I don't see how you could pursue the destruction of al Qaeda without going to war against the Taliban "state" in Afghanistan. By that point, the two were one and the same, with bin Laden's organization training the state's military, and al Qaeda cadres helping to fight the Taliban's Northern Alliance enemies.
Even the majority of the strikes have been on target, killing unlawful enemy combatants who mean to do as much harm as they can to the U.S. understates the case.
The sum total of all of the civilians killed in over a decade of drone strikes is a fraction of those killed by al Qaeda in just one day in September 2001. The embassy bombings killed over 200 civilians in one day. So did the Bali bombing.
Because of the drone strikes and the other efforts to disrupt and destory al Qaeda, the organization has been rendered almost completely incapable of carrying out further attacks. They try, such as the effort to murder over 200 civilians in an airplane one Christmas, but due to the war being waged against them, they are a shadow of their former self.
The erosion of al Qaeda's capacity to slaughter civilians has saved countless lives. A reckoning of the cost of American policy towards al Qaeda should take into account the cost of doing nothing.
The Islamic extremists got their butts handed to them in the election in Libya.
I'm going to write that again, because it feels so good: "the elections in Libya." "The elections in Libya." Ahhhhhhh......
When the Libyan people rose up to overthrow their dictator, only the most jaded, amoral cynic would think first about relations with Israel, or look at those protests and think first of Muslim extremists.
The Geneva Conventions proscribe reduced protections for militants who blend in with civilians or obscure their identities as combatants, compared with those defined as "authorized combatants."
Oddly, the very actions al Qaeda or Haqqani network or Taliban militants take to blend in and obscure their identities is often cited as a reason why they are less-appropriate targets for military force.
But, then, the Geneva Conventions are several decades old. Perhaps the people who make that argument consider them quaint.
Drone strikes never seem to be implemented against European nationals who could conceivably be engaging in terrorist activity.
Drone strikes, and other military operations, are not used in places where law enforcement operations and the authority of the local government are present. These strikes are happening in places like the tribal areas of Pakistan or the rural areas of Yemen where al Qaeda has set up shop because there is no government presence to resist them. This is certainly not the case in Belfast. It was a sovereign part of the United Kingdom, with a police force that enforced that law in that area.
I'm not sure how slippery the slope is, but I more-or-less agree with the notion that non-intervention is a rebuttable presumption. The burden of proof falls on those who want to intervene, and they have a high bar to clear.
Anyway, at least you consider looking at the specific facts of individual situations as the appropriate way to answer the question. There are too many people, both hawks and doves, who seem to think that they only need to know that there is a possible American military action in order to know exactly what their opinion is.
Obama would be way out in front if he had just attempted to hold those who created, cherry picked and disseminated false WMD intelligence ACCOUNTABLE.
He's certainly held the politically accountable, but under what legal theory would spinning intelligence about WMDs in a dishonest manner be legally actionable? Is there a law against politicians lying to the public?
Obama for his arrogation of dictatorial powers that allow him sans trial to execute American citizens (okay, maybe just impeachment for that one) and his trigger-happy use of drones in general.
The use of force by the United States against al Qaeda is as clear-cut an example of legitimate self defense under the UN Charter as could possibly be imagined.
Prior to the Iraq War, there was an effort at the UN - led by Colin Powell - to improve the sanctions regime, to make it both more effective and more humane. Given the status and respect the U.S. had in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bush could have surely made this happen if he'd put the weight of American prestige behind it.
But he didn't, because he didn't want the sanctions regime to work. He was determined to have a war.
As a Christian, Tutu would not doubt recognize Kerry's admission of his error and his subsequent effort to make amends, and forgive him.
The idea that genuine penitents should be forgiven and welcomed back into the good graces of the church is one of the more admirable elements of Christian ethics, and one that others would do well to adopt.
It’s impossible to believe that Saddam Hussein could have killed 110,000 Iraqis between 2003 and 2007.
Or at any point after 1992, when he was thoroughly contained. There was no way his government could have conducted another Anfal Campaign even if it wanted to.
That is also the basis of a non-interventionist foreign policy. Aggression, meddling or humanitarian intervention by another state is more likely to inflame internal conflict and cause more death than not.
I suppose this is true, if we are only able to evaluate intervention in the aggregate and come up with an average, but why would we do that? Why would we act like libertarians, who discuss "economic intervention" in the abstract, as some sort of undifferentiated mass, alike in every root and branch, instead of looking at the specifics of individual interventions into particular situations?
The French intervention into the American Revolution surely didn't cost more lives. Nor did the American intervention against Japan as it was devouring China. Nor did the American intervention into the war between Germany and Britain. Nor did the Vietnamese intervention into Cambodia, deposing the Khmer Rouge.
The only thing I’d differ with in Archbishop Tutu’s argument against Blair is that probably the instability in Syria is not very related to the Iraq War. People in Syria were tired of Baath dictatorship and Bashar al-Assad pushed them into armed struggle. Most of those fighting al-Assad were opposed to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Indeed. If one was to attribute the uprising in Syria to the Iraq War, one would also have to attribute the similar, contemporary uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and throughout the Arab world to the Iraq War. That is to say, to attribute the uprising in Syria to the Iraq War is to accept the Bush administration's claim that the invasion of Iraq would cause an outbreak of democratic reform in the region. I remain as skeptical of this argument in 2012 as I was in 2003.
So he just made promise after promise when, in fact, nobody wanted to close GITMO, as evidenced by his own party when it came down to a vote.
Are you, by any change, a Republican?
Because that would explain why you're having trouble understanding that Democrats often disagree with each other. Democrats in Congress don't, unlike the people across the aisle, fall into lockstep obedience with whatever the President wants.
Obama wanted something, and the Congressional Democrats blocked it. Where's the hypocrisy?
"In these Cesarian times," Congress still holds the power of the purse, and included in the annual defense appropriations bill a ban on using tax dollars to transfer prisoners from Guantanamo.
Bringing Bush’s Constitution-free zone into the US
But that's just the point - the US is not a Constitution-free zone. That's why Bush set up the prison camp in Cuba in the first place - because locating it overseas reduced the constitutional protections that apply to detainees. This is also why bringing them into the US, as Obama intended, was so important - because it would have brought them out of a Constitution-free zone. Once again, the people you read and echo were, themselves, shouting this from the rooftops six years ago, but now have conveniently forgotten it. Yours is the only hypocrisy in this argument. You've completely and utterly flip-flopped on the importance of shutting Guantanamo, and on the evil of extra-territorial, Constitution-free prison camps. Your snotty posturing notwithstanding.
(and to gulags around the world)
Obama shut down the black sites. He did exactly the opposite of what you're accusing him of. It's no wonder you don't know this, though - there has been quite the campaign to ignore the significant advances he has made in this area.
Um, excuse me, but holding POWs in an actual war zone, and setting up an extra-territorial prison camp far from any war zone, are not even remotely the same idea.
Except with detainees from all over the world, far outside of the actual war zone.
There were far more prisoners "from all over the world, far outside the actual war zone" in Guantanamo than in Baghram.
(Setting aside the shift from detention to assassination for a minute.)
There was no such shift. The people being targeted in military strikes are not people who would have been raided and detained before Obama took office. They are people in areas, like northwest Pakistan or the rural areas of Yemen, in which we lack the capacity to stage such raids. They would not have been detained under Bush; detaining them has never been an option. The shift has been from doing nothing about such people to conducting strikes against them. (Setting aside the legal and moral error of calling military strikes against wartime enemies operating on foreign soil outside of the reach of the government "assassination.")
whether or not Obama intended to shut down Gitmo is of secondary importance
Then why do you (plural) consistently, reliably phrase your argument as "Obama didn't shut down Guantanamo," and make the argument go through these ridiculous preliminaries every single time the topic comes up? The answer, of course, is that your primary purpose is to accuse President Obama of breaking a promise, and the actual issue of detainees is just some silly putty to shape and then reshape as necessary in order to make that charge stick.
