Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

Perrin's right, the Western world is run by the fucking Sopranos. Fuck giving a shit, stooges.

i guess if i lived in america i would also say fuck giving a shit. libya is a long way away.

but even im getting increasingly cold feet on this.

as perrin says, everyone plays their role:

But I think our national values are closer to The Sopranos -- armed sociopaths trying to maintain their power and wealth by any means necessary. And if a former friend/ally/business partner becomes inconvenient, two in the back of his head. Bada bang. It's only business.

"former friend/ally/business partner"... yeah. reaching a bit there. which of these was gadaffi? either way plainly wasn't becoming inconvenient for the US.

gorge (aka dick destiny) quotes this from the new york times. just in case anyone was still wondering why bahrain is being treated differently:

The mainly Shiite demonstrators moved beyond Pearl Square, taking over areas leading to the financial and diplomatic districts of the capital. They closed off streets with makeshift roadblocks and shouted slogans calling for the death of the royal family.

“Twenty-five percent of Bahrain’s G.D.P. comes from banks,” Mr. Abdulmalik said as he sat in the soft Persian Gulf sunshine. “I sympathize with many of the demands of the demonstrators. But no country would allow the takeover of its financial district. The economic future of the country was at stake. What happened this week, as sad as it is, is good.”

US warplane crash-lands in Libya

Charlie Savage, valuable as ever, on a president's war powers.

"I don't mind a few hundred Tomahawk strikes, what really bothers me is that I was not consulted!"

#fragileegos

Seriously. Do you have a point, or are you just all of a sudden really concerned about Constitutional interpretation?

By the way, I love how the NY Times' top coverage of Libya these days comes with a D.C. dateline. And they're by Elizabeth Bumiller. You may remember Bumiller as the author of the White House Letter in the months and years following the invasion of Iraq. It contained memorable passages like these:

Mr. Bush, it should be noted, spent one hour at the Houston rodeo last week. There he patted some cows on the head and said, briefly, "I thought there was a lot of bull in Washington, D.C."

...

When George W. Bush campaigned for president in 2000, he brought along his feather pillow, complained about having to sleep in hotels and missed his cats. He wanted to be president, all right, but he also wanted to wake up in his own bed in the governor's mansion in Austin, Tex., and pad downstairs for the comforting ritual of fetching the newspapers and making coffee.

...

The next dust-up, also music-related, involved the president’s iPod, which was a gift from his daughters. It was reported in this column that an aide to President Bush maintained the device’s playlist. What was not reported was that the iPod came pre-programmed by his daughters as part of the gift. Among the email to this reporter generated by that story, nearly all of it positive, came a note from the office of the First Daughters that included the gift’s original playlist (Eric Clapton exclusively) and a request to let the public know that the Bush daughters “rock.”

my question was how did all the talk of nfz (which in the beginning had cameron isolated and ridiculed iirc, with obama keeping well clear) become a diplomatic freefall into aggressive air strikes on military capabilities, command facilities etc etc? the same air strikes that the arab league and russia immediately distanced themselves from

The rebels wanted the attacks on tanks, etc. according to the stories I read and heard. Russia, like China, never wanted anything. They're happy doing doing business with Quadaffi no matter what's happening in his country.

Take the byline with a grain of salt, but here's Jack Goldsmith arguing that Obama's policy might be unnecessary but it's not unconstitutional.

By the way, I love how the NY Times' top coverage of Libya these days comes with a D.C. dateline

this is because the four writers the nyt sent to libya were captured by the libyan government and only freed yesterday, dude

two writers, two fotogs iirc

but yes that is a fairly iron-clad excuse.

yeah sorry should have said 4 journalists

i really just wanted to pour scorn on elizabeth bumiller

"let's see, our four people in libya have been taken hostage, who should take the lead in our reporting? i know, the lady who spent three years living inside george w. bush's asshole"

i kind of regret invoking that image

worst lynch parody

i have to remember that one the next time i'm late for work. "where have you been??" "sorry, running a little late, got taken hostage in libya" "it's ok we gave your job to brett, our ceo's scheduling assistant"

Every minute this goes on, it just seems worse and worse. The biggest difference between now and last week is that now we own a piece of this mess, and will no doubt get stuck with its bloody legacy and pricey clean-up. Seriously, after the last decade of military boondoggles, how could we so blithely enter into yet another pointless and pricey middle eastern military campaign? It boggles the mind.

i've begun to wonder if that isn't the point, in a way - that now the USA and/or the_west will "own" some of the contours of this unprecedented uprising in the middle east - get to influence its eventual shape. the crudest form being that now libyans will "owe us" something. yes there are massive downsides but i suppose the thinking is that there could be massive upsides as well.

and hey, it pisses china and russia off, so

Tracer i really wonder why the stated objective of a 'humanitarian intervention' is so hard for you to accept as the real motivation for this.

what about this resembles a humanitarian intervention? we've chosen sides in a civil war. that's it.

well, go tell the president!

