Figured we could use one.
Who said this?
It was just a few days ago that some Balloon Juice commenter was insisting over and over again that dirty fucking hippies were stupid because all that was going to happen was that the Arab League would start enforcing a no fly zone.
FWIW, I don’t know what I think about intervention in Libya. I’m skeptical but it doesn’t seem crazy the way Iraq did.
Can Anyone Answer Any of These Questions?
Look, I’m not opposed to saving innocent people. I’m not opposed to a word without Qaddafi. But can anyone answer any of these questions:
Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) warned on Sunday that the U.S. is starting a treacherous descent down a slippery slope of international diplomacy by getting involved in Libya.
It doesn’t make sense, he said, for the U.S. to help Libyan civilians when the citizens of countries like Bahrain, Yemen and Syria are also being oppressed.
“We had better get this straight from the beginning,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “or there’s going to be a situation where war lingers on, country after country, situation after situation, all of them on a humane basis, saving people.”
Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has helped broker key nuclear weapons reductions with former Soviet Union countries, is one of the few Republicans who’s spoken against using force in Libya. He said Sunday the success of the airstrikes against Moammar Qadhafi’s air defenses hasn’t convinced him that getting involved there is a good idea.
Lugar warned that the U.S. is investing huge sums of money in a foreign endeavor at a time when the domestic economy is still struggling.”It’s a strange time,” he said. “Almost all of our congressional days are spent on budget deficits, outrageous problems. Yet, at the same time, all of this passes, which is a very expensive operation.”
He cautioned that President Barack Obama has authorized airstrikes without understanding whom the strikes might empower in Libya.
“We really have not discovered who it is in Libya that we are trying to support,” Lugar said.
When do we know we have “won?” Who are we protecting? What do we do if Qaddafi survives? What do we do when we figure out the people we are “saving” hate us, just slightly less than they hated Qaddafi? What about civilian casualties? How much is this going to cost? How long is it going to take? Who is going to pay for it? Are we going to raise taxes, or do we just proceed with devastating cuts to the poor to finance another war. Are we going to have to stay and protect people after we “win?” Will we have to create bases to protect the war profiteers who are going to swoop in and start drilling and reconstructing what we just blew up? What is the reaction going to be in other Arab nations? What kind of blowback will there be from this? We don’t know any of that. Other than Lugar, I don’t think anyone is discussing it.
And then the meta-lesson. What lesson does Iran learn from all of this? Qaddafi gave up his nukes to protect himself from American military attacks, and we went ahead and attacked him anyway. North Korea, with their nukes, remains safe from American tampering. What lesson would you learn if you were Iranian?
And then the way this was sold- just a no-fly zone and an Arab League action, which was just transparent bullshit from the get-go. I mean, this is a noble cause, but at least the Bush crew worked hard to sell their war with a special defense department designed solely to spew agitprop. We just get a serving of obvious nonsense about the Arab League leading this and it just being a no-fly zone, when it is pretty clear this is about regime change. I feel cheated- don’t we deserve war foreplay anymore? Someone say something about babies in incubators, for christ sake. I don’t need dinner and a movie, just talk dirty to me a little bit. Maybe jiggle my balls a little bit. Put some effort into it.
And so we have a coalition. How does that answer any of the questions in this post?
Can Anyone Answer Any of These Questions?Post + Comments (177)
Just a Simple Arab League Action
Apparently this is what it looks like:
American and European forces intensified their barrage of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces by air and sea on Sunday, a day after an initial American cruise missile barrage badly damaged Libyan air defenses, military officials said.
In a first assessment from Washington, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the first day of “operations yesterday went very well.” Speaking to NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said a no-flight zone over Libya to ground Colonel Qaddafi’s warplanes — a prime goal of the attacks — was “effectively” in place and that a loyalist advance on the eastern rebel stronghold of Benghazi had been halted.
American warplanes became more involved on Sunday, with B-2 stealth bombers, F-16 and F-15 fighter jets and Harrier attack jets flown by the Marine Corps striking at Libyan ground forces, air defenses and airfields, while Navy electronic warplanes, EA-18G Growlers, jammed Libyan radar and communications. British planes flew frequent bombing missions, and French forces remained heavily involved in patrol and airstrike missions near Benghazi, officials said.
And this is just priceless:
A day after a summit meeting in Paris set the military operation in motion, some Arab participants in the agreement expressed unhappiness with the way the strikes were unfolding. The former chairman of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, told Egyptian state media that he was calling for an emergency Arab League meeting to discuss the situation in the Arab world and particularly Libya.
“What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians,” he said, referring to Libyan government claims that allied bombardment had killed dozens of civilians in and near Tripoli.
In assessing the results for the military mission so far, Admiral Mullen said the allies had made great progress toward their short-term military roles. “We hit a lot of targets, focused on his command and control, focused on his air defense, and actually attacked some of his forces on the ground in the vicinity of Benghazi,” Admiral Mullen told Fox News.
But it remained unclear just how those short-term military objectives — establishing a no-flight zone and protecting Libyan civilians, as mandated by United Nations Security Council — aligned with the political objectives of the Obama administration. Both Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have said in recent days that Colonel Qaddafi must go.
No one could have predicted. Freedom bombs for everyone!
