Donate to American Red Cross here. Donate to The National Coalition for the Homeless here.
All The News That Gives Me Fits



WWW Amygdala

Our Mysterious Name.

Our
mission.


Our
task.



Photo (©) David Hartwell. August 7th, 2010.


Home


Blog advertising supports bloggers!

I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.



Follow GaryFarberKnows on Twitter

Scroll down for Amygdala archives! You know you want to. [Temporarily rather borked, along with rest of template.]
Amygdala's endorsements are below my favorite quotations! Keep scrolling!

Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
Tagging posts, posts by category, next/previous post indicators, and other post-2003 design innovations are incrementally being tweaked/kludged/melting.

Blogroll is now way down below! You may be on it!


Site Feed

Feedburner RSS Feed

LiveJournal Feed

Gary Farber

Create Your Badge


Above email address currently deprecated!

Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz!

Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!

Commenting Rules: Only comments that are courteous and respectful of other commenters will be allowed. Period.
fi

You must either open a Google/Blogger.com/Gmail Account, or sign into comments at the bottom of any post with OpenID, LiveJournal, Typepad, Wordpress, AIM account, or whatever ID/handle available to use. Hey, I don't design Blogger's software:
sorry
!

Posting a spam-type URL will be grounds for deletion. Comments on posts over 21 days old are now moderated, and it may take me a long while to notice and allow them.

I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?

I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.

Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.

I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.

If you like my blog, and would like to help me continue to afford food and prescriptions, or simply enjoy my blogging and writing, and would like to support it -- you are welcome to do so via the PayPal buttons.

In return: free blog! Thank you muchly muchly.

Only you can help!

I strive to pay forward. Please also give to your local homeless shelter and street people: you can change a person's life.

Hundreds of millions of people on planet Earth are in greater need than I am; consider helping them in any small way you can, please.


Donate to support Gary Farber's Amygdala:
Please consider showing your support for Amygdala by clicking below and subscribing for $5/month! Free koala bear included! They're so cute!

To subscribe for further increments of $5, simply click above again, after completing one, for as many $5 subscriptions as you desire!

Advance notification of cancellations are helpful, but it's all up to you.

Thanks so much for your kind generosity.

Additional options! $25/month Supporter subscription: click below!
$50/month Patron subscription: click below!

Variant Button!
Subscription options



Change.org|Start Petition


"The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson


"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin


"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton


"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan


"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken


"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt


"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley


"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss


"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire, the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind; and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon


"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon


"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon


"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize their teachers."
-- Socrates


"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook


"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook


"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson


"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr


"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion


"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson


"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices, intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation; a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition -- to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand


"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri


"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams


"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France


"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke


"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology; it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant


"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville


"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis


"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis


"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis


"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon, but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant


"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand


"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal


"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.


"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible, and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus


"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814


"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated. This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944


"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News


"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas


"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero


"Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." -- François, duc de La Rochefoucauld


"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." -- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson


"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example." -- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic


"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower


"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance." --
H. W. Fowler


"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place." -- Kate Wilhelm


"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein


"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms


"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho


"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).


"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman


“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman


"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison


"Those who are free from common prejudices acquire others."
-- Napolean I of France -- Napoleon I of France


"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.


"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.


"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128


"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)


"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)


"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days


"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs


"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign


"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden


"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman



 

 
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit. He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.

The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cute panda. Don't you love pandas?

Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181

Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9

Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6

Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 20 sign-ups; 13 cancellations; Total= 7

This page best viewed by you.

Contents © 2001-2013 All rights reserved. Gary Farber. (The contents of e-mails to this email address of Gary Farber are subject to the possibility of being posted.)

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world


[Blogroll now far below the sea line! Dive, dive, dive!]


You Like Me, You Really Like Me

Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula


...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object. -- Hilzoy

...I think Gary Farber is a blogging god. -- P.Z. Myers, Pharyngula

...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow

‎"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere." -- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com

"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog." -- Gareth Porter

Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir

Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.

-- Hilzoy

Gary Farber gets it right....
-- James Joyner, Outside The Beltway

Once again, an amazing and illuminating post.
-- Michael Bérubé, Crooked Timber

I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings

Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow

Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit."
-- Jim Henley

...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong

Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross

Gary Farber is a straight shooter.
-- John Cole, Balloon Juice

I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber


Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged

I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow

One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com

One of my favorites....
-- Matt Welch

Favorite....
-- Virginia Postrel

Amygdala continues to have smart commentary on an incredible diversity of interesting links....
-- Judith Weiss

Amygdala has more interesting obscure links to more fascinating stuff that any other blog I read.
-- Judith Weiss, Kesher Talk

Gary's stuff is always good.
-- Meryl Yourish

...the level-headed Amygdala blog....
-- Geitner Simmons

The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes

...the all-knowing Gary Farber....
-- Edward Winkleman, Obsidian Wings

Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged

We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!

Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!

Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog


Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog


GARY FARBER IS MY AROUSAL CENTER. -- Justin Slotman

Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland

Recommended for the discerning reader.
-- Tim Blair

Gary Farber's great Amygdala blog.
-- Dr. Frank

Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott

Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit

My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal

If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.

Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks

I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes

Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this?
-- Natalie Solent

You nailed it... nice job."
-- James Lileks

Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit


Archives:
December 2001 January 2002 February 2002 March 2002 April 2002 May 2002 June 2002 July 2002 August 2002 September 2002 October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2009 December 2009 January 2010 February 2010 March 2010 April 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010 August 2010 September 2010 October 2010 November 2010 December 2010 January 2011 February 2011 March 2011 April 2011 May 2011 June 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 December 2011 January 2013


Blogroll is Always In Progress:

Roger Ailes
Alas, A Blog
AlterNet
The American Street
The Aristocrats
Avedon Carol
Between the Hammer and the Anvil
Lindsay Beyerstein
The Big Con
bjkeefe
CantBlogTooBusy The Center for American Progress
Chase me Ladies, I'm in the Cavalry
Chuckling
Doghouse Riley
Kevin Drum
elementropy
Eschaton
Fables of the Reconstruction
Gall and Gumption
Gin and Tacos
House of Substance
Hullabaloo
The Hunting of the Snark
If I Ran The Zoo
Lawyers, Guns & Money
Lotus: Surviving a Dark Time
Matters of Little Significance
Nancy Nall
Charlie Stross bastard.logic
Daniel Larison
Afro-Netizen
American Conservative
American Footprints
Andrew Sullivan
Angry Bear
Attackerman
Attempts
Balkinization
Balloon Juice
Beautiful Horizons
Bitch Ph.D.
Brad DeLong
Cato-at-liberty
Cogitamus
Crooked Timber
Cunning Realist
Daily Kos
Debate Link
Democracy Arsenal
Edge of the American West
Eschaton
Ezra Klein
Feministe
Glenn Greenwald
Governing.com: 13th Floor
Hit & Run
Hullabaloo
Juan Cole
Kevin Drum
Lawyers, Guns and Money
List Project (Helping Iraqis who worked with us get out)
Marc Lynch
Mark Kleiman
Katha Pollit
Market Square
Matthew Yglesias
Megan McArdle
Metro Green
Mightygodking
Newshoggers
Orcinus
Pam's House Blend
Pandagon
Paul Krugman
Pharyngula
Philosophy, et cetera
Radley Balko
Sadly, No!
Shakesville
slacktivist
Southern Appeal
Stephen Walt
Steve Clemons
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Taking It Outside
Talking Points Memo
TAPPED
The Poor Man
The Progressive Realist
The Sideshow
TPMCafe
U.S. Intellectual History
Unfogged
Unqualified Offerings
VetVoice
Volokh Conspiracy
Washington Monthly
William Easterly
Newsrack Blog
Ortho Bob
Pandagon
Pharyngula
The Poor Man
Prog Gold
Prose Before Hos
Ted Rall
The Raw Story
Elayne Riggs
Sadly, No!
Snarkmarket
TAPped
TBogg
Texas Liberal
Think Progress
3 Weird Sisters
Tristram Shandy
Washington Monthly
Ian Welsh
James Wolcott
World o' Crap
Matthew Yglesias
Buzz Machine
Daniel Larison
Rightwing Film Geek About Last Night
can we all just agree
Comics Curmudgeon
Dum Luk's
Glenn Kenny
Hoarder Museum Juanita Jean
Lance Mannion (Help Lance!
Last Words of the Executed
The Phil Nugent Experience
Postcards from Hell's Kitchen
Vanishing New York
a lovely promise
a web undone
alicublog
alt hippo
american street
city of brass
danger west
fact-esque
fierce urgency of now
get fisa right
great concavity
happening here
