Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

i mean sure we need a six month policy review before really taking sides but -- a preliminary view perhaps?

For the intervention but reserving the right to carp impotently (xp)

Lol I've managed to not realise this was happening until now. Kudos to all involved.

Official: U.K. Subs Fired at Tripoli Compound

But will they give back their performance fees?

How this squares with yesterday's statements from the AL to the effect of "whoa, whoa, we thought we were supporting a no-fly zone, not a full-scale NATO assault" I don't know.

Just covering their asses. Hard to believe many Arab leaders give much of a shit about Libya being bombed to pieces. It's not like they're thinking, "Oh no, Bahrain is next," since it very obviously isn't.

An American general on the news last night (it was unclear if he was was retired or not) was very frank that this was about removing Gaddafi

"It is not or mission to kill Qaddafi. Cut off his money, food and weapons, yes. Destroy his army, that too. Blind him and cripple him, OK. Give his enemies better weapons and directions to his bunker, maybe. But kill him? No."

Recommend watching your back there, Dmitry

part of this is the_west giving a fuck when it ain't its turn

whose turn is it? Just Qaddaffi with money from Russia, China and others? Or others (the weak Arab league or coalition of African nations)?

when is it the_west's turn?

i think we weve properly reassembled our paradigm to include buddhism and energy and stuff

^ hilarious post

funny US politics note to all this:

Obama changing his mind is attrib'd to Sec. Clinton, Amb. Rice, NSCer Samantha Power

Power called Hillary a "monster" (actually didn't, but...) in 08, got fired.

well, people here think it's interesting

and they're all ladies! imagine that. ladies!

not joking/combatitive (mostly cuz i dont know where i stand on this frankly) wondering what ilx poster 'aerosmith' thinks of all this

Freddie deBoer, over the last couple days:

I believe in the importance of internal resistance movements. I believe in them precisely as long as they remain internal, because I understand, as so many seem not to, that it is a blatant and ridiculous contradiction in terms to enforce democracy by foreign military aggression. You cannot enforce democracy from without. Self-determination is the non-negotiable precondition for democracy. After we have installed our Vichy democracies, they tend to operate as you would assume such governments would. You only have to ask the minority parties of Iraq, which have reported again and again that they are excluded, marginalized, and oppressed, up to and including the disappearance of protesters.

I believe in resistance, but that doesn't mean I believe in good outcomes coming from all resistance. And this is the fundamental error, among so many, of the supporters of Libyan revolution, or of the supposed "pan-Arab" uprising: they look to this incredibly complex phenomenon, made up of a shifting multitude of actors and interests, supported by foreign powers both near and far, which proceeds in fits and starts towards whatever goal the aggregate of its parts supports at the moment... and they pronounce it good. With their child's view of the world, with their infantile Manicheanism, they feel that the must sort all actors at all times into the piles of good and bad. With their American arrogance, they believe that they actually possess the wisdom and knowledge capable of performing such a feat. With their imperial hubris, they believe that this knowledge gives them the right to impose their judgments with force and by fiat, and they will do so even while they know that doing so will kill innocent people. That's the condition of the contemporary American.

...

What disturbs me so much about those who are arguing the side of the Libyan revolution and against the side of Qaddafi is that they think that this is sufficient to justify engaging in war. That democracy insists that their opinion on the question is irrelevant to whether to go to war, or that even if we knew for a fact what was right and wrong we'd have no right to invade, seems not even to compute, not for a moment. Of course, I prefer the revolution to Qaddafi. I don't mistake my ill-informed (as any must be) preference with real knowledge; I don't mistake the value of my opinion for the value of a Libyan's; I don't pretend that my Western bleeding-heart morals have any right dictating who lives and dies thousands of miles from our borders; I don't imagine that every Libyan who is revolting has inside them some mini-American, waiting to burst forth and adopt perfectly American values. Support for democracy that is dependent on our agreement with the outcome of democracy is a sham.

i agree with the sentiments well enough, but i guess i haven't made up my mind about all this yet (max otm)

first protester with a KEEP YOUR ROSY FINGERS OFF LIBYA! sign gets a cookie from me

I believe in the importance of internal resistance movements. I believe in them precisely as long as they remain internal, because I understand, as so many seem not to, that it is a blatant and ridiculous contradiction in terms to enforce democracy by foreign military aggression.

