kramwest1
has a
There's something toxic in D.C.
Leaking info from a classified briefing?
There's something toxic in D.C.
Moreover, the Obama administration has explained its failure to fulfill certain promises -- such as closing Gitmo -- on having to obey limits set by Congress. If the administration's view is that Congress cannot constrain the president's actions in wartime because he is commander in chief, then those restrictions are ones the administration acquiesces to willingly in order to avoid making good on politically risky commitments. If Congress can't tell the administration it can't wage war, it sure as hell can't tell the president where to keep alleged enemy prisoners.
But, I'm wondering if the end result is worth it in the grand scheme in spite of these motivations.
Just wondering if anyone who hated Bush for his warmongering is at all disappointed in Obama for not only not stopping but escalating war and starting a new one?
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Change eh?
Or maybe you're saying that this indicates motives other than pure humanitarian considerations (probably very true.)
sure, but are you suggesting that unless we intervene in all these situations we should not intervene anywhere? I don't see how that is defensible.
And not only that, a multitude of innocent lives may have been saved.
Isn't it sometimes alright to step outside of all the cynicism (which I admit has its place - is needed) and feel a bit of hope and solidarity and support for those looking to live free from senseless oppression?
This
I don't care what the motives were, I'm just glad the rest of the world is doing something to stop a dictator from slaughering it's people. It's a real damn shame they don't do anything else in places like Africa, but why shit on the international community for doing something, somewhere.
Marines on ground in Libya
An ABC affiliate in North Carolina says more than 2,000 U.S. Marines are on the ground in Libya.
WCTI-TV in New Bern reports those Marines, assigned to the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) at Camp Lejuene, are "preserving the sanctity of the city [of Ajdubiyah] and the safety of the civilians within it."
Capt. Timothy Patrick with the 26th MEU told the station: "In Libya right now they are doing exactly what we need them to do. They are doing what they are told, and right now that's protecting Libyan people against Qadhafi forces."
Evidently the Marines' efforts are being successful. The commanding officer of the 26th MEU, Col. Mark Desens, says that following a second round of strikes by AV-8B Harrier jets, the Libyan dictator's forces "are now less capable of threatening the town than before."
According to the report, the 2,200 Marines with the 26th MEU are nearing the end of their deployment in the Mediterranean area and are due to be replaced with Marines from the 22nd MEU out of Camp Lejeune. A March 7 notice from the commanding officer of the 22nd MEU says that unit was being deployed to the Mediterranean Sea earlier than previously planned.
The deputy commander of NATO operations in Libya acknowledged Friday that NATO warplanes may have mistakenly bombed rebel forces Thursday near Brega, killing at least five people and generating angry complaints from rebel leaders. But Rear Adm. Russell Harding, in a briefing from his Naples headquarters, declined to apologize for the lethal mistake. Instead, he sought to shift the blame to rebel commanders, who he said had deployed captured Libyan army tanks for the first time, unbeknownst to NATO pilots flying bombing raids high over the area.
...The admission further underscored the lack of communication between opposition leadership in eastern Libya and NATO. The rebel military commander, Abdul Fattah Younis, said Thursday that they had notified NATO they would be deploying tanks while also saying he was not in direct contact with NATO...Asked how communications between NATO and rebel forces could be improved to prevent more such friendly fire casualties, Harding said that was not NATO’s problem.
In less than four months, as uprisings have swept through the Arab world, we've seen that the once-comfortable Arab elites and their backers in Europe and the United States not only don't know what to do, they don't even know what to say. Regimes in Tunisia and Egypt toppled. Libya sank into civil war with NATO's desultory participation taking it toward stalemate, maybe even break-up. Bahrain erupted and Saudi Arabia intervened. Yemen continues blowing up and the dictator is finding himself utterly friendless while al Qaeda exploits the chaos. Syria is facing an uprising the likes of which it hasn't seen since the Hama massacre of 1982. Jordan is looking shaky. Palestinians are growing bitterly impatient with their own leadership and, now under bombardment from Israel, their anger continues to intensify. The Iranian regime is making mischief among the Arabs wherever it can, all the while worrying about a resurgence of the 2009 uprising that shattered whatever credibility its theocracy had left.
