Libya

[onmyknees]

So...the rebels in Libya are asking for international support to help them with ( at this point) a no fly zone because Kadaffi's Mig jets are gunning down protesters and anti government fighters. Refugees are streaming across the border in Tunisia. Sen. Kerry seems to agree with the request to enforce a no fly zone. The instability in Northern Africa and the Middle East could send oil prices soaring and cause a world wide recession . What to do ??

[south ov da border]

it's all planned. The rising oil prices are supposed to precede the fall of the dollar, followed by a "discovery" of oil stateside...

[onmyknees]

it's all planned. The rising oil prices are supposed to precede the fall of the dollar, followed by a "discovery" of oil stateside...

I see...

[russtafa]

Wow and whats your theory on u.f.o's and the Lachness monster?

[Silcc69]

Meh it would'nt hurt a second time
Bombing of Libya - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:USF-111_Libya1986.JPG" class="image"><img alt="USF-111 Libya1986.JPG" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/71/USF-111_Libya1986.JPG/300px-USF-111_Libya1986.JPG"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/7/71/USF-111_Libya1986.JPG/300px-USF-111_Libya1986.JPG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Libya)

[onmyknees]

Meh it would'nt hurt a second time
Bombing of Libya - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Libya)



yup...the original battle was called "Battle for the Line of Death"...but it wasn't much of a battle. The F-14 pilots made it target practice !

[russtafa]

I don't understand why no country will help the Libyan people get rid of this wanker thats killing them?

[trish]

I thought you were dead set against foreign aid?

[Stavros]

a 'No-fly-zone' means direct intervention, which in the current climate is both financially expensive and politically treacherous with no clear exit strategy as defined by a time frame, or in political terms with a 'satisfactory outcome'. Yes rebels ask for help, but what percentage of Libyans would welcome direct intervention by the US/NATO? Thats not clear, certainly in the west. If Qadhafi is eliminated, what happens next? Egypt is still struggling to re-organise its politics and it had a civil society that Qadhafi long ago obliterated in Libya -Libya actually has a lot of promise -well educated labour force, undeveloped resources, small population etc -but however much we might want to 'do something' this is something the Libyans must do themselves, and they will in time. Qadhafi has loyal and armed guards amounting to small armies, but weaker than Saddam Hussein, so it will be bloody and distressing to see, but for the time being we can but stand and wait -the help they need will come after the revolution.

[thombergeron]

yup...the original battle was called "Battle for the Line of Death"...but it wasn't much of a battle. The F-14 pilots made it target practice !

Well, that's what Gaddafi called it. He was challenging the international community to enter the Gulf of Sidra. In the U.S., we call it Operation El Dorado Canyon. Also would have been difficult for F-14s to bomb Libya in 1986 since the aircraft wasn't cleared for air-to-ground operations until 1992. So maybe you're talking about F-111 pilots.

[onmyknees]

Well, that's what Gaddafi called it. He was challenging the international community to enter the Gulf of Sidra. In the U.S., we call it Operation El Dorado Canyon. Also would have been difficult for F-14s to bomb Libya in 1986 since the aircraft wasn't cleared for air-to-ground operations until 1992. So maybe you're talking about F-111 pilots.


No my friend....you are sadly mistaken, as you usually are...Better go back and read up on naval aircraft ...I was there... They were Gruman F14 TomCats based in Pensocola and carrier based. There were still some Phantoms in service as well back then..The Tomcats toyed with the Mig 23's. until blowing them out of the sky.

[Stavros]

I guess the wave of change that swept across North Africa has petered out in Libya, it was wishful thinking, certainly on my part that enough people in the West would turn against Qadhafi to make the difference -its not over of course, but the dilemma now for the 'west' is: what to do? Libya produces a 'sweet' oil light in sulphur which is in big demand because of its versatility in making oil-derived products and lower than usual carbon emissions, and it has pipeline links to Italy: are European, American and Asian companies going to go without by imposing an effective boycott on Libyan oil? I expect Russia and China to abstain on key votes in the UN, so for the time being I think Libyan oil will get through. Seif is now claiming Libya will release bank records 'proving' they bankrolled Sarkozy's election campaign in 2007 and who knows what else -in theory- they could use to embarrass the forces ranged against them. However, I suspect there will be a ferocious crackdown in Benghazi, and certainly the regime is weaker now than it was last year. How does one get rid of someone like this,short of carpet bombing the place in the hope he gets it...?

[Ben]

YouTube - British Forces Are In Action Over Libya, Prime Minister David Cameron Confirms (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I-IbTPGGqw)

YouTube - French fighter jets over Libya (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihA0bbN4C-8)

YouTube - Military action against Libya in full swing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiT5XSBez3A)

[Infern0]

about bloody time.

Goodbye Gadaffi!

[loren]

I think we should support wichever side is loosing; giving them enough support to keep on fighting but not enough to land a "killer blow". Then when they start to get the upper hand, start supporting the other side.

[russtafa]

Brilliant idea

[Ben]

From the American Conservative magazine...

The Littlest Invasions (http://www.amconmag.com/blog/the-littlest-invasions/)

(http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=amconmag)No-fly zones and covert ops are just as bad as large-scale interventions.