And as we discussed on the other thread I guess people with views like this do not recognize the legitimacy of the American revolution because the French helped.

That wasn't aggression, that was France bringing its unique capabilities to bear.

or any e. european gov't after '89, yeah...

i realize that the above article does not represent all objections to or qualms with the situation, but i still think it is ridiculous to paint united nations intervention to prevent the illegal massacre of civilians by a united nations member as some kind of ghastly violation of the enlightened precepts of moral relativism because WHO ARE WE TO SAY???? weirdly this is possibly the only position actually more infantile than manicheanism.

We certainly don't recognise its legitimacy over here (xxxp)

it's true that foreign intervention perverts and damages revolutions. that's why egypt was so cool. if only everything were a best-case scenario.

and they're all ladies! imagine that. ladies!

― goole, Monday, 21 March 2011 16:13 (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

<3 u goole

the LeCarre fan in me rears its head and wonders if the military part of the opposition to Gaddafi weren't the result of plans laid years ago by the_west in tandem with various obstinate tribes and incubated for this moment to strike. This assigns a degree of competency and long-range planning to the CIA and Special Forces which I doubt has ever existed but if such plans DID get made (a "sleeper revolution") what better time than the present to have pressed the Play button?

it's true that foreign intervention perverts and damages revolutions. that's why egypt was so cool. if only everything were a best-case scenario.

I read that sentence 4 times before I realized you weren't talking about "foreign intervention perverts"... Like, hmm...does he mean the US? or the French? who are the perverts in this scenario...

well obviously the french.

though i'd keep my eye on belgium.

my money is on the French, definitely

difficult listening hour (who r u btw?? enjoyed your posts lately and i'm always like 6wks behind on the rename game):

yeah all that falls down somewhat because i think it's really pretty easy to consider QDF as being uniquely, totally horrible! like, how bad would a 'resistance movement' have to be to be worse than him? this is something that can be accurately judged from outside, relatively.

the principle of non-intervention hinges on something else than what deboer describes, in this case. practicality? like, i think the operation has a slim chance of doing anything good.

also, when was the last time a popular resistance movement turned out to be significantly worse for a nation and neighbors than the status quo ante? iran 79?

Attributing any kind of forethought to 'Special Forces' is kind of a basic misunderstanding of their role, IMO. They take orders for involvement from other parts of the government, they don't go starting revolutions on their own.

iran 79?

Significantly worse than the Shah? Are you sure about that?

I'm perhaps alone in thinking UNSCR 1973 might strike just the right ethical balance, so long as its limited to no-fly + halt armor advancing on rebel cities.

The stories out of Az-Zawiya, Zuara, and Ajdabiya of mass reprisals against civilians are pretty ugly, if true. If, at limited human cost the rest of the world can prevent similar atrocities at the larger towns of Misrata and Benghazi it was a correct decision. But it ends there. Let Libya separate into Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, if need be. Libya was an invention of Italian colonialism, just as Iraq an invention of the Treaty of Versailles.

I don't see any on reason on balance why the rest of the world should support a rebel advance on Tripoli, and the political difficulty is now whether we'll resist an instinct to bring the civil war to a speedy conclusion.

it depends on what you mean by "status quo" - the united states has sort of made a specialty of eliminating progressive resistance movements in favor of extremist resistance movements, which it can then point to as extremists who need to be crushed (i.e. Viet Cong in Vietnam; Tudeh in Iran); not sure what the most recent example of this is (Hamas?) but they must be legion

milo good point (guess i was thinkin about planning AND execution but you're right, they don't merit a mention in my fantasy scnario of ultra-clever regime change plan-makin)

part of this is the_west giving a fuck when it ain't its turn

― BIG GERTRUDE aka the steindriver (history mayne), Monday, March 21, 2011 3:32 PM (58 minutes ago)

Hold on - quite apart from any butchering, a fairly likely consequence of doing nothing would be hundreds of thousands of Libyan refugees coming to Europe. That's a pretty clear interest in the outcome. In fact, refugee and asylum and human rights protection doesn't make huge sense as a coherent, sustainable system without the will/ability to tackle such things at source. Otherwise it's a bit like having an obligation to clean up after your messy flatmate, while prohibiting you from calling him on it.