To be fair to Clinton, taking too long to stage a major military intervention is a relatively minor sin for an American President to make. He was also wrong not to intervene in Rwanda - and yet, let's not forget that there were very good historical reasons for a President to be reticent to engage in military intervention around the world.
Puh-lease. How was it that FDR and LBJ were able to get the things done that they did, and Obama wasn’t with a super-majority?
The package of legislation passed in Barack Obama's first two years is more extensive and more progressive than that of any other President in the last 45 years. It is comparable, both in scope and progressivity, to LBJ, and close to Roosevelt.
The Green Lantern Theory - that we can have anything we want if only we have the will - is no more useful as an analysis of domestic legislating than it is in international affairs.
The existing stimulus squeaked through by the skin of its teeth, but you are just sure that there were hundreds of billions of dollars left on the table if only the first African-American to get himself elected President of the United States (and who succeeded in passing the most extensive legislative agenda of any President in 45 years) had some determination and political skills.
Perhaps if he gave a really good speech, Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn would have seen the error of their ways. Right, that would work.
Actually, those are the numbers for the passage of the entire defense appropriations bill in which the amendment prohibiting the closure of Gitmo was buried.
It is inaccurate to claim that everyone who voted for the final bill as it ultimately emerged supported the particular provision. These are giant compromise bills, that must be passed every year, in which everyone has to eat something he or she doesn't like.
"Obama never tried to close Guantanamo–he tried to move the whole lawless operation to the Midwest."
Oh, is Guantanamo in the midwest?
What is it that makes you Grenwaldians so determined that you MUST include this false claim "Obama didn't want to close Gitmo" in your argument. Your actual point (still not entirely fair, but at least truthful) that he would have continued to hold people in military detention stateside can still be made without insisting on this false point.
But no, you just can't bring yourself to grant even that inarguable point. It's pathological.
Anyway, once upon a time, people who were concerned about civil liberties recognized, even loudly proclaimed on their own!, that the existence of an off-shore prison camp posed a unique hazard, because its location weakened the protections enjoyed by inmates under the Constitution. Now, however, the same people who shouted this argument to the heavens six years ago conveniently let it slip their minds.
"Obama had a filibuster proof majority in both houses of Congress for the first two years of his presidency. He could have done anything he wanted.":
Now he didn't. He had, nominally, a 60-vote majority between Arlen Specter's switch and Scott Brown's election, a period of a few months. Even then, "his" majority included people like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman who, unlike Republican's, don't do exactly what the party leader wants.
It's best not to lead off with such an easily-disproved falsehood, it makes your readers ignore whatever else you have to say.
It would be more accurate to say that he has called the bluff of the coal industry on "clean coal."
What he has actually done is issue regulations left and right that are shutting down coal-fired power plants and prohibiting the construction of new ones, using pollution regulations, while pinky-swearing that he'll support "clean coal" technologies just as soon as the industry solves that whole pollution thing.
The Israel lobby hates the Obama administration's approach to Iran. They're pretty down on the administration's policy towards the region in general.
It's a mistake to divide the world into "those who agree with me" and "everyone else." Just because you aren't getting the policy you want, doesn't mean that the Israelis are.
Do you see any new thinking in Washington in this regard? Any adjustment for this new reality?/i>
Name another U.S President in the past century who would have gone along with the overthrow of a core ally like Mubarak by a mass movement that included the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists. I'm having trouble coming up with one who wouldn't have sent in troops to quash it.
I'm pretty sure the Israelis weren't too happy about what happened to Mubarak.
think the middle east has had enough intervention,
I agree with your criticism of the Russians and Iranians. I'd love it if you'd link to the comments you've left on Russian and Iranian web sites, expressing your opposition to foreign intervention.
It's a good thing Cheney didn't get this bee in his bonnet until 2007. Bush had pretty much sidelined him by that point. He probably would have gotten his way two years earlier.
Calling anyone who gets in trouble for releasing anything a whistleblower demeans the term.
Bradley Manning blindly stole half a million documents. He had no idea what was in 99% of them, but boy would it really be a problem for the United States to release them, so he did.
And now, thank God, we know that John Kerry thought that the Syrians were almost ready to make peace with Israel. Thank God Assange blew the lid of that one!
Don, there is no such thing as fundamentalists actions of the Catholic Church.
The term "fundamentalist" is not some catch-all for any conservative religious belief or action. Fundamentalism is the doctrine that a religion or society has become corrupted by getting away from the doctrines and practices that ruled it when it was first formed. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, believes that the traditions and doctrines that develop over the course of history, including novel ones that come out of the Vatican, are legitimate expression of divine will.
Outsiders, especially on the British and American fringe left, have sometimes suggested...that religious fundamentalism in the Middle East will overthrow secular, modernizing regimes like those of Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.
I'm assuming that the phrase "that Russian fears" is a typo.
I don't think the western leftists who side against the Libyan and Syrian rebels honestly do so out of a fear of Skeery al Qaeda Mooslems. After all, these people - in most cases, literally the same people - spent the previous decade railing against the depiction of political Islam as a threat, claiming that the government and media were hyping the al Qaeda threat for political purposes, and claiming that such depictions were intended to discredit the legitimate gripes of people suffering oppression from western-aligned governments in the Islamic world.
To attribute their (highly selective) concern about Arab Spring uprisings to an actual fear of fundamentalist Islam gives them too much credit. More likely, they've decided to adopt what they consider to be a line of propaganda that will be effective with the American public, and will discard it with the same ease with which they discarded their previous opposition to such discourse.
It is better for a hegemonic power if the promotion of their interests/suppression of their opponent's interests in a region is seen as coming from locals, not from the foreign power.
Why would Russia and China bother to sponsor such resolutions and promote such debate, and be seen to do so, when there are plenty of local countries doing so on their own?
During the Cold War, there was a fundamental symmetry between the interests of the two sides. The Soviets were interested in local conflicts because of their implication for the Soviet/Western contest, and so were the Americans.
This doesn't seem to be true anymore. The Russians and Chinese seem to be most interested in Syria in terms of checking American power in a global contest, while United States finds itself in a spat with the Russians and Chinese not as a purpose in and of itself, but as a consequence of the American interest in 1) the Syrian conflict itself and 2) the regional implications.
It's a bit like when the Yankees play the Orioles. The Orioles are thinking about their great rivalry with the Yankees, while the Yankees don't realize they have a rivalry with the Orioles, and are thinking about winning the division and playoff seeding.
The Swedish government has refused this deal, which makes it somewhat harder to believe that their primary interest here is the enforcement of their own laws.
Whoa whoa whoa.
Sweden has an extradition treaty with the United States that imposes certain responsibilities on the Swedes, the violation of which could be a problem for Swedish-American relations.
It does not follow that their unwillingness to violate the extradition treaty must demonstrate that their motive is not the enforcement of their own laws.
Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told a news conference that Ecuador had received a written threat on Wednesday from Britain that "it could assault our embassy" if Assange was not handed over.
Has anyone seen this letter?
There is no question in my mind that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have pressured British Prime Minister David Cameron into taking this step.
That seems a bit of a stretch. Being angry about the release of classified information and violating embassies are two quite different things.
I was disappointed to see this comment, though: the Libyan conflict entered thereafter a phase of prolonged stalemate which lasted for many months before the Qaddafi regime collapsed in the city of Tripoli and Qaddafi himself was captured and killed.
