Month: March 2011

A reader writes:

Your antipathy toward this intervention only makes sense to me in the context of the scars of the Bush years. Ask yourself, absent Iraq and the debacle of its invasion, whether you would support a no-fly zone to protect the citizens of Benghazi, as indeed you did to protect the citizens of Kosovo or the no-fly zone over Iraq after Gulf I. We have before us a truly international action, supported by a UN resolution, requested by the Arab League, and focused on protection of civilians.

You used to feature prominently on your website a quotation form Orwell: To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

I suppose I am exhorting you to struggle.

Yes, I confess, the last decade is integral to my initial take on this new war. If it had been contemplated before 2001, I might well have backed and been moved by it. But being scarred by history is not inherently suspect. What I learned from Iraq and Afghanistan is the extreme difficulty of intervening in countries we do not understand and the limits of even the best military in the world to control events in other people's lands, driven by other peoples' concerns. It also remains a fact – and it wasn't a fact in 2001 – that the US is already involved in two wars and is bankrupt, with no sign of any political will to balance the books, including this president. Hence the skepticism.

By the way, why is my Iraq lesson more worrying than those who do not even refer to Iraq in this context? Every moment in history is different; and what failed last time could succeed now. But I prefer caution after a debacle, rather than pretending that the world began yesterday.

Bernstein notes the latest example:

I've talked several times about "playing by the rules." I've said that the main reason Sarah Palin was unlikely to win the Republican presidential nomination was that she refuses to do the sorts of things that candidates for president have to do. Wonderful, wonderful example of this in a post yesterday from David Frum. Frum describes in some detail one group of GOP elites (the Republican Jewish Coalition) and what Palin did to annoy them. The gist of it is that the RJC has sponsored Israel trips for numerous GOP presidential candidates, and that Palin chose to use another group to arrange her trip without even bothering to RSVP to the RJC's invitation.

Dylan Matthews polices the debate over whether invading Libya is worth the cost:

[Leon Wieseltier] mocks Ezra's point on the relative benefits of spending money fighting Libya versus spending money fighting malaria, asking, "Did our inaction in Rwanda reduce the frequency of malaria in Africa?" The point seems to be that malaria eradication may be a better goal, but it's not politically tenable, and in light of that, intervening in Libya is a good second-best option in humanitarian terms.

But one reason that humanitarian intervention is so much more politically tenable than anti-malaria spending is that Leon Wieseltier, most everyone else at The New Republic, and a whole lot of other liberal hawks in DC have made it their mission for the past 20+ years to make it politically tenable. If he and his comrades thought anti-malaria spending was a better idea, then they should have spent time arguing that instead. But they didn't. And turning around when called on it and saying, "Well yes, this is a second best option" is really bizarre.

Kutiman, the mashup genius behind ThruYou, returns with another orchestral hit:

(Hat tip: URLesque)

A reader writes:

I am as depressed by the news these days as you are, and I am now more depressed that an optimist such as Andrew Sullivan has been reduced to such low-bar life-affirming thoughts as, “At least I don’t have smallpox.”

I am turning everything off for two weeks … sadly, even the Dish … the truth is just too much at this point.

A reader writes:

Regarding your post highlighting Joe Biden's apparent absence the Libya decision, it seems likely the VP actually facilitated UN Security Council Resolution 1973 on Libya. Keating neglected to mention Biden's mid-March trip to Russia where he met with Medvedev and Putin and discussed Libya. Russia's veto on any strongly worded resolution seemed all but certain before the visit. Earlier, Russian foreign policy officials had denounced the idea of a no-fly zone over Libya as "superfluous" and "a serious interference into [Libyan] domestic affairs." Yet Russia did not oppose UNSCR 1973. Biden's trip was likely a crucial factor in Russia's abstention.

After the Biden trip the Kremlin became notably optimistic concerning the intervention (even if Putin still has reservations).

Medvedev even indicated "he considered the UN resolution to be correct, adding if he did not believe the UN-mandated action was the proper way of handling the Libyan crisis he would have ordered the Foreign Ministry to oppose the measure when it was voted on in the Security Council." That is an unprecedented shift in Russian foreign policy. Why the change of heart?

One of the main items on Biden's agenda was Russian accession to the WTO, which our ally Georgia has heretofore blocked. Russian experts believe US pressure on Georgia could convince Tblisi to drop its objections to Moscow's WTO membership. It appears, then, Biden linked Washington's support for Moscow's WTO application to Moscow's tacit approval of the Libya resolution. Hence the abstention. So Biden may have played a bigger part in the story after all.

Sargent flags an impressively packed pander. Guess who said this:

“I believe that it flows from [Obama']s fundamental disbelief in American exceptionalism. In the President’s world, all nations have ‘common interests,’ the lines between good and evil are blurred, America’s history merits apology. And without a compass to guide him in our increasingly turbulent world, he’s tentative, indecisive, timid and nuanced.”

Nuanced! Just because it sounds French doesn't make it bad, you know. And note the repeat of the Big Lie. Romney's in this to win it.

Guanajuato, Mexico 6.33 pm

Timothy B Lee questions how much real reporting the NYT does:

[E]ven if you believe that a purely advertising-supported web won’t be able to support an adequate amount of shoe-leather reporting, voluntarily subscribing to a paywalled Times, despite the existence of high-quality, free alternatives like CNN and the BBC, seems silly. If serious news is what I want, then I should donate to an organization that focuses on producing it. About 65 cents of every dollar I give to Pro Publica will go to support serious, public-interested newsgathering. It makes no sense to instead give money to an organization that will spend less than 20 cents of every dollar on shoe-leather reporting as a means to its primary goal of making the Sulzberger family wealthier.

Philip Howard explains:

The modern recipe for democratization includes several key ingredients. Wired civil society groups have proven particularly agile at sensitive moments for regimes, particularly during rigged elections. Only the regimes made wealthy through oil and natural gas reserves have had the resources to keep civil society actors at bay in these critical moments. Several significant political transitions over the last 15 years fit this recipe, as do recent cases of Egypt and Tunisia. Social scientists are loathe to predict, and rightly so. So instead of predicting political upheaval, it may be better to think about countries with the kinds of ingredients that go into the modern recipe for democratization.