Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

(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"?

xp: Libyan military saying "fuck it".

The ones who sided with the rebels in the East were already in this state. After Gaddafi detained/kidnapped the families of their officers in Tripoli they just sat in their barracks while the kids from Benghazi got shot up.

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

― goole, Monday, March 21, 2011 5:46 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is another big worry, yeah. ugh.

the big problem with the free baluchistan map is how lame the country names are

at first I thought it said "Belugastan" and I thought ew caviar fuck them

to fix the mess Europeans in pinstriped trousers left us

goddam it I KNOW, so SICK of this

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

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 21, 2011 5:46 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

p sure this was what a bunch of people in those countries wanted [via pan-arabism]

Trump crowing about "screwing" Qadafi out of a bunch of money is disgusting fwiw

Unconfirmed: Qaddafi's son dead in suicide attack.

Love Clemeanceau's mopey mien:

http://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/image/PagesAnnexes/Annee_1918/820_GerorgesClemenceau2.jpg

DIABEETUS

this whole no fly zone is a very jed bartlett move

wouldve been a good 6-episode arc

I think the West should not have got involved in Libya, because then we could have complained about how they were propping up crazy dictators.

While it seems highly sensible to recreate the middle east as a larger set of smaller nations, of more equal size and more consistent ethnic makeup, I've got a hunch that it could rather easily lead to a lot of border skirmishes between the new ethnically-assembled nations and the older border-shrunken nations, sometimes turning into hot wars, similar to what we saw when the former USSR broke into pieces. In the former SSRs, this didn't matter so much. In the heart of Oildom, this is still nagl.

goole killin it itt

A lot of those claimed ethnic make-ups are nonsense anyway, and it mixes up religion and ethnicity. I don't see any particular reason why Shia muslims in what is now Bahrain would like to be in the same country as coreligionists in Iraq that they have never really had anything to do with. The map also ignores how intermingled a lot of these people are (though the article it comes from does not - the crazy man who wrote it was upfront about how he thought ethnic cleansing was a great idea) and it ignores all the little groups like Christian Arabs (or various stripes) and Armenians who live in a lot of different countries as small minorities.

Evidently Turkey finally relented:

AFP French foreign minister Alain Juppe has said that NATO is ready to support the coalition intervening in Libya “within a few days”.

A lot of those claimed ethnic make-ups are nonsense anyway, and it mixes up religion and ethnicity. I don't see any particular reason why Shia muslims in what is now Bahrain would like to be in the same country as coreligionists in Iraq that they have never really had anything to do with. The map also ignores how intermingled a lot of these people are (though the article it comes from does not - the crazy man who wrote it was upfront about how he thought ethnic cleansing was a great idea) and it ignores all the little groups like Christian Arabs (or various stripes) and Armenians who live in a lot of different countries as small minorities.

― The New Dirty Vicar, Monday, March 21, 2011 6:05 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

i... agree. long story short. when people say libya or iraq are fake countries, you know, i get it, but so is belgium if you want to look at it that way.

In a column for Armchair General Magazine

heh

fakest country of all is the u.s. in that regard, if we want to take it all the way

*strokes beard*

fakest country of all is the u.s. in that regard, if we want to take it all the way

More champagne!

can we just combine Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, into something appropriately Wilsonian like

I read this as Wisconsin-like.