By Gary Brecher

The newest fad in foreign intervention is the slim-line approach. I swear, it really is like fashion news. A few years ago, the neocons were pushing a full-figured style of intervention, which ended up with us wasting hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives in Iraq. Since that went so badly, the fashion has swung the other way, and the same idiots who brought you Iraq are pushing for a smaller, smarter style of intervention that leans on small groups of special-forces troops and covert operations.
Watch this play out with Libya: it starts with Sen. John McCain saying we should just impose a no-fly zone. Before you know it, there’s talk about a few airstrikes, providing logistical help to the rebels, maybe sending some troops with NATO or the UN—you know, to keep the “peace.”
The notion of not intervening, period, never enters the neocons’ heads. I got the shock of my life going through the Weekly Standard a couple of years ago when I saw the headline, “The Case Against Intervention.” But it turned out to be about the American economy. I should’ve realized, the only place these people don’t want us to pour money into is the USA.
When it comes to sending American GIs into harm’s way, they never met an intervention they didn’t like. Some of their proposed military interventions are so crazy you have to wonder if they weren’t chuckling to themselves over at Bill Kristol’s magazine when they wrote this nonsense. Craziest of all was the flurry of calls a couple of years back for us to intervene in Zimbabwe.
Too Stupid For Bush
If you actually know anything about contemporary military doctrine, you have to laugh at this notion. Zimbabwe has every deal-breaker in the book. For starters, it’s landlocked. America is and always has been an air/sea power; projecting that kind of power to a landlocked country is a nightmare. Zimbabwe is also mired in one of those endless ethnic feuds that just don’t respond to foreign pressure—in this case, deep and abiding hate between the two biggest tribes, Shona and Ndebele.
There’s also the fact that the dictator we’d have intervened against, Robert Mugabe, is a former guerrilla who still commands the allegiance of a tribal/irregular army. That’s the last thing U.S. conventional forces want to face. And finally—the factor that should veto any intervention—Mugabe has a long history of using foreign threats to prop up his regime. In fact, a foreign intervention is just about the only thing that could make Mugabe popular in Zimbabwe again, just as a foreign invasion to depose Obama is the only thing that would make him popular in Texas—well, maybe not Texas but, say, North Carolina.
So you think that stopped the neocon “let’s you and them fight” propaganda machine? Not for a second. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, living proof of the old saying that “there’s an idiot born every second, but unfortunately they take much longer to die,” wrote a column calling for us to use cruise missiles fired by an unmanned drone, the ultimate in “smaller, smarter” interventions, to kill Mugabe, in a column with the supposedly humorous title “Predator For a Predator.”
But Cohen didn’t go far enough for James Kirchick, the same genius who once wrote an article called “Hail, Mauritania” lauding the Coup Capital of the Sahara, often nominated for worst place in the world, as a beacon of democracy. He wrote an impassioned plea for full-scale military intervention in Zimbabwe, based on the fact that his Zimbabwean guide/lackey had broken down and cried, right in front of poor Kirchick, about the local situation.
Luckily, not even Bush was stupid enough to take that idea seriously. But the neocons never stop, and they don’t have a very high opinion of the American public’s memory or IQ. So they’ve developed new ad campaigns specifically designed for the wary buyer who has a bit of a problem with the Iraq lemon they sold us last time around. They’re using the notion of “smaller, smarter” interventions to lure us onto the lot the way car dealers use subcompact base models, sold at a loss, so they can talk us into the all-options luxury model intervention.
Small Wars, Big Mistakes
All “limited” interventions suffer from something the armed services call “Mission Creep.” They’ve seen it happen so many times: you go into some country promising to get ’er done, pack up and leave. But once you’re there, the mission starts creeping toward total occupation. The most obvious and insane example of mission creep is Vietnam. It’s hard to believe, but in the beginning, that was supposed to be a small, smart intervention too.
I don’t have to tell you, it suffered from a severe case of mission creep. In fact, missions don’t get much creepier than that one turned out to be, and all for nothing; Ho Chi Minh’s people won just like they would have if we’d left the place alone. Everyone else lost: the ordinary people of South Vietnam, the taxpayers of the United States, and 57,000 trusting working-class American kids who were too decent to go for the sleazy college deferment like Cheney did, along with a few thousand other chickenhawks who always love interventions that get other, braver and more honest people killed and maimed.
The closer you look, the worse all of our small-scale interventions appear, even the ones that supposedly succeeded. Take Clinton’s mini-war on Serbia in 1999. The official version is that we did a great job, stopping a Serbian massacre of Kosovo Albanians without losing much. Wrong on both counts.
For starters, you may have noticed that the Chinese air force is deploying a new stealth fighter. And how’s that related to the war against the Serbs? Well, a brand new F-117 stealth fighter went down over Serbia on its way to bomb the afternoon reruns. The stealth tech from that downed fighter found its way to the China’s aircraft designers, who reverse-engineered it to make radar-invisible fighters. America was never in any danger from the Serbs; China’s another matter.
That’s what happens when you start indulging every pundit and ethnic lobby’s pet interventions: you lose sight of what the real job of American security is supposed to be. I mean: keeping America secure.
Take a look at what that supposedly successful intervention in the Balkans actually did. The Serbs had been having a problem with a so-called army of Albanian irregulars called the KLA, “Kosovo Liberation Army.” These guys couldn’t fight at all and had already been beaten by Serb militia, tired middle-aged cops and veterans. But they realized that with the gullible Beltway pundit crowd, losing can be your fastest way to win. They took the corpses of their men who’d been killed by the Serb cops and militia, stripped them of weapons, and showed them to the international press as victims of Serb massacres. This being the Balkans, where massacres have been every tribe’s way of making war since the glaciers retreated, nobody doubted them.
The American press took it from there. The Beltway pundits can’t imagine a situation without a good guy and a bad guy, so they made the Serbs the bad guys and the Albanians the good guys. Now, I have no trouble with the Serbs as fairly bad guys when provoked—though I wish more people remembered what happened to the Serbs in World War II, so they’d understand why the Serbs are so easy to provoke—but the idea that the KLA were ever anything even slightly resembling good guys was just ridiculous. The KLA is a gang of bloodthirsty tribal killers who make it a policy to kill any Serb civilians they catch and have also been involved in heroin smuggling, human trafficking, and even organ sales. They actually harvested Serbian prisoners for organs to sell on the black market. And unlike Saddam, the KLA are genuine about their Muslim militancy and have tight connections with al-Qaeda.
At least the Serbs weren’t pro-al-Qaeda. That might have counted for something if anybody in D.C. had actually been thinking about us, the Americans they’re supposed to be protecting. But it didn’t figure into the decision to help the KLA. It never does.
One of the lessons you could learn from Kosovo, if anybody inside the Beltway was into learning lessons, is to take a look at the world you’re butting into. Kosovo is the heart of the Balkans, where tribal warfare is a way of life. What are the odds yougoing to find one tribe of totally evil people and another of totally good, gentle people in a region like that? But that’s the idea behind interventions like Clinton’s: bad, bad Serbs and good, sweet Albanians. God, just imagine how the rest of the Balkan tribes laughed at the idea of the Albanian mafia as noble victims.
Most American interventions come from two closely related childish fantasies: first, that one side in a tribal war is all good and the other all bad; and second, that the weaker tribe are the “underdogs” and therefore the good guys. Just look at those two ideas and you’ll see that they’re a series of disasters waiting to happen. The first one is bad enough, idealizing one bunch of desperate killers—but idealizing the weaker bunch of killers is even worse. That means you’re stuck propping up totally evil people who can’t even fight, like the KLA.
There are no good guys in tribal wars. The novelist V.S. Naipaul has a good line about that kind of world in Bend in the River, his surprisingly cool novel about the Congo War: “It’s not that there’s no right or wrong here. There’s no right.” The best thing to do about a place where everyone’s wrong is stay the hell away from it.
If the world had enough sense to do that, even Congo might not be so bad. If the Europeans and the do-gooders had left Congo to sort itself out, it’d be at peace now—a Roman-style peace, under the strongest and best-organized tribe, the Tutsi, hardcore warriors, the only tribe in that part of the world that can fight and stay disciplined.
Instead, the First World keeps clawing at the Tutsis every time they get stronger. They must be evil because they’re strong; that’s how the argument went. So when almost a million Tutsis were hacked to death with machetes in Rwanda, there really wasn’t much complaining from those compassionate Euro-lefties, or Bono, or any of the usual suspects. But oh, the minute the Tutsis organized a relief force and entered Rwanda to save the few of their people who were still alive, you should have heard the screaming from Paris! Aggression! Actual military progress, actual accomplishment! Mon dieu, we can’t have that! And so General Nkunda, the Tutsi leader and the one man who could have brought a kind of peace to Central Africa, is on trial for “war crimes,” while most of the Hutus who hacked up his people are sitting pretty.
Playing Castro’s Game
That’s the argument I’d make against “compassionate” or “humanitarian” intervention: it doesn’t work because it’s based on some of the most childish ideas in history. Of course not all intervention claims to be compassionate—though when it’s America doing the intervening, we almost always say so, at least. The funny thing is, when you look at more cold-blooded intervention, done strictly for reasons of state, it’s not very effective either.
Once again, take the case of a supposedly successful small, smart intervention: the CIA overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. That succeeded short-term: the CIA got rid of a nationalist leader and replaced him with Reza Shah, aka the Shah, the guy who fled Iran in 1979 to be replaced by Khomeini. The trouble with these cool James Bond coups is that when you suavely overthrow a democratic government like we did in Iran, people don’t forget. Every Iranian I ever met can give you every detail about the coup that overthrew Mossadegh, like any red-blooded Southerner can give you the starting lineup for Pickett’s Charge. Those bitter memories have a lot to do with all the hate we’ve been getting from Tehran ever since. When you consider that the “reasons of state” behind the coup were to please the Brits, who’d been stealing the Persians’ oil in their usual style and didn’t like getting their hands slapped by Mossadegh, you have to ask: was it worth it?
A year after overthrowing Mossadegh, the CIA took down another democratically elected head of state who was messing with a big industry: Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. Arbenz nationalized land owned by United Fruit, who called some Agency friends, got them to recruit a little mercenary army, and pushed Arbenz out of office. That short-term success didn’t benefit anybody except United Fruit. It hurt the U.S. and it hurt Guatemala. For one thing, as an article in the National Catholic Reporter once said, “the overthrow of Arbenz inspired the beginning of the Guatemalan resistance, the first guerrilla movement in Latin America after Cuba’s rebels.” And it led to a bad case of mission creep, with the CIA spending more and more to suppress the Resistance. Oh, and there’s the fact that about 250,000 Guatemalans died violent deaths.
You could say those people would have died even if we hadn’t bankrolled the right-wing paramilitary gangs. Maybe so: for obvious reasons, the places where the U.S. has intervened are weak states with bloody histories. But speaking for myself, I’d kind of feel better if that happened without our help. Because when you look at the records for some of these limited interventions, you start to get a little sick. The quarter-million dead in Guatemala isn’t anywhere near a record for messy CIA-funded operations. That goes to the Indonesian generals’ coup that overthrew Sukarno in 1965. About 500,000 people died in that one. In per capita terms, the bloodiest was El Salvador in the 1980s, where 75,000 people died out of a population of four or five million, nearly all of them killed by death squads the Agency was funding to the tune of $1 million per day of your tax money.
That was the “Red Dawn” era. I remember worrying as a kid about Communist armies conquering Colorado in alliance with Soviet paratroopers. It seems a little ridiculous now, like the idea we really needed to hold South Vietnam. Vietnam went over to the Communists and now it’s a major beach destination; El Salvador stayed out of Communist hands and half the population poured into L.A. If we’d stayed out of both, we’d still probably have way too many Salvadorans in L.A., but we’d have a lot more cash, too, and a lot less wasted blood, ours and theirs, on our hands.
So in the long term, even the successful interventions get pretty damn messy. Worse yet, the successful interventions always seem to come against soft targets, relatively democratic governments like Arbenz’s or Mossadegh’s—exactly the kind we probably shouldn’t be messing with anyway. When you look at the U.S. record against hardcore totalitarian regimes, you don’t see even temporary success, just one long series of disasters.
You can sum up our rotten record in trying small, smart interventions in police states with one word: Cuba. All the downsides of intervention are in our record down there. The most obvious flaw is sheer Three Stooges incompetence. If you ever believed in the CIA as big, bad covert warriors, just read up on what they came up with against Castro. The BBC realized that this stuff was comedy gold years ago and made a “Spinal Tap” mockumentary called “638 Ways to Kill Castro.” The sad thing is, that number isn’t a comic exaggeration. There really were 638 attempts by the Agency to rub out The Beard.
And some of them were stupider than anything you came up with in junior high. Everybody’s heard about the exploding-cigars plot, but how about exploding coral reefs? Yup: the CIA scouted all the pet shops in D.C. looking for a Caribbean shellfish big enough to blow Castro out of the water on one of his scuba-diving trips. They were going to paint the shell in bright day-glo colors so Castro would notice it and swim over, and then kaboom! If you ask me, they were way too subtle. Should’ve gone for a big underwater neon sign: “Hey Fidel! Check out this amazing clam here!”
But the most painful of all is a scene right out of Sean Connery’s outtakes: the CIA sent a woman to have sex with Castro and then slip him a poison pill while he was snoring. This genius decided to hide the pills in her cold cream, where they melted. She didn’t think she could get away with stuffing cold cream in The Beard’s mouth while he slept, so she confessed everything. That’s bad enough, but what happened next was the final blow to American manhood: Castro actually handed her his pistol and said something like, “Cara mia, mi Corazon, here is my pistol! If you wish to kill me, this will do the job!” Well, either he’s great in bed or she didn’t like her chances of getting out of the palace after firing that shot because she collapsed in his hairy arms. Score another for Latin lovers and socialism, which makes it 638 for Castro’s team and a big goose egg for the Anglos.
Maybe Castro’s score is even higher than that. I don’t want to jump in the black lagoon of “Who Killed JFK?” but Castro is a prime suspect. Oswald was a KGB asset, the theory goes, the Kremlin passed him on to the Cuban intelligence agency, CGI, and after a few hundred failed attempts on his own life, Castro lost his sense of humor and gave the go-ahead. That was Edwards Jay Epstein’s conclusion in Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, and it’s supported by new German research.
That’s the kind of thing that happens when a democratic country starts playing with the dark, nasty stuff that totalitarian regimes are very good at. The CIA has never had anything like the Cubans’ finesse with assassination and probably never will. I remember William F. Buckley joking about an assassination attempt on Sukarno, way back in the 1960s, saying in that cool stutter of his, “Yes, it was, er, quite … quite clear that it was an, ah, CIA plot because … chuckle … the bomb killed everyone in a crowded room except, ah, Sukarno.” Buckley knew what he was talking about; he worked for the Agency in Mexico City.
When we intervene against democratic governments we make enemies with long memories; when we intervene against totalitarian states we play to their strength and our weak points. It’s always, always worth considering the option of not getting involved at all.
What would have happened if we’d just told the Soviets to get their missiles out and otherwise ignored Castro? Well, if we’d called off the embargo, Castro’s island would’ve been flooded with cheap, cool stuff and it’s a good bet his people would have gotten damn sick of socialist austerity when what they wanted was new cars and better stereos. By imposing the embargo, we managed to let Castro survive a half-century in never-never land. The Cubans even have this great joke about his Toyota-pickup stamina: Somebody gives Castro a present of a giant tortoise, telling him they live 100 years. Castro sighs and says, “That’s the problem: you get attached to them and they die on you.”
And if you look at paramilitary operations, the CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in 1961, usually called “The Bay of Pigs,” is the most obvious example of why America should just say no. The invasion was over in a few hours. A couple hundred anti-Castro Cubans hit the beach, ran into opposition, and were killed or captured. Castro’s propaganda services had a great time playing up this latest case of gringo interference, and everyone else was shocked at how just plain inept it all was.
In fact, the whole fiasco was so ridiculous that it may have been designed to fail to make JFK, the new, young president, look bad. Which raises another very dangerous side-effect of all these interventions: they put a little gang of generally creepy guys right at the center of power, leaving the rest of us totally out of the loop. And these guys, contrary to what you see in spy movies, are not usually the best and brightest. Take E. Howard Hunt, who planned two of the dumbest operations in America history more than a decade apart: Bay of Pigs and the Watergate burglary. That freak couldn’t have been elected to the Kern County Mosquito Abatement District; I sure wouldn’t want him deciding my country’s foreign policy with a few of his throat-slitting buddies.
Yanqui, Stay Home!
Like the embargo, the Bay of Pigs made Castro much stronger. That’s what usually happens when a foreign power interferes: the locals get furious and unite against the outsider. And when the country’s had a history of being messed with by foreign powers, the anti-intervention backlash is much more intense. That’s why the people who said we should intervene in Egypt were crazy. The Turks, British, and French screwed with Egypt so many times that foreigners trying to overthrow Mubarak is about the only scenario that could have made him a local favorite.
Which brings us to the latest neocon project, Libya. Right on cue, here’s Judith Miller—the New York Times’ Cheney conduit who assured everybody that Saddam had WMDs in every walk-in closet—back to her old tricks by pushing for a nice, quick, clean intervention in Libya:
One of the options [Obama] should consider is to create a ‘no-fly zone’ over the capital, Tripoli, and the eastern part of the country which Qaddafi-loyal troops still control. President George H. W. Bush imposed such a zone over the Kurdish part of Iraq in 1991 after the Gulf War to prevent another monster, Saddam Hussein, from punishing the Kurds for rising up against him.
Pentagon friends tell us that shutting down Libyan air space to prevent Qaddafi from using his air force to bomb his own people would be relatively simple to do in a few hours. Radar-homing missiles could target Libyan radar, and the country’s 13 airstrips could be bombed to prevent them from being used to land aircraft. Americans could also target Libyan Air Force planes on the ground, along with their contract Ukrainian pilots. Only about half of the 400-plus-plane Libyan Air Force is estimated to be operational, the expert said.
If you wanted proof that neocons never learn anything, this is it. Just as I was writing, there was news that the Libyan resistance has managed to shoot down one of Gaddafi’s planes on its own. That’s going to be a heroic accomplishment that will live in Libyan memory forever. Imagine if we’d gone in with our multi-billion-dollar air force and done it for them. They might have been sullenly grateful for a while, but nobody really wants to be liberated by foreigners. The Libyans want to do it themselves.
If we intervene in Libya, we might manage a clean, quick regime change, though I doubt it, based on our record. But we might also accomplish the impossible: turning Gaddafi a hero to his people, denying the locals the chance to make their own destiny—and making ourselves look like fools doing it.

[nosferatus666]

Yes... a new war...maybe next week we will start a new one against North Korea...and me like millon of American still struggling to pay mortgage and bills...why we have to be the Police in the world? And now new people are giong to hate us

[Silcc69]

Yes... a new war...maybe next week we will start a new one against North Korea...and me like millon of American still struggling to pay mortgage and bills...why we have to be the Police in the world? And now new people are giong to hate us

Meh China would be a better target since we owe them a shitload of money let's just nuke em and call it a day. Wait 90% of our companies import there good from there. wamp wamp

[Stavros]

No-fly zones and covert ops are just as bad as large-scale interventions.
By Gary Brecher

Oh dear what confused nonsense; I hardly know where to begin since it doesn't address any of the core issues concerning this intervention in Libya.

1. Libya -I got the impression that we were not going to intervene, and that the rebels would mostly be defeated, but that possibly Qadhafi would lay siege to Benghazi rather than attack it. I also thought that without enough Arab support, plus the cost and the lack of strategic coherence to a no-fly-zone Qadhafi would live to kill another day. I understand that Benghazi has become non-transferable, as it were, that enough support was mustered in the UN Security Council, and that someone must believe that the rebellion in Libya is based on broad support across the country but just isn't well-equipped, and that -and I think this is crucial- there are enough elements close to Qadhafi who are willing to dispose of him for their own reasons. As it stands the danger is that the attack on Libya's military capacity will weaken Qadhafi but not fatally, and that he may hang on for some time yet.

2. Strategically, Iraq was part of a long-term plan to re-structure the Middle East, a sort of 'revolution from above' as envisioned in the 'Project for an American Century' -the neo-cons were always disturbed that their closest Middle Wastern allies were violent despots, but how to change? Saddam had the dubious benefit of being feared and loathed in equal measure, and was strategically poised between Syria and Iran with billions of undeveloped oil and gas resources -but Iraq also had a deep legacy of political division and bitterness that guaranteed actual or virtual civil war with the Baathist lid taken off the state -Libya too has its demons so I don't know how 'the west' thinks it will make a transition to something close to democracy, if Qadhafi goes and 'the people' rule.

We all want to see cruelty ended, I don't think any of us want to see people starving, raped, and murdered, but the sad fact is that humantiarian intervention may stop one thing, without leading to a new dawn of peace and prosperity. An Albanian I used to know disputed the claims of Kosovars to be Albanian -'they are Kosovars!' she said -their gangster culture is well-known in the region, but yes, they were supported over the Serbs because a Serbian defeat was deemed crucial to the longer term politics of southern Europe. Southern Europe is not a liberal place -transexuals have a hard time even being invisible in Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo or Macedonia, the Greeks and also Ariel Sharon in Israel were enthusiastic supporters of Milosovic, its a dangerous and dispiriting place to live.

3. Brecher is wrong about Iran in 1953 -Mossadeq made too many mistakes after becoming Prime Minister in 1951; he failed to focus on the general economy of Iran, being obsessed with oil; the US and the UK were actually divided on the issue -the US saw communists everywhere whereas the British were anxious that violence not be the route to independence -Iran's oil through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in which it was the major shareholder, was the main source of foreign exchange for a country still bankrupt after World War II and the major source of its oil when its armed forces were in Korea, etc etc. That doesn't justify the coup d'etat which was mounted by the Iranians not the USA (albeit with CIA covert support), but like the JFK thing there are too many empty conspiracy theories around it and they obscure the truth.

