions, even those that have some humanitarian motive, get pretty complicated.
Frankly, I’m glad John Cole put this up. I’ve learned a fair amount already.
joe from Lowell
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
I don’t think that’s a hard-and-fast rule. I think he’s particularly reticent about ground troops right now because of how stretched our ground forces are with Iraq (47,000) and Afghanistan (100,000, including a combat mission).
I also he’s particularly reticent about ground troops in the MENA region, for some pretty obvious reasons.
But I’m not convinced he wouldn’t ok American peacekeepers for a Rwanda-type situation, for instance.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@mclaren: so fuckin’ what?
I am VERY unhappy about Humanitarian Imperialism. I regard the Obama doctrine as a horrific personal betrayal. I worked on the guy’s campaign.
:(
But there is NOTHING I can do about it.
Because the alternative to Obama is the conservative deatheaters that would burn the world to get back into power.
mclaren
@Hawes:
Once again, grotesque ignorance. You people cannot come up with even the slightest shred of credible reasoning to back up Obama’s ill-advising cowboying around the world.
FACT: The Suez Canal carries very little of the world’s vital shipping today. Do you know why? Obviously you don’t, you’re too ignorant — so I’ll explain it to you.
Today’s oil supertankers and giant container ghips are far too large to fit through the Suez Canal.
This is like whack-a-mole. Each time some ill-informed Obot pops up to concoct a foolish and provably false rationale for Obama’s ridiculously reckless military actions, I whack him down with the facts…and then another new ill-informed Obot pops up.
Well, not a problem. I can whack you Obots down with the facts a lot faster than you can concoct half-witted illogical reasons to justify Obama’s unjustifiable military adventurism.
Hawes
One more potential difference between Libya and Cote D’Ivoire. We DIDN’T act at first. We hardly rushed into Libya. While I might be able to blame the myopic news media for this, how long has the situation in Cote D’Ivoire been acute as opposed to chronic? I honestly don’t know.
Political violence is endemic to west Africa. Nigeria has seen hundreds killed in pre-election violence this year. Ultimately, there has to be an acute situation. Has Cote D’Ivoire been that had for that long?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@IM: I’m not really sure, but my guess is that ethnicity is involved. Likely political connections as well. The government of Ghana has been pretty outspoken that they think the election was rigged and the people certifying the votes were just puppets of the French and Americans.
John Cole
Maybe it is just me, but the troops in the IC sort of feels like just doing something but not really caring about the outcome. Does anyone here think that the UN troops are actually going to stop either side from doing WTFTW? It just sort of feels like singing the National Anthem before a baseball game or saying All Rise before Court starts. Why? Just because.
In Libya, though, it seems like there is an actual vested interest in a specific outcome (massacre stopped, Qaddafi out). Maybe that is just me, but it sure seems like we are actually serious about doing something in Libya and not the IC.
Hawes
@mclaren: OK, the Suez is irrelevant. How about being the largest Arab speaking country in the world?
And over 7% of the world’s sea traffic travels through the canal.
That’s not insignificant.
But you said I was ignorant on the Internet, so it must be so.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@joe from Lowell: he might ok ground troops for a Rwanda.
But never on the Arabian Peninsula.
Americans have absolutely no clue about how hated the
missionaries with gunsrapist-torture killersAmerican soldiers are in majority muslim nation states.cat48
I disagree with everyone who thinks there is a clear “Obama Doctrine”. I haven’t found one person who does foreign policy daily who thinks there is a clear “Doctrine.” I’ve seen individuals make up one for him, but that doesn’t mean it’s his “Doctrine.” He’s been more of a Realist up till now.
IM
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
But then the opposition of Ghana should not be more valued then the opposition of Iran in the Libyan situation.
joe from Lowell
@Bob Loblaw:
No, it doesn’t. Why does everybody start thinking about our stance towards Libya only dating back to the beginning of the discussions about the military campaign? Gadaffi has happily selling his oil to the west when Obama came out with his “Gadaffi has to go” statement on February 26. This was several days before Gadaffi even cracked down seriously on the protesters, who didn’t form a military force or political leadership for weeks.
War is the pursuit of politics by other means. If you aren’t looking at the military intervention in Libya as an extension of the political/diplomatic/economic actions we took towards Libya, and the policies that evolved over the course of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, you’re not going to understand how we got here.
mclaren
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Once again, illogic to the rescue. This is the classic fallacy of the excluded middle.
“We must intervene militarily in Vietnam because otherwise, we’ll be fighting the communist Chinese in Tijuana!”
Bullshit. There is a broad middle ground between “doing nothing” and “Obama sends the U.S. army to cowboy around the world and mire us deep in another 10-year-long endless unwinnable war in some third world hellhole.”
Among the many, many, many options that fall in between “do nothing” and “send troops into a third war when we’re already in the process of losing two” are:
[1] sanctions
[2] international boycotts (worked goddamn well against the South African apartheid regime, by the way)
[3] carrot & stick diplomacy
[4] providing safe passage for refugees who want to leave Libya
[5] supporting the UN without sending in the U.S. army or the U.S. airforce
Just Some Fuckhead
You sociopathic fuckers do this fainting goats shit in every thread and then you get all butthurt or outraged when I tell you how much you suck.
Try to pretend someone else is President if that helps. Try to imagine we are fourteen trillion dollars in debt and have finite resources and cannot even sustain the infrastructure in our own country, cannot even save lives in our country, still put thousands of people to death every year in our own country.
Imagine for a moment that YOU are the President and YOU have to assign priorities to what we do and where we do it and for what reasons then answer John’s fucking question.
Linnaeus
@Mnemosyne:
Agreed re ground forces. When I mean “level of commitment”, I mean a number of things: financial resources, military resources, diplomatic resources, sense of urgency, etc. Admittedly, I’m still catching up on my reading on both Libya and Ivory Coast.
IM
@Hawes:
As far as I understand, Cote Ivoire has been gone from threatening civil war to actual civil war since some weeks.
Still, there was Nigeria, I mentioned Kenya. There the situation was just left smoldering and in the end no full-blown civil war developed.
Mnemosyne
@cat48:
I agree with you — I’m not sure where the “doctrine” talk is coming from. So far, all I’ve heard from Obama is, “We’ll look at things on a case-by-case basis before we decide what to do.” It’s a pretty long stretch to claim that’s a “doctrine.”
Hawes
So, I’m confused mclaren. You think sanctions would have stopped the Razing of Benghazi? Because, we already froze Qaddafi’s assets and imposed sanctions on him.
Carrots and sticks is as bullshit a formulation as the “bully pulpit” being used to pass legislation. It’s magical thinking.
Ultimately, economic pressure only works when the government is in some way responsive to the great mass of its population.
mclaren
@Hawes:
More bullshit, more ignorance.
The available evidence strongly suggests that the entire Libyan uprising was a CIA-staged operation. Source: New York Times story C.I.A. Agents in Libya Aid Airstrikes and Meet Rebels.
Based on prior experience, anyone with a brain now realizes that the entire Libyan rebellion was staged, financed and entirely created and sustained by the CIA as a black op. It’s as obvious as the fact that that `Raymond Davis’ guy (not his real name, you can bet your ass) in Pakistan was a JSOC black ops assassin carrying out wet work (which a mountain of circumstantial evidence now shows to have been true — among other things, the military consulting company he claimed to have worked at was an empty office in a deserted office park, classic CIA front).
Try again, Obots. You can’t even come up with the most trivially credible justifications for Obama’s military cowboying.
JMS
Trying to ask for consistency in these cases is naive. Who gets interventions and who doesn’t is some amalgam of timing, for lack of a better term, “PR” of the people involved, economic interests (like oil), historical ties, colonial and otherwise, actual threat to the U.S. and I imagine, the race or color of the people being massacred often has some bearing on the willingness of not just one man (the president), but a whole military-industrial complex to involve itself.
Also, a situation where some airstrikes are called for are a much easier sell than one that is more messy and would involve real ground troops and a situation that is more entrenched, messy, and pretty much unfixable. The situation in Iraq under Bush basically broke a lot of the “rules” of the above, though, for what was apparently a grudge held by Bush and others like him.
There is no shortage of situations where one could make a case for military involvement. No country or entity can get to all of them. Some say we should be involved with none, or fewer than we are. But if you’re going to be involved with any, it’s going to bring up just this sort of consternation.
Mark S.
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Oh hush. This has been a very entertaining thread to read while I wait for the Final Four to start.
Mnemosyne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
As other people have mentioned, the US stops participating in the airstrikes tomorrow.
If W — or any other current Republican — was in charge, that wouldn’t be happening. So, yes, I would feel differently if someone was taking different actions than the ones Obama is taking. I would feel differently if Obama was taking different actions than the ones he’s currently taking.
Hawes
@mclaren: Your tinfoil hat looks lovely this time of year.
The CIA? Really? Because they are there now, they must have always been there?
Sorry, I’m done feeding trolls.
Especially the angry paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Don’t forget about “The Rothschilds, the Gettys, the Queen, the Rockefellers AND COLONEL SANDERS WITH HIS WEE BEADY EYES!”
joe from Lowell
@John Cole:
Agreed. I think the observation that there is a U.N. mission in the Ivory Coast, while legitimate, only gets you so far, because there is this difference. When do you think more than a quarter billion dollars in resources will be put into the Ivory Coast? I’ll take the over on “Never.”
On the other hand, “getting serious” in Libya hasn’t meant Boots Onna Ground(TM) in any real sense, while it will mean a big ground commitment in Ivory Coast, in a “hot” location, not just patrolling, observing, and “enforcing” an already-existing peace deal.
