Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

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.

the poor Kurds.

There's an awful lol in Margaret McMillan's Paris 1919 when Wilson, despairing, turns to Lloyd George after studying a map of Europe and says, "Please remind me: are we creating North or South Silesia?"

if this thread is anything like your average room then three-quarters of the people in it hate christopher hitchens, but this (pre-intervention) line is i think worth considering:

Libya is a country with barely 6 million inhabitants. By any computation, however cold and actuarial, the regime of its present dictator cannot possibly last very much longer. As a matter of pure realism, the post-Qaddafi epoch is upon us whether we choose to welcome the fact or not. The immediate task is therefore to limit the amount of damage Qaddafi can do and sharply minimize the number of people he can murder.

remember when this was going around?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articlePictures/The%20Project%20for%20the%20New%20Middle%20East.jpg

lol i had to gis long and hard to find a website that was not alex jones-y

i can't remember/find what the origin of it was either

Baghdad (city-state)

oh the lols

Islamic Sacred State vs Free Baluchistan

"west bank - status undetermined"

just a couple of i's to dot and t's to cross then

Self-determination is the non-negotiable precondition for democracy

This is one of those statements that looks great on paper until you actually apply it to the situation in hand.

the let's-just-call-this-part-here-iraq decision after ww1 really was a disaster, though, and as Imperialist as anything gets. but yeah not sure what you're supposed to do about it now. "baghdad (city-state)" isn't it.

http://www.dailyhistory.net/images/big-4-versailles-george-orlando-clemenceau-wilson.jpg

love these bros

One unique aspect to this whole shebang: perhaps the first middle east conflict, en masse, where the "blame the Jews/Israel" crew are for once out a boogeyman. Was shocked when a recent New Yorker began with an editorial about the state of Israel/Palestine, and I was all like, people still care about that? (I mean, I know they do, but that particular perennial disaster has been relegated to the b-list for the time being.)

Lost to history: what the hell Orlando's saying that's so amusing.

Clearly they are discussing the previous day's acquisition of what they used to call "hot tail."

what they used to call "hot tail."

http://go.hrw.com/venus_images/0909MC20.gif

I thought Italy was the "hot tail."

robert gates sez the US will retreat to a secondary role within a few days. other people will take up the slack. no idea if he means someone who isn't britain or france. hope so!

idk, if i were in the libyan military, id be at a 'fuck this' crossroads right now. but im not, im some message board guy. wonder what they'd post.

free baluchistan comes from this article:

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899/

"In a June 2006 article titled "Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look", Peters conducted a thought experiment by changing the borders in the Middle East: "In each case, this hypothetical redrawing of boundaries reflects ethnic affinities and religious communalism—but iran have a perfect blood border-in some cases, both."[16]

He has drawn strong criticism for his maps in the countries involved, who viewed these as a direct attack on the integrity of their borders and usually attributed the maps to US Military and US Intelligence services and government, and their future plans for the region, rather than the retired Lieutenant Colonel.[citation needed]

In a February 2008 column, Peters called for giving the majority-Serb enclave in northern Kosovo to Serbia, calling it a "cancerous issue" that "just promises further conflict down the road - like forcing an ex-husband and -wife to share an apartment after a savage divorce." In the same column, he also called for a division by ethnicity of Pakistan, writing that "Islam has not been enough to unite Sindhis and Punjabis, Baluchis and Pashtuns."[17]

Regarding Iraq, he wrote, "might it not have been wiser - as several of us suggested in 2003 - to shake off Europe's vicious legacies and give Kurds their state, Iraqi Shias their state, and the country's Sunni Arabs a rump Iraq to do with as they wished?" Regarding all these countries, he wrote, "We needn't launch an endless war to fix the mess Europeans in pinstriped trousers left us - but we'd damned well better accept that, when we expend blood and treasure to prop up phony states, we're standing on the tracks in front of the speeding train of history."[18]

In a column for Armchair General Magazine, he wrote in support for regime change in Syria, Iran and Pakistan:

Syria's determination to develop nuclear weapons apes Iran's and North Korea's nuke programs, as well as Pakistan's successful bid to join the club of nuclear powers. ... Given a choice between taking out Osama Bin Laden and his entire leadership network and eliminating renegade nuclear engineers, the latter option might do far more for our long-term security.[19]"

wonder what they'd post.

― BIG GERTRUDE aka the steindriver (history mayne), Monday, March 21, 2011 1:35 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

"pls ban me from ilx for the next few weeks, i have a big project"

lol

on a srs tip, maybe the libyan military are not at a 'fuck this' xroads because what happens to them post-qaddafi is really bad.

can we just combine Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, into something appropriately Wilsonian like "Arabic North Africa"?