There are not always grand designs behind these events; sometimes states stumble into a situation and can't get out: the next phase will be interesting to watch; I feel generally pessimistic about it, but I am a pessimist by nature anyway.

Finally, not all the armed service personnel in Vietnam were working class, that is a myth.

[south ov da border]

Yes... a new war...maybe next week we will start a new one against North Korea...and me like millon of American still struggling to pay mortgage and bills...why we have to be the Police in the world? And now new people are giong to hate us

damn bankers and their oil quest. They have enough but want more.//

[Faldur]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY-_JsNrxiM&feature=player_embedded

[Ben]

YouTube - Ron Paul: Why Obama Is Wrong on Libya (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkAxjsufiWI)

[Stavros]

Farrakhan implies that the 'rebels' in Libya have been in receipt of the CIA's largesse without addressing the root causes of their dissatisfaction. He makes bogus claims about 'Qadhafi's' investments in Libya, whereas one of the many reasons for the 'dissatisfaction' in Benghazi is the lack of investment there -pot-holes in the road, buildings falling apart, etc. It is widely known that Qadhafi's own tribe have been the main beneficiaries of Libyan wealth -they are 'his people' the rest are of no real concern, unless, like the Megrahi they are larger and can pressure the boss into getting their boy released from a Scottish prison. The 'water' Farrakhan says 'brother Qadhafi' discovered and developed is part of a ridiculous and wasteful 'man-made river' scheme that will deplete not add to Libyan water resources. Africans long ago gave up on Qadhafi's hare-brained schemes which were never about real development but just gewgaws for his shop window of 'achievements' -swallowed hook, line and sinker by Mr Farrakhan -he never points out that in 40 years Qadhafi has never confirmed how much the people love him by asking them to vote him into office or into anything-- no mention of the political rivals who were murdered by Qadhafi, the detentions without trial, torture and summary executions -is there any wonder people are 'dissatisfied'??

[Ben]

damn bankers and their oil quest. They have enough but want more.//

Well, corporations, by their very design, have to maximize profits. It's an institutional requirement. Actually, by law.
A CEO can be sued if he or she doesn't do everything to increase shareholder return every single quarter. So, the very nature of the institution depends upon more and more and more.
I mean, take, say, Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs. Is he a nice guy? He could be. Who knows. It really doesn't matter whether he's a nice guy or not. What matters is whether he fulfills his core institutional role. And if he doesn't carry out the function of maximizing investor return, well, he's out and someone else is in.
I mean, the purpose of a corporation could change. Whereby the essence of a corporation would be to serve the stakeholders -- and not the stockholders -- and also serve the communities in which they operate in.
Lastly, corporations conduct themselves in what's called: externalities. In economic jargon it means the cost to others. So, a bank will calculate the risk to itself. Not the risk to others. Meaning systemic risk. Or the risk to the system. Oil companies do the same. They look at the risk to themselves. Not the external risks. Meaning global warming. Global warming is an externality. Meaning the effect on others. Mainly human beings -- ha! ha! ha! So, oil companies can't take into account the costs on others, can't concern themselves with the harm to others. So, it's actually an institutional requirement to exacerbate global warming. Again, oil companies cannot concern themselves with external costs.

[Stavros]

Lastly, corporations conduct themselves in what's called: externalities.

I can't agree with this, and certainly not in relation to the major independent oil companies -externalities are factored in to long term strategic planning for a number of reasons. One is practical: if a company is opening up a production facility in a remote location -and the fate of oil and gas is that often resources are in remote locations- developing a physical infrastructure will be part of that: road building, laying down communications and production and social/recreational facilities for staff and their families, etc. Developing a production can dovetail with 'corporate social investment' and add value for shareholders and through practical benefits to local people, aka your stockholders, and in the process create a positive reputation, a key element in commercial success and one you ignore at your peril. Oil companies also see themselves providing the raw materials for what people want: gasoline for their cars; fuel for ships and aeroplanes; the base ingredients of computers, Cd's and DVD's, ball-point pens etc etc: the prize in Libya might be oil and gas in a popular democracy: we can't really do without either (until commercially viable alternatives to oil and gas enter the mainstream), so condeming any corporation is just a childish form of gesture politics based on ignorance: better to do some research on who they are, where and how they operate, their reputation issues, and use the existing law and political system to bring them to account.

[beandip]

Look at Drudge Report now.


www.drudgereport.com

I'm so glad you assholes voted for MR "Hope and Change" our winner of the Nobel Peace Prize... under his watch we have hunter / killer teams posing next to civilians they whacked. What's even better is they're cutting ears and cocks off too!


Any complaints from the Left?

Crickets....

It's not ok when Bush has Gitmo... but it's fine for Obama to have Gitmo...and hit teams posing next to dead civilians.



We need another dose of Hopium and in a hurry....


HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I love the total hypocrisy of the "Left"


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1368314/German-newspaper-publishes-suppressed-photos-U-S-soldiers-posing-partially-naked-Afghan-corpse.html

[trish]

How do you know that's true?
The Drudge Report te-lls me soooo.
(To the tune of a well known hymn).

[Ben]

Lastly, corporations conduct themselves in what's called: externalities.

I can't agree with this, and certainly not in relation to the major independent oil companies -externalities are factored in to long term strategic planning for a number of reasons. One is practical: if a company is opening up a production facility in a remote location -and the fate of oil and gas is that often resources are in remote locations- developing a physical infrastructure will be part of that: road building, laying down communications and production and social/recreational facilities for staff and their families, etc. Developing a production can dovetail with 'corporate social investment' and add value for shareholders and through practical benefits to local people, aka your stockholders, and in the process create a positive reputation, a key element in commercial success and one you ignore at your peril. Oil companies also see themselves providing the raw materials for what people want: gasoline for their cars; fuel for ships and aeroplanes; the base ingredients of computers, Cd's and DVD's, ball-point pens etc etc: the prize in Libya might be oil and gas in a popular democracy: we can't really do without either (until commercially viable alternatives to oil and gas enter the mainstream), so condeming any corporation is just a childish form of gesture politics based on ignorance: better to do some research on who they are, where and how they operate, their reputation issues, and use the existing law and political system to bring them to account.

Global warming is an externality. Pollution is an externality. (A pleasant looking garden is also an externality. Albeit a positive one.) It's simply a market transaction that a third party doesn't consent to.
So, when, say, I fill up my gas tank, as it were, I am not factoring into the transaction the affect on others: pollution, smog etc. Again, it's any market transaction. From buying a car to driving a car to smoking a cigarette.
And as Milton Friedman pointed out: it's a big problem.
So, with respect to oil companies, well, the external cost is the fate of the species.
But [coal and oil] companies cannot and do not think about that. Because they can't. Institutional constraints demand that they dodge the costs to others whether it's pollution -- or the big one: global warming.

[onmyknees]

From the American Conservative magazine...

The Littlest Invasions (http://www.amconmag.com/blog/the-littlest-invasions/)

(http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=amconmag)No-fly zones and covert ops are just as bad as large-scale interventions.