Everybody here understands that a major Boots commitment is a big barrier to overcome for an intervention, much higher than a bombing campaign or a handful of spooks creeping around.
Mnemosyne
Can’t we get some kind of moderation dictionary so I can figure out why the fuck my innocuous comment got thrown into moderation?
Thank you.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@mclaren: well the Bush Doctrine of Missionary Democracy has done this.
I’m willin’ to let Obama give Selective Low-Budget Humanitarian Intervention a try.
I would, personally prefer NO INTERVENTION.
It is all meddling.
But I don’t get peoples panty-twisting over Libya when A-stan is morphing into Vietnam Redux.
We are spending a billion dollars a month to make more Taliban and commit atrocities. And everyone, even Petraeus, accepts that the Taliban will be part of whatever government we leave behind.
Fuckin’ batshit, that is.
Our exit strategy (the mini-surge) has failed.
I think everyone should be wilin’ out on Obama to come up with a new exit strategy….or our exit is going to look like the chopper airlift at the Fall of Saigon.
joe from Lowell
@Mnemosyne: Exactly.
Also, how do you pronounce your handle? NEM-os-in-ee?
Citizen_X
@mclaren:
Sadly, no:
It’s bigger than the Panama Canal, BTW. See figure at link.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
From the White House and every major news network and all the major newspapers.
There are too many references to link to (3 URL limit) so just google “Obama Doctrine” and you’ll find:
“The Obama Doctrine” The American Prospect, 24 March 2008
“Libya: test case for the ‘Obama doctrine'” Christian Science Monitor, 29 march 2011
“How the ‘Obama doctrine’ compares with predecessors,” CNN, march 29 2011.
“Obama Doctrine,” Wikipedia entry.
“The Obama Doctrine: the Fix,” Washington Post, 29 March 2011.
Next, you people are going to yelp “Where does all this talk about Obama being black come from?”
What a bunch of pathetic cranks.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mnemosyne:
Agreed, if we knew what was causing it, we could tweak it to catch everything you write.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@John Cole:
I totally agree with this.
joe from Lowell
@cat48:
You mean Pragmatist. Realism is 1) a doctrine, and 2) focused around the advancement of national interest.
Brachiator
@John Cole:
If you believe in neo-isolationism, make an argument for it.
Americans, especially conservatives, used to seriously believe in the idea of an island America, blissfully disconnected from the rest of the world. Of course, they depended on a powerful military industrial complex which kept their boots on the necks of people in other countries who might disrupt our pursuit of happiness.
Odd that this is now the “liberal” argument.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
Is air power being used in Ivory Coast? It seems like it already is a no fly zone.
mclaren
@Citizen_X:
Sadly, yes. More ignorance, more denial of well documented facts:
Source: Wikipedia article on supertankers.
Learnt the facts before you try to distort them.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Brachiator:
If the choice is between neo-humanitarianism and neo-isolationism, put me in the latter category.
Mnemosyne
@joe from Lowell:
As far as I can tell, that’s correct. Not quite sure how the actual ancient Greeks would have pronounced it.
People who get tired of typing the whole thing can shorten it to Mnemo.
Bob Loblaw
@joe from Lowell:
No, you’re not getting it. It has nothing to do with Obama, the Pentagon, or anybody in the United States. They are not relevant strategic actors.
There are four actors who matter: France, UK, Egypt and the Gulf Cooperation Council. If you can figure out what they wanted from the situation, you can put it all together.
Once France and Britain went beyond sanctions and recognized a new government of Libya, the die was cast and an entirely new set of geopolitical considerations created. Escalation was inevitable.
joe from Lowell
@Hawes:
No, he doesn’t. If American policy was to impose sanctions on Libya, he’d be boo-hooing about how we’re starving the Libyan people.
You also seem to think he gives a crap about a former Soviet client slaughtering 100,000 people.
Mclaren is bringing up sanctions for the same reason Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine talks about carbon taxes, or New Gingrich brought up a system of private health insurance subsidies in 1993: to pretend that he actually believes in something other than just running down whatever the president does.
Just Some Fuckhead
@mclaren:
Mnem and Stuck, yes.
JfL just likes blowing up shit and killing people. Otherwise, he’s a mensch.
MattR
@Mnemosyne: Link to WP spam words
mclaren
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Do you even bother to read what you write?
You aren’t even trying to make sense. You’ve given up the effort entirely.
You just told us above that
Your own comment @149.
If the Obama Doctrine is deliberately amorphous, then it can’t possibly be selective.
What we’re seeing here is a complete meltdown by the Obots in response to Obama’s desperately foolish and hopeless ill-thought-out military adventurism.
And John Cole is 100% dead right to nail you people for it. Way to go, Cole.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
From Wikipedia:
Do you ever get tired of being wrong?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937:
lawl.
;)
Citizen_X
@mclaren: Oh, for fuck’s sake. You said
Although, maybe “ghips” are something I’m not aware of.
joe from Lowell
@Brachiator: I don’t think John is asking those questions as if they are UNASSAILABLE EVIDENCE THAT HE’S RIGHT, BECAUSE NOBODY CAN ANSWER THEM! Believe me, I’ve seen an awful lot of people throw questions out there for that reason, do a little victory dance, and then stand there with the intertubez equivalent of a stupid look on their face when I answer it.
I think Cole is asking these questions in good faith to see what people say.
Mnemosyne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Awww, I wuv you, too. You’re my favorite Fuckhead.
And I liked you telling mclaren that I’m the crank. Nice touch.
cat48
@joe from Lowell:
Exactly, Pragmatist.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Do you ever get tired of lying?
Obama himself enunciated the basis of his doctrine and every major newspaper has called it “The Obama Doctrine” for the last 3 years.
Next, you’ll tell us that U.S. forces aren’t killing innocent peasants in Afghanistan because we’re technically at war.
English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@mclaren: lol
It is DELIBERATELY amorphous so Obama can DO THE SELECTING.
Call it Subjective Low-Budget Humanitarian Intervention if you like.
Dude, you are seriously thick.
Obama is 6 hops out, drinking your milkshake, in ur base an’ killin’ ur doodz.
like usual.
joe from Lowell
@Bob Loblaw:
Ah, I was talking about our involvement.
Again, aren’t you starting a little late in the game? As in, once there was already a rebel military and government, and there were already sanctions, put in place in response to the crackdown, itself a consequence of the uprising, which Obama, and other leaders, had already responded to by calling for Gadaffi to leave.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mnemosyne:
You are. Only you can’t see that.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
One of us doesn’t seem to:
IM
I don’t see an Obama doctrine. I see “making it up as one goes along”. But then isn’t that a very traditional way to conduct foreign affairs?
Events, dear boy,events.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@mclaren: “killing innocent peasants in Afghanistan” is the direct result of the Bush Doctrine/COIN aka Missionary Democracy.
Libya is the first application of the Obama Doctrine.
Corner Stone
@mclaren:
No. She does not.
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Listen. Can we please agree to wait a couple months before you start touting the “Obama Doctrine” ?
It is NOT at all clear to this point there is any demarcation in foreign policy by our head of state.
MattR
@Just Some Fuckhead: Personally, I enjoy the whackos on both sides of the spectrum calling each other out while acting like they are sane and logical.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@mclaren: And COIN is still operational.
COIN is the Bush Doctrine cut down to village size.
IM
Furthermore, does anybody believe that Sarkozy, who was very much the driver into this, acted on an “Obama doctrine”?
mclaren
@joe from Lowell:
And now, having failed to produce any credible facts or susbtantive logical arguments for Obama’s ill-advised decision to cowboy around the world with the U.S. military, the commenters have stooped to the old Senator Joe McCarthy smear tactic.
Notice what Joe from Lowell is doing: he’s linking my name with people everyone recognizes as scumbags (Ron Bailey and Newt Gingrich) in order to create guilt by association.
Well, two can play that game.
Joe from Lowell is only saying these things because he’s male, just Albert Hamilton Fish, the infamous kiddy raper, known as “the Gray Man.” People who spend their time molesting children have to keep the spotlight off themselves. Is that why Joe from Lowell is spending his time attacking me without providing any evidence for his claims, instead of trying to debate the issue of Obama’s incredibly poorly-thought-out military intervention in Libya on the basis of the logic and evidence?
You can keep going down this road, Joe from Lowell, using character assassination and guilt by association and all the other sleazy Karl Rove tactics…or you can come up with some facts and logic to justify Obama’s intervention in Libya.
So far, you haven’t been able to.
Counting down to even more vicious character assassination by Joe from Lowell devoid of actual argumentation or facts in…3…2…1…
Mnemosyne
@IM:
I think the argument is that Sarkozy is Obama’s puppet and this whole thing was secretly engineered by the US. Because foreign leaders have no thoughts or policies of their own, dontchaknow.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Corner Stone: Can we agree that Obama is NO LONGER applying the Bush Doctrine to New Events then?
Perhaps the Obama Doctrine is not revolutionary, but evolutionary.
;)
Srsly, WWBHD?
(what would bush have done)
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone:
I agree. He just said a bunch of pretty shit to justify our involvement in the affairs of another oil country. Let’s wait to see if there’s An Actual Doctrine.
Corner Stone
@Bob Loblaw:
It was inevitable from the beginning of action.
The “rebels” have no logistics, supply train, C3, etc etc etc.
They CAN NOT defeat Gaddafi. Period.
Some external force will have to close with and destroy his forces. Period.
