Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

Especially when the policy means we are engaged in killing people. There are far too many damsels in distress for the USA to go charging around saving them all and too many evil-doers for us to ever kill them all. Another justification is required.

― Aimless, Wednesday, 27 April 2011 17:50 (38 minutes ago) Permalink

It does not look like there is any justification that would satisfy your beliefs. And no one is advocating that the USA can save "them all."

the US CAN'T intervene everywhere it should, simply from a practical standpoint (case in point - Syria). but where we can and we have a moral obligation to do so (as I believe we did in Libya), then we should.

And I don't trust the thinking of the neo-cons either but knee-jerk reactions that we have to do the opposite of what they want is not exactly a nuanced approach.

also very otm

can it really be a moral obligation to do something that isn't possible?

xp

There are many quite strong and well-established justifications for going to war against a country and it I have no problem with them whatsoever. For example, if that country's armred forces invades or attacks your country, or it blockades your ports, or seizes ships at sea that sail under your flag. There are other, similar causus belli and I won't bother to name them all. They are united by the simple fact of violent aggression against your country.

However, invading a country, or bombing it, because your country doesn't approve of its internal policies and you desire a change of government more amenable to your way of thinking is only another form of colonialism, no matter how you dress it up.

Getting the sanction and approval of a bunch of other, third party countries before you bomb the country you all agree "deserves it" may be a step in the right direction, perhaps, but it is still pretty damn shaky ground, imo, because it still amounts to aggression and should not be touted as some moral high ground.

I prefer the shakey ground of the current Libya approach to your isolationist one.

So, to leap straight to Godwin's you would have been fine with the Nazis killing 6 million people if they hadn't breached another country's borders?

just to be clear here, aimless thinks colonialism is worse than genocide. sounds great.

lol xp

because your country doesn't approve of its internal policies and you desire a change of government more amenable to your way of thinking

Also -- some of the people in Libya don't appear to be too pleased with their government. It's not a situation involving some cliched colonialist power trying to impose its values.

he's called 'lenin's tomb': he's SWP: you'll find any amount of apologias for totalitarians of various stripes on his blog: and he's appeared on press tv

― lloyd banks knew my father (history mayne), Wednesday, April 27, 2011 5:54 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm not marrying the guy. I haven't signed up to some kind of blood-pact. I just think he has some sensible things to say about Libya.

xp Using force against a country because it has attacked a third nation, rather than your own, has a legal and moral justification stretching back centuries. The idea of intervention because a government has attacked a subsection of its own population is newer, and more controversial, but it's tough to make an absolute moral distinction. There's never really been any suggestion in the modern era that your own state needs to be at direct or indirect risk.

The weird thing to me is, our new doctrine seems to be, "If you can get ahold of some guns and start a war against your dictator, we'll help. But if you stick to nonviolence, you're on your own."

Is that where the "moral obligation" comes from? The fact that the Libyan rebels decided to use technicals and mortars and raise a small army?

xp

Isolationists do not believe in getting involved in the far off wars of other countries.

At present the USA is bound by treaty to involve itself in wars if one of our many, many, many treaty allies are attacked from without. I would not not renounce these treaties, even though the number of countries we are obliged to protect probably number around 50 or 60.

If it is isolalionist to say we ought not as a rule seek out and aggressively start wars, that protect neither ourselves, nor our allies, then I guess I am isolationist. But that seems a damned peculiar way to define isolationism. Basically, if any war is proposed, and any reason can be produced for starting it, opposing it becomes "isolationist", by your apparent definition.

x-post Again, they started with non-violence and were attacked by their state.

just to be clear here, aimless thinks colonialism is worse than genocide

another case where 2 + 2 = 22.

There's never really been any suggestion in the modern era that your own state needs to be at direct or indirect risk.

And what a lovely era it has been, too.

If you can get ahold of some guns and start a war against your dictator,

uh

dowd I'm kind of aware of that. So did protestors all over the middle east. But they're not getting rewarded with an air force.

So did protestors all over the middle east.

no, what happened in Libya has not happened anywhere else.

oh that's not true at all!

Again: where is the difference? Why the "moral obligation" in Libya but not elsewhere, where peaceful protestors are getting killed like shooting gallery targets? It seems the difference is that in Libya, the protestors responded by picking up guns and turning a violent crackdown into a civil war. The message appears to be that this behavior will get you an airforce. But stick to nonviolence and well, good luck with getting shot.

the difference is that every country is different. why is this so hard to grasp.

like the consequences of bomging Libya /= the consequences of bombing Syria /= the consequences of bombing Yemen /= the consequences of bombing Bahrain

The difference was possibility, maybe. Chance of success, both with and without external force, has to be a consideration.

we've done all this

the reason the US hasn't done this in different places is they are different: either the US is sided with the government, as in bahrain, or, as with syria, it's just like no way

ie there was an element of expediency

for example: consequences of NATO bombing Syria = Iran gets involved, Israel gets involved, mass regional warfare on a heretofore unprecedented scale that would have impacts WAY beyond the bounds of Syria's internal politics.