Hundred of thousands of anti-Gadaffi refugees vs. hundred of thousands of pro-Gadaffi refugees, perhaps?

xp to goole: yeah, i mean, all the "wait how are we going to do this? what's the plan? what happens if he falls? what happens if he doesn't? who's going in? with what? for how long?" questions are totally legitimate and troubling, especially since this happened so fast (and yet not fast enough). but i don't have a lot of patience for "nobody is ever allowed to touch anything outside their borders no matter what because how could they know anything about anything".

you'd need to know more about iran than i to make the call re: the shah. pretty sure though that it was clear before he fell that khomeini et al had thoroughly hijacked the country's opposition, which was not all that hard to do because the shah was so completely and nakedly a western puppet and so the revolution had plenty of inherent anti-western feeling that could be coupled neatly to fundamentalist islam. that's not the case here (though we don't know exactly what the case is here).

i am ready to oppose significant deployment of american troops to libya because i don't think they could do much except get trapped in there forever. this isn't going to happen under the current resolution, but i doubt obama would bother with congressional authorization if he wanted to do it, which is A Problem but apparently just how things work these days. in the meantime, as someone who'd been worrying about the impending massacre for weeks before the intervention, i am cautiously OK with cruise missiles and bombers, and very happy gaddafi's advance was stopped.

(i am new so you are not failing at the rename game. this is me.)

eah all that falls down somewhat because i think it's really pretty easy to consider QDF as being uniquely, totally horrible! like, how bad would a 'resistance movement' have to be to be worse than him? this is something that can be accurately judged from outside, relatively.

One of the most fruitless tasks is assessing horribleness. If we agree that Stalin and Hitler were uniquely monstrous, and other bad guys are in second or third tiers, where would you stick'em? We can agree Saddam and Pol Pot are worse than Fidel and Tito, but what about Trujillo, Mubarek, Qaddafi? What about Allende? By what standard is Bahrain's autocracy "better" than Qaddafi's regime? It's frustrating.

useful rubric: "is he bad enough to kill basically everyone in this city by wednesday y/n"

I haven't been reading al-Jazeera the last couple of weeks, but what was the perception on the streets about Mubarek's American ties – a puppet with his own brains?

One of the most fruitless tasks is assessing horribleness. If we agree that Stalin and Hitler were uniquely monstrous, and other bad guys are in second or third tiers, where would you stick'em? We can agree Saddam and Pol Pot are worse than Fidel and Tito, but what about Trujillo, Mubarek, Qaddafi? What about Allende? By what standard is Bahrain's autocracy "better" than Qaddafi's regime? It's frustrating.

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 21, 2011 4:52 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

cant say im really a fan of turning this into some greatest-of-all-time list like we're SI ranking Jordan's competition in the all-time greats list

that's partly my point

xxp -- obv there's a certain amount of that, which is one of the reasons the u.s. admin was so comically dithering re: the revolution. ultimately i think they played it decently. not sure what the kids think at the moment.

(also: the problem of post-WWII U.S. foreign policy)

alfred:

it's a double calculus (or triple maybe): how horrible is the dude x what can we do about it really x what are the costs of doing it (or not)

sorry that's kind of obvious :/

it's a double calculus (or triple maybe): how horrible is the dude x what can we do about it really x what are the costs of doing it (or not)

...on which no one will agree. We should start our own think tank.

The ILXor Institute: We Didn't Realize You Were All Gonna Be Such Dicks About This

lol

while we're on a theoretical level, can i say that i don't really think the idea of cutting up countries is a good one? the fact that said boundaries were drawn a few generations ago by assholes doesn't seem all that salient in the here-and-now. separatism is a very weak substitute for rights-based treatment of minorities, and creates weak and dependent states in the process. maybe in cases like east timor that 'very weak substitute' was the only one on offer, not too familiar with that situation. kosovo is kind of a shithole.

i live in a country whose lines were drawn for all kinds of ass-backward reasons, AND fought a civil war to keep parts from going their own way, so, i dunno, no thanks. this goes for your catalunyas and your occitanias too. i don't really get the point of it, just looks like the return of shitty ethno-something-ism. i could be convinced tho.