IM
@Mnemosyne:
The assent of the US was needed. But UK and France were pushing and the US was a lot more hesitant. (For good reasons)
General Stuck
For anyone who cares. Yes, I do support Obama and like him on a personal level, but my support is also because he is the democrat in the WH, and unless you bring some evidence besides a mountain of emo and self importance to trash the dem president, then I will defend that dem presnit.
But as I stated in another one of these threads the other day to commenter Pattonb, my support for Obama has limits, and some bright red lines. And I will restate what I said in that thread comment, if Obama introduces ground troops into Libya, I am done with him. I will still vote for the dem candidate in 2012, whoever, but if any primary candidate pops up that is qualified, I will throw my support to them in money and what ever else I can, including my vote in a primary.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
No, it isn’t clear to me this isn’t exactly what the Bush/PNAC crew wouldn’t be doing.
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
We just killed some dozen odd “rebels” by the rebels own admission via drone strike. What is different about this than prior COIN ?
DS
First, nobody gives a fuck about Africa. However, wait until the diabetes-ridden Tea Bag fucks realize that the price of their Snicker’s bar will skyrocket if there is a disruption in cocoa production. Then I’m sure there will be a call to arms. Second, Gbango is not using jets against his own people, which seems to be the entire rationale behind support for intervention in Libya. Jets? Fuck that shit! Let’s get ’em! Black people being raped and massacred? Sorry, just not in our national interest. And so forth.
joe from Lowell
@mclaren:
Yeah, don’t care. I’m not bothering to read your shit. I cut and pasted every word of yours I’ve read.
I just wanted to point out what you were all about to someone who didn’t seem to know.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: I thought it was pronounced “nee-MOZ-a-nee.” The Keanu Reeves vehicle “Johnny Mnemonic” was pronounced “nee-MON-ic,” frex.
Corner Stone
@General Stuck:
Bullshit. You will continue to “evolve” that definition as much as you need to, so you can keep up your slavish devotion.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Corner Stone: nothing. COIN is what it always was. An attempt to standup/impose/implant/install/force missionary democracy on muslims that don’t want it….in villages, as opposed to the Bush Doctrine proper which operated on whole countries.
And that is why 30k Taliban are kicking ass on 100k of America’s finest.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
So now an official policy of the United States government enunciated by the president of the united states isn’t actually happening because it’s “a phrase” instead of a “specific foreign policy”?
I’ve heard of bullshit sophistry, but this is the most infantile example I’ve ever encountered. Even a three-year-old would be embarassed by this exercise in vacuous verbal calisthenics.
That’s like arguing that you didn’t kill someone when you shot ’em with your gun because the bullet actually caused the person’s death.
I’m going to quote Barack Obama’s public speech once again:
In case you ignorant seemingly deluded Obots are now going to try to claim that Obama wasn’t trying to explain his decision to send U.S. military forces into Libya, listen to what Obama himself said.
Obama promised “to explain what we have done, what we plan to do, and why this matters to us.”
These are Barack Obama’s own words.
And they’re a half-ass mish-mash of poorly-thought out John Wayne cliches, incoherent vaporous do-goodism, and hopelessly confused maundering.
Before sending the United States military into some third world hellhole for a mission of undefined duration with no exit strategy and no specific goal, I goddamn well expect a former editor ot the Harvard Law Review and a summa cum laude graduate from law school to come up with something better than this.
Just Some Fuckhead
@FlipYrWhig:
I’ve never been able to figure it out and am frankly a little surprised she doesn’t even know how to pronounce her own handle. That just seems wacky, crankish even.
Corner Stone
@Mnemosyne:
Jeebus but you are hilarious.
Mnemosyne
@IM:
You know that, and I know that, but unfortunately there’s a group of people who absolutely can’t understand that the US does not actually drive every single decision made in the world and that other countries sometimes want to take actions of their own. To them, if France and the UK convince the US to join them, that’s proof that it was the US’s secret plan all along and the other countries were duped.
General Stuck
@Corner Stone:
Go to hell you psychopath, and take mclaren and fuckhead wit you. None of You offer anything of value here and never have.
mclaren
@Corner Stone:
He’s done with Obama just the way he was done with Balloon-Juice a couple of years back when he plaintively begged John Cole to ban him.
Internet addiction: it’s a bitch.
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: Unsurprisingly then, I’m confused. What’s different about killing Libyan rebels via drone than killing Pakis via drone?
Does anyone think their loved ones dying for the Obama Doctrine makes for a more spruced up funeral?
mclaren
@General Stuck:
Ah, the sweet sound of peerless logic and unimpeachable facts. That’s the Balloon-Juice commentariat we’ve all come to know and love.
John Cole
You would think that after ten thousand plus posts, it would be clear when I am trolling, when I am honestly asking questions, and when I am just phoning shit in.
Pro-tip: If I am trolling, I will not include the statement “So I swear I am not trolling you all with this, and it is a serious question.”
And second, you all need to toughen up. Joe from Lowell and I had multiple heated back and forth flame wars t he last few weeks, and it appears that neither of us withered up and died. It’s a blog. People argue. People say pointed things. Life goes on.
Unless you are one of the two dozen pansy seeds I planted, which are all as dead as can be.
joe from Lowell
@Mnemosyne: Well, you have to admit, seeing the United States get involved in something significant where we aren’t driving the train is pretty unprecedented. When was the last time that happened? World War One?
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
You have no idea what the Monroe Doctrine was, do you? Hint: it’s not just a collection foreign policy statements made by Monroe.
Calling Obama’s foreign policy “the Obama Doctrine” is like appending “-gate” to every Washington scandal.
Bob Loblaw
@joe from Lowell:
I don’t waste my time on minor actors. If the US wants to be mere trigger pullers for the UNSC, that’s their business. I just hope they get some nice flex out of Egypt and NATO for their trouble.
How long exactly do you think regime change was thought about? If the last three months haven’t taught you that the US and Europe have absolutely no idea what the hell they’re doing in the middle east, then I don’t know what to say.
A resurgent Qaddafi changed the math. The oil math, the security/terrorism math, the refugee math. And all of it was bleaker for Europe than the risks of intervention.
mclaren
@Corner Stone:
When America murders thousands of innocent Pakistani familes at funerals and wedding parties, it doesn’t count.
It would prove interesting indeed to apply this doctrine to the police: they can shoot as many innocent bystanders and they like and as long as they were aiming at some bank robbers, no harm — no foul!
Corner Stone
@General Stuck: It’s substantive answers like this that make me question whether you still really care.
You’ve already done what you always do. Stake out a position, then crawfish to include whatever is needed to keep you on the righteous.
When we have 3 or 5 or 100 dozen “advisors/trainers” killed in Libya I will look forward to you telling us they don’t really count.
Bob Loblaw
@Just Some Fuckhead:
If your contrarian hipsterdom leads to you having to defend mclaren, you’ve gone too far. It’s like pontificating on the artistic merits of Troll 2 or The Room.
Corner Stone
@John Cole:
Probably due to the pot.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Nice try — but your effort to derail the discussion into an irrelevant dead end has failed.
Once again, you haven’t provided a single credible argument of fact to justify Obama’s rash and reckless decision to cowboy around the world with the U.S. military — specifically, his incredibly bad decision to send the U.S. army and U.S. airforce into a CIA-sponsored and CIA-aided uprising in Libya.
We’re still waiting. Tick…tick…tick….
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Corner Stone: nah. Qaddafi can’t hold on. His only chance was to smush the rebels in Benghazi and kill their leadership. Sad for him the French scrambled and brought the rain.
The rebels have 80% of the oil reserves, and Qaddafi has no friends.
Also, guess who is just across the border?
The Muslim Brotherhood. al-Qaradawi and the Brothers just put out a death fatwah on Qaddafi. And guess what else, Stone? Not only do the Brothers now own Egypt, they own a sweet 30 year stockpile of American armament that the US bribed Mubarak to make nice with Israel with.
Possibly one reason Obama let himself be dragged into Libya is so the MB would sit this one out.
Egypt borders Israel, doontcha know.
Mnemosyne
Have I thanked cleek lately for inventing the pie filter? It really is man’s greatest invention.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Bob Loblaw: I wasn’t defending mclaren, bozo. I was agreeing with him/her.
General Stuck
@John Cole:
Sorry, ain’t buying it dood. This thread was just another angle at bitching about what we are doing in Libya. Like I said, a 6 year old could answer your question in half a sec. And you put up a post without even checking if the UN was even involved, which they are. You hate warfare on principle now. Fine. that is an honorable position, but leave out the sly angles for dissent. We can’t save everyone, and Libya is close to Europe where they can do most of it. We are tapped out.
Now you gonna go wiltly flower emo again and accuse me of sucking Obama’s cock?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@John Cole:
no, i’m Rosie. You never speak to me except to shout.
:(
mclaren
@Bob Loblaw:
Once again, the balloon-juice commenters stoop to name-calling and character assassination, since they have no facts or logic to justify Obama’s military internvention in Libya.
We’re still waiting.
Explain to us why, 10 years from now, the U.S. army won’t be still bogged down in Libya. Explain to us what our exit strategy from Libya is. Explain to us how going into Libya today is materially different from going into Iraq back in 2003. Explain to us what the victory conditions in Libya are.
We’ll wait.
Citizen Alan
@General Stuck:
Shorter General Stuck:
/recited with tear-stained mascara while using an old sheet as a backdrop
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: You’re not catching a lot of this. Egypt is run by the military. Not the MB. That’s the end of that.
I read multiple reports recently of rebels taking gas from abandoned fuel trucks. France and NATO can blow the shit outta anything that moves. But butts on seats occupy ground, and the rebels haz none. It will absolutely take an outside force of men and materiel to off Gaddafi.