impeach them!
jensscholz.com
kathryn cramer
notes from the basement
sideshow
talking dog
uncertain principles
unqualified offerings
what do i know
balkinization
crooked timber emptywheel
ezra klein
Fact-esque
The F-Word
glenn greenwald
governmentality
hullabaloo
Lifehacker
schneier on security
ta-nehisi coates
talking points memo
tiny revolution
Roz Kaveney
Dave Ettlin
Henry Jenkins' Confessions of an Aca-Fan
Kathryn Cramer
Monkeys In My Pants
Macadamia
Pagan Prattle
As I Please
Ken MacLeod
Arthur Hlavaty
Kevin Maroney
MK Kare
Jack Heneghan
Dave Langford
Epicycle
Onyx Lynx Atrios
Demosthenes
Rittenhouse Review
Maxspeak
Public Nuisance
Scoobie Davis
MadKane
Nathan Newman
Whiskeyfire
Echidne Of The Snakes
First Draft
Corrente
Rising Hegemon
NTodd
Cab Drollery (Help Diane!
Hullabaloo
Southern Beale
The Kenosha Kid
Culture of Truth
Talk Left
Black Ag=Q< Report
Drug WarRant
Nieman Watchdog
Open Left
Meet the Bloggers
Dispatch from the Trenches
Frameshop
Crooks and Liars
LiberalOasis
Campaign for America's Future
Iraq Today
Daily Kos
Lefty Directory
MyDD
Infothought
Balkinization
News Hounds
The Brad Blog
Informed Comment
UN Dispatch
War and Piece
Glenn Greenwald
Schneier on Security
Newshoggers
Krugman
Jim Henley
Arthur Silber
Julian Sanchez
The Agitator
Balloon Juice
Wendy McElroy
Whoviating (LarryE)
Scott Horton
Tennessee Guerilla Women
Looking Glass
Charles Kuffner
Brad DeLong
Busy, Busy, Busy
Blah3
Norbizness
Oliver Willis
The Carpetbagger Report Shakesville
Firedoglake
Pandagon
Down With Tyranny
Professor B
Monkey Media Report
The Grumpy Forester
Majikthise
Uggabugga
Ian Welsh
Pacific Views
Alas
Booman Tribune
Matthew Yglesias
Skippy
The American Street
Slacktivist
Xymphora
Media Bloodhound
Liz Henry's Composite
Eccentricity
The Heretik
Arizona Eclectic
Sisyphus Shrugged
Interesting Times
Talking Dog
Liberal Desert
TBogg
Under the Lobsterscope
Seeing The Forest
Sean Paul Kelley's The Agonist
Orcinus
King of Zembla
Mark Kleiman
Liquid List
Elayne Riggs
Wampum
Skimble
No More Mr. Nice Blog
Fanatical Apathy
Blue Gal
Linkmeister
Mark Evanier
Roger Ailes
Scratchings
Suburban Guerrilla (Help Susie with money!)
BadAttitudes
Peevish
The Mahablog
Brilliant at Breakfast
The Group News Blog Scrutiny Hooligans
Respectful of Otters
Max Blumenthal
Two Glasses
Feministing
Running Scared
Sadly, No!
WTF Is It Now?
Attytood
William K. Wolfrum
Rox Populi
Alicublog
Angry Bear
Crooked Timber
No Capital
Alternative Hippo
Newsrack
The Rude Pundit
Ezra Klein
Trish Wilson's Blog Jon Swift, RIP
Jeremy Scahill Mercury Rising
Cup 0' Joe
Fact-esque
Lance Mannion (Help Lance!)
Lawyers, Guns and Money
Feministe SF
Agitprop
Progressive Gold
PSoTD
Paperwight's Fairshot
Biomes Blog
Progressive Blog Digest
A Tiny Revolution
Yellow Doggerel Democrat
Pros Before Hos
Michael Bérubé
Notes From Underground
Bob Geiger
AintNoBadDude
StoutDem
Adam Magazine
Reptile Wisdom
Steve Gilliard archives
The Poor Man
Neal Pollack
Jesus' General
Fafblog
Running Scared
Paul Krugman
Hendrik Hertzberg
Murray Waas
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Kevin Drum @ MoJo
Political Animal
The Big Con (Rick Perlstein)
Talking Points
Altercation
Dan Perkins
Conason
Tapped
TomPaine weblog
MoJo Blog
Sirotablog
Jim Hightower
Chris Floyd
*
Michaelangelo Signorile
Naomi Klein
James Wolcott
Bear Left
Lean Left
Left i
The Left Coaster
Upper Left
Here's What's Left
Left in the West Daily Howler
Common Dreams
Buzzflash
Smirking Chimp
TomPaine
Intervention
Moose & Squirrel
Make Them Accountable
Failure is Impossible
Ampol
White Rose Society
Velvet Revolution
Cursor
Political Strategy
The Daou Report
Meryl Yourish
Memeorandum
Peek
IceRocket
Blogpulse
Technorati
Blogwise Paul Krugman
Gene Lyons (or)
Joe Conason
Engadget
Gizmodo
SFNovelists
Boing!Boing!
Futurismic
Sadly, no!
Walter Jon Williams
Stiftung Leo Strauss
Crooked Timber
Gordon