The Libyan conflict only looked like a stalemate to people looking at a map of the Benghazi/Abjdabyi/Sirte front and noting that it wasn't moving. During those months, the rebels opened up entire new fronts, such as that in the Nafusa Mountains, while the Gadhaffi ground forces were steadily weakened and isolated by air power.
As the back-and-forth movements of the British and German/Italians from 1940-1942 demonstrate, territorial gains don't win wars in Libya. One side grinding down the other and causing it to collapse wins wars, and there was never a time after the UN intervention that the rebels weren't winning.
Yes, please, google "Obama coal." Note all of the links to hysterical conservatives wailing that Obama is killing the coal industry.
Want to know a secret? They're right this time. Obama's EPA Director, Lisa Jackson, is using the Clean Air Act to drive the coal industry out of business. They've picked their target, they're culling it from the larger energy industry herd, and they're going to kill it off.
wind is already having trouble competing with shale gas, which has become abruptly abundant and relatively inexpensive in recent years in the US, though at a high environmental cost....coal is being killed not by renewables by but cheap natural gas and by coal plants’ inability to burn cleanly enough to meet environmental regulations.
Let's not forget that the existence of those (growing, increasingly stringent) regulations is not some sort of "natural order," but the consequence of policy decisions.
Someday, natural gas will become more expensive. When it does, wind energy will only be cheaper and more abundant than it is today, and will be available to horn in on the market.
Coal, on the other hand, will be dead. There will be no more coal plants built, and old coal plants are shutting down left and right. When natural gas becomes more expensive, coal-fired power plants will not be available an an alternative.
So my question is, why are these people being persecuted?
They aren't being persecuted, in any way, shape or form. Did you mean "criticized?"
They are being criticized because the scope of their economic power creates an uneven playing field, producing distorted outcomes that are further and further away from the results of a fair contest of ideas.
The self-interest of the donors is far from the only concern a supporter of democracy should take into account.
But to a much lesser extent. An order of magnitude less.
Mote, beam, and all of that. I can tell how terribly seriously you take this matter by the total and complete absence of any comments from you about the vast majority of the problem.
So that explains why Obama won the election in 2008, and the Democrats carried both houses of Congress–it was because the Republicans had the advantage by appealing to the rich.
It certainly tips the scales in their direction, even if it isn't the sold controlling factor.
It's an "all else being equal" situation. Of course, running Barack Obama against that sack of potatoes and his crazy girlfriend isn't "equal."
It was easy for USA to label Hamas a terrorist organization after it won the elections because it is a tiny place & foe to our dear friend next door, but we cannot apply same formula to the now powerful & maybe the oldest movement in the Middle East, The Muslim Brotherhood, in the most populace country in the ME, after Mr. Mursi’s elections.
There's also the fact that Hamas continues to support and carry out terrorist attacks, while the Muslim Brotherhood has been a peaceful political movement for over a decade.
Hillary Clinton might just have to stand aside and smile, while her country’s Egyptian clients get humiliated.
You're talking about the administration that has, in the past year, worked to ease their "client" Mubarak out of office, while deploying their military officers to contact mid-level Egyptian military officers to urge them to ignore orders to fire on the Tahrir Square protesters. The notion that this administration views the Egyptian military command as a "client" is old-fashioned thinking that has been overtaken by events.
That you need to come up with reasons to explain why the United States would refuse to back up a "client" should make that obvious. Since when has the United States not backed up friendly dictators against popular uprisings? Since 2011.
Fall of Dominos in the ME is certainly shaking 10, Downing Street & the Oval office.
Nice theory. The only problem is, this particular White House supported each of those "dominoes" falling.
Perhaps the rather lengthy tenures -ahem, ahem - of leaders in your region has obscured something about American politics: we change our presidents rather frequently, and they often have quite different approaches from their predecessors.
Perhaps Morsi is using the attack by the militants in the Sinai as a pretext to replace a military command that can be blamed for allowing it to happen.
Here's hoping the trouble being stirred up by Gadhaffi's hired thugs in Mali will be the last time Libya's neighbors suffer because of his tyrannical rule.
And just look at the photos published by Amnesty – only one is of shell-holes, and they are of holes identified in farmland, not in areas of human habitation.
They are using satellite photography, which can show the recognizable, circular craters in open land quite well, but which does not do a good job "seeing" the exterior damage to a large building caused by an artillery strike. Look at the close-in shot at the top of the Amnesty report: if one of those buildings had been hit by an artillery shell on one of its faces, it wouldn't look any different than a building that hadn't been hit.
This is pretty obvious from looking at the big photo Professor Cole included in his post. Look at all of those shell holes just to the left of that main road on the left-center of the photo, that divides the built-up area from the farmland. There is no artillery crew in the world that could line them up that accurately - and why would they? We also have plenty of on-the-ground reporting of extensive damage from shelling in Aleppo.
I'm pretty sure that "Amnesty International doesn't know what it is doing" is a bad assumption to make.
I don’t understand why the rebels concentrate forces in particular neighborhoods, making themselves vulnerable to artillary and air strikes.
Because they are in a friendly area full of supporters, making it possible for them to engage in urban insurgency. They would be vulnerable to close-quarters urban combat in areas where the locals were helping the regime.
Having Sunni neighborhoods get destroyed is not an efficient way to win-over Assad’s supporters in wealthier areas. They already have the support of the Sunnis in those areas; that's why they go there. They avoid neighborhoods that are less open in their support, such as Christian areas, specifically to avoid turning them against the rebels.
I get the point of guerrilla wars is to draw the government into brutal responses that turn public opinion against them.
Not all guerilla warfare is based around provoking crackdowns. Think about Mao in the 40s, or various Central American movements in the 70s and 80s. Harassing actions are often used to make large areas no-go zones, or at least prohibitively expensive in terms of force protection, for the government.
It has been against the law to provide material support for organizations on the State Department's sponsors of international terrorism list for many years.
Could you kindly link to a story in which a customer of a business, unaware of how its proprietor spends his money, was so charged?
The Ted Kennedy story is interesting to me for a reason beyond the campaign.
We're quite a bit harder on rich Presidential candidates these days then we used to be. Two decades ago, Ted Kennedy could be beloved as a populist despite not releasing his tax returns. George W. Bush once delivered the line at a fundraising dinner: "My base is here: the haves and the have-mores." Nobody batted an eye - ho ho ho, yeah, he's rich.
Actually, JT, your belief that we are trying "regime change" in Pakistan is the closest think to a game of Risk in this conversation. You seem to think that counter-terrorism is the same thing as taking over a country and basing your armies in it.
All you are doing is digging in with a line of canned patter, reading off your very favorite, well-worn note cards - the same set your use for every occasion.
Love the false equivalence between the Nazi/Axis war machine and a penny-ante pecksniff little bunch called “al Quaeda,”
The only equivalence I have drawn is to note that we have declared war on them both, and that they both have a presence in other countries. Are either of these equivalences "false," or is "false equivalence" one of your very favorite words, like "regime change," that you use purely out of sentiment?
Super390 asked a question - are we at war with Pakistan? - and I answered it. None of this blather, none of the very favorite lines you remember from the Bush years, has the slightest relevance to the answer I gave.
“We’re” doing it, so it must be Right, right?
The only one in this discussion who has based any argument whatsoever on who is doing it is you, JT. You just spent how much of your life writing paragraph after irrelevant paragraph about whatever terrible thing the United States did eighty years ago happened to flit through your consciousness, used that as a reason why something we're doing now is wrong, and then accused me of basing my opinions of right and wrong on who is dong something?