By Gary Brecher

The newest fad in foreign intervention is the slim-line approach. I swear, it really is like fashion news. A few years ago, the neocons were pushing a full-figured style of intervention, which ended up with us wasting hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives in Iraq. Since that went so badly, the fashion has swung the other way, and the same idiots who brought you Iraq are pushing for a smaller, smarter style of intervention that leans on small groups of special-forces troops and covert operations.
Watch this play out with Libya: it starts with Sen. John McCain saying we should just impose a no-fly zone. Before you know it, there’s talk about a few airstrikes, providing logistical help to the rebels, maybe sending some troops with NATO or the UN—you know, to keep the “peace.”
The notion of not intervening, period, never enters the neocons’ heads. I got the shock of my life going through the Weekly Standard a couple of years ago when I saw the headline, “The Case Against Intervention.” But it turned out to be about the American economy. I should’ve realized, the only place these people don’t want us to pour money into is the USA.
When it comes to sending American GIs into harm’s way, they never met an intervention they didn’t like. Some of their proposed military interventions are so crazy you have to wonder if they weren’t chuckling to themselves over at Bill Kristol’s magazine when they wrote this nonsense. Craziest of all was the flurry of calls a couple of years back for us to intervene in Zimbabwe.
Too Stupid For Bush
If you actually know anything about contemporary military doctrine, you have to laugh at this notion. Zimbabwe has every deal-breaker in the book. For starters, it’s landlocked. America is and always has been an air/sea power; projecting that kind of power to a landlocked country is a nightmare. Zimbabwe is also mired in one of those endless ethnic feuds that just don’t respond to foreign pressure—in this case, deep and abiding hate between the two biggest tribes, Shona and Ndebele.
There’s also the fact that the dictator we’d have intervened against, Robert Mugabe, is a former guerrilla who still commands the allegiance of a tribal/irregular army. That’s the last thing U.S. conventional forces want to face. And finally—the factor that should veto any intervention—Mugabe has a long history of using foreign threats to prop up his regime. In fact, a foreign intervention is just about the only thing that could make Mugabe popular in Zimbabwe again, just as a foreign invasion to depose Obama is the only thing that would make him popular in Texas—well, maybe not Texas but, say, North Carolina.
So you think that stopped the neocon “let’s you and them fight” propaganda machine? Not for a second. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, living proof of the old saying that “there’s an idiot born every second, but unfortunately they take much longer to die,” wrote a column calling for us to use cruise missiles fired by an unmanned drone, the ultimate in “smaller, smarter” interventions, to kill Mugabe, in a column with the supposedly humorous title “Predator For a Predator.”
But Cohen didn’t go far enough for James Kirchick, the same genius who once wrote an article called “Hail, Mauritania” lauding the Coup Capital of the Sahara, often nominated for worst place in the world, as a beacon of democracy. He wrote an impassioned plea for full-scale military intervention in Zimbabwe, based on the fact that his Zimbabwean guide/lackey had broken down and cried, right in front of poor Kirchick, about the local situation.
Luckily, not even Bush was stupid enough to take that idea seriously. But the neocons never stop, and they don’t have a very high opinion of the American public’s memory or IQ. So they’ve developed new ad campaigns specifically designed for the wary buyer who has a bit of a problem with the Iraq lemon they sold us last time around. They’re using the notion of “smaller, smarter” interventions to lure us onto the lot the way car dealers use subcompact base models, sold at a loss, so they can talk us into the all-options luxury model intervention.
Small Wars, Big Mistakes
All “limited” interventions suffer from something the armed services call “Mission Creep.” They’ve seen it happen so many times: you go into some country promising to get ’er done, pack up and leave. But once you’re there, the mission starts creeping toward total occupation. The most obvious and insane example of mission creep is Vietnam. It’s hard to believe, but in the beginning, that was supposed to be a small, smart intervention too.
I don’t have to tell you, it suffered from a severe case of mission creep. In fact, missions don’t get much creepier than that one turned out to be, and all for nothing; Ho Chi Minh’s people won just like they would have if we’d left the place alone. Everyone else lost: the ordinary people of South Vietnam, the taxpayers of the United States, and 57,000 trusting working-class American kids who were too decent to go for the sleazy college deferment like Cheney did, along with a few thousand other chickenhawks who always love interventions that get other, braver and more honest people killed and maimed.
The closer you look, the worse all of our small-scale interventions appear, even the ones that supposedly succeeded. Take Clinton’s mini-war on Serbia in 1999. The official version is that we did a great job, stopping a Serbian massacre of Kosovo Albanians without losing much. Wrong on both counts.
For starters, you may have noticed that the Chinese air force is deploying a new stealth fighter. And how’s that related to the war against the Serbs? Well, a brand new F-117 stealth fighter went down over Serbia on its way to bomb the afternoon reruns. The stealth tech from that downed fighter found its way to the China’s aircraft designers, who reverse-engineered it to make radar-invisible fighters. America was never in any danger from the Serbs; China’s another matter.
That’s what happens when you start indulging every pundit and ethnic lobby’s pet interventions: you lose sight of what the real job of American security is supposed to be. I mean: keeping America secure.
Take a look at what that supposedly successful intervention in the Balkans actually did. The Serbs had been having a problem with a so-called army of Albanian irregulars called the KLA, “Kosovo Liberation Army.” These guys couldn’t fight at all and had already been beaten by Serb militia, tired middle-aged cops and veterans. But they realized that with the gullible Beltway pundit crowd, losing can be your fastest way to win. They took the corpses of their men who’d been killed by the Serb cops and militia, stripped them of weapons, and showed them to the international press as victims of Serb massacres. This being the Balkans, where massacres have been every tribe’s way of making war since the glaciers retreated, nobody doubted them.
The American press took it from there. The Beltway pundits can’t imagine a situation without a good guy and a bad guy, so they made the Serbs the bad guys and the Albanians the good guys. Now, I have no trouble with the Serbs as fairly bad guys when provoked—though I wish more people remembered what happened to the Serbs in World War II, so they’d understand why the Serbs are so easy to provoke—but the idea that the KLA were ever anything even slightly resembling good guys was just ridiculous. The KLA is a gang of bloodthirsty tribal killers who make it a policy to kill any Serb civilians they catch and have also been involved in heroin smuggling, human trafficking, and even organ sales. They actually harvested Serbian prisoners for organs to sell on the black market. And unlike Saddam, the KLA are genuine about their Muslim militancy and have tight connections with al-Qaeda.
At least the Serbs weren’t pro-al-Qaeda. That might have counted for something if anybody in D.C. had actually been thinking about us, the Americans they’re supposed to be protecting. But it didn’t figure into the decision to help the KLA. It never does.
One of the lessons you could learn from Kosovo, if anybody inside the Beltway was into learning lessons, is to take a look at the world you’re butting into. Kosovo is the heart of the Balkans, where tribal warfare is a way of life. What are the odds yougoing to find one tribe of totally evil people and another of totally good, gentle people in a region like that? But that’s the idea behind interventions like Clinton’s: bad, bad Serbs and good, sweet Albanians. God, just imagine how the rest of the Balkan tribes laughed at the idea of the Albanian mafia as noble victims.
Most American interventions come from two closely related childish fantasies: first, that one side in a tribal war is all good and the other all bad; and second, that the weaker tribe are the “underdogs” and therefore the good guys. Just look at those two ideas and you’ll see that they’re a series of disasters waiting to happen. The first one is bad enough, idealizing one bunch of desperate killers—but idealizing the weaker bunch of killers is even worse. That means you’re stuck propping up totally evil people who can’t even fight, like the KLA.
There are no good guys in tribal wars. The novelist V.S. Naipaul has a good line about that kind of world in Bend in the River, his surprisingly cool novel about the Congo War: “It’s not that there’s no right or wrong here. There’s no right.” The best thing to do about a place where everyone’s wrong is stay the hell away from it.
If the world had enough sense to do that, even Congo might not be so bad. If the Europeans and the do-gooders had left Congo to sort itself out, it’d be at peace now—a Roman-style peace, under the strongest and best-organized tribe, the Tutsi, hardcore warriors, the only tribe in that part of the world that can fight and stay disciplined.
Instead, the First World keeps clawing at the Tutsis every time they get stronger. They must be evil because they’re strong; that’s how the argument went. So when almost a million Tutsis were hacked to death with machetes in Rwanda, there really wasn’t much complaining from those compassionate Euro-lefties, or Bono, or any of the usual suspects. But oh, the minute the Tutsis organized a relief force and entered Rwanda to save the few of their people who were still alive, you should have heard the screaming from Paris! Aggression! Actual military progress, actual accomplishment! Mon dieu, we can’t have that! And so General Nkunda, the Tutsi leader and the one man who could have brought a kind of peace to Central Africa, is on trial for “war crimes,” while most of the Hutus who hacked up his people are sitting pretty.
Playing Castro’s Game
That’s the argument I’d make against “compassionate” or “humanitarian” intervention: it doesn’t work because it’s based on some of the most childish ideas in history. Of course not all intervention claims to be compassionate—though when it’s America doing the intervening, we almost always say so, at least. The funny thing is, when you look at more cold-blooded intervention, done strictly for reasons of state, it’s not very effective either.
Once again, take the case of a supposedly successful small, smart intervention: the CIA overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. That succeeded short-term: the CIA got rid of a nationalist leader and replaced him with Reza Shah, aka the Shah, the guy who fled Iran in 1979 to be replaced by Khomeini. The trouble with these cool James Bond coups is that when you suavely overthrow a democratic government like we did in Iran, people don’t forget. Every Iranian I ever met can give you every detail about the coup that overthrew Mossadegh, like any red-blooded Southerner can give you the starting lineup for Pickett’s Charge. Those bitter memories have a lot to do with all the hate we’ve been getting from Tehran ever since. When you consider that the “reasons of state” behind the coup were to please the Brits, who’d been stealing the Persians’ oil in their usual style and didn’t like getting their hands slapped by Mossadegh, you have to ask: was it worth it?
A year after overthrowing Mossadegh, the CIA took down another democratically elected head of state who was messing with a big industry: Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. Arbenz nationalized land owned by United Fruit, who called some Agency friends, got them to recruit a little mercenary army, and pushed Arbenz out of office. That short-term success didn’t benefit anybody except United Fruit. It hurt the U.S. and it hurt Guatemala. For one thing, as an article in the National Catholic Reporter once said, “the overthrow of Arbenz inspired the beginning of the Guatemalan resistance, the first guerrilla movement in Latin America after Cuba’s rebels.” And it led to a bad case of mission creep, with the CIA spending more and more to suppress the Resistance. Oh, and there’s the fact that about 250,000 Guatemalans died violent deaths.
You could say those people would have died even if we hadn’t bankrolled the right-wing paramilitary gangs. Maybe so: for obvious reasons, the places where the U.S. has intervened are weak states with bloody histories. But speaking for myself, I’d kind of feel better if that happened without our help. Because when you look at the records for some of these limited interventions, you start to get a little sick. The quarter-million dead in Guatemala isn’t anywhere near a record for messy CIA-funded operations. That goes to the Indonesian generals’ coup that overthrew Sukarno in 1965. About 500,000 people died in that one. In per capita terms, the bloodiest was El Salvador in the 1980s, where 75,000 people died out of a population of four or five million, nearly all of them killed by death squads the Agency was funding to the tune of $1 million per day of your tax money.
That was the “Red Dawn” era. I remember worrying as a kid about Communist armies conquering Colorado in alliance with Soviet paratroopers. It seems a little ridiculous now, like the idea we really needed to hold South Vietnam. Vietnam went over to the Communists and now it’s a major beach destination; El Salvador stayed out of Communist hands and half the population poured into L.A. If we’d stayed out of both, we’d still probably have way too many Salvadorans in L.A., but we’d have a lot more cash, too, and a lot less wasted blood, ours and theirs, on our hands.
So in the long term, even the successful interventions get pretty damn messy. Worse yet, the successful interventions always seem to come against soft targets, relatively democratic governments like Arbenz’s or Mossadegh’s—exactly the kind we probably shouldn’t be messing with anyway. When you look at the U.S. record against hardcore totalitarian regimes, you don’t see even temporary success, just one long series of disasters.
You can sum up our rotten record in trying small, smart interventions in police states with one word: Cuba. All the downsides of intervention are in our record down there. The most obvious flaw is sheer Three Stooges incompetence. If you ever believed in the CIA as big, bad covert warriors, just read up on what they came up with against Castro. The BBC realized that this stuff was comedy gold years ago and made a “Spinal Tap” mockumentary called “638 Ways to Kill Castro.” The sad thing is, that number isn’t a comic exaggeration. There really were 638 attempts by the Agency to rub out The Beard.
And some of them were stupider than anything you came up with in junior high. Everybody’s heard about the exploding-cigars plot, but how about exploding coral reefs? Yup: the CIA scouted all the pet shops in D.C. looking for a Caribbean shellfish big enough to blow Castro out of the water on one of his scuba-diving trips. They were going to paint the shell in bright day-glo colors so Castro would notice it and swim over, and then kaboom! If you ask me, they were way too subtle. Should’ve gone for a big underwater neon sign: “Hey Fidel! Check out this amazing clam here!”
But the most painful of all is a scene right out of Sean Connery’s outtakes: the CIA sent a woman to have sex with Castro and then slip him a poison pill while he was snoring. This genius decided to hide the pills in her cold cream, where they melted. She didn’t think she could get away with stuffing cold cream in The Beard’s mouth while he slept, so she confessed everything. That’s bad enough, but what happened next was the final blow to American manhood: Castro actually handed her his pistol and said something like, “Cara mia, mi Corazon, here is my pistol! If you wish to kill me, this will do the job!” Well, either he’s great in bed or she didn’t like her chances of getting out of the palace after firing that shot because she collapsed in his hairy arms. Score another for Latin lovers and socialism, which makes it 638 for Castro’s team and a big goose egg for the Anglos.
Maybe Castro’s score is even higher than that. I don’t want to jump in the black lagoon of “Who Killed JFK?” but Castro is a prime suspect. Oswald was a KGB asset, the theory goes, the Kremlin passed him on to the Cuban intelligence agency, CGI, and after a few hundred failed attempts on his own life, Castro lost his sense of humor and gave the go-ahead. That was Edwards Jay Epstein’s conclusion in Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, and it’s supported by new German research.
That’s the kind of thing that happens when a democratic country starts playing with the dark, nasty stuff that totalitarian regimes are very good at. The CIA has never had anything like the Cubans’ finesse with assassination and probably never will. I remember William F. Buckley joking about an assassination attempt on Sukarno, way back in the 1960s, saying in that cool stutter of his, “Yes, it was, er, quite … quite clear that it was an, ah, CIA plot because … chuckle … the bomb killed everyone in a crowded room except, ah, Sukarno.” Buckley knew what he was talking about; he worked for the Agency in Mexico City.
When we intervene against democratic governments we make enemies with long memories; when we intervene against totalitarian states we play to their strength and our weak points. It’s always, always worth considering the option of not getting involved at all.
What would have happened if we’d just told the Soviets to get their missiles out and otherwise ignored Castro? Well, if we’d called off the embargo, Castro’s island would’ve been flooded with cheap, cool stuff and it’s a good bet his people would have gotten damn sick of socialist austerity when what they wanted was new cars and better stereos. By imposing the embargo, we managed to let Castro survive a half-century in never-never land. The Cubans even have this great joke about his Toyota-pickup stamina: Somebody gives Castro a present of a giant tortoise, telling him they live 100 years. Castro sighs and says, “That’s the problem: you get attached to them and they die on you.”
And if you look at paramilitary operations, the CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in 1961, usually called “The Bay of Pigs,” is the most obvious example of why America should just say no. The invasion was over in a few hours. A couple hundred anti-Castro Cubans hit the beach, ran into opposition, and were killed or captured. Castro’s propaganda services had a great time playing up this latest case of gringo interference, and everyone else was shocked at how just plain inept it all was.
In fact, the whole fiasco was so ridiculous that it may have been designed to fail to make JFK, the new, young president, look bad. Which raises another very dangerous side-effect of all these interventions: they put a little gang of generally creepy guys right at the center of power, leaving the rest of us totally out of the loop. And these guys, contrary to what you see in spy movies, are not usually the best and brightest. Take E. Howard Hunt, who planned two of the dumbest operations in America history more than a decade apart: Bay of Pigs and the Watergate burglary. That freak couldn’t have been elected to the Kern County Mosquito Abatement District; I sure wouldn’t want him deciding my country’s foreign policy with a few of his throat-slitting buddies.
Yanqui, Stay Home!
Like the embargo, the Bay of Pigs made Castro much stronger. That’s what usually happens when a foreign power interferes: the locals get furious and unite against the outsider. And when the country’s had a history of being messed with by foreign powers, the anti-intervention backlash is much more intense. That’s why the people who said we should intervene in Egypt were crazy. The Turks, British, and French screwed with Egypt so many times that foreigners trying to overthrow Mubarak is about the only scenario that could have made him a local favorite.
Which brings us to the latest neocon project, Libya. Right on cue, here’s Judith Miller—the New York Times’ Cheney conduit who assured everybody that Saddam had WMDs in every walk-in closet—back to her old tricks by pushing for a nice, quick, clean intervention in Libya:
One of the options [Obama] should consider is to create a ‘no-fly zone’ over the capital, Tripoli, and the eastern part of the country which Qaddafi-loyal troops still control. President George H. W. Bush imposed such a zone over the Kurdish part of Iraq in 1991 after the Gulf War to prevent another monster, Saddam Hussein, from punishing the Kurds for rising up against him.
Pentagon friends tell us that shutting down Libyan air space to prevent Qaddafi from using his air force to bomb his own people would be relatively simple to do in a few hours. Radar-homing missiles could target Libyan radar, and the country’s 13 airstrips could be bombed to prevent them from being used to land aircraft. Americans could also target Libyan Air Force planes on the ground, along with their contract Ukrainian pilots. Only about half of the 400-plus-plane Libyan Air Force is estimated to be operational, the expert said.
If you wanted proof that neocons never learn anything, this is it. Just as I was writing, there was news that the Libyan resistance has managed to shoot down one of Gaddafi’s planes on its own. That’s going to be a heroic accomplishment that will live in Libyan memory forever. Imagine if we’d gone in with our multi-billion-dollar air force and done it for them. They might have been sullenly grateful for a while, but nobody really wants to be liberated by foreigners. The Libyans want to do it themselves.
If we intervene in Libya, we might manage a clean, quick regime change, though I doubt it, based on our record. But we might also accomplish the impossible: turning Gaddafi a hero to his people, denying the locals the chance to make their own destiny—and making ourselves look like fools doing it.


Ben...where do you get these articles from? What a bunch of bullshit...really. I got half way through and all I read was about neocons, Cheney, Bush and McCain. I realize he's trying to create a frame work regarding intervention, but Does he mention Obama once by name? You'd swear Bush was still in office ...! LMAO Ben...can you send this fool a memo and kindly inforn him for better or worse Obama is the President now and no amount of deflection can change the that. The conservatives are largely in opposition to this action, or at least unsure of the actual intent. . This is typical liberal bilge.

[russtafa]

I agree with Ben on this issue

[Stavros]

Institutional constraints demand that they dodge the costs to others whether it's pollution -- or the big one: global warming.

Again I can't agree: global warming began before the oil industry began to dominate the energy sector; and far from dodging costs, it was the independent oil industry that began the practical measure of carbon storage and sequestration, and developed the practicalities of carbon trading; and is the sector which has actually reduced carbon emissions more, for example, than the power industry.

[Cuchulain]

Institutional constraints demand that they dodge the costs to others whether it's pollution -- or the big one: global warming.

Again I can't agree: global warming began before the oil industry began to dominate the energy sector; and far from dodging costs, it was the independent oil industry that began the practical measure of carbon storage and sequestration, and developed the practicalities of carbon trading; and is the sector which has actually reduced carbon emissions more, for example, than the power industry.

Yeah...Big Oil are the good guys. That's why they spend so much money funding junk science climate change deniers.