We’re done here.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Because when you can’t win an argument, you can always ignore the other debater.
If all else fails, run away from the debate.
Impressive strategery, Mnemosyne. Looks like we’ve misunderestimated your intellectual powers.
joe from Lowell
@Bob Loblaw:
But why was Gadaffi “resurgent?” Because he’d already been knocked down, and the U.S. and the Europeans had already long since turned on him.
Do you understand that we, and England, and Italy, and France, were plotting regime change when Gadaffi was happily selling oil to us? (ETA: sentence changed because it made no fucking sense the way I first wrote it.)
We dumped him, and did so a lot earlier than the military action. How long was regime change contemplated? Well, Sarkozy said that he must go back on February 25, before there was any interruption at all in the flow of oil from LIbya to Europe.
So, again, regime change didn’t come out of the oil situation. The threat to the oil supply came about because we – the US and our allies – told our crack dealer to go stuff it, because of his human rights violations.
General Stuck
@Corner Stone:
I said ‘ground troops” dumbass. from the beginning, sometimes using combat or whatever, but it means ground troops. period. WE have people on the ground, yes, NGO’s, some CIA people, and they might get hurt or killed, but ground troops means FUCKING GROUND TROOPS, and that is what I said. There is no wiggle room even for a rat snake like you.
Citizen_X
@John Cole:
HOMOPHOBE!
FlipYrWhig
@John Cole: Lots of people, even on this very thread, take the “Well why aren’t we intervening in Whatthefuckistan?” to be not a question but an answer. These questions _do_ have potentially interesting answers, and IMHO the blog and its comments are at their best when we try to figure ’em out.
I’ll admit I’d be much more skeptical of a Bush-run version of the actions in Libya, as I was about Afghanistan and, jumping back to the last Bush, Iraq I and Panama. This one feels more genuinely righteous. This one seems to be being conducted with all the warnings we would lodge already in mind. Not that we shouldn’t stay on the case.
I think we should all always be skeptical about warfare — and I’m not even a veteran, as many of you are — but I think it’s irritating to use that skepticism as a paddle to spank the less skeptical. I think there’s a difference between a heated, passionate difference of opinion and a heated, passionate game of the dozens. Both can be entertaining to read, but the latter doesn’t really lead anywhere. YMMV.
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Or chase you with a vacuum cleaner which I for one thought SHOUTED volumes about Cole.
OzoneR
@Sleeper:
All the more reason for an oil hungry country to invade Cote D’Ivorie , so we can bring our production capability TO THEM rather than rely on what’s already there. It’s a blank slate!
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
Yes, rash cowboying that ends tomorrow.
Well, it ends tomorrow in our reality. I’m sure that, in your reality, the US will replace all of the French and UK fighter jets and take the whole operation over themselves because Obama is just. that. evil.
Angry Black Lady
@Hawes: Hilarious.
Corner Stone
@General Stuck: You will excuse anything you pathetic moron.
eemom
goddamn. Hate it when I’m late to a good flame war. Can somebody give me a quick rundown of who’s flaming who over what? kthxbai.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
Don’t worry, mclaren, I’ll never pie you. I’ll always be here for you.
Corner Stone
Boots Onna Ground ™ !!
Villago Delenda Est
If only the Ivorians were living on someone else’s oil, they’d have all the help they could possibly use.
Corner Stone
U.N. Char Tar !!
IM
@eemom:
I can tell you that much: we are not really talking about Cote Ivoire. Amazing, what?
Villago Delenda Est
Forgot to add, the Ivorians have the same basic problem as the Bosnians had in the early 90’s…not living on top of someone else’s oil.
FlipYrWhig
@eemom: Cole raised an “if Libya, why not Ivory Coast” question, Stuck took it as a neener-neener, dogpile involving the usual subjects, matoko weasley kept harping on her latest single note, etc.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Corner Stone:
You might think that, but you would be wrong.
The MB is in the same position as the ISI and Jamaat-e-Ismali in Pakistan– groups aiding the Taliban across the border.
OzoneR
@mclaren:
Is this supposed to be a fucking joke? The Suez Canal carries over 2,300 more vessels in 2010 than it did in 2003!
It’s not vital for the US because we have a Pacific Coastline, but it’s incredibly vital for Europe and North Africa.
Ships that are too big unload on one end into a special boat and reload on the other.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@FlipYrWhig: what is my “latest single note”?
mclaren
@Hawes:
You don’t read so good, do you?
Read that New York Times report again. Among the people currently aiding the Libyan rebels are
Yes, repeat after me: documented facts reported in the New York Times are a crazy conspiracy theory…
Documented facts reported in the New York Times are a crazy conspiracy theory…
Documented facts reported in the New York Times are a crazy conspiracy theory…
Documented facts reported in the New York Times are a crazy conspiracy theory…
Do you Obots actually have even one credible argument?
So far we’ve heard:
[1] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because it’s not really an “Obama Doctrine,” it’s just “a phrase”;
[2] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because John Cole has come unglued;
[3] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because mclaren is a troll;
[4] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because the claim that the CIA is deeply involved on the ground and has been for some time is all a conspiracy theory;
[5] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because cleek invented the pie filter!
[6] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because mclaren has no idea what the Monroe Doctrine was;
[7] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because Libya is different from Pakistan, but we can’t explain how;
[8] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because Libya isn’t comparable to the Ivory Coast, but we can’t explain how;
[9] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because “go to hell, you psychopath!”
[10] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because “Yeah, don’t care. I’m not bothering to read your shit.” (This from Joe from Lowell, a particularly compelling argument.)
[11] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because “the Obama Doctrine is not a specific foreign policy introduced by the executive.”
[12] We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because Egypt is vital to world trade even though the most vital shipping consisting of oil supertankers and giant container ships can’t fit through the Suez Canal anymore.
And not a single one of these half-asses incredibly weak arguments for Obama’s military intervention in Libya makes even the slightest scintilla of sense.
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
This the ANTI doctrine for a “doctrine”. By definition.
FlipYrWhig
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: That humanitarian = imperial, something that’s been alleged continuously since 1899 but was apparently shattering news to you this week.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: I’m still failing to see the difference between what you were arguing for when you argued we should intervene in Libya and what you claim the Obama doctrine means.
You said you thought Libya was a one-off and that’s why you agreed with it but it IS a one-off. I don’t see yer so-called Obama doctrine being applied anywhere else.
And even if there had been no pretty words uttered to flesh out this nefarious doctrine, surely you would have supported efforts to intervene in another middle east country under the same circumstances for which you initially supported the Libya effort, right?
mclaren
@OzoneR:
A new record — you contradict yourself within 3 sentences.
You claim that the Suez Canal is tremendously important, then admit it isn’t vital for the U.S.
Here’s a brain flash: if the Suez Canal is so tremendously vital for Europe, then let the Europeans support the Libyan rebels. We Americans will stay out of it.
A warmed-over Domino Theory that claims Egypt could fall and the Suez Canal might fall into “the wrong hands” isn’t gonna cut it. By that standard, we can justify sending U.S. troops into any country on earth, since by some far-fetched scenario instability in any country could result in damage to America’s national interests.
None of this byplay explains why America must send our young men to die and get mutilated in Libya, spend a few trillion dollars of our own money, and get bogged down for potentially another 10 years with no exist strategy in yet another third world hellhole, all to protect the vital interests of Europe and North Africa.
We’re still waiting for a credible explanation of why Obama should be sending U.S. troops and the U.S. airforce into Libya.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@FlipYrWhig: it was shattering. I wanted to die for a little while. Is that my “single note”?
Please enjoy my tears.
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Not any more.
Humanitarian Imperialism explains a lot of things I couldn’t understand before.
Like DDOSing wikileaks and torturing Bradley Manning and sliming Assange and staying in A-stan.
Like suppressing Camp No and the Gharani massacre and the Kill Squad and the Baghram Theater Detention Center pictures.
Epiphany.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
How about “We don’t have to worry about getting mired in Libya for 10 years because we’re leaving tomorrow”?
I’ve posted that link twice and it still hasn’t sunk in for you, has it?
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: Ha! When the MB tell the military what to do we can talk.
Not even close to being the case.
Corner Stone
@OzoneR:
Wow Nick! How many did it carry in 2003? What’s the percentage change versus worldwide ship tonnage?
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
I think that speaks more to a problem with what you considered “reality”, than any real change in the system.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Corner Stone: you forget. The Egyptian military is 100% conscript.
The military IS the people.
Mnemosyne
Much as I’ve enjoyed batting mclaren around like a chew toy, I really must go wash and re-lube my bike so I can start riding it to work again on Monday. Try not to make too much of a mess while I’m gone.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
I’m not asking for your opinion now that you’ve changed it.
I’m saying, absent any pretty words you could point at that represent some nebulous doctrine to which you now disagree, wouldn’t the case you made for intervening initially in Libya apply equally to another middle east country with similar circumstances?
I’m trying to understand how your original case for intervention is in any way different at all from exactly what we are doing right now that you suddenly disagree with.
mclaren
In case none of you are aware of history, the only even remotely convincing argument any of you have come up with for U.S. military intervention in Libya is the hoary old long-debunked Domino Theory.
This canard fell apart and became permanently discredited in Vietnam. But that hasn’t stopped anyone from resurrecting it.
Also, in case you masterminds haven’t noticed, the Domino Theory is the exact same failed and disproven justification originally used for invading Iraq in 2003. “Instability in the region could spread, causing chaos and disrupting America’s access to vital oil supplies!”