What’s the parallel between German armies all over the European map, including Belgium, being bombed with varying and post-hoc-seemingly questionably effective tonnage, as part of a world war spasm that had the potential, sort of, for the Germans to “dominate everything,” and annoying Haqqanis and maybe a salting of a tiny number of “al Quaedas” up there in the Northwest Tribal Regions
They are both enemies against whom the United States Congress invoked its war powers, who are operating in the territory of a non-hostile state that is incapable of ejecting them. Because that friendly state is incapable of ejecting them, we end up fighting our war against that wartime enemy in the territory of a non-hostile state.
This is hard to follow? OK.
“We” have no freakin’ business there. Far as I can see, “We” have no “national interest” that can be denominated, outside of some fuzzy notion of Great Game whiz-kiddery.
As far as you can see, the United States has no freakin' business using force against al Qaeda. You should get your eyes checked.
“We” have mastered the dirty arts of “regime change” and de-stabilization and suckering our population into paying for inflating the endless, infinitely elastic bubbles of imperial wars.
We're trying to change the regime in Pakistan? That's why we're bombing al Qaeda targets in the FATAs? For regime change?
Was Belgium our enemy in the 1940s. We dropped an awful lot of bombs in Belgium in the 1940s - and yet, we weren't at war with them. How could this be?
The decision for us is; do the drone strikes make the environment for Pakistani democracy better or worse?
Forgive me but, I don't think that the state of Pakistani democracy is the sole consideration for the United States to take into account in its security policy. An important one to be sure, but we do have this al Qaeda problem to consider as well.
The decision for us is; do the drone strikes make the environment for Pakistani democracy better or worse? The answer to that should be obvious.
Why should that be obvious? When was Pakistan's democracy stronger: under Musharrif, before the drone strikes began; or during the past few years (that is, during the period when the drone strikes took off)?
What can you point to in terms of real-world evidence that would show a decline in Pakistani democracy during the period of the drone war?
I can't help but remember, Richard, that people were telling me as late as August 2011 that the Libyan civil war was stuck in an entrenched stalemate, and predicting that it would last for a long time.
The only plausible explanation I’ve seen inkled is that Syria as an open wound continues to bleed diplomatic power from the US and Europe which have clearly been unable to head off the conflict.
China and especially Russia have suffered diplomatically much more from the situation than the US. The UN General Assembly just sent Russia and China a nasty-gram.
A disintegrated Syria also further destabilizes the positional power team of Israel and the US.
Syria is a Russian client state and host to a major base. A disintegrated Syria harms the Russians' power interests much more than those of its opponents.
Israel has a demonstrated historic preference for destabilizing its neighbors
Except when it hasn't, such as its post-Camp David relationship with Egypt, and its relations with Jordan.
Doesn't it make a lot more sense to conclude that the Russians are primarily motivated by wanting to prop up Assad and maintain their regional influence through their closest ally in the region?
Thank you for the number. Now, your source for the laugh-out-loud sycophancy about the leadership and morale of the defection-wracked Syrian armed forces?
You would be surprised by a lot of things, it would appear. You're clearly surprised by the continuing failure of the government to take the city.
You don't have to "control" the populace of a city that isn't hostile to you. 5000 fighters - a figure for which you don't provide any backup, and which sounds far too small to have performed as the FSA has over the past few days - can hold a city quite well, if they have the tacit support of those locals. Those locals sure as heck don't seem to be going out of their way to help the regime forces.
Could you please avoid the passive voice, and tell us exactly who it is that has "reported" rebel strength in Aleppo at 5000? And who describes the defection-wracked Syrian forces as "Well rested, well supplied, and well led and motivated?" Especially "well-led" - that's a real howler right there.
Wow, that guy's repulsive. What's up with the scare quotes around rebels? The rebels aren't rebels? Is rebel just too positive a word, in some alternative universe?
I also loved his description of "born to kill army defectors." Yes, clearly, it's the soldiers who defect from a fascist dictator's army as it is ruthlessly suppressing a popular uprising whose moral and psychiatric foundations must be impugned. Still waiting for Pepe's feelings about the troops who have remained loyal.
Not "tactical gear," Jared. Tactical dress. Gear refers to equipment, the weaponry and tools carried by the personnel. That is a page discussing what the officers are wearing. That is, their clothing.
Another demonstration of the problem I'm talking about.
Funny how none of the "skeptics" were saying this about him before he released his findings. In fact, it was those very "skeptics," such as the Koch Brothers, who considered him to be so very reliable that they hired him to run the BEST project, which was intended to debunk the broad consensus.
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The only sense in which the Taliban wasn't the state sponsor of al Qaeda is their questionable status as a legitimate state.
I don't see how you could pursue the destruction of al Qaeda without going to war against the Taliban "state" in Afghanistan. By that point, the two were one and the same, with bin Laden's organization training the state's military, and al Qaeda cadres helping to fight the Taliban's Northern Alliance enemies.
Even the majority of the strikes have been on target, killing unlawful enemy combatants who mean to do as much harm as they can to the U.S. understates the case.
The sum total of all of the civilians killed in over a decade of drone strikes is a fraction of those killed by al Qaeda in just one day in September 2001. The embassy bombings killed over 200 civilians in one day. So did the Bali bombing.
Because of the drone strikes and the other efforts to disrupt and destory al Qaeda, the organization has been rendered almost completely incapable of carrying out further attacks. They try, such as the effort to murder over 200 civilians in an airplane one Christmas, but due to the war being waged against them, they are a shadow of their former self.
The erosion of al Qaeda's capacity to slaughter civilians has saved countless lives. A reckoning of the cost of American policy towards al Qaeda should take into account the cost of doing nothing.
The Islamic extremists got their butts handed to them in the election in Libya.
I'm going to write that again, because it feels so good: "the elections in Libya." "The elections in Libya." Ahhhhhhh......
When the Libyan people rose up to overthrow their dictator, only the most jaded, amoral cynic would think first about relations with Israel, or look at those protests and think first of Muslim extremists.
Getting away from the purely semantic point, there is a vast difference between supporting the rebels and intervening militarily into a conflict.
...which is probably why the word comes from Spain.
Which is also not Persia.
"Lassoed?"
That's an interesting choice for a translator to make.
People are going to wonder, why is this the first time we’ve heard any of this?
It isn't. The administration has been pushing exactly this message for years. Perhaps you haven't been listening?
Or, perhaps, it's easy to get one's message across when the economy isn't in catastrophic shape.
(whatever those are)
The Geneva Conventions proscribe reduced protections for militants who blend in with civilians or obscure their identities as combatants, compared with those defined as "authorized combatants."
Oddly, the very actions al Qaeda or Haqqani network or Taliban militants take to blend in and obscure their identities is often cited as a reason why they are less-appropriate targets for military force.
But, then, the Geneva Conventions are several decades old. Perhaps the people who make that argument consider them quaint.
Drone strikes never seem to be implemented against European nationals who could conceivably be engaging in terrorist activity.
Drone strikes, and other military operations, are not used in places where law enforcement operations and the authority of the local government are present. These strikes are happening in places like the tribal areas of Pakistan or the rural areas of Yemen where al Qaeda has set up shop because there is no government presence to resist them. This is certainly not the case in Belfast. It was a sovereign part of the United Kingdom, with a police force that enforced that law in that area.
I like this idea.
"...and then, while they were saying that security was the Iraqis' problem, they disbanded the Iraqi army."
"Oh, yeah, right. Like that would actually happen. You're just making this up as you go along aren't you?"
I'm not sure how slippery the slope is, but I more-or-less agree with the notion that non-intervention is a rebuttable presumption. The burden of proof falls on those who want to intervene, and they have a high bar to clear.