'Greenpeace has released the report "Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine" (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/reports/koch-industries-secretly-fund/) to expose the connections between these climate denial front groups and the secretive billionaires who are funding their efforts. The Koch brothers, their family members, and their employees direct a web of financing that supports conservative special interest groups and think-tanks, with a strong focus on fighting environmental regulation, opposing clean energy legislation, and easing limits on industrial pollution. This money is typically funneled through one of three "charitable" foundations the Kochs have set up: the Claude R. Lambe Foundation (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/claude-r-lambe-foundation/); the Charles G. Koch Foundation (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/charles-g-koch-foundation/); and the David H. Koch Foundation (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/david-h-koch-foundation/).' http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/

'The world's largest oil (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/oil) company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change) denial, a new analysis shows.
Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/01/exxon-mobil-climate-change-sceptics-funding

[Stavros]

I did not say the independent oil companies are the 'good guys', even if my former post might have implied so: the case of Exxon is one in which this US-based firm has to deny that the oil industry has contributed to global warming because it is terrified of being taken to court if the Sierra Club or the Wilderness Society or whoever can make a precise link between some aspect of global warming and a tangible contravention of US law. It is because global warming is not recognised in law as a factor in environmental damage that companies are not being prosecuted -at least I assume that this is the legal case. I believe there is such a thing as global warming, and that in part it must be due to human activity since the onset of the industrial revolution in the 18thc, but many people dispute what it is, and my earlier point about the measures taken by oil companies to reduce emissions and come up with other solutions, remains on file for your consideration. There is a difference between a moral argument, and a legal one. Incidentally, I understand Exxon's installations are the most carbon efficient in the world, as far as oil and gas installations can be.

ps, can we re-orient this back to Libya? Its more interesting...

[onmyknees]

Yeah...Big Oil are the good guys. That's why they spend so much money funding junk science climate change deniers.

'Greenpeace has released the report "Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine" (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/reports/koch-industries-secretly-fund/) to expose the connections between these climate denial front groups and the secretive billionaires who are funding their efforts. The Koch brothers, their family members, and their employees direct a web of financing that supports conservative special interest groups and think-tanks, with a strong focus on fighting environmental regulation, opposing clean energy legislation, and easing limits on industrial pollution. This money is typically funneled through one of three "charitable" foundations the Kochs have set up: the Claude R. Lambe Foundation (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/claude-r-lambe-foundation/); the Charles G. Koch Foundation (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/charles-g-koch-foundation/); and the David H. Koch Foundation (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/david-h-koch-foundation/).' http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/

'The world's largest oil (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/oil) company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change) denial, a new analysis shows.
Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/01/exxon-mobil-climate-change-sceptics-funding

Blame it on the Koch boys !! LMAO...haven't they been busy up in Wisconsin pulling Walker's Strings ? And now onto Ohio and Michigan ? My they are busy indeed.

You lament about a measly 50K donated to The Heritage Foundation ...that won't fund a foundation that size for more than a week. Doubtful they'd sell thier soul for that amount, but it does make for interesting conspiracy theories for the left.

[Cuchulain]

Blame it on the Koch boys !! LMAO...haven't they been busy up in Wisconsin pulling Walker's Strings ? And now onto Ohio and Michigan ? My they are busy indeed.

What, only two !! ? You're getting lazy in your old age, or maybe a little tendonitis? The Koch boys remind me of mega-corp 'Engulf and Devour' from Mel Brook's 'Silent Movie', whose motto was 'our fingers are in everything'.

Hard to believe that even you would deny that Big Energy is funding the climate change deniers, but then, deny and spin is what the REICHwing is all about. Karl Rove would be proud of you. Here's a summary of the Greenpeace report:
'Koch Industries has become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition. This private, out-of-sight corporation is now a partner to ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and other donors that support organizations and front-groups opposing progressive clean energy and climate policy. In fact, Koch has out-spent ExxonMobil in funding these groups in recent years. From 2005 to 2008, ExxonMobil spent $8.9 million while the Koch Industries-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organizations of the ‘climate denial machine’.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/reports/koch-industries-secretly-fund/

Selling your soul is a prerequisite for working at the Heritage Foundation. The ceremony is rumored to involve self-flagellation and the ritual sacrifice of bunnies in front of a statue of JP Morgan...

[Prospero]

This is how a British tabloid paper was covering the story today.

[Ben]

Be Consistent—Invade Saudi Arabia
by Robert Scheer (http://www.commondreams.org/robert-scheer)

It’s the black gold that drives nations mad and inevitably raises the question of whether America and the former European colonial powers give a damn about human rights as the basis for military intervention. If Libya didn’t have more oil than any other nation in Africa would the West be unleashing high-tech military mayhem to contain what is essentially a tribal-based civil war? Once again an American president summons the passions of a human rights crusade against a reprehensible ruler whose crimes, while considerable, are not significantly different from those of dictators the U.S routinely protects.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Moammar Gadhafi must now go not because his human rights record is egregious but rather because his erratic hold on power seems spent. After all, from the London School of Economics to Harvard, influential foreign policy experts were all too happy until quite recently to accept Libyan payoffs in exchange for a more benign view of Gadhafi’s prospects for change under the gentle guidance of what Harvard’s Joseph Nye celebrated as “soft power.”
But that revisionist appraisal of Gadhafi suddenly became an embarrassment when this nutty dictator—whom few in the world could ever understand, let alone warm to—was exposed by defections from his own armed forces to be akin to rotten fruit destined to drop. Libya’s honeymoon with the West, during which leaders led by Tony Blair and George W. Bush thought Col. Gadhafi might finally prove to be a worthy partner more concerned with reliably exporting oil than ineffectively ranting against Western imperialism, has suddenly been abandoned as no longer necessary. As with former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein before him, the Libyan strongman now seemed an awkward relic of a time that had passed him by, and easily replaceable. Not so the royal ruler of Saudi Arabia and the surrogates he finances in Yemen and Bahrain; their suppression of their peoples still falls within acceptable limits because of the vast resources the king manages in a manner that Western leaders have long found agreeable.
But this time, in the glaring light of the democratic currents sweeping through the Mideast, the contradictions in supporting one set of dictators while toppling others may prove impossible for the U.S. and its allies to effectively manage. The recognition, widely demanded throughout the region, that even ordinary Middle Easterners have inalienable rights is a sobering notion not easily co-opted. Why don’t those rights to self-determination extend to Shiites in the richest oil province in Saudi Arabia or for that matter to Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza?
The fallback position for U.S. policymakers is the “war on terror” standard under which our dictators are needed to control super-fanatic Muslims. That’s why the U.S trained the Republican Guard led by the son of the despised ruler of Yemen as the counterterrorism liaison with Washington. On Tuesday it was the tanks of the lavishly U.S-equipped Republican Guard that stood as the final line of support surrounding the Presidential Palace as calls for departure of Yemen’s dictator increased in intensity. The U.S. was still following the lead of Saudi Arabia, long a financier of the Yemeni ruler.
The Saudi lead was made clearer in the kingdom’s support for the royal family in neighboring Bahrain as Saudi troops were sent in along with forces from the United Arab Emirates to suppress Bahraini democracy advocates claiming that freedom would enhance the power of the majority Shiite population. The fraud here is to locate Shiite Iran as the center of terrorism when it was the Sunni monarchies that were most closely identified with the problems that gave rise to al-Qaida. Not only did 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 come from Saudi Arabia but Saudi Arabia and the UAE, along with Pakistan, were the only countries to diplomatically recognize the Taliban regime that harbored al-Qaida. In Bahrain the majority Shiite population is dismissed as potentially under the sway of the rulers of Iran without strong evidence to that effect. Once again it is convenient to ignore the fact that Iran, as was the case with Saddam’s Iraq, had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack that launched the U.S. war on terror.
All of which elevates the question of how long will the U.S. and its allies ignore the elephant in the room posed by an alliance for human rights and anti-terrorism with regimes in the Middle East that stand for neither? While the jury is still out on whether the West’s attack on Libya will prove to be a boon for that nation’s population, at the very least it should expose the deep hypocrisy of continuing to sell huge amounts of arms and otherwise supporting Saudi Arabia and its contingent tyrannies.

[muhmuh]

This is how a British tabloid paper was covering the story today.

i think they have gaddafi and berlusconi confused
then again they wouldnt be virgins if it were silvio

[onmyknees]

Yeah...Big Oil are the good guys. That's why they spend so much money funding junk science climate change deniers.

'Greenpeace has released the report "Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine" (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/reports/koch-industries-secretly-fund/) to expose the connections between these climate denial front groups and the secretive billionaires who are funding their efforts. The Koch brothers, their family members, and their employees direct a web of financing that supports conservative special interest groups and think-tanks, with a strong focus on fighting environmental regulation, opposing clean energy legislation, and easing limits on industrial pollution. This money is typically funneled through one of three "charitable" foundations the Kochs have set up: the Claude R. Lambe Foundation (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/claude-r-lambe-foundation/); the Charles G. Koch Foundation (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/charles-g-koch-foundation/); and the David H. Koch Foundation (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/david-h-koch-foundation/).' http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/

'The world's largest oil (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/oil) company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change) denial, a new analysis shows.
Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/01/exxon-mobil-climate-change-sceptics-funding

You're funny. I don't think big oil is neither bad....nor good. I think they act in thier best self interest as any other industry. Shocking revelation for you.....but if you've ever been to K Street in DC, you know Big Oil is hardly the only industry with lobbyists !! Shocking...I know. How about Health Care Lobbyists? Barry's pretty cozy with those folks !

You want to make big oil irrelevent ??....advocat for a cogent energy policy cause windmills tilting in the wind in Iowa and electric cars ain't gettin' it !!!!!!!!!

[onmyknees]

I don't hate progressives, I simply think they're misinformed to the point of being dangerous. I put them into several categories...those that are misinformed, those that are hypocrites and those that are just damn liars. This jerk starts off in the second category, and quickly propels himself into being a damn liar category. The lies begin at the 1:00 mark, but it's not uncommon...they all do it..Anthony Weiner...hypocrite, liar, war monger.

YouTube - Anthony Weiner talks about Libya with Don Imus (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk50toNvXu8)


Now for the facts...A congressional Resolution authorizing the use of force for the Iraqi conflict which included affirmative votes by...Harry Reid, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton John Edwards,

It matters not your opinion on the wisdom of the conflict. Opinions are subjectctive, facts are not. Anthony Weiner...liar, hypocrite, and now military hawk !!

And a United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 which was unamious !!!!!

And despite Whiner's backhand slight about 4 Polish troops ...here's the countries involved


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia: 2,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom:
Romania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Romania.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Romania"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Flag_of_Romania.svg/125px-Flag_of_Romania.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/7/73/Flag_of_Romania.svg/125px-Flag_of_Romania.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania):
El Salvador - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_El_Salvador.svg" class="image" title="Flag of El Salvador"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/34/Flag_of_El_Salvador.svg/125px-Flag_of_El_Salvador.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/3/34/Flag_of_El_Salvador.svg/125px-Flag_of_El_Salvador.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador):
Estonia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Estonia.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Estonia"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Flag_of_Estonia.svg/125px-Flag_of_Estonia.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/8/8f/Flag_of_Estonia.svg/125px-Flag_of_Estonia.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia):
Bulgaria - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Bulgaria.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Bulgaria"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Flag_of_Bulgaria.svg/125px-Flag_of_Bulgaria.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/9/9a/Flag_of_Bulgaria.svg/125px-Flag_of_Bulgaria.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria):
Moldova - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Moldova.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Moldova"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/Flag_of_Moldova.svg/125px-Flag_of_Moldova.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/2/27/Flag_of_Moldova.svg/125px-Flag_of_Moldova.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldova):
Albania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Albania.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Albania"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Flag_of_Albania.svg/125px-Flag_of_Albania.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/3/36/Flag_of_Albania.svg/125px-Flag_of_Albania.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albania):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine:
Denmark - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Denmark.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Denmark"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Flag_of_Denmark.svg/125px-Flag_of_Denmark.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/9/9c/Flag_of_Denmark.svg/125px-Flag_of_Denmark.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Republic:
South Korea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_South_Korea.svg" class="image" title="Flag of South Korea"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/Flag_of_South_Korea.svg/125px-Flag_of_South_Korea.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/0/09/Flag_of_South_Korea.svg/125px-Flag_of_South_Korea.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea):
Japan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Japan.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Japan"><img alt="Centered red circle on a white rectangle." src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Flag_of_Japan.svg/125px-Flag_of_Japan.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/9/9e/Flag_of_Japan.svg/125px-Flag_of_Japan.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan):
Tonga - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Tonga.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Tonga"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Flag_of_Tonga.svg/125px-Flag_of_Tonga.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/9/9a/Flag_of_Tonga.svg/125px-Flag_of_Tonga.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan: 250
Bosnia and Herzegovina - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Flag_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina.svg/125px-Flag_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/b/bf/Flag_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina.svg/125px-Flag_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnia_and_Herzegovina):
Republic of Macedonia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Macedonia.svg" class="image" title="Flag of the Republic of Macedonia"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/Flag_of_Macedonia.svg/125px-Flag_of_Macedonia.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/f/f8/Flag_of_Macedonia.svg/125px-Flag_of_Macedonia.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Macedonia):
Latvia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Latvia.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Latvia"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/84/Flag_of_Latvia.svg/125px-Flag_of_Latvia.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/8/84/Flag_of_Latvia.svg/125px-Flag_of_Latvia.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvia):
Poland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Poland.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Poland"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Flag_of_Poland.svg/125px-Flag_of_Poland.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/1/12/Flag_of_Poland.svg/125px-Flag_of_Poland.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland): 200
Kazakhstan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Kazakhstan.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Kazakhstan"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/Flag_of_Kazakhstan.svg/125px-Flag_of_Kazakhstan.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/d/d3/Flag_of_Kazakhstan.svg/125px-Flag_of_Kazakhstan.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia:
Georgia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(country)):