But it’s ok, though, because we have a coalition!
NIXONLAND, Week 8: “Violence”, “From Miami… “, “Wed. 8/28/68”
When Nelson Rockefeller arrived, he claimed he had almost twice as many firm delegates as Reagan. The standing ovation John Wayne had just received put that notion rather in doubt.
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Over and over again, delegate Ronald Reagan had visited on his recent Southern tour told him they might switch their votes to him if he were a declared candidate. At 4 pm Reagan returned to Miami Beach and stepped up to the press conference microphones and announced that this was what he now was.
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Harry Dent, Strom Thurmond’s man, said he’d never seen anything like what happened next. Reagan enthusiasts appeared out of nowhere. Reagan was queried for his reaction: “Gosh, I was suprised. It all came out of the blue.”…
… If one were willing to consider ‘four years of non-stop underground campaigning’ as “out of the blue”. I’ll admit I never knew how far back St. Ronnie had started to run for his eventual ascension; if we’re gonna talk about what-ifs: What if Nixon’s paranoia hadn’t been stoked by his “friends'” continual assaults on his right flank? (All we ever seem to hear about is the Original DFHs trying to garrote him with their love beads from the other side of the aisle, which is, after all, the purpose of a two-party system.)
What’s your take?
NIXONLAND, Week 8: “Violence”, “From Miami… “, “Wed. 8/28/68”Post + Comments (96)
Open Thread: Mil-Grade Roombas to Clean Tsunami-Stricken Areas
Not quite accurate, but people have asked why more robots weren’t being used to help shut down the damaged reactors. The company that makes Roombas got a squib in the local news:
BEDFORD (CBS) — The Bedford, Mass. company i-Robot is about to be on the frontlines of Japan‘s nuclear crisis.
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Japanese officials asked for help from the company and -iRobot is sending two “Warriors” and two “Packbots.” Together they’re worth about $750,000. Six volunteers will also go over to help train people how to use the robots.
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Exactly how the robots will be used hasn’t been determined yet, but company officials say they’re ready for anything. The “Packbot” comes with a hazmat package and can detect chemical, biological and radiological elements.
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The “Warrior” is for areas that are tough to get to, like rugged terrain and through rubble, even up stairs.
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“One of the main purposes of these robots is to save lives,” said Alex Wong, a software engineer at the company. “Over the last couple of days we’ve heard of humans going into the nuclear reactor area with lots of radiation.”…
Video clip at the link, if you’re curious.
Open Thread: Mil-Grade Roombas to Clean Tsunami-Stricken AreasPost + Comments (10)
The Libyan Second Amendment Solution
I know I’ve been off-grid lately (work is the curse of the blogging classes), and I haven’t had much chance to think about much of anything — but in part it’s because I’ve been getting ready for a meeting with folks whose security clearances greatly exceed mine. (It is impossible to have a lower clearance than I do, just to be clear. I’m a citizen, and that’s it.)
So now I’m in London getting ready for this meeting, and one of the Very Interesting People from whom I’ll be learning and I are watching the scroll on the silenced TV in the hotel lobby to see one fact roll by: Qaddifi has distributed arms to a million Libyans.
Smart move, my interlocutor says. Why? ask I — doesn’t this just destabilize the country further, threatening him as much as anyone else?
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Yes indeed says my new teacher. That’s the point.
As explained: Qaddafi knows that he can’t engage in a contest of strength. He faces an overwhelming force and so he can’t just roll up his opposition. Stalemate weakens him. He doesn’t want to end up like Ceausesco, dead against a wall, ridiculed and reviled. He wants at a minimum what Saddam Hussein got — martyrdom of a sort amidst the chaos of a country that has become ungovernable, a state that rebounds to the discredit of any successor regime.
This is of course the classic choice of crappy outcomes. I have no idea what could possibly produce what some impartial observer might call a good outcome — either for Libyans or in the realization of actually articulated and reasonable ends for the U.S.
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It certainly seems to this non-expert observer that we pursue intervention on the harp seal model: cute megafauna get protected, snail darters don’t.
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But it’s at least arguable that it would make sense to intervene in cases where that rise to the level of media-consciousness even if no realpolitic interest is genuinely at stake — if and only if we can demonstrate that such intervention actually stands a good chance of producing a better outcome than the present situation. Sheer awfulness is not sufficient, in other words, if the results do not include a lasting reduction in horrible outcomes.
In that context, these million rifles tell you two things:
First: that there are all kinds of ways for the best intentions to go pear-shaped, and we may already be witnessing one of them here.
Second (and I find this one consoling, in a depressing kind of way): there are plenty of very smart members of our national security apparatus who understand this. I have to tell you the most impressive thing to me about this hotel-lobby conversation was the sheer speed with which my conversational partner seized on the skill of Qaddafi’s manouver, and its potential for lasting mischief.
Me talking, not those I talk to — but this is genuinely important. Folks on the ground have actually learned a lot from Iraq and Afghanistan. That these lessons do not always reach either end of Pennsylvania Avenue is a problem — the problem I would say.
And with that — it’s off to learn something else, depressing no doubt.
Image: Melchior de Hondecoeter, Bildnis von drei Kindern in einer Landschaft mit Jagdbeute (translation help, anyone?), 17th c.