See also: Tienamen Square.

but if we're godwinning: the ussr violated other countries' borders (poland, finland) *and* had unpleasant internal policies... and yet the US refused to attack. what's up with that? why single out germany?

tbf Russia probably would have been better off if we had iced Stalin. too bad there were all those pesky treaties and promises made at Yalta and the UN Security Council etc

Spoken like a true Curtis LeMay acolyte, shakey mo.

never heard of him

playin' possum

did the music to Superfly IIRC

I get all that dudes; I was picking at the contention of "moral obligation".

ah the "stone age" guy. yeah that really reflects my politics *rolls eyes*

There's arguably a moral obligation to prevent crimes against humanity where they can reasonably be predicted. The idea that Benghazi would be flattened with huge civilian loss of life is probably the primary moral / legal (rather than logistical) difference between Libya and some of the other states in question.

In some cases acting on that moral obligation won't be possible, in others it might make things worse, in many the obligation will simply be ignored. Where it's possible to act legally, effectively and in line with the principles of the UN, i don't think inaction elsewhere prevents it from being valid. Whether that's what's happened in Libya is clearly open to debate.

Again: where is the difference? Why the "moral obligation" in Libya but not elsewhere, where peaceful protestors are getting killed like shooting gallery targets? It seems the difference is that in Libya, the protestors responded by picking up guns and turning a violent crackdown into a civil war. The message appears to be that this behavior will get you an airforce. But stick to nonviolence and well, good luck with getting shot.

― 40% chill and 100% negative (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, April 27, 2011 7:20 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is such a false set-up
the reason they picked up guns & didnt stick with nonviolence is because they would be beaten/killed. how effective do you see nonviolence being in libya exactly

hoping we compare it to the civil rights movement soon

I'm not saying that amping up resistance into a civil war was the wrong move. I don't know. But yeah you're right, before that happened, I guess the nonviolent resistance was about as effective as it is in Syria right now. It made the whole world sit up and pay attention. It discredited Gaddafi (to the extent that there was any more discrediting to be had with him; more meaningfully it thoroughly discredited the rehabilitated image that Gaddafi's son had been meticulously pushing for years). It was doing a lot. Would it have toppled Gaddafi on its own? Not fucking likely.

So I guess my question is, what if Syrians managed to cobble together a rebel army? What if they held some towns, started ambushing Syrian army troops? I imagine the US would find a reason or two not to prevent the inevitable slaughter that would ensue.

(For the reasons posted above by Shakey and history mayne)

Comes back to the gap between what the US / UN would like to do and what they can do in practice. The moral case for action would still be there but it would be overridden by the threat of sparking a massive conflagration in the region.

it's funny that rabid interventionists never seem to bring up any historical example other than WW2 -- i mean, you'd think if it were inherently such a great idea, you'd have loads and loads of examples of it working out just fine other than a war that wasn't even an "intervention" to begin with.

It's pretty fucked for Italy to now be taking the lead in bombing fuck out of things in Libya. Well played, NATO, well played.

never seem to bring up any historical example other than WW2

Bosnia's been referenced several times on this very thread. Rwanda is probably a case where intervention should have happened but didn't. But yeah inalienable human rights and the idea that genocide is wrong are pretty much a 20th century ideas.

Did we or did we not agree itt that "genocide" is not applicable to the Libyan situation, speculative or otherwise?

yes, but it is such a tempting argument, because it makes a moral morass look much more like a moral imperative.

who is applying genocide to this situation

lol @ aimless being an utter hypocrit about using misleading language to imply the obvious rightness of his position

i do wish everyone itt would stop acting like the answer is OBVIOUSLY the one they agree with.

i think its important that we keep discussing this shit obv -- it could turn out to have been a terrible idea. but its not super obvious in either direction right now that this is the wrong thing to do so stop acting like its elementary

xp The British intervention in Sierra Leone is generally thought to have been justifiable and effective, the same is often said about the Indian intervention in the civil war in Pakistan. There are a couple of other examples that stand up reasonably well.

There's no right or wrong answer as the cases are always different. Liberal intervention can be used as a cloak for darker aims (as with some of the later justification of Iraq) and even where there's a case on paper it doesn't mean that the method of intervention (aerial bombing of Serb cities) is moral. Libya should be discussed on its own merits.

whats weird about the anti-intervention in all cases thing to me is that its bassline understanding of human rights is weirdly nationalistic -- we dont want this blood on OUR hands -- let it be in gaddaffis. even if theres more of it