Slovakia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Slovakia.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Slovakia"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Flag_of_Slovakia.svg/125px-Flag_of_Slovakia.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/e/e6/Flag_of_Slovakia.svg/125px-Flag_of_Slovakia.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovakia):
Lithuania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Lithuania.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Lithuania"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/11/Flag_of_Lithuania.svg/125px-Flag_of_Lithuania.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/1/11/Flag_of_Lithuania.svg/125px-Flag_of_Lithuania.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuania):
Italy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Italy.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Italy"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/Flag_of_Italy.svg/125px-Flag_of_Italy.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/0/03/Flag_of_Italy.svg/125px-Flag_of_Italy.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy):
Norway - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Norway.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Norway"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Flag_of_Norway.svg/125px-Flag_of_Norway.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/d/d9/Flag_of_Norway.svg/125px-Flag_of_Norway.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway):
Hungary - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Hungary.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Hungary"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Flag_of_Hungary.svg/125px-Flag_of_Hungary.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/c/c1/Flag_of_Hungary.svg/125px-Flag_of_Hungary.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary):
Netherlands - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Netherlands.svg" class="image" title="Flag of the Netherlands"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/Flag_of_the_Netherlands.svg/125px-Flag_of_the_Netherlands.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/2/20/Flag_of_the_Netherlands.svg/125px-Flag_of_the_Netherlands.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands):
Portugal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Portugal.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Portugal"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Flag_of_Portugal.svg/125px-Flag_of_Portugal.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/5/5c/Flag_of_Portugal.svg/125px-Flag_of_Portugal.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal): )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand:
Thailand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Thailand.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Thailand aka Rainy Thailand (most recorded Rains)"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a9/Flag_of_Thailand.svg/125px-Flag_of_Thailand.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/a/a9/Flag_of_Thailand.svg/125px-Flag_of_Thailand.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thailand)
Philippines - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Philippines.svg" class="image" title="Flag of The Philippines"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Flag_of_the_Philippines.svg/125px-Flag_of_the_Philippines.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/9/99/Flag_of_the_Philippines.svg/125px-Flag_of_the_Philippines.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines):
Honduras - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Honduras.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Honduras"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Flag_of_Honduras.svg/125px-Flag_of_Honduras.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/8/82/Flag_of_Honduras.svg/125px-Flag_of_Honduras.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honduras):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominican_Republic:
Spain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Spain.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Spain"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Flag_of_Spain.svg/125px-Flag_of_Spain.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/9/9a/Flag_of_Spain.svg/125px-Flag_of_Spain.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spain):
Nicaragua - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:Flag_of_Nicaragua.svg" class="image" title="Flag of Nicaragua"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Flag_of_Nicaragua.svg/125px-Flag_of_Nicaragua.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/1/19/Flag_of_Nicaragua.svg/125px-Flag_of_Nicaragua.svg.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua):

[Stavros]

Be Consistent—Invade Saudi Arabia
by Robert Scheer (http://www.commondreams.org/robert-scheer)

A confused and useless article. Realism in politics has always meant that states will support a nasty dictator as long as there is a strategic advantage to it. The USA believes for many reasons it is stratgically advantageous to support Israel, it has also sold billions of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

Intervention directly in Saudi Arabia has always been a sensitive issue: it is true that in the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany this alliance failed to use their call to 'Jihad' to rouse Arabs and Muslims from the Mediterranean to India to rise up against the British; the latter made a point of not intervening in Arabia when Ibn Saud and his 'Muslim Brothers' left their kingdom in the Najd to invade the Hejaz on the western side of Arabia and overthrow the Hashemite monarchy-damaging much of Mecca in the process. Ironically, perhaps, after sending Ibn Saud a bag of gold every month for a year or so, the British fell out with him over his attempt to take over TransJordan, and so Ibn Saud took the yankee dollar instead, and the rest is history.

There are some things one just doest do, and invading SA is one of them. As it happens, non-Muslims have been to Mecca, the siege in Mecca in 1979 was broken on the advice of a French special forces officer, Captain Paul Barril -one version has it that he 'converted' to Islam before entering the city, but I have also seen a source which says the Grand Mufti of the time, ibn Baz issued a fatwa waiving the 'Muslims only' rule for as long as it took to lift the siege. Even when US troops were stationed in the north-west of Saudi Arabia in 1990 even moderate Saudi's I knew were outraged. Even if Saudi Arabia were to lose its Saud's, the oil would still be there, and the new government would need to sell it. Anyway, their biggest problem is the long term future of water, not oil, but thats another thread I think.

[Ben]

YouTube - Ron Paul: U.S. Foreign Policy is Destabilizing the World (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efS2lh3DAPQ)

And:

YouTube - Americans asked: Where is Libya and why are we there? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOhznar0Yzk&feature=related)

[Cuchulain]

You're funny. I don't think big oil is neither bad....nor good. I think they act in thier best self interest as any other industry. Shocking revelation for you.....but if you've ever been to K Street in DC, you know Big Oil is hardly the only industry with lobbyists !! Shocking...I know. How about Health Care Lobbyists? Barry's pretty cozy with those folks !

You want to make big oil irrelevent ??....advocat for a cogent energy policy cause windmills tilting in the wind in Iowa and electric cars ain't gettin' it !!!!!!!!!

And there it is, the CON philosophy in a nutshell. You think it's perfectly ok for Industries to work in their own self interest, even when that self interest directly opposes the Public Interest. Cheaper to hire an army of lawyers than fix a problem? Okie-dokie. Better for the bottom line to crush worker's rights, pollute the environment and spread propaganda? Sure, why not. When will you figure out that Big Oil, etc, doesn't give any more of a shit about you and your family than it does about me? The ONLY thing they'll do for you is put a little more money in your pocket when the stock you own goes up. Apparently, you think that's a fair trade for stomping the long term health of people and the planet. That's the difference between hardcore CONs and the rest of us.

K Street, C Street, they're all scumbags. Are you really gonna imply that I agree with everything Barry O does? I've told you before, the best thing I can say about him is that he's better than the alternative. The reason we don't have a real energy policy that benefits The People is because Big Energy has bought all the CON legislators to block anything that they think will interfere with their profits.

Oh, and I'll say it again : The Koch boys remind me of mega-corp 'Engulf and Devour' from Mel Brook's 'Silent Movie', whose motto was 'our fingers are in everything'.

Hard to believe that even you would deny that Big Energy is funding the climate change deniers, but then, deny and spin is what the REICHwing is all about. Karl Rove would be proud of you. Here's a summary of the Greenpeace report:
'Koch Industries has become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition. This private, out-of-sight corporation is now a partner to ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and other donors that support organizations and front-groups opposing progressive clean energy and climate policy. In fact, Koch has out-spent ExxonMobil in funding these groups in recent years. From 2005 to 2008, ExxonMobil spent $8.9 million while the Koch Industries-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organizations of the ‘climate denial machine’.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/med...secretly-fund/ (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/reports/koch-industries-secretly-fund/)

Selling your soul is a prerequisite for working at the Heritage Foundation. The ceremony is rumored to involve self-flagellation and the ritual sacrifice of bunnies in front of a statue of JP Morgan...

[onmyknees]

And there it is, the CON philosophy in a nutshell. You think it's perfectly ok for Industries to work in their own self interest, even when that self interest directly opposes the Public Interest. Cheaper to hire an army of lawyers than fix a problem? Okie-dokie. Better for the bottom line to crush worker's rights, pollute the environment and spread propaganda? Sure, why not. When will you figure out that Big Oil, etc, doesn't give any more of a shit about you and your family than it does about me? The ONLY thing they'll do for you is put a little more money in your pocket when the stock you own goes up. Apparently, you think that's a fair trade for stomping the long term health of people and the planet. That's the difference between hardcore CONs and the rest of us.

K Street, C Street, they're all scumbags. Are you really gonna imply that I agree with everything Barry O does? I've told you before, the best thing I can say about him is that he's better than the alternative. The reason we don't have a real energy policy that benefits The People is because Big Energy has bought all the CON legislators to block anything that they think will interfere with their profits.

Oh, and I'll say it again : The Koch boys remind me of mega-corp 'Engulf and Devour' from Mel Brook's 'Silent Movie', whose motto was 'our fingers are in everything'.

Hard to believe that even you would deny that Big Energy is funding the climate change deniers, but then, deny and spin is what the REICHwing is all about. Karl Rove would be proud of you. Here's a summary of the Greenpeace report:
'Koch Industries has become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition. This private, out-of-sight corporation is now a partner to ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and other donors that support organizations and front-groups opposing progressive clean energy and climate policy. In fact, Koch has out-spent ExxonMobil in funding these groups in recent years. From 2005 to 2008, ExxonMobil spent $8.9 million while the Koch Industries-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organizations of the ‘climate denial machine’.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/med...secretly-fund/ (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/reports/koch-industries-secretly-fund/)

Selling your soul is a prerequisite for working at the Heritage Foundation. The ceremony is rumored to involve self-flagellation and the ritual sacrifice of bunnies in front of a statue of JP Morgan...


Wow.You progressives sure do like to create boggy men. Are we to blame the Koch boys too that the alternative ( green) energy industry has been a huge colossal bust ? With all those government give always from Barry's boys they still can't make it work. Solar Panels? Not here...check the Chinese. Ask T Boone Pickens. LMAO. Billions in subsidies and all we get is a new light bulb that you can't dispose of. You stay awake nights worrying about the Koch boys while Soros is plotting to manipulate the world currency.....AGAIN.

This whole Public Interest thing with corporations is also another red herring...Who decides what is in "The Public Interest" ? You and Trish ?? LMAO...With all due respect you couldn't operate a lemon aid stand with your anti business agenda. You'd pay the workers more than your net profits and would be in receivership in a month. You really in your heart believe a company exists to serve the workers. That's socialist my friend. They exist as publicly held companies to serve the stock holders. The beauty of that is you too can be a stock holder and get in the fun........but that's not what you want....you want some sort of government intervention so that you can control the results...rig the game.

I have to laugh at these idiots in Wisconsin screaming to tax the corporations more....sure...let's do that and have even more of them take their profits overseas. Look the problem with this administration and most of the people looking to take his place is they lack a fundamental understanding of business, monetary policy, The Federal Reserve and it's impact on the economy, and tax policy. You have the most anti business president in a generation. You must love this guy...yet do you love the results? Folks like you got your guy.....yet we see unemployment stuck at 10-12% Housing starts still at an all time low. Business capitol investment and expansion almost non existent. Energy and commodity prices creeping up, inflation trying to make a come back , a weak dollar, a ballooning trade deficit almost everywhere. These are the monetary policies and the results of someone with your political philosophy. Change? Change for the worse I'd say, and so would most Americans at this point.

And by the way....why would one have to sell his soul to work for the Heritage Foundation ? Would one have to do that to work at NPR?
You may not like the research results or the positions of Heritage, but they are one of the most respected think tanks in the country...notwithstanding your partisan misinformed opinion to the contrary. Don't like the results of thier research? Prove them wrong.

[onmyknees]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yAyCdfOXvec#at=16

[Cuchulain]

Wow.You progressives sure do like to create boggy men. Are we to blame the Koch boys too that the alternative ( green) energy industry has been a huge colossal bust ? With all those government give always from Barry's boys they still can't make it work. Solar Panels? Not here...check the Chinese. Ask T Boone Pickens. LMAO. Billions in subsidies and all we get is a new light bulb that you can't dispose of. You stay awake nights worrying about the Koch boys while Soros is plotting to manipulate the world currency.....AGAIN.

This whole Public Interest thing with corporations is also another red herring...Who decides what is in "The Public Interest" ? You and Trish ?? LMAO...With all due respect you couldn't operate a lemon aid stand with your anti business agenda. You'd pay the workers more than your net profits and would be in receivership in a month. You really in your heart believe a company exists to serve the workers. That's socialist my friend. They exist as publicly held companies to serve the stock holders. The beauty of that is you too can be a stock holder and get in the fun........but that's not what you want....you want some sort of government intervention so that you can control the results...rig the game.

I have to laugh at these idiots in Wisconsin screaming to tax the corporations more....sure...let's do that and have even more of them take their profits overseas. Look the problem with this administration and most of the people looking to take his place is they lack a fundamental understanding of business, monetary policy, The Federal Reserve and it's impact on the economy, and tax policy. You have the most anti business president in a generation. You must love this guy...yet do you love the results? Folks like you got your guy.....yet we see unemployment stuck at 10-12% Housing starts still at an all time low. Business capitol investment and expansion almost non existent. Energy and commodity prices creeping up, inflation trying to make a come back , a weak dollar, a ballooning trade deficit almost everywhere. These are the monetary policies and the results of someone with your political philosophy. Change? Change for the worse I'd say, and so would most Americans at this point.

And by the way....why would one have to sell his soul to work for the Heritage Foundation ? Would one have to do that to work at NPR?
You may not like the research results or the positions of Heritage, but they are one of the most respected think tanks in the country...notwithstanding your partisan misinformed opinion to the contrary. Don't like the results of thier research? Prove them wrong.

Wow, now there's a surprise. The venerable onmyknees tosses off a post comprised entirely of REICHwing talking points. Move away from the FOX, lad. What little humanity you have left is in dire jeopardy.

You don't even attempt to defend your beloved Kochers, but instead rail about the Left creating bogeymen while trotting out George Soros, a fellow Lonesome Roads Beck would have us believe is the devil incarnate.

Who decides what is in the Public Interest? Why, the PUBLIC, of course - better us than some corporate CEO with visions of golden parachutes dancing in his pointy little head while he's busy cooking the books and trying to decide how to hide his latest environmental crime. You think WE want to rig the game. You poor fool! The game is already rigged. Money = power = a kick in the teeth for democracy, every time.