Turns out the only disruption in the region was caused by America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
So now I’m going to show how a real debater uses facts and logic. I’m going to use your own Domino Theory against you.
Claim: the Domino Theory requires that we intervene in Libya, because chaos and disruption in the region could dmage America’s vital national interest!
FACT: But chaos and disruption are already spreading throughout America because of massive budget shortfalls caused by pissing away 1.45 trillion dollars per year on America’s military, broadly defined to include the CIA, the NSA, the NRO, military retirement, Pentagon black projects, etc. Look at the chaos and disruption in Winsconsin caused by lack of revenue-sharing with the states because the U.S. government is broke from all its spending on foreign wars.
FACT: America’s annual deficit would disappear tomorrow if we cut our military spending by 80%.
LOGIC: Therefore the Domino Theory requires that we must immediately cease all foreign military interventions and cut back America’s military spending pronto. Because chaos and dispruptions at home here our individual states are even more damaging to America’s national interest than hypothetical chaos and disprutions in third world countries on the ass end of nowhere.
CONCLUSION: Your own Domino Theory demands that we stop America’s foreign wars and cut America’s military budget down to a rational level.
Debate that, motherfuckers.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Corner Stone: pardon. The US government DID DDOS Wikileaks. DID slime Assange. DID suppress the Gharani massacre video. IS trying to negotiate permanent bases in A-stan. DID suppress the Camp No data. DID suppress the Baghram torture porn. IS denying Mannings citizen rights. DID deny al-Awlaki’s citizen rights.
That is reality.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Just Some Fuckhead: I am against meddling in any guise. Now.
Because I now realize that meddling is meddling, with or without the humanitarian suit.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: So you were wrong initially when you made a case for intervention? With or without some bullshit doctrine to point at?
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Yeah, sure they are. The guys who told their people not to blast protesters?
Not simple people. They are Western trained. All of them know us, and we know them.
Corner Stone
@Mnemosyne: Need a nap from your lying?
I thought by now you’d have built up a tolerance to it, since it’s all you ever do.
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: All that is very true. Reality, as some call it.
Your hopes and dreams for a righteous “Obama Doctrine” are shit.
That is also reality.
Corner Stone
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Can you tell me the name of the administration doing all this? Or complicit in it moving forward?
Ed Marshall
@Corner Stone:
Well, that’s fucking awful. I stand against this horrid imperialism and demand that the United States take no position on the human rights conduct of militaries that we partner with.
mclaren
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, we’re leaving Libya tomorrow. Just like America will withdraw from Afghanistan with a FIRM deadline, July 2011!
Except, of course, we’re not.
Poor dear. You actually believe this bullshit that comes out of U.S. politicians’ mouths when they promise “the troops will be home by Christmas!”
Read your history, you ignorant fool, that’s what the Kaiser promised his troops in 1914.
Corner Stone
“UN envoy: UN workers killed running from bunker
mclaren
@Ed Marshall:
Two can play that game. You put up one straw man caricature of Corner Stone, I’ll put up another of you:
Shorter Ed Marshall: America is the world’s policeman in an eternal war all over the world we can never pay for and never win because, SHUT UP! that’s why.
Corner Stone
@Ed Marshall: Agreed! Thank you sir for your rationally good common sense!
joe from Lowell
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
I love this.
Please note: this isn’t actually a direct comparison between the MB and either the ISI or the Pakistani Taliban. She could have picked any one of a number of similar situations, but she picked this one.
Nice.
Corner Stone
@Ed Marshall: You fucking clown. We’ve been paying the Egyptian military billions of dollars a year to not attack Israel.
We don’t give a good fuck what they do otherwise.
joe from Lowell
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Uh, no, the enlisted ranks are. The career officers aren’t. You know, the ones who run it.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Just Some Fuckhead: I was wrong.
Corner Stone
@mclaren:
I’m still waiting for Mnemosyne to apologize to me after Obama extended tax cuts for all.
I think she actually really does believe these things.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Corner Stone: yup. its all shit.
Like Cole said, bury your uterus at Waco, or bury your heart at Wounded Knee, it doesnt make a damn bit of difference.
Ed Marshall
@Corner Stone:
This is what bugs me: This shit is like evo psych, where you find something out and make a story about it.
If the U.S. had stood alone in the world and vetoed the no-fly zone, and everyone else stood down and Gadaffi had went apeshit in E. Libya, I would have turned on Democracy Now! and got an analysis that Gadaffi was a U.S. client and that our lack of action had led to a mass slaughter in defense of oil interests with the dictator.
If the U.S. had abstained or voted yes and refused to contribute militarily, Amy Goodman would have someone on the show to demonstrate that the UK and France were American proxies, and that it was a demonstration in the new era of American imperialism, where we are so overstretched that we are handing over the war fighting arm of the empire to the junior partners.
The U.S. voted yes, and here you are.
OzoneR
Really now, who the hell is Nick and why is it so damn impossible to have an actual conversation on this blog? This place is the biggest hot mess I’ve ever seen.
Corner Stone
@Ed Marshall: What is your point re: Egypt and their military?
Ed Marshall
@Corner Stone:
You were the one who said that we pulled their strings not to attack the protesters! That was what I was responding to!
Nick
@Corner Stone: Corner, stop, this guy is not me. You caught me, why do you insist on tormenting other people?
Corner Stone
@Ed Marshall:
That is not even close to what I said.
mclaren
@Corner Stone:
Oh, they weren’t really tax cuts — just revenue de-enhancements.
See how simple it is when you’re Mnemosyne?
OzoneR
@mclaren:
you didn’t say vital to the US, you said
THE WORLD! The Suez Canal is very vital to the world; Europe, North Africa, Middle East, South Asia, East Africa, West Indies, Australia.
It’s not vital to the Western Hemisphere, which is about, oh, 15% of the world’s population.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: I can respect that.
Bob Loblaw
This thread is completely insane.
Combining mclaren, hermione_chan, and Corner Stone in one place is like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Nick: lmfao
Corner Stone
@Bob Loblaw: Man, give me a fucking break. Like you’re above it all or some shit. Fuck off.
Corner Stone
@Bob Loblaw: My name’s Lil Bobby Loblaw and I’m the only one with the untainted perspective to tell THE TRUTH!
OzoneR
@Bob Loblaw:
This whole blog is completely insane. This is a fucking shitshow, every thread. What’s going on here? I though DailyKos was bad, but wow
Corner Stone
@Nick: Ha!
https://balloon-juice.com/2011/03/30/open-thread-971/#comment-2503501
https://balloon-juice.com/2011/03/29/wishing-and-hoping/#comment-2501574
Nick, you aren’t smart enough to pull this shit off kid.
joe from Lowell
You know what makes me think Cole was serious, when so many other people are just wanking when they ask questions like this?
Because he asked about Ivory Coast. Not Bahrain, not Syria, not Yemen. As bad as things are in any of those countries, none of them come close to the situation in Libya at the time of the air strikes. We’re talking about a few hundred times more killing.
In order to take somebody asking this question seriously, you’d have to believe they’re simultaneously pushing an anti-war line, while not taking into account the idea of force as a last resort, reserved for extreme cases. It’s just not an honest effort to honestly confront the situation. Unless you postulate that someone is just ignorant: Derp derp shooting protesters derp.
But Ivory Coast actually is a situation at the same level of seriousness. This is actually a legitimate question that somebody who isn’t misinformed or mendacious would ask.
My answer is, because bombing to take away the Libyan government’s military capacity is a whole hell of a lot less scary than sending troops to pacify a war zone in sub-Saharan Africa. With all due respect to our air brave men and women at 30,000 feet, they aren’t going to hunkering down at night in beautiful downtown Abdijan for months on end. There aren’t going to be 30 gunner’s mates on missile subs sent to be the police force for a town with 30,000 refugees, 50 miles from the next blue helmet.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: You missed mine from when you were in Chicago.
Ed Marshall
@Ed Marshall:
That was the implication. The officer corp is a corrupt, co-opted instrument of imperial power, and this will be demonstrated in the future, when the Muslim Brotherhood (who you are sure are both militantly anti-American and the representative face of the Egyptian people because you are an expert on ??????) takes power it will be demonstrated.
In the event that the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t control Egypt, that will be proof of pernicious meddling. If they do and practice sane statecraft (which implies not firing up the armor to replay 1973, and in the process ruining a profitable treaty regime) it will be proof that the Muslim Brotherhood is coopted
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: Meh, I’ll look down sometimes and see him chewing on my foot. It’s what he does.
Bob Loblaw
@Corner Stone:
I’m burnishing my Very Serious Poster credentials to get in good with the new ABL/eemom/Allan power axis.
Or the three of you are hysterical dipshits. One or the other.
Corner Stone
@Just Some Fuckhead: Hmmm, fuckin work getting in my damn blog wreckin’ !!
Nick has to be the worst puppeteer of all time.
Corner Stone
@Bob Loblaw: Pick your clique and die! Infidel!
Or how bout you come down off your horse and get in the room together and stop all the bullshit.
You try this on once in a while and I just never get it.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: What’s amazing is he’s still here after getting busted, pretending he wasn’t busted, then acknowledging he was busted. What an assclown.
VCU goes down. I haz a sad.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone:
I agree, Lob. You need to shit or get off the pot.
Nick
@Just Some Fuckhead:@Corner Stone: Don’t act you everyone here doesn’t already know you two are the same person too.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Nick: lmfao
John W.
To answer Cole’s question: Because there’s no regional buy in to action beyond what is ALREADY DONE, because sending in the army to fight in close urban quarters excites no one not even in Libya, and because Russia is vetoing any serious action.