Anyway, at least you consider looking at the specific facts of individual situations as the appropriate way to answer the question. There are too many people, both hawks and doves, who seem to think that they only need to know that there is a possible American military action in order to know exactly what their opinion is.
Obama would be way out in front if he had just attempted to hold those who created, cherry picked and disseminated false WMD intelligence ACCOUNTABLE.
He's certainly held the politically accountable, but under what legal theory would spinning intelligence about WMDs in a dishonest manner be legally actionable? Is there a law against politicians lying to the public?
Obama for his arrogation of dictatorial powers that allow him sans trial to execute American citizens (okay, maybe just impeachment for that one) and his trigger-happy use of drones in general.
The use of force by the United States against al Qaeda is as clear-cut an example of legitimate self defense under the UN Charter as could possibly be imagined.
Prior to the Iraq War, there was an effort at the UN - led by Colin Powell - to improve the sanctions regime, to make it both more effective and more humane. Given the status and respect the U.S. had in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bush could have surely made this happen if he'd put the weight of American prestige behind it.
But he didn't, because he didn't want the sanctions regime to work. He was determined to have a war.
As a Christian, Tutu would not doubt recognize Kerry's admission of his error and his subsequent effort to make amends, and forgive him.
The idea that genuine penitents should be forgiven and welcomed back into the good graces of the church is one of the more admirable elements of Christian ethics, and one that others would do well to adopt.
It’s impossible to believe that Saddam Hussein could have killed 110,000 Iraqis between 2003 and 2007.
Or at any point after 1992, when he was thoroughly contained. There was no way his government could have conducted another Anfal Campaign even if it wanted to.
That is also the basis of a non-interventionist foreign policy. Aggression, meddling or humanitarian intervention by another state is more likely to inflame internal conflict and cause more death than not.
I suppose this is true, if we are only able to evaluate intervention in the aggregate and come up with an average, but why would we do that? Why would we act like libertarians, who discuss "economic intervention" in the abstract, as some sort of undifferentiated mass, alike in every root and branch, instead of looking at the specifics of individual interventions into particular situations?
The French intervention into the American Revolution surely didn't cost more lives. Nor did the American intervention against Japan as it was devouring China. Nor did the American intervention into the war between Germany and Britain. Nor did the Vietnamese intervention into Cambodia, deposing the Khmer Rouge.
The only thing I’d differ with in Archbishop Tutu’s argument against Blair is that probably the instability in Syria is not very related to the Iraq War. People in Syria were tired of Baath dictatorship and Bashar al-Assad pushed them into armed struggle. Most of those fighting al-Assad were opposed to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Indeed. If one was to attribute the uprising in Syria to the Iraq War, one would also have to attribute the similar, contemporary uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and throughout the Arab world to the Iraq War. That is to say, to attribute the uprising in Syria to the Iraq War is to accept the Bush administration's claim that the invasion of Iraq would cause an outbreak of democratic reform in the region. I remain as skeptical of this argument in 2012 as I was in 2003.
So he just made promise after promise when, in fact, nobody wanted to close GITMO, as evidenced by his own party when it came down to a vote.
Are you, by any change, a Republican?
Because that would explain why you're having trouble understanding that Democrats often disagree with each other. Democrats in Congress don't, unlike the people across the aisle, fall into lockstep obedience with whatever the President wants.
Obama wanted something, and the Congressional Democrats blocked it. Where's the hypocrisy?
"In these Cesarian times," Congress still holds the power of the purse, and included in the annual defense appropriations bill a ban on using tax dollars to transfer prisoners from Guantanamo.
Bringing Bush’s Constitution-free zone into the US
But that's just the point - the US is not a Constitution-free zone. That's why Bush set up the prison camp in Cuba in the first place - because locating it overseas reduced the constitutional protections that apply to detainees. This is also why bringing them into the US, as Obama intended, was so important - because it would have brought them out of a Constitution-free zone. Once again, the people you read and echo were, themselves, shouting this from the rooftops six years ago, but now have conveniently forgotten it. Yours is the only hypocrisy in this argument. You've completely and utterly flip-flopped on the importance of shutting Guantanamo, and on the evil of extra-territorial, Constitution-free prison camps. Your snotty posturing notwithstanding.
(and to gulags around the world)
Obama shut down the black sites. He did exactly the opposite of what you're accusing him of. It's no wonder you don't know this, though - there has been quite the campaign to ignore the significant advances he has made in this area.
Same idea, but in an actual war zone
Um, excuse me, but holding POWs in an actual war zone, and setting up an extra-territorial prison camp far from any war zone, are not even remotely the same idea.
Except with detainees from all over the world, far outside of the actual war zone.
There were far more prisoners "from all over the world, far outside the actual war zone" in Guantanamo than in Baghram.
(Setting aside the shift from detention to assassination for a minute.)
There was no such shift. The people being targeted in military strikes are not people who would have been raided and detained before Obama took office. They are people in areas, like northwest Pakistan or the rural areas of Yemen, in which we lack the capacity to stage such raids. They would not have been detained under Bush; detaining them has never been an option. The shift has been from doing nothing about such people to conducting strikes against them. (Setting aside the legal and moral error of calling military strikes against wartime enemies operating on foreign soil outside of the reach of the government "assassination.")
whether or not Obama intended to shut down Gitmo is of secondary importance
Then why do you (plural) consistently, reliably phrase your argument as "Obama didn't shut down Guantanamo," and make the argument go through these ridiculous preliminaries every single time the topic comes up? The answer, of course, is that your primary purpose is to accuse President Obama of breaking a promise, and the actual issue of detainees is just some silly putty to shape and then reshape as necessary in order to make that charge stick.
To be fair to Clinton, taking too long to stage a major military intervention is a relatively minor sin for an American President to make. He was also wrong not to intervene in Rwanda - and yet, let's not forget that there were very good historical reasons for a President to be reticent to engage in military intervention around the world.
Puh-lease. How was it that FDR and LBJ were able to get the things done that they did, and Obama wasn’t with a super-majority?
The package of legislation passed in Barack Obama's first two years is more extensive and more progressive than that of any other President in the last 45 years. It is comparable, both in scope and progressivity, to LBJ, and close to Roosevelt.
He did get things done. You just didn't notice.
Actually, Robert, they are the same thing. They are exactly the same thing. They both result Glass-Steagel being overturned. Period, end of story.
If you want some political theater to make the medicine go down, watch some old episodes of Aaron Sorkin's "The West Wing."
The Green Lantern Theory - that we can have anything we want if only we have the will - is no more useful as an analysis of domestic legislating than it is in international affairs.
The existing stimulus squeaked through by the skin of its teeth, but you are just sure that there were hundreds of billions of dollars left on the table if only the first African-American to get himself elected President of the United States (and who succeeded in passing the most extensive legislative agenda of any President in 45 years) had some determination and political skills.
Perhaps if he gave a really good speech, Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn would have seen the error of their ways. Right, that would work.
Actually, those are the numbers for the passage of the entire defense appropriations bill in which the amendment prohibiting the closure of Gitmo was buried.
It is inaccurate to claim that everyone who voted for the final bill as it ultimately emerged supported the particular provision. These are giant compromise bills, that must be passed every year, in which everyone has to eat something he or she doesn't like.
Nope, Aaron is right: Specter switched parties before Franken was seated.
The point remains.
"Obama never tried to close Guantanamo–he tried to move the whole lawless operation to the Midwest."
Oh, is Guantanamo in the midwest?
What is it that makes you Grenwaldians so determined that you MUST include this false claim "Obama didn't want to close Gitmo" in your argument. Your actual point (still not entirely fair, but at least truthful) that he would have continued to hold people in military detention stateside can still be made without insisting on this false point.