Lol, I'm a socialist because I believe corporations owe some loyalty and gratitude to their workers and the communities they reside in. Seems you and the coal barons of the late 1800s and early 1900s have a lot in common. Not good company, lad.

Yeah, Barry O is REALLY anti-business. That's why he rolls over for corporate power at every opportunity. Even the tiny bit of fairness and equal treatment he's had the balls to push for are too much for you guys. Like your heroes, the Koch boys, you want ALL the cookies. All the dire results you bemoan are the result of 8 years of Bush/Cheney and unchecked CON greed, not two years of Obama. Of course, we'd be in better shape in Barry and the Dems had had the guts to stand up to the REICHwing bullies and not allowed the stimulus, healthcare and everything else to be watered down like whiskey in a backwoods after-hours saloon.

And finally, yes, the Heritage Foundation is respected...by FOXNOISE and the Grey Poupon crowd. Everyone else knows it's just another CON propaganda machine. You know it too, but you'd never admit it here. You're too busy playing the game and trying to score points against the left. Your posts sound like a 'fair and balanced' discussion between Karl Rove and Sean Hannity: "Oh Karl, you're so brilliant". "Oh Sean, you're so butch".

[Ben]

YouTube - Rand Paul on Freedom Watch 03/31/11 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEZUbMgIUQM)


(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxUl3szXhlE&feature=player_embedded#at=36)

[Ben]

YouTube - US media quick to support war (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxUl3szXhlE)

[JamesHunt]

The instability in Northern Africa and the Middle East could send oil prices soaring and cause a world wide recession . What to do ??

Build more nuclear power stations.

[trish]

You'd have to miniaturize those nuclear stations and put one under the hood of every car, truck and train in the world; that or you'd have to put electric motors or electric-gasoline-hybrid engines under all those hoods so you can plug them into the yields of all those new nuclear plants you want to build. We could just go back to the old calorie burning modes of transportation, horse & buggy, donkey and rickshaw.

[theone1982]

Declare victory and leave.:)

[Faldur]

Declare victory and leave.:)

The man's a genius.. next issue!

[theone1982]

The man's a genius.. next issue!

Lol! Thank you, thank you! Now if I could just get the Pentagon on speed dial!:)

[Ben]

Rand Paul has an interesting take on Libya:

YouTube - &#x202a;Sen. Rand Paul on AC360 with Anderson Cooper&#x202c;&rlm; (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8-WpUQ3DAo)

[Ben]

YouTube - &#x202a;3/23/2011 - Rand Paul on Libya&#x202c;&rlm; (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtsOC6RRVJA)

[Faldur]

"Involvement to be a matter of days, not weeks." Tell me another story daddy!!

[Ben]

Lure of Oil: 'NATO set to stay in Libya for long' - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1MtcberyE)

[robertlouis]

Dangerous times. Qadaffi has still to be found, the remnants of his forces are still capable of inflicting a lot of damage, and most of all, the opposition coalition is largely incoherent and fragmented, with western-style liberals and jihadists jockeying for supremacy.

On the other hand, it is worth celebrating the overthrow of yet another tyrant in this remarkable year in the Middle East.

Question: don't they have much oil in Syria? :whistle: Cynical, moi?

I know that there's the issue of Israel on the doorstep and the absence of any consensus among the Arab states, but hasn't Assad being doing to his people essentially exactly the same as Qadaffi was doing to his before, and after, NATO went in?

[Stavros]

I think you are right to be cautious about the political changes that many would like to see, and the changes that might actually come to pass. If this is a genuine revolution it will be five to ten years before a proper assessment can be made. Libya on one level is a relatively small country and while there is an historical cultural/political issue between Arabs and Berbers (mostly in the West/South West) I don't think this need be overplayed. Libya was in the process of refurbishing its existing oil and gas resources through its deal with British and American companies, and looking for new resources. I see no reason why this should not continue in the short-to-medium term, as the independent companies have the capital to do it while the state will have to focus on re-building, particularly in the east which Qadhafi deliberarely neglected. I don't see oil as part of a conspiracy, apart from heritage tourism there isn't much else in Libya. Thr workforce is well educated, so ultimately it comes down to the ability of different factions to reach an accommodation. Unfortunately the Arabs have an historic inability to agree with each other, on top of which the absence of civil society in Libya has meant that many people don't have much experience of consensus and cooperation across many levels. The two places where Libyans were free to congregate were football matches, and the Mosque, yet even in these places the secret police were known to be listening in. That inexperience and the details of a new constitution could delay agreement -the Islamic bloc will want it to declare Libya an Islamic republic, for example. Libya can absorb many of the rebels into a revamped armed forces if they want a career in the military, the danger that they might branch out into private armies is there, but Libya is not Iraq on this level, although revenge killings have already begun. I once asked a Libyan what would happen if Qadhafi was overthrown and he automatically said 'a bloodbath' because of the bitterness so many people have and the revenge they want for all sorts of crimes.

Qadhafi is undoubtedly finished, its rather like Saddam as I read this morning he might be on a farm someone. Its just a matter of time really -his tribal cohort if they have any sense, will ditch him for the new regime. The fate of Megrahi is the most intriguing; he is also protected by his tribe, which is even bigger than Qadhafi's.

As for Syria, oil is indeed a small resource compared to its Arab neighbours, but accounts for 25% of state revenue, an indication of how badly managed Syria has been. It remains to be see, however, if the gas fields that currently extend from offshore Alexandria through Gaza to Haifa, also lie off the Syrian coast. None of the maritime boundaries to my knowledge have been formally demarcated, at least one gas field straddes Gaza and Israel, and now it seems if you go further out there is the complication of Cyprus making claims -either 'Northern Cyprus' or the real one. These are not Persian Gulf level resources, but of great importance for domestic markets in the Eastern Mediterranean countries.

[Prospero]

Interestingly though the issue of oil may be relevant in Libya, the case of Syria is much more complex - with the collapse of the minority sect tyrant there (should it happen) likely to cause a far greater regional insecurity. Syria is bolstered by iran. They won't allow a pro-Saudi government there. Syria could be a powder keg for a wider conflagration. It has a strategic importance that Libya lacks.

And, of course NATO could find the collapse of Gaddafi will open the door to a regime of greater risk - a Jihadist dominated Libya with its oil wealth could find common cause with other similar groups in North Africa and the wider region. A confortable outcome after Gaddafi is by no means guaranteed. And if a fundamentalist government emerged there, what chance for Tunisia or Egypt to stave off something similar. The Muslim brotherhood is already allowing its real colours to show in Egypt.

[Stavros]

I understand your anxiety Prospero. The key reason why people fear the potential for radical Muslims to assume power in both the Maghreb and Mashrek, is that historically they have been better organised, and prepared to take on the state, as was the case in Egypt and Syria in the 1980s, and Libya in the 1990s. The potential for Islamic parties to win a large share of the vote in a free election is strong, again, because of its superior organisation, with the Mosque a read-made recruiting ground/polling station. In addition, while there are strong secular voices in Syria, and Muslims in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya who would prefer a separation of religion from the state, they are likely to be poltically divided in ways the 'Muslim Brotherhood' are not, this would give them the advantage in elections, and I don't see how 'we' can continue to protest if elections don't go 'our' way.

Nevertheless, I subscribe to the theory that 9/11 marked the end of the radical Islam that is associated most of all with the events of 1979, the siege of Mecca and the Iranian Revolution (Olivier Roy has the most eloquent version of this, the link is below although I posted it before). The generation that has done so much to break the back of one-party states does not have the same agenda as the Militant Muslims, but again, I dont know how these shebab are going to translate the energy of protest and rebellion into practical politics, raising the fear of the 'same old same old Middle East' being (re)-constructed on the ruins of the other. But first they have to root out Qadhafi and his loyalists.

Roy's article is here:
http://www.europeaninstitute.org/February-2011/qpost-islamic-revolutionq-events-in-egypt-analyzed-by-french-expert-on-political-islam.html

[hippifried]

I don't think what's happening in the Arab world can be seen in the same way we've been looking at it all these years. This is an upheaval against autocracy, & especially monarchy. It's internal & caught everybody by surprize. It's not that hard to see. Just look at the catylists that set it off. In Tunesia, Egypt, Syria, & Libya, the dictators were in the process of putting their sons in line to take over the dictatorship. How's that different from a kingdom? Syria's already in the second generation & going for 3. In Jordan, they're trying to lose a standing monarchy. The house of Saud is real scared right about now.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is staying quiet. This isn't their gig. They had nothing to do with it, & still don't know where they stand. They're not really a factor. Same goes for Hezbollah. They're not taking sides at all. If they did, this'd be over. They're a lot more badass than the Syrian army. Except for Hezbollah, Iran doesn't have much influence. They can't really back the Assad regime (kingdom) without calling their own revolution into question.

None of this is about philosophies or religion. People are just tired of kings. With all the modern communications, they see what things can be like when the kings are gotten rid of. Philosophers & theologians just argue over who should be king. The standard explanations don't work here.

[Ben]

Leaked cable: Sen. McCain promised to help Gaddafi obtain U.S. military hardware

By Stephen C. Webster (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/author/stephen/)
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011...

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) promised to help former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi obtain U.S. military hardware as one of the United States' partners in the war on terror, according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released Wednesday (http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/08/09TRIPOLI677.html) by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
The meeting, which took place just over a year ago on Aug. 14, 2009, included other influential Americans, such as Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sen. Susan Collins (R-SC) and Senate Armed Services Committee staffer Richard Fontaine, the document explains.
McCain opened the meeting by characterizing Libya's relationship with the U.S. as "excellent," to which Liebermann added: "We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi."
"Lieberman called Libya an important ally in the war on terrorism, noting that common enemies sometimes make better friends," the cable continues. "The Senators recognized Libya's cooperation on counterterrorism and conveyed that it was in the interest of both countries to make the relationship stronger."
Part and parcel to that relationship: military hardware, including helicopters and non-lethal weaponry, meant to ensure the security of Tripoli. In exchange for this and assisting the nation in rehabilitating its image with other lawmakers, Gaddafi pledged to send Libya's highly enriched uranium supplies to Russia for proper disposal.
The cable does not mention anything about the senators pressing Gaddafi for democratic reforms.
In a twist of fate, Gaddafi temporarily abandoned that agreement (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-cables-libya-enriched-uranium) in dramatic form last November, leaving a large quantity of uranium in a poorly sealed container strewn on the side of an airport runway for weeks. The incident nearly caused massive quantities of nuclear radiation to leak into the atmosphere -- a nuclear disaster, by all accounts.

And it all stemmed from a spat Gaddafi had with U.S. billionaire Donald Trump.

Trump even bragged about the incident in a recent appearance on Fox News (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/21/trump-brags-about-accepting-money-from-gaddafi/), telling the conservative television station he "screwed" the Libyan dictator out of a land deal. Gaddafi had paid Trump to pitch a tent on his property in New York ahead of a United Nations summit. Once the media began zeroing in on the bizarre structure erected on Trump's property, the billionaire revoked his permission and sent Gaddafi packing.
Gaddafi is quoted in other U.S. diplomatic cables as saying he felt "humiliated" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/237232) by his treatment, inspiring him to back out of the deal.
A rapid response was made by Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, who had aides describe in detail what exactly a nuclear disaster in Libya would look like. After nearly a week of talks, Libyan officials finally allowed the uranium to be carted off to Russia, with the U.S. paying $800,000 to transport it.
Sen. McCain, who provided the impetus for the whole strange affair, later wrote on microblogging site Twitter that he'd shared an "interesting meeting with an interesting man" (Gaddafi) -- a comment that has haunted the Arizona Senator since the former dictator began slaughtering his own people.
Since that time, McCain has also come out in favor of arming Libya's rebels, saying: "I think we could do the same thing that we did in the Afghan struggle against the Russians. There are ways to get weapons in without direct U.S. supplying."

[Faldur]

Happy 6 month anniversary (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-intlJA3nK4&feature=player_embedded)

[Stavros]

Ben -your post merely underlines the sad truth that some politicians think Libya has little to offer the western world than oil and that access to it was a 'payoff' for Qadhafi's renunciation of 'weapons of mass destruction'. It happened before, in one sense, when 'we' backed someone called Saddam Hussein when he was attacking an even greater enemy, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

This is an upheaval against autocracy, & especially monarchy

A neat idea, Hippified, especially as Mubarak used to be sarcastically referred to as Pharoah by some critics; but I see this as a deeper problem that relates to the formation ane subsequent performance of the state as it emerged in the Middle East from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

In fact, you could see it in the context of the processes of modernisation that have been taking place globally since c1400 but which accelerated with the onset of the industrial revolution. This created the separate development which gave Europe, Japan and North America an industrial base at a time, in the 19thc when the Ottoman Empire, reeling from the shock of Napolean's invasion of Egypt, tried and failed to reform itself at least three times before 1914. To a limited extent, the reforms of the military and bureacracy did bring modern administration and weapons into the Empire; land and tax reform did raise revenue from an agricultural sector that had more potential than had been realised; but industry was small-scale and craft based and capital poor, and no match for its competitors -the modernisation of the Ottoman Empire can look impressive at times when compared to what went before, but compared to what was happening in the USA, in Britain or Germany, it was poor. By the 1930s, many Arabs were wearing cheap cotton made in Japan, and even cheaper sandals, also made in Japan. The Qajar 'Empire' in Persia was even poorer, and led to the D'Arcy Concession of 1901 and the discovery of oil in 1908, but you cant say that Persia (Iran from 1935) struck it rich; there was no substantial development outside the south-west and the coast at Abadan, until real modernisation began in the 1960s.