'they can't be this simple-minded, there must be some other calculation'

yeah well no

our "humanitarian intervention" in Kosovo simply accelerated the killing, I seem to recall

I don't see why it can't be both humanitarian AND opportunistic. it's some combination of both imho

bad show Morbz

altho as I've said before: in Libya, as in Kosov, this would all be brought to a much tidier resolution if we could execute a little targeted decapitation of the leaders in question. The Bosnian conflict wouldn't have gotten nearly so bad if Milosevic had been killed earlier, and Libya would similarly have benefited from Kaddaffey being iced earlier in this flare-up.

(and before anyone jumps on me yes I am perfectly aware of why this strategy - while most likely very effective - is also completely illegal, dangerous, and not really possible to implement)

'they can't be this simple-minded, there must be some other calculation'

yeah well no

it's plausible that all they really want to do is protect the anti-gaddafi fighters, sure. but it really is a measure of those fighters' ineptitude that close air support for their operations is being billed as "humanitarian intervention"

The "humanitarian" aspects of this are bogus. Qaddafi was just a run of the mill bad guy dictator until a small fraction of the population took up arms against him and he retaliated (which is of course no different than how Qaddafi himself took power, except he won). This was not genocide in progress. This was not pointless, malicious mass murdering of innocent women and children. This was a bad guy, with many decades of bad guy-ness to his name, suppressing a limited uprising.

Playing realpolitik here, since when did anyone give a shit about the Libyan people, any more than the millions of oppressed people elsewhere in the region at large we'd managed to more or less ignore until they started taking matters into their own hands a few months ago?

The "humanitarian" aspects of this are bogus. Qaddafi was just a run of the mill bad guy dictator until a small fraction of the population took up arms against him and he retaliated (which is of course no different than how Qaddafi himself took power, except he won). This was not genocide in progress. This was not pointless, malicious mass murdering of innocent women and children. This was a bad guy, with many decades of bad guy-ness to his name, suppressing a limited uprising.

Playing realpolitik here, since when did anyone give a shit about the Libyan people, any more than the millions of oppressed people elsewhere in the region at large we'd managed to more or less ignore until they started taking matters into their own hands a few months ago?

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, March 22, 2011 4:17 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

is this true? what are you basing your knowledge of the scale of this on? not saying your wrong per se, but you're contending a pretty diff picture than what id read so i was wondering if u have some info i dont

"Genocide". STOP USING THIS WORD, WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i can't wait to see what action the UN security council takes when pres. obiang takes his inevitable revenge on the people organizing protests on march 23rd in equatorial guinea

Also, this "he kills his own people" thing, how is that worse than killing anybody else?

x-post Well, here's what I mean. In Kosovo, there were people - men, women, children - targeted and killed based on their ethnicity. In Iraq, too (Kurds). In Afghanistan, no one would challenge the Taliban's active, aggressive, expansionist oppressiveness. Not saying they necessarily justified intervention, but at least there was some justification. But AFAIK, Qaddafi treated his whole country equally bad, and currently is repelling a rebellion.

Would we intervene on behalf of the Tibetan people vs. China? The Zimbabweans vs. Mugabe? Clearly Bahrain is SOL. Somalia began as a humanitarian mission, before we just held up our hands and said fuck it. What made Libya, of all the rotten or broken countries in the world, worth the potential costs of intervention?

i mean the guy's a total monster but i don't recall anything in libya over the last couple of months being as bad as those snipers killing 50 protesters in yemen the other day from the rooftops. the civil war in libya ramped up quick; it was soldier v soldier almost immediately. correct me if i'm wrong goole but it's the positions of rebel soldiers being protected here, not civilians.

Though of course, the rebels are "civilians."

are people actually claiming that qaddafi is committing genocide? or is that just something youre saying?

this really cant be said enough, but "there are dictators all over the world" isnt an argument against libyan intervention.

we give a shit about libya over bahrain or china because we feel as though we can make a positive difference at a low cost to our resources, int'l standing, money, investments, whatever

i keep hearing we have to 'prevent a genocide'

from

Tracer

ban tracer

I've heard it used in the media and by idiot politicians. I've heard all of the old Saddam cliches wheeled out... though, bizarrely, it was Gadaffi who brought up Hitler first, getting his retaliation in first I suppose