That’s fucking why, Cole, and if you took 5 minutes to read about it (try clicking my name) then you wouldn’t be trolling here.
John W.
By the way, Cote D’Ivoire has oil too, and that’s a main reason that Russia is actually vetoing action, so don’t give me the sob story about oil.
Any action in Cote D’Ivoire would have to be massive and blooody and on the ground. No one has the stomach for that, not even local actors.
Jesus Christ, Cole, you’re smarter than this.
Corner Stone
@John W.:
Based on?
Corner Stone
@Nick: Actually, my main job is just to sit here and look pretty. My JSF persona does all the heavy lifting.
Whooops!!
Corner Stone
Oh, and eemom? FUCK YOU!!
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone:
That’s bullshit. I’m clearly the good looking one.
John W.
The irony is that US intervention in Cote D’Ivoire would probably turn it into Afghanistan in a hurry, just hardening the two sides and quickly creating extremists. It’s a good idea to continue the UN operation and keep pushing Russia to allow broader missions.
John W.
@Corner Stone:
based on that cole left the gop. Apparently he decided to bring some of it with him.
Corner Stone
@Just Some Fuckhead: Bullshit!
You know I got dad’s handsome jeans!
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone:
OMFG, don’t invoke her!
*runs and hides*
Gus
My god, how noble of us!
Corner Stone
@John W.:
Ok, I’ll grant you he’s smarter than a kitchen toaster. The rest is still suspect.
Suck It Up!
Obama is quite clever. He certainly got people to care about what’s going on in the rest of the Motherland. Got a weird way of doing it but whatever.
Stop buying into beltway talk people. This doctrine talk is pure bullshit. Why any president would box themselves in that way is beyond me.
Kathryn
Obama Doctrine. He is a good, thinking, religious Christian. One of his strongest influences is Reinhold Neibuhr. Take a look at “Christian Realism” and you’ll see where a lot of this “amorphous doctrine” comes from. This is neither approval or condemnation, it is just the case. And not enough folks realize how powerful this side of Obama’s thought is. This is why the “authority” of wall street is held up but the folks on main street need to lift themselves up. Another aspect of Niebuhr is that social justice movements are inherently going to fail. It’s why so many progressives see him as a conservative without understanding why. His principles, his priorities, come from this aspect of his thought. And, I think, filter through pragmatism. And so Cote d’ivoire looks to be far too messy, too needful of a large amount of troups and likely to be a huge quagmire. In Libya, with coalition backing, and the odds favoring light US casualties in balance with making a great difference in the outcome — Very much in the Niebuhr mold.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone:
Where’s yer pretty jeans now, birdbrain!?
virag
@mclaren:
sweet jesus. a man of reason. fan fucking tastic.
Ed Marshall
@Kathryn:
What it looks like to me is a man who knows how to play poker, and only sits at the table full of donkeys because that is the only way that you know that you will win. Libya was a winning table, Cote D’Ivory isn’t.
Ed Marshall
@mclaren:
Cool Story, Bro.
Mike M
I’ve read through this entire thread, and it doesn’t seem that anyone, including John Cole, gives a damn about the situation in the Ivory Coast. Not trolling? Hmm. To me, it seems that anyone who took even a short amount of time to understand the complexities of the situation in the Ivory Coast would not be proposing a parallel to Libya.
Don’t believe, counter to the UN Charter, that military intervention for humanitarian purposes is ever justified? Fine. State that. Personally, I think the UN intervention in the Ivory Coast has been an instrument for peace and has saved thousands of lives, perhaps tens of thousands. Does the Ivory Coast deserve the same level of resources? I don’t know. Certainly, the UN has been involved in the Ivory Coast for a much longer period of time, and at great expense to certain countries, such as France.
My sister has been “on the ground” multiple times over the past few years providing medical assistance as part of the UN sponsored humanitarian efforts. At times, she has had to depend on UN or French forces to protect her vehicle when travelling from the airport to certain hospitals in the area. It has been a dangerous place for a long time. From what I’ve heard from her, though, people have been cautiously optimistic about the progress the country was making towards a functioning democracy until the crisis over the most recent presidential election. It may be falling apart now, but the UN has made a difference. And the US has provided millions of dollars in food, medical, and other humanitarian assistance.
I’d be interested in hearing genuine proposals for solutions to the situation in the Ivory Coast. If you think there ought to be an increase in UN peacekeeping forces or that the US should send troops to quell the escalating violence, I’d be anxious to hear how you think that might improve the situation rather than make matters worse.
There are problems all over the world and resources are not infinite, for any country. Our military is currently involved in a very large and expensive humanitarian effort in Japan. Certainly, some of those resources might be used instead to aid the beleaguered population in the Ivory Coast.
Is Japan more important to us than the Ivory Coast despite the chocolate? Yes, in many ways. And so we choose to help one more than the other. You can debate the choice, but you can’t argue that choices don’t have to be made.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Kathryn:
aye. a christian. a Meddler.
the problem is….the other side is muslims.
Christians believe their faith commands them to proselytize, muslims believe their faith commands them to resist proselytization.
Both proselytizing and resistance to proselytizing are articles of faith, and not amenable to reasoned discussion. Here is a thought experiment for you all. Can christians be stopped from proselytizing, ie thinking their faith is superior and all humans would be better off to follow it? Can’t be done. The same for muslims, defense against proselytization reflex cannot just be “switched off.”
This will not stop until the West gives up on Missionary Democracy.
You see Kathryn…..muslims don’t really care if christians want to believe in the jesus godhead–christians are people of the book, afterall. But muslims do care, quite vehemently as it turns out, that christians want to MAKE them believe it too.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Mike M: its simple. Stop proselytizing.
Kathryn
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Why do you sound like Matoko-chan? And at pushing 400 comments this thread needs to die and go into archives, but what has proseltyzing got to do with Obama’s war doctrine? Never mind. Never mind. I’ll go watch the basketball thread.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Kathryn: meddling. Obama is meddling.
or proselytizing. same same.
See? Kathryn can’t stop either.
She can’t turn it off.
People dont want the USA to tell them HOW TO LIVE THEIR FUCKING LIVES.
Fuck off and DIAF, Kathryn.
Ed Marshall
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Go to your mosque (you do have one, Hermoine-Chan?) and try and lay all that out for everyone. You don’t know what the hell you are talking about. You have no idea what your adopted religion thinks, and if you are a serious student of the faith you will be embarrassed by what you thought you knew when you have really learned something.
Democracy was a concept that was born in Greece and grew to a joke in Rome, before it was entirely forgotten by a willfully ignorant Europe, who at the time was ruled by a Christian church invested in keeping everyone stupid, ignorant, and completely obsessed with obtaining a reward in the afterlife, and this meant obeying their God-given rulers.
It *wasn’t* forgotten in the Islamic world and there is a vast repository of Hadiths and traditions regarding shurra, ijma, and the like that are available to real Muslims who didn’t just throw a scarf on their head one day and start making shit up.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
I realize I’m very late to this thread but we need to do a little logical housekeeping here. There is no argument to not intervene. Non-intervention is the default state. The argument, then, is to intervene.
The argument put forth to intervene was for humanitarian reasons, to which it was immediately and correctly pointed out that there are comparable or worse atrocities taking place elsewhere in the world, and no interventions are being contemplated in those places. Hence, humanitarian reasons are insufficient to explain the intervention. Hence, we request of our leaders that they give us all the reasons why intervention is taking place.
Hope this helps.
cynn
@Mike M: So I have to wait till the end of the damn thread to get a substantive comment.
Ed Marshall
@Shoemaker-Levy 9:
Consensus, conforming to international norms, a desire by the UNSC members to convince the populace of the rapidly disolving middle east order that we are on their side after being caught flat footed early on in Tunisia and Egypt. A thought to statecraft that isn’t slogans or navelgazing.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Ed Marshall: dude. shariah forbids proselytization. Freedom of speech legalizes proselytization. Therefore freedom of speech and al-Islam are incompatible.
It is pretty simple.
Hellenic democracy is consent of the governed.
That is in the Quran.
Free speech is not.
The Law of God is quite clear on how to respond to arguments and attacks of proselytizers. In God’s Law (the Qur’an) the proper response to such attacks is: ” (16:125). RESPOND ONLY TO THE EXTENT OF THE ATTACK LEVELLED AGAINST YOU. Thus resistance to proselytization is both symmetrical and proportional. See Afghanistan.
Article 10 of the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights states: “Islam is the religion of unspoiled nature. It is prohibited to exercise any form of compulsion on man or to exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to convert him to another religion or to atheism.”
What is missionariism but exploitation?
Corner Stone
@General Stuck:
That simple motherfucker wishes he was pretty like me.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone:
Don’t let Stuck get to ya. He’ll be dragging around remorsefully by tomorrow begging John for makeup sex.
Ed Marshall
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Yes, Muslim-chan, go tell all this horseshit to your local Imam and get schooled. Get a serious religion, or don’t and go on being some sort of weird internet created Muslim, but don’t imagine that you have some kind of special knowledge that is going to enable you to predict how real Muslims behave.
John W.
@Mike M:
You win the thread.
Corner Stone
@Kathryn:
I thought this whole comment was snark. It has to be, right?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Ed Marshall: I dont have any special knowledge. All muslims Know the Law.
@Just Some Fuckhead: I never get make-up sex. I just yelled at and chased with the vacuum cleaner.
Corner Stone
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Personally, I think joe from LoL has set the bar for Cole-fuckers. He got a taste of FP magic and he’s been doing his godsdamndest to get Cole to pay attention to him ever since.