Bear in mind that when Lawrence claimed to be the first person to drive a car in Arabia -in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (I think at Aqaba but not sure)- he was right -the only known wheeled vehicles I can think of south of Damascus at that time were the two-wheeled carts imported by the Circassians who were re-located to Amman from the Caucasus in the 1870s. Once south of Amman, I don't know if they had the wheel -it sounds absurd, but as a ubiquitous object I think its true outside major cities.

I make these points because part of modernisation is a mind-set, one that is educated to some extent, and receptive to new ideas particularly in science and the (usually) happy marriage of science with commerce.

The Arabs (and certainly the Israelis) are actually good at both science and making money, but my argument is that the emergence of the State from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire gave the Arabs an inheritance of Grand Politics based on a feeble economic base; it would have been better had the Arabs been in possession of great natrual resources and then built a state around it -the only successes close to this are the UAE and Oman.

The British were instrumental in shaping this transformation, yet people don't know or forget that when Churchill assembled 40 People in Cairo to determine the future of the region, Britains' primary concern was India. The security of the land and sea links to India shaped Middle Eastern policy -the Indian Army had jurisdiction in Iran and Iraq after 1920, and in Iraq the currency was the Rupee, until Iraq's so-called Independence in 1932.

Hourani referred to the late Ottoman and early independence periods as the 'liberal age', his primary concern was to see how the modern world impacted on Islamic scholars and Arab political thinkers. In a way my argument is that the state template which the Arabs were given by the British offered a pluralist polity in a social framewoek so riven with differences shaped by religion, income and geography, it is hardly surprising that the two key states of Syria and Iraq were poltically volatile until both, in the 1960s, opted for the Ba'athist One-Party state as a means of putting an end to endless bickering and the paralysis of decision-making that followed. The architect of Ba'athism, a Christian called Michel Aflaq tried to combine Arab nationalism with Arab socialism, with stunningly obvious pitfalls. Both Syria and Iraq, potentially the richest and most powerful states in the Arab world, sacrificed economic development for political grandstanding and, given Syria's chronic inability to even get back the Hadbatu-i-Jawlan, and Iraq's hopeless attempts at Military Supremacy, they have both been failures at this.

The modern state has thus been a failure because it has attempted to march its citizens to one tune, as played on the band in the Presidential Palace. When the population was much smaller, the Centre could send cheques to the tribal leaders, give their sons jobs in the Ministry of Love and Hate, and marry their daughters to the right people in the Military or, well, the Ministry of Love and Hate. At some point the money ran out, the cushy jobs ran out, and though I doubt there is a daughter-deficit, there are many more people with ambitions that are unfulfilled.

But these states have been doing everything, the people have no experience of doing things for themselves; there was no civil society. Which is why the transition from a one-party state, neo-monarchy or whatever you call it could be so difficult, and also disappointing. So much more is yet to come.

[hippifried]

Nice double post. (Don't you wish the servers would get their connection problems out of the way when you're not clicking the send button?)


But these states have been doing everything, the people have no experience of doing things for themselves; there was no civil society. Which is why the transition from a one-party state, neo-monarchy or whatever you call it could be so difficult, and also disappointing. So much more is yet to come.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the exact same line that gets recited every time people demand self-determination? Eurocentric hubris. Ottomans were just one in a long line of invading powers who were saving the savages from themselves. What a crock of shit. This attitude goes away when people are seen as people, instead of some lame inferior stereotype from any "explorer's" point of view or 3 Stooges movie. No states "emerged" from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Europeans drew a bunch of lines on the map to carve the region up between themselves. There's never been anything but an utter disrespect for the people of the levant. The cradle of civilization.


Bear in mind that when Lawrence claimed to be the first person to drive a car in Arabia -in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (I think at Aqaba but not sure)- he was right -the only known wheeled vehicles I can think of south of Damascus at that time were the two-wheeled carts imported by the Circassians who were re-located to Amman from the Caucasus in the 1870s. Once south of Amman, I don't know if they had the wheel -it sounds absurd, but as a ubiquitous object I think its true outside major cities.
There's the perfect example. Do you really think southern Arabia was oblivious to the wheel until white people introduced it in the 19th & 20th centuries? I consider it insulting that you would think I could possibly buy into such a line of bullshit. You do understand that the modern wheel (independant on the axle, with radial spokes & metal tire) originated in what is now southern Pakistan, & worked its way all the way to Egypt while most Europeans were still living in caves & eating raw meat, right?

On & on it goes. The lies & stereotypes have become accepted memes. These people aren't cut off from the world. Go on facebook or twitter & ask them how remote they are. Don't worry. They can probably speak your language. Even the Saudi king (the most repressive regime in the region) was forced to lift the ban on satellite dishes years ago. Sorry, but "They don't know how..." doesn't work anymore.

[Stavros]

You seem to have misunderstood some of my points.

Eurocentric hubris. Ottomans were just one in a long line of invading powers who were saving the savages from themselves. What a crock of shit...No states "emerged" from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Europeans drew a bunch of lines on the map to carve the region up between themselves. There's never been anything but an utter disrespect for the people of the levant. The cradle of civilization.

1) I did not even suggest that the Ottomans were invading powers in the way you mean. I was trying to draw attention to the gulf that opened up between the Ottoman empire and the European Empires, Japan and the USA. The point is that within the Ottoman Empire, the reforms that were made to the state bureaucracy, to the military and particularly to land and tax reform were of great importance and more successful than used to be thought -but the scale and breadth of growth in the industrialising economies was far beyond what the Ottomans could achieve by 1914. I probably made an assumption that you are aware that the golden age of arts, science and letters in the Islamic world had long since declined and the Ottoman Empire by 1914 had not been able to match the achievements of the Abbasid, to take one example. The overall picture is patchy. There was some growth of the agricultural sector in Palestine, and Nablus was emerging as an industrial town; the textile industry was of importance in the Damascus-Beirut corridor with increasing ties to the silk merchants of Lyon who were instrumental in propelling France to make claims on the Levant in 1914; the proposed railway mooted before 1914, to be financed by the Germans, from Constantinople to Baghdad was one project intended to open up a new trading route. In other words, the Empires were looking at opportunities in the Ottoman Empire that were provided by both existing raw materials and local skills, but the range of skills -and, critically the capital investment- cannot be compared to what was happening elsewhere, and you have to accept that the level of education across the Arab world was poor at this time, because it was poor.

2) The emergence of the modern state may not have been the inevitable consequence of the Ottoman Empire's entry into the war in November 1914, but it was following the defeat in 1918. In two cases, there are states which were not created by Anglo-French collusion. Turkey emerged as an independent state, and continued to grow of its own accord or, if you prefer, Anglo-French indifference, vide its illegal and enforced annexation of the old Sanjak of Alexandretta in 1938.
The Kingdom of the Hejaz, which had been under Ottoman control was ruled by the Hashemite Hussein ibn Ali, supported by the British until he was thrown out of Mecca by Ibn Saud who merged the Hejaz with the Nejd in the 1930s having failed to add TransJordan to his domain -he really wanted Jerusalem as well.
Of the others, the point is that the Arabs did not get the States -or single, unified state- they wanted. The Syrians told the American King-Crane Commission that they wanted to choose their own government, but the US did not participate in the League of Nations, and Syria ended up with a French administration, imposed at the point of a gun. When General Gouraud entered the city in 1920, he made a point of going to the grave of Salah ad-din Al-Ayubi and shouted We're back! The French then proceeded to dismember what had been Ottoman provinces, creating Lebanon as a majority-Christian statelet. They were supposed to have taken over Mosul, but the French foreign minister Berthelot was so drunk the night before the negotiations with the British in 1919, he signed it away in the morning, so he could go back to bed.
There was an Arab nationalist movement, it was small, it was young and inexperienced, and many felt they were sold out by the landed elites and Sheikhs who did deals with the British and the French in return for gold and guns--the same sell-out which saw tracts of land in Palestine sold to Zionst settlers. It sounds sleazy because it is; but crucially, it meant that for decades the Arabs felt they were not in control of their own destiny, and this has been a powerful theme in their own history, its not a patronising, Eurocentric concept.
And when there were revolutions against British-imposed monarchs -Egypt in 1952, Iraq in 1958 -what did it bring? The fractious nature of politics and political instability isn't some patronising Eurocentric fantasy -it was real, and as paralytic as the French Fourth Republic -sometimes politics is like that, wherever it happens.

These people aren't cut off from the world. Go on facebook or twitter & ask them how remote they are. Don't worry. They can probably speak your language. Even the Saudi king (the most repressive regime in the region) was forced to lift the ban on satellite dishes years ago. Sorry, but "They don't know how..." doesn't work anymore.

3) And it is the reason why so many Arabs feel they have been denied real Freedom, the kind of freedom they have experienced in the west, in America, in Germany.
The quality of life under the dictators cannot be measured in dinars or dollars, but in the freedom people have had, or not had even to speak. When my father and I were in Tunisia in the 70s, we tried to talk to a student on a bus in a town somewhere, but all he would say was I believe Habib Bourgiba is the best man for Tunisia and that he is leading the country to progress, and so on. What else was he going to say knowing other people on the bus could hear him? You turn on the tv and 90% of the news is about Habib Bourgiba receiving delegations, from the army, from Olive farmers, from teachers and so on and so on. How long to you think the Arabs could put up with this drivel, year after year -what is patronising about telling the truth when the Arabs themselves so long to do it? A key point about the Arab Spring is that young people can see what the rest of the world is like, many have visited our countries to study or stay with relatives -their issue is why can't they have some of that? But the key point about civil society, is that people like Saddam Hussein and Qadhafi stripped it all away and replaced it with a surveilance state that is a dismal mix of 1984 and Stalin's Russia -Stalin succeeded in a vast place like the USSR how difficult was it in Libya or Iraq? Its not patronising to tell the truth about how little freedom people have had, and how much of it they want to create for themselves.

4) The wheel. Yes, I exagerrated that a little, but the first car south of Damascus probably was Lawrence's -for years there was only one car in Oman and that belonged to the eccentric Said bin Taimur until his son (with the help of the British of course) overthrew him in a coup in 1970. You understimate just how poor much of Arabia was before oil wealth began to affect life there in the 1960s; the wheel argument was not meant to be patronising, but an illustration of the reality -but I was not referring to places like Palestine, Syria, Jordan or even Iraq.

[NaughtyJane]

New person here... no matter what I think, know, or think I know.... Some of you all are kind of bright and intelligent... whether I agree with you or not. I am pleasantly surprised, not at all what I expected to find on this site... cool.

[robertlouis]

It sounds like you are going to be a welcome and interesting addition to this colourful pageant yourself Jane. Nice to meet you here.

[Prospero]

Wish I was on the pacific coast of the US for a plethora of reasons. But at least some of its sunshine is here... so welcome Jane.

I scanned the last few posts. no time to read all. But I DO take issue with the notion that radical islam is played out after 9/11. I have read Olivier Roy's most recent books and simply see evidene everywhere that he is wrong. Economic wealth can bring a surcease of such aspirations (the UAE has fe rumblings - even against its obvious autocrats) and nor does Qatar. As Stavros observes the Mosque has been a great focal point - or protest but also of social organisation. It could become that again in a chaotic post-Quaddafi Libya. And the Muslim Brotherhood have certainly been visible recently in Egypt. They took over Tahrir square for a vast demonstration only a couple of weeks ago.

And look at the growth of Radical Islamism in the Mahgreb, in Nigeria (yesterday's bombings) in Pakistan and - though pretty ruthlessly supressed - in central asia. It's an impulse and temptation that is far from run its course. But it isn't a simple thing to understand.

[NaughtyJane]

it sounds like you are going to be a welcome and interesting addition to this colourful pageant yourself jane. Nice to meet you here.
(blush)

[Stavros]

I have read Olivier Roy's most recent books and simply see evidene everywhere that he is wrong

The point would be that Roy is indicating a trend -obviously a welcome trend -but that there are still enough Muslims over the age of 35 or 40 who haven't noticed their bus left the station. This suggests a generation struggle within any emerging 'Islamic republic' similar to what is happening in Iran. And wishful thinking on my part, I admit.

[Prospero]

There is certainly a generational struggle going on within islam internationally - and that is also evident in the UK where young second generation Muslims males are among the greatest reruiting ground for organisations like Hizb ut Tahrir (the party of freedom) which has been outlawed throughout the Middle East but not in the UK (Blair said this was for fear of simply driving it underground). They are a more sinister group than those led by clowns like Anjem Choudhary. I have met former members of this organisation and also former Jihadists who are involved in organisations to thwart its work and to help those tempted by these ideas back "into the fold' of the mainstream. Most Muslims are good people - nice people - and in the end ordinary people with the range of faults and strengths of the wider society. Radical islam is a tiny minority (but revoutions are often made by tiny minorities) and since 9/11 and, in the uk, since 7/7 MI5 and special branch have done a good job so far in monitoring any singificant threats. But it has not gone away. Militant islam (globally a minority) will NOT go away while key issues that it ralies around are resolved. (israel is an obviously one, but economic hardship is another, kashmir, the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, the persecton of maintream islam in Western China, in Chechnya, in Uzbekistan and the other central Asian 'stans, the growth of islamophobia in Europe - oddly much more profund than in the US). As i said its complicated and I would love to share your optimism Stavros. But this is a long story and is by no means played out. The Arab spring could mutate into an radical islamist summer.

[Ben]

Libyan capital under Islamist control after Tripoli airport seized:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/24/libya-capital-under-islamist-control-tripoli-airport-seized-operation-dawn