As this beat goes on, there's an ill-disguised hope in Washington and in European capitals that somebody can be stomped—a dictator here, a rebellion there—and somehow everything will calm down. (Does anybody in any Western capital, or in Israel, really want to see Bashar al-Assad go down in Damascus? The "what next" is almost too complicated and crazy to contemplate.) But no matter what Washington or Paris or London does, the unrest throughout the Arab world inspired by the self-immolation of a Tunisian vegetable seller on December 17 is going to continue. In Egypt over the last few days a military and police crackdown on Tahrir protesters cost two lives, and ex-President Hosni Mubarak made a speech defending his record. This isn't so much democracy as déjà vu, and there's doubtless worse to come. As Al-Hayat columnist Raghida Dergham puts it, the Arab Spring will be followed by summer, fall—and winter.
Ultimately, if we want to take the very long view, all this is to the good. Decades ago, historian David Fromkin put his finger on the essential problem in his classic history of the partition of the Middle East after World War I, 'A Peace to End All Peace.' "The characteristic feature of the region's politics," he wrote, is that "in the Middle East there is no sense of legitimacy—no agreement on rules of the game—and no belief, universally shared in the region, that within whatever boundaries, the entities that call themselves countries or the men who claim to be rulers are entitled to recognition as such." What we're watching right now is the painful creation of a new Middle East where, eventually, countries will be recognized as legitimate reflections of their people's national identities, and governance will have the legitimacy of popular support. As Fromkin pointed out, after the fall of the Roman empire, it took Europe more than 1500 years, and many disastrous wars, to get that far.
In the Middle East, the process won't last that long. We're probably talking decades rather than centuries. But those decades will be tough. And one of the great frustrations for the Western powers is that they're not really going to be able to do much to affect the outcome. What Libya has shown us is that these powers only find the political will to act in extremis, to stop a massacre, not to build a country.
So, whether as spectators or erratic participants in events, there are a couple of key points we in the West would do well to keep in mind. First of all, it's time to get over the idea that Arabs really aren't up to the job of governing themselves. This has been the quasi-racist subtext of Western policy toward the Middle East at least since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, when European powers drew lines on maps and called them national borders. The presumption is that those countries had to be ruled by colonial powers or strongmen more or less beholden to them. The protests, uprisings, and revolutions we've seen in the last few months are entirely Arab, focused on Arab interests, and the governments that eventually emerge will be, too. But it's also true that the Arabs of today—the two-thirds of the population that are under the age of 30—are connected to the world and to each other to an extent never before imagined by their parents, by their rulers, or by the Western powers who thought those rulers were secure. In December and January, Burson-Marsteller conducted a poll of Arabs aged 18 to 24 in 10 Middle Eastern countries, and the results, published last month show just how quickly, and potently, political awareness has been growing. In 2008, only 50% of the respondents in that age group said "living in a democratic country" was important to them. At the beginning of this year—before any dictators had actually been overthrown—that figure had gone up to 92%. Clearly the Internet and social networking have played a role: In 2009, 56% used the Web daily, in 2010 the number was 80%, although most still get their news mainly from television.
...But nobody in the West can make these things happen for them. And nobody will.
TRIPOLI, March 17 (Reuters) - Muammar Gaddafi told Libyan rebels on Thursday his armed forces were coming to their capital Benghazi tonight and would not show any mercy to fighters who resisted them.
In a radio address, he told Benghazi residents that soldiers would search every house in the city and people who had no arms had no reason to fear.
"It's over ... We are coming tonight," he said. "You will come out from inside. Prepare yourselves from tonight. We will find you in your closets."
The speech was broadcast on radio and television shortly after a defence ministry statement warned that any foreign military action would trigger counter-attacks and endanger all air and sea traffic in the Mediterranean region.
In Benghazi, live footage on Al Jazeera television showed hundreds of defiant Libyan rebels gathered in the central square waving the tricolour flag of the monarchy era in a rally after Gaddafi's speech was broadcast.
In the speech, the Libyan leader denounced the rebels and said: "We will show no mercy and no pity to them".
He also told his troops not to pursue any rebels who drop their guns and flee when government forces reach the city.
I hope I'm being understandable here. If one says "this intervention could cost many many lives by causing a stalemate", the response tends to be "at least we averted a massacre!" What is the support for that thought? I don't particularly enjoy defending dictators in some small measure, but this stems from a genuine desire to nail down the sources for why Westerners evidently thought disaster was about to strike Benghazi. If I am missing key quotes I would appreciate being corrected.