I think Stuck needs to bring it a little more S&M style to get mentioned on the FP again.
Nothing less than auto-erotic asphyxiation’s gonna do it from here on.
Ed Marshall
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Don’t trust me, I’m just someone on the internet. Trust a serious Muslim, and not one on the internet. If it requires you trying to find some illiterate, Gulf Arab in a tent in the FATA to agree with you, that’s your bad.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Hermione Granger-Weasley: Hah. You may want to visit the bathroom naked when he’s cleaning the shower and hope he falls into you.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: Nah, Joe is a good guy. He justs like killing people and blowing up shit because it’s being done to someone else by someone else and he can pretend it’s clean and safe.
Otherwise, he’s awesome.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Ed Marshall: Let me explain Ed Marshall. Marklar, these marklars want to change our marklar. If we let them stay here they will build more marklars. They use marklar to try and force marklars to believe their marklar. If they stay here they will build marklars and more marklars to replace all our marklars.
Got it?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
That’s remarklarble.
Ed Marshall
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
I’m trying to be nice, because you just seem ignorant and I’m pointing you into a direction of receiving correction. You can take my advice, or not take advice, but the difference between the stupid and the ignorant is that the ignorant can be made to understand the inadequacy of their understanding and there just isn’t jack shit that you can do with the stupid. I don’t think you are stupid, and don’t let confirmation bias or an internet argument with me get in the way of understanding.
Corner Stone
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I disagree. I think joe from LoL is not only good with killing and bombing people that aren’t him, I feel he’s also a wannabe know it all prick who only Allan can rival for most pompous jackass on BJ.
And, sadly, Allan seems to be slacking lately. So joe from LoL has a clear edge to this point.
Maybe we should ask ABL to throw up another dog’s breakfast of a FP post by Allan and rub it in Cole’s face a little more?
Corner Stone
@Ed Marshall: “trust a serious Muslim” ?
WTF?
Ed Marshall, is your other name Ima Dumass?
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Ed Marshall: Marklar, marklar can only be marklar. That is the limit of marklar. If you insist on marklar, the marklars will marklar you back.
Marklar?
;)
Ed Marshall
@Corner Stone:
Why, yes, it is. Ima Dumass. I just wasted a good couple hours of Saturday night, arguing with a troll who doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about, or even what constitutes an argument vs. emoting and supposing a bunch of shit that he pulled out of his ass.
Corner Stone
@Ed Marshall: That doesn’t sound very bright to me.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Just Some Fuckhead:
/giggles behind hand
Ed Marshall
@Corner Stone:
I concur.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone:
Wait – wasn’t Nick Ima Dumass? I’m starting to lose track here..
Kathryn
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
ROFLLLLL … Holy shit, this thread goes to all kinds of hell and I’m the one that has to DIAF? Whatever. Yes, HGW, you can’t stop the signal.
@Corner Stone: and yes, if I invoke poor old Reinhold Neibuhr, it’s not snark. Sad. But not snark.
eemom
@Mike M:
That is true. Cole was just using it because it is the example du jour of “why not there.”
In case you hadn’t noticed, Cole as a general rule isn’t much for digging into the facts and actually reflecting on the specifics of a situation. His attention span is pretty much limited to the time it takes to put up a post parroting the latest CW.
But I appreciate your attempt to actually, you know, DISCUSS the example he raised. I wish there were a way to extract it from the CS-JSM drek that surrounds it so that the rest of us here could actually learn something for once.
Kathryn
More Libya weirdness:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-is-the-fed-bailing-out-qaddafi-20110401
Just Some Fuckhead
@eemom:
Yes, but here’s what you were saying earlier in the thread when you had plenty of opportunity to debate:
So that kinda makes yer newfound concern for digging into the facts and having a serious discussion of the issues look like so much of your usual ornery bullshit.
You really are a hideous person.
Bob Loblaw
I gotta wonder, if Cole is such an irredeemable dumbass in so many quarters, why are so many detractors still posting here?
Inertia? Nostalgia?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Bob Loblaw:
No idea why eemom stays. No one likes her, she isn’t funny and she seems to be perpetually angry at everything on the blog.
General Stuck
@Bob Loblaw: @Just Some Fuckhead:
Isn’t it past you fucking Heathers bedtime. Give it a rest, there will still be bottom left for you to feed on tomorrow.
Just Some Fuckhead
@General Stuck: Aw.. you spoilin for another fight now that Kaintuckee lost?
General Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead:
fighting you is like taking it to a baby seal. no sport in that.
Mark S.
@General Stuck:
THEMS FIGHTIN WORDS!
Corner Stone
@eemom:
You’re looking to Cole to learn something about Libya?
That’s a stretch considering the ultimate warmongering and general lazy fair you’ve been doing here on this issue.
Please say some more mean things to Cole and drive him into another spluttering hissy fit whilst I munch my popcorn. kthxbai
But I’m sure you’re here for the discussion.
Corner Stone
@Mark S.: I was slightly wondering how he knew what taking it to a baby seal was like.
Slightly, only slightly.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone: It almost seems like she’s operating in bad faith.
wasabi gasp
Doobie Brothers at their worst.
Ed Marshall
@Corner Stone:
The phrase you are trying to use is laissez-faire, and it still doesn’t exactly mean what you think it does. It is better than “lazy fair” which doesn’t mean fucking anything, but don’t let that stop you from schooling everyone and knowing what is *really* going on.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Kathryn: Proselytizer.
There is no signal.
Just jeebusnoise.
Neibuhr is a perfect example of the anti-intellectual tradition of protestantism.
Selection for stupid.
Corner Stone
@Ed Marshall:
If I could insert Beavis and Butthead laughing noises here I would.
You are seriously testing my sense of credulity, my good sir.
Ed Marshall
@Corner Stone:
What, you aren’t an idiot? It was some form of post-modern irony and not illiterate nonsense? Who are you trying to bullshit?
Corner Stone
@Ed Marshall: Obviously not you, my good sir. You have vanquished me! Oy!
Ed Marshall
@Corner Stone:
Excellent trolling, I guess. Grats.
Phoenix Woman
@Citizen_X: Facts in context seem to confuse the wee lad.
By the way, my favorite Everlasting Gobstopper of a paranoid argument RE: Libya is the one advanced by a certain 9/11 nut who thinks that Al-Qaeda and the CIA have always worked together and are the same entity, which he calls (prepare for the wit explosion) “Al-CIA-duh”!
You know, I kinda wish the CIA was actually running the operation, because then there’d at least be some coordination between the rebels on the ground and NATO in the air. Instead there’s been incidents like this:
Phoenix Woman
@Phoenix Woman: I was going to add this but ran out of time to edit. It’s from a piece in the New Yorker describing the rebels as mostly civilian protesters, many of whom haven’t quite figured out the difference between protests and wars:
Not exactly hardened Al-Qaeda or CIA pros, are they?
Corner Stone
@Phoenix Woman: All the reports thus far are consistent of a piece with this.
The rebels are protestors. And nothing is more important to a Protest Person than their image as a Protest Person.
They get shelled and they run for the hills and scream, “Where is Sarkozy?”, “Where is the US?”
The airstrikes come down and the rebels regroup and siphon gas off abandoned trucks.
There isn’t much of an end, here.
Mark S.
@Corner Stone:
I would have like to have known that before we got into this. These guys are a long way from marching into Tripoli.
ETA: Editing without opening a new tab seems to work again.
Corner Stone
@Mark S.: Wouldn’t we all?
The bare fact is that anyone exhorting the “rebels” or counter force to Gaddafi is blowing smoke out their collective ass.
The US and NATO et al can blow the absolute fuck out of anything that moves in column strength across parts of Libya.
But then what?
The rebels have no ability to take advantage of their air superiority, their TAC air, their CAS, nothing.
Nobody is coordinating with any one singular force on the ground in Libya.
Gaddafi can last forever, contra what some here have professed.
UNLESS. We (read whoever WE is) put bodies on the roads, checkpoints and city squares.
The bottom line is that Boots Onna Ground ™ will resolve this issue, and nothing short of that.
And any idiot who says different should have their godsdamned head examined.
Gaddafi is a dead man outside Libya, and he has many, many people counting on him for their survival.
They ain’t giving it up easy.
Corner Stone
@Mark S.: People knew this. Maybe not Boots Onna Ground ™ ABL, et al. But people with working noodles did.
Corner Stone
We’re going to need at the very least armed men and women lasing targets going forward. The drones can get most of it, but some of the nasty business has to be done by hand.
We’re putting humps in country, make no mistake.
I for one am sure they are already there, but maybe haven’t had much luck connecting with “rebels” to this point.
Mainly because the “rebels” are scared to fucking death and are counting on Western powers to save their asses.
The hoary old saying, “An army marches on its stomach” is unfortunately true here as well. There’s no supply train backing these guys as they march.
Corner Stone
So, some say Boots Onna Ground ™ !!
Corner Stone
Mainly because they’re fucking idiots.
eemom
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I knew either you and/or Stoned were gonna say just exactly that about my earlier comment. And so you did.
It is so very easy to predict each twitch of your miniscule worm-sized brains.
Corner Stone
@eemom: So, you just say the nastiest shit possible, then predict after the fact that people will call you on your shit?
Excellent!
Corner Stone
Oh wait, let me get my popcorn. kthanxbai.
Allan
@Corner Stone: If I’m quiet, it’s because you’re doing such a good job building the case for your own expulsion that anything I add would be like painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Carry on!
Mark S.
@Corner Stone:
Well, I didn’t think they were the A-team, but I didn’t think they were so green that they would be surprised when the other side fired at them. Even pretty inept armies can do all right when they have NATO’s fucking air force backing them up, but it doesn’t seem to be helping these knuckleheads. I also didn’t think much of the Libyan army, considering they got their asses kicked by Chad.
I just pray that Obama realizes he’s losing Stuck if he puts Boots Onna Ground™
Corner Stone
@Allan: Expulsion from where? Who exactly do you think you’ve got by the balls, amigo? ABL is garbage here. You’re somewhat less than that.
Just Some Fuckhead
@eemom:
Doh! Once again, you have outwitted, outplayed and outlasted me.
eemom
@Corner Stone:
nope, that’s not it.
But whatever. Go back to your “No Girls Allowed” treehouse with fuckhead and resume the circle-jerk. Maybe some day the two of you will show up in a psychopathology textbook and get some of that attention you so desperately crave.
Corner Stone
@Mark S.:
Obama knows he’s never losing Stuck. Ever. That sad POS will always shift turf to keep himself righteously protecting Obama.
And I know a guy named Chad who could kick the fuck outta the Libyan Army if he felt like it. On a Tuesday maybe.
But that ain’t gonna help the loser ass “rebels” trying to topple Gaddafi. Because without ABL’s Boots Onna Ground ™, the “rebel” force will never be able to coordinate CAS or TAC air support, etc. That’s not an argument, that’s bottom line common sense.
Corner Stone
@eemom: Oh, so that’s not it?
You’re not a horrible human being who says the worst shit possible and then comes back later to chime in on how right you were?
Yeah. Gotcha.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
No, translation is “I have things I like to do other than hang around on the internet all night.”
Though it’s always amusing to tune back into a thread after a few hours’ absence and see how your paranoid fantasies continued to metastastize.
Corner Stone
My name’s Allan and I say “Boots Onna Ground ™ !!”
Allan
@Corner Stone: I look forward to your next front-page post about it.
eemom
@Corner Stone:
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Good night, sad sick fucks. At least you’ve got each other.
Unless, of course, you’ve been Nicking us all along, and you’re actually Just Some FuckedStone. Who knows. But we’ll leave that for another day.
Corner Stone
@Allan: And Allan, I very much look forward to your next front page post here at BJ.
It will give me no end of pleasure my friend.
There are many things in this life that will enjoyify me. That is up close to the top.
Just Some Fuckhead
@eemom:
Does this mean you aren’t leaving for good?
Corner Stone
@eemom: So you were absolutely wrong about Nick being a sockpuppeting fool? And now you’re doing your best to play off that absolute wrongness?
Good luck fea.
Allan
@Corner Stone: And I look forward to your next one too. Oh wait…
Just Some Fuckhead
@Allan: I liked your front page post too. After the terribly homophobic remarks you made to some of us here, it was nice to find out you are a gay man yourself, though obviously a very self-loathing one.
Mark S.
@Corner Stone:
Does he comment here as joe from Lowell? He’s the only Boot Onna Ground™ we need!
Corner Stone
@Allan: I hope she brings it. I doubt she will. I mean, after Cole called you out in the comments for the paper tissue thin POS you are, and a confused psychosexual wreckage and all that mess. But a poor boy like myself can only hope…
Corner Stone
@Mark S.: Nope. This Chad is pure TX trash. He will FUCK their shit up and have a beer after, wondering what the fuss was all about.
But I agree with you. Maybe we should sponsor joe from LoL to fly into Libya and sort it all out. Seeing as he thinks it’s not that big a deal or anything.
In fact, I’m happy to pay for that one way flight myself.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Corner Stone:
I’m good for a parachute. Can someone set up a donation page?
Corner Stone
UN Charter!!
Corner Stone
Boots somewhere!
Anya
@John Cole:
OMG, really, that’s what you’re gonna go with. Why, oh, why, did I check this cluster fuck of a thread. Is this place full of 15 year old boys. Can’t we discuss important issues without childish taunts.
BPC
So I haven’t commented here in literally years, but felt I had to chime in…
1. I’m pretty sure I share a hometown with Joe from Lowell, if it’s Massachusetts.
2. I might have missed it, but in this whole thread has anyone even considered the fact that intervening might be unconstitutional regardless of whether its moral/strategic/wise? Not that I think it would ever affect decision making by POTUS, etc, I’m just legitimately curious.
3. Why do opponents of intervention bring up Ivory Coast/Syria/Bahrain as examples of other countries we could intervene in? Shouldn’t the burden of action go the other way? I think its a lot more likely that this argument will lead to lots more intervention, not less.
4. If Joe from Lowell is still following, or another liberal interventionist, please describe your ideal outcome to this scenario. I’m not being snarky, I really want to know your best case resolution to US involvement.
BPC
3.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@mclaren:
Three things wrong with this reply:
1). Hawes didn’t bring up supertankers, you did.
2). Oil isn’t the only good shipped on the sea. There are many other goods being shipped both ways through Suez- how do you think shit gets TO the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent from Europe and the US’s Atlantic ports? That you want to believe that this about nothing more than oil is telling. Go see an opthamologist- you need to get your chronic myopia treated.
3). Naval forces that need to quickly respond from the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean piracy hotbeds just to the south of the Suez Canal DO use the canal, too.
Robert Waldmann
I too have wondered why not in Ivory Coast. I think there are three explanations, two of which are not disgraceful.
The disgraceful (and alarmingly plausible) explanation is that
we care more about petroleum than chocolate itself and we are bombing Libya to free its oil.
But I can think of two other explanations.
First it seems that Outtara’s forces have the upper hand (he’s the one we assert won the election). When it looked as if the rebels could win without help, we didn’t intervene in Libya.
Second and more importantly, I suspect that we respect French sovereignty over their “former” colonies. Basically a NATO country’s soldiers are there and control the main Airport. They don’t want the US to get involved. They can handle it.
I might go so far as to guess that Gbagbo would have been ousted over a decade ago if the French hadn’t intervened to protect him, but to speculate about that, I should know how things were going before the French intervened and I don’t.
My final guess is that the long delay before the current pro Ouattara offensive was due to negotiations between Ouattara and foreigners. I’d guess it was clear that Gbagbo couldn’t hold on without French support and that Ouattara was asking Sarkozy’s permission to take over.
The UN also has peace keepers there watching the war. It may be that Ouattara was demonstrated to the UN that he was willing to give diplomacy a chance or ten.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@mclaren:
And more myopia here, with your introduction and continued use of “Domino Theory”. I do not think that it means what you think that it means.
In the context of the Cold War, it was a theory that a successful communist revolution in one nation would provide a base to with which to launch a communist revolution into neighboring countries. One purposeful action would lead to another purposeful action.
No one here is suggesting purposeful action into neighboring nations but you. The worry others have are that introducing the unintended chaos that has so far been the outcome of the protests in Libya would trigger unintended chaos in neighboring countries when already troubled economies are flooded with refugees, further straining those economies. There are no dominoes lined up neatly, waiting for a push. Think of it more as Collateral Damage Theory. The protests in Libya exploded like an IED and released shrapnel- once released, you can only hope that there aren’t shit-tons of innocents who don’t get hit.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Robert Waldmann:
Except that Libya was never a French colony. It was an Ottoman regency from 1551 (man, that Suleiman the Magnificent had some reach) until 1911, when it became an Italian colony. From roughly 1943 until 1951, the Brits administered the majority of what was then considered rather more as an occupied Italian territory than a colony, with the French overseeing about 1/3 of the land and 5% of the population after the war until independence.
ETA: Okay, you were referring to only Cote d’Ivoire there, weren’t you? My bad. Time for me to go to bed.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
Do you know what I think would be epic?
If eemom becomes one of the ABL Borg.
And if asiangirlman also starts co-blogging at LoOG.
And if ABL put up a joint post with Hall Monitor Allan and eemom, and EDK put up a joint post with him and asiangirlman and Daniel Larison and they were all front page posts at BJ.
That would be sweet.
;)
Hermione Granger-Weasley
And do you know what else I was wondering? I was wondering if Sully moving to the Beast means he will have comments.
Because I would like Sully to have have comments.
Truly I would.
General Stuck
@Mark S.:
Nice comment. You and human excrement corner stone seem to be of a mind meld on this thread. Classy work.
JGabriel
Hermione Granger-Weasley:
Probably not. If Sully wanted comments, he would have them. The Atlantic lets its bloggers choose whether they want comments or not. Sully & Fallows don’t have them, but McMegan and Ta-Nehesi Coates do.
.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): lol
Egypt ALREADY fell.
The MB owns Egypt now.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): mclarens theory is green domino theory, as opposed to red domino theory, when we were afraid the world would fall to communism. Green is the color of islam.
Now we are afraid of creeping shariah and Islam taking over the world.
That is why A-stan is morphing into Vietnam II.
Corner Stone
@Mike M:
Damn it. I had meant to say something lewd about your sister but I got distracted. Oh well, there’s always another day.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
you know guyz….it seems to me….that part of the reason Obama decided to involve the US in the Libyan coalition…is so Egypt doesnt get openly involved. Just like Mubarak did, Qaddafi outlawed the MB in Libya years ago.
Because Egyptian Special Forces are training the rebels along with US Special Forces and supplying them with rockets.
Israel is the 800 pound gorilla in the MENA room.
Cote d’Ivoire is too far away from Israel to matter.
Does that answer your question, John Cole?
benintn
Because Nigeria has too much power in that region of Africa. Want me to explain this further?