But no, you just can't bring yourself to grant even that inarguable point. It's pathological.
Anyway, once upon a time, people who were concerned about civil liberties recognized, even loudly proclaimed on their own!, that the existence of an off-shore prison camp posed a unique hazard, because its location weakened the protections enjoyed by inmates under the Constitution. Now, however, the same people who shouted this argument to the heavens six years ago conveniently let it slip their minds.
"Obama had a filibuster proof majority in both houses of Congress for the first two years of his presidency. He could have done anything he wanted.":
Now he didn't. He had, nominally, a 60-vote majority between Arlen Specter's switch and Scott Brown's election, a period of a few months. Even then, "his" majority included people like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman who, unlike Republican's, don't do exactly what the party leader wants.
It's best not to lead off with such an easily-disproved falsehood, it makes your readers ignore whatever else you have to say.
has called for more clean coal
It would be more accurate to say that he has called the bluff of the coal industry on "clean coal."
What he has actually done is issue regulations left and right that are shutting down coal-fired power plants and prohibiting the construction of new ones, using pollution regulations, while pinky-swearing that he'll support "clean coal" technologies just as soon as the industry solves that whole pollution thing.
Solar towers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower
I, too, am deeply disappointed that the Libyan people are now electing democratic governments.
The Israel lobby hates the Obama administration's approach to Iran. They're pretty down on the administration's policy towards the region in general.
It's a mistake to divide the world into "those who agree with me" and "everyone else." Just because you aren't getting the policy you want, doesn't mean that the Israelis are.
Nice little anti-American rant.
Perhaps the Irish educational system could work on teaching the concept of "ad hominem fallacy."
Iran's government isn't regressive and medieval because AMERICAN SUCKS! That's your argument?
Do you see any new thinking in Washington in this regard? Any adjustment for this new reality?/i>
Name another U.S President in the past century who would have gone along with the overthrow of a core ally like Mubarak by a mass movement that included the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists. I'm having trouble coming up with one who wouldn't have sent in troops to quash it.
I'm pretty sure the Israelis weren't too happy about what happened to Mubarak.
think the middle east has had enough intervention,
I agree with your criticism of the Russians and Iranians. I'd love it if you'd link to the comments you've left on Russian and Iranian web sites, expressing your opposition to foreign intervention.
"what of Hilary Clinton stating the road to Tehran is through Damascus:"
Link?
"Anti-imperialists" have adopted the argumentation of global warming deniers.
Oh, boo-hoo, this incredibly biased climate report doesn't include my very latest theory about solar flares!
They're only "allegedly" dead?
It's a good thing Cheney didn't get this bee in his bonnet until 2007. Bush had pretty much sidelined him by that point. He probably would have gotten his way two years earlier.
And yet, it's the government that is sending out feelers for a peace deal.
This is not the behavior of a regime that is winning.
Calling anyone who gets in trouble for releasing anything a whistleblower demeans the term.
Bradley Manning blindly stole half a million documents. He had no idea what was in 99% of them, but boy would it really be a problem for the United States to release them, so he did.
And now, thank God, we know that John Kerry thought that the Syrians were almost ready to make peace with Israel. Thank God Assange blew the lid of that one!
Don, there is no such thing as fundamentalists actions of the Catholic Church.
The term "fundamentalist" is not some catch-all for any conservative religious belief or action. Fundamentalism is the doctrine that a religion or society has become corrupted by getting away from the doctrines and practices that ruled it when it was first formed. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, believes that the traditions and doctrines that develop over the course of history, including novel ones that come out of the Vatican, are legitimate expression of divine will.
I checked the records of disturbances in London
You mean the riots? The lethal riots?
I forget, were their riots going on in Moscow, and was Pussy Riot's performance conducted in conjunction with them?
Outsiders, especially on the British and American fringe left, have sometimes suggested...that religious fundamentalism in the Middle East will overthrow secular, modernizing regimes like those of Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.
I'm assuming that the phrase "that Russian fears" is a typo.
I don't think the western leftists who side against the Libyan and Syrian rebels honestly do so out of a fear of Skeery al Qaeda Mooslems. After all, these people - in most cases, literally the same people - spent the previous decade railing against the depiction of political Islam as a threat, claiming that the government and media were hyping the al Qaeda threat for political purposes, and claiming that such depictions were intended to discredit the legitimate gripes of people suffering oppression from western-aligned governments in the Islamic world.
To attribute their (highly selective) concern about Arab Spring uprisings to an actual fear of fundamentalist Islam gives them too much credit. More likely, they've decided to adopt what they consider to be a line of propaganda that will be effective with the American public, and will discard it with the same ease with which they discarded their previous opposition to such discourse.
Remind me, how did the Shia come to power in Iraq?
The Turks, like the Americans, like the Saudis, didn't cause the Syrian Arab Spring to happen.
They are reacting to a situation that has come about whether they like it or not, and settled on what they think is the best policy.
It is better for a hegemonic power if the promotion of their interests/suppression of their opponent's interests in a region is seen as coming from locals, not from the foreign power.
Why would Russia and China bother to sponsor such resolutions and promote such debate, and be seen to do so, when there are plenty of local countries doing so on their own?
As opposed to regional superpower Oman.
😉
Similarly, shouldn't those Central Asian states you mention be red?
During the Cold War, there was a fundamental symmetry between the interests of the two sides. The Soviets were interested in local conflicts because of their implication for the Soviet/Western contest, and so were the Americans.
This doesn't seem to be true anymore. The Russians and Chinese seem to be most interested in Syria in terms of checking American power in a global contest, while United States finds itself in a spat with the Russians and Chinese not as a purpose in and of itself, but as a consequence of the American interest in 1) the Syrian conflict itself and 2) the regional implications.
It's a bit like when the Yankees play the Orioles. The Orioles are thinking about their great rivalry with the Yankees, while the Yankees don't realize they have a rivalry with the Orioles, and are thinking about winning the division and playoff seeding.
I dunno, ask the people who think the United States want to extradite him.
Ask the Ecuadoreans.
"Only?"
Revoking Ecuador's diplomatic status would be a very big deal.
The Swedish government has refused this deal, which makes it somewhat harder to believe that their primary interest here is the enforcement of their own laws.
Whoa whoa whoa.
Sweden has an extradition treaty with the United States that imposes certain responsibilities on the Swedes, the violation of which could be a problem for Swedish-American relations.
It does not follow that their unwillingness to violate the extradition treaty must demonstrate that their motive is not the enforcement of their own laws.
Thanks to Vecors, above: https://www.juancole.com/2012/08/ayatollah-cameron-threatens-to-invade-ecuador-embassy-re-assange-or-whitewashing-iran-for-the-us-national-security-state.html#comment-119436
Yep, the letter is real.
Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told a news conference that Ecuador had received a written threat on Wednesday from Britain that "it could assault our embassy" if Assange was not handed over.
Has anyone seen this letter?
There is no question in my mind that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have pressured British Prime Minister David Cameron into taking this step.
That seems a bit of a stretch. Being angry about the release of classified information and violating embassies are two quite different things.
A very nice overview piece.
I was disappointed to see this comment, though: the Libyan conflict entered thereafter a phase of prolonged stalemate which lasted for many months before the Qaddafi regime collapsed in the city of Tripoli and Qaddafi himself was captured and killed.
The Libyan conflict only looked like a stalemate to people looking at a map of the Benghazi/Abjdabyi/Sirte front and noting that it wasn't moving. During those months, the rebels opened up entire new fronts, such as that in the Nafusa Mountains, while the Gadhaffi ground forces were steadily weakened and isolated by air power.
As the back-and-forth movements of the British and German/Italians from 1940-1942 demonstrate, territorial gains don't win wars in Libya. One side grinding down the other and causing it to collapse wins wars, and there was never a time after the UN intervention that the rebels weren't winning.
Yes, please, google "Obama coal." Note all of the links to hysterical conservatives wailing that Obama is killing the coal industry.
Want to know a secret? They're right this time. Obama's EPA Director, Lisa Jackson, is using the Clean Air Act to drive the coal industry out of business. They've picked their target, they're culling it from the larger energy industry herd, and they're going to kill it off.
Better yet, google "Cross state pollution rules," or "Lisa Jackson coal" or "Mercury toxics regulations" or "coal ash EPA" or, you know what? Just click here and enjoy the coal industry's salty ham tears: http://news.yahoo.com/group-says-epa-regulations-coal-plants-impossible-224700268.html
Are you talking to me?
You seem to have hit a reply button at random.
The new clean coal burners emit only Co2 and water vapor.
This person has no idea what he is talking about.
wind is already having trouble competing with shale gas, which has become abruptly abundant and relatively inexpensive in recent years in the US, though at a high environmental cost....coal is being killed not by renewables by but cheap natural gas and by coal plants’ inability to burn cleanly enough to meet environmental regulations.
Let's not forget that the existence of those (growing, increasingly stringent) regulations is not some sort of "natural order," but the consequence of policy decisions.
Someday, natural gas will become more expensive. When it does, wind energy will only be cheaper and more abundant than it is today, and will be available to horn in on the market.
Coal, on the other hand, will be dead. There will be no more coal plants built, and old coal plants are shutting down left and right. When natural gas becomes more expensive, coal-fired power plants will not be available an an alternative.
So my question is, why are these people being persecuted?
They aren't being persecuted, in any way, shape or form. Did you mean "criticized?"
They are being criticized because the scope of their economic power creates an uneven playing field, producing distorted outcomes that are further and further away from the results of a fair contest of ideas.
The self-interest of the donors is far from the only concern a supporter of democracy should take into account.
…except that…Democrats do “do it too!!!!”
But to a much lesser extent. An order of magnitude less.
Mote, beam, and all of that. I can tell how terribly seriously you take this matter by the total and complete absence of any comments from you about the vast majority of the problem.
So that explains why Obama won the election in 2008, and the Democrats carried both houses of Congress–it was because the Republicans had the advantage by appealing to the rich.
It certainly tips the scales in their direction, even if it isn't the sold controlling factor.
It's an "all else being equal" situation. Of course, running Barack Obama against that sack of potatoes and his crazy girlfriend isn't "equal."
Correction: those 47 billionaires are attempting to buy the election.
But they're probably going to lose, and all of that money will be wasted. This time, anyway.
I wasn't even thinking about the rocket attacks. Hamas was still using suicide bombers in 2010.
Has "military instability" ever clipped the wings of hawks?
Seems to me that it usually gives them a freer hand.
It was easy for USA to label Hamas a terrorist organization after it won the elections because it is a tiny place & foe to our dear friend next door, but we cannot apply same formula to the now powerful & maybe the oldest movement in the Middle East, The Muslim Brotherhood, in the most populace country in the ME, after Mr. Mursi’s elections.
There's also the fact that Hamas continues to support and carry out terrorist attacks, while the Muslim Brotherhood has been a peaceful political movement for over a decade.
Hillary Clinton might just have to stand aside and smile, while her country’s Egyptian clients get humiliated.
You're talking about the administration that has, in the past year, worked to ease their "client" Mubarak out of office, while deploying their military officers to contact mid-level Egyptian military officers to urge them to ignore orders to fire on the Tahrir Square protesters. The notion that this administration views the Egyptian military command as a "client" is old-fashioned thinking that has been overtaken by events.
That you need to come up with reasons to explain why the United States would refuse to back up a "client" should make that obvious. Since when has the United States not backed up friendly dictators against popular uprisings? Since 2011.
Fall of Dominos in the ME is certainly shaking 10, Downing Street & the Oval office.
Nice theory. The only problem is, this particular White House supported each of those "dominoes" falling.
Perhaps the rather lengthy tenures -ahem, ahem - of leaders in your region has obscured something about American politics: we change our presidents rather frequently, and they often have quite different approaches from their predecessors.
Perhaps Morsi is using the attack by the militants in the Sinai as a pretext to replace a military command that can be blamed for allowing it to happen.
Here's hoping the trouble being stirred up by Gadhaffi's hired thugs in Mali will be the last time Libya's neighbors suffer because of his tyrannical rule.
Lord knows it's not the first.
You're not fooling anyone, Perfesser. We all remember the camel charge in Tahrir Square.
Those camels are part of a militia. They probably tortured somebody just before they got on the truck, too.
Oh, Barack Obama, what have you wrought?!?
The concept of a "front" is meaningless in guerilla warfare.
And just look at the photos published by Amnesty – only one is of shell-holes, and they are of holes identified in farmland, not in areas of human habitation.
They are using satellite photography, which can show the recognizable, circular craters in open land quite well, but which does not do a good job "seeing" the exterior damage to a large building caused by an artillery strike. Look at the close-in shot at the top of the Amnesty report: if one of those buildings had been hit by an artillery shell on one of its faces, it wouldn't look any different than a building that hadn't been hit.
This is pretty obvious from looking at the big photo Professor Cole included in his post. Look at all of those shell holes just to the left of that main road on the left-center of the photo, that divides the built-up area from the farmland. There is no artillery crew in the world that could line them up that accurately - and why would they? We also have plenty of on-the-ground reporting of extensive damage from shelling in Aleppo.
I'm pretty sure that "Amnesty International doesn't know what it is doing" is a bad assumption to make.
I don’t understand why the rebels concentrate forces in particular neighborhoods, making themselves vulnerable to artillary and air strikes.
Because they are in a friendly area full of supporters, making it possible for them to engage in urban insurgency. They would be vulnerable to close-quarters urban combat in areas where the locals were helping the regime.
Having Sunni neighborhoods get destroyed is not an efficient way to win-over Assad’s supporters in wealthier areas. They already have the support of the Sunnis in those areas; that's why they go there. They avoid neighborhoods that are less open in their support, such as Christian areas, specifically to avoid turning them against the rebels.
I get the point of guerrilla wars is to draw the government into brutal responses that turn public opinion against them.
Not all guerilla warfare is based around provoking crackdowns. Think about Mao in the 40s, or various Central American movements in the 70s and 80s. Harassing actions are often used to make large areas no-go zones, or at least prohibitively expensive in terms of force protection, for the government.
It has been against the law to provide material support for organizations on the State Department's sponsors of international terrorism list for many years.
Could you kindly link to a story in which a customer of a business, unaware of how its proprietor spends his money, was so charged?
The Ted Kennedy story is interesting to me for a reason beyond the campaign.
We're quite a bit harder on rich Presidential candidates these days then we used to be. Two decades ago, Ted Kennedy could be beloved as a populist despite not releasing his tax returns. George W. Bush once delivered the line at a fundraising dinner: "My base is here: the haves and the have-mores." Nobody batted an eye - ho ho ho, yeah, he's rich.
I credit OWS with this turn of events.
Actually, JT, your belief that we are trying "regime change" in Pakistan is the closest think to a game of Risk in this conversation. You seem to think that counter-terrorism is the same thing as taking over a country and basing your armies in it.
All you are doing is digging in with a line of canned patter, reading off your very favorite, well-worn note cards - the same set your use for every occasion.
Love the false equivalence between the Nazi/Axis war machine and a penny-ante pecksniff little bunch called “al Quaeda,”
The only equivalence I have drawn is to note that we have declared war on them both, and that they both have a presence in other countries. Are either of these equivalences "false," or is "false equivalence" one of your very favorite words, like "regime change," that you use purely out of sentiment?
Super390 asked a question - are we at war with Pakistan? - and I answered it. None of this blather, none of the very favorite lines you remember from the Bush years, has the slightest relevance to the answer I gave.
“We’re” doing it, so it must be Right, right?
The only one in this discussion who has based any argument whatsoever on who is doing it is you, JT. You just spent how much of your life writing paragraph after irrelevant paragraph about whatever terrible thing the United States did eighty years ago happened to flit through your consciousness, used that as a reason why something we're doing now is wrong, and then accused me of basing my opinions of right and wrong on who is dong something?
Whatever, man.
What’s the parallel between German armies all over the European map, including Belgium, being bombed with varying and post-hoc-seemingly questionably effective tonnage, as part of a world war spasm that had the potential, sort of, for the Germans to “dominate everything,” and annoying Haqqanis and maybe a salting of a tiny number of “al Quaedas” up there in the Northwest Tribal Regions
They are both enemies against whom the United States Congress invoked its war powers, who are operating in the territory of a non-hostile state that is incapable of ejecting them. Because that friendly state is incapable of ejecting them, we end up fighting our war against that wartime enemy in the territory of a non-hostile state.
This is hard to follow? OK.
“We” have no freakin’ business there. Far as I can see, “We” have no “national interest” that can be denominated, outside of some fuzzy notion of Great Game whiz-kiddery.
As far as you can see, the United States has no freakin' business using force against al Qaeda. You should get your eyes checked.
“We” have mastered the dirty arts of “regime change” and de-stabilization and suckering our population into paying for inflating the endless, infinitely elastic bubbles of imperial wars.
We're trying to change the regime in Pakistan? That's why we're bombing al Qaeda targets in the FATAs? For regime change?
Was Belgium our enemy in the 1940s. We dropped an awful lot of bombs in Belgium in the 1940s - and yet, we weren't at war with them. How could this be?
The decision for us is; do the drone strikes make the environment for Pakistani democracy better or worse?
Forgive me but, I don't think that the state of Pakistani democracy is the sole consideration for the United States to take into account in its security policy. An important one to be sure, but we do have this al Qaeda problem to consider as well.
The decision for us is; do the drone strikes make the environment for Pakistani democracy better or worse? The answer to that should be obvious.
Why should that be obvious? When was Pakistan's democracy stronger: under Musharrif, before the drone strikes began; or during the past few years (that is, during the period when the drone strikes took off)?
What can you point to in terms of real-world evidence that would show a decline in Pakistani democracy during the period of the drone war?
Right, drone strikes. That's the problem with Pakistan's democracy.
I can't help but remember, Richard, that people were telling me as late as August 2011 that the Libyan civil war was stuck in an entrenched stalemate, and predicting that it would last for a long time.
The only plausible explanation I’ve seen inkled is that Syria as an open wound continues to bleed diplomatic power from the US and Europe which have clearly been unable to head off the conflict.
China and especially Russia have suffered diplomatically much more from the situation than the US. The UN General Assembly just sent Russia and China a nasty-gram.
A disintegrated Syria also further destabilizes the positional power team of Israel and the US.
Syria is a Russian client state and host to a major base. A disintegrated Syria harms the Russians' power interests much more than those of its opponents.
Israel has a demonstrated historic preference for destabilizing its neighbors
Except when it hasn't, such as its post-Camp David relationship with Egypt, and its relations with Jordan.
Doesn't it make a lot more sense to conclude that the Russians are primarily motivated by wanting to prop up Assad and maintain their regional influence through their closest ally in the region?
He was captured by coalition forces and quickly released. He did a television interview in 2005, was well-paid, and seems to be living a quiet life.
Thank you for the number. Now, your source for the laugh-out-loud sycophancy about the leadership and morale of the defection-wracked Syrian armed forces?
You would be surprised by a lot of things, it would appear. You're clearly surprised by the continuing failure of the government to take the city.
It appears that the Assad propaganda machine has decided to bring Baghdad Bob into the internet age.
Someone hacked Reuters and posted false stories about the rebels suffering a defeat in Aleppo: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/reuters-hacked-phony-stories-posted-on-syria.html
Also, there are no rebels at the airport. They've all been defeated, the outcome is inevitable, and it's only a matter of time.
You don't have to "control" the populace of a city that isn't hostile to you. 5000 fighters - a figure for which you don't provide any backup, and which sounds far too small to have performed as the FSA has over the past few days - can hold a city quite well, if they have the tacit support of those locals. Those locals sure as heck don't seem to be going out of their way to help the regime forces.
Could you please avoid the passive voice, and tell us exactly who it is that has "reported" rebel strength in Aleppo at 5000? And who describes the defection-wracked Syrian forces as "Well rested, well supplied, and well led and motivated?" Especially "well-led" - that's a real howler right there.
Wow, that guy's repulsive. What's up with the scare quotes around rebels? The rebels aren't rebels? Is rebel just too positive a word, in some alternative universe?
I also loved his description of "born to kill army defectors." Yes, clearly, it's the soldiers who defect from a fascist dictator's army as it is ruthlessly suppressing a popular uprising whose moral and psychiatric foundations must be impugned. Still waiting for Pepe's feelings about the troops who have remained loyal.
Anyway, it would, indeed, be insane to equip al Qaeda groups with SAMs. It's a good thing that the CIA is working to prevent that from happening: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/world/middleeast/cia-said-to-aid-in-steering-arms-to-syrian-rebels.html%3Fpagewanted%3Dall&sa=U&ei=jxccUO2bOvTg6wGnpICoBg&ved=0CBIQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNEpumYnnfC5G_p2trUUuS9donrrVg
Buzz buzz buzz
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/22/libyans-thank-obama-poster_n_933396.html
Maybe you can explain to them why they're wrong.
Ask Hosni Mubarak what kind of a friend this administration is to democracy.
Oh, wait...
Good for Obama. Arab Spring is not optional, and the United States shouldn't let itself be on the wrong side of history.
This isn't Sweden.
You want to move the NYSE out of the United States? Good luck with that.
Not "tactical gear," Jared. Tactical dress. Gear refers to equipment, the weaponry and tools carried by the personnel. That is a page discussing what the officers are wearing. That is, their clothing.
Another demonstration of the problem I'm talking about.
My point is that the claim is factually false. That should be enough for you to consider my complaint perfectly legitimate, but I've got more.
My point is that overly-dramatic, factually-deficient, panicky rhetoric doesn't help; it undermines the argument you want to make.
I doubt you have trouble understanding this when the panic button being pounded says "terrorist."
not showing off his knowledge of military tactical gear
Then don't use specific language ("special forces operative," "full battle gear") intended to foster that impression.
and you might forgive naifs like Juan, myself, and the beseiged citizens of Anaheim and elsewhere for thinking that the police are in full combat gear
And you might forgive me for not wanting my side of the debate to be lead by naifs like you, because naifs get the asses kicked in political debates.
Ugh. Please avoid writing about military matters, Professor.
Dressing up an Anaheim Police Officer in camo and giving him a tear gas gun does not turn him into a Special Forces operative with full battle gear.
he does not seem to be a very reliable judge
Funny how none of the "skeptics" were saying this about him before he released his findings. In fact, it was those very "skeptics," such as the Koch Brothers, who considered him to be so very reliable that they hired him to run the BEST project, which was intended to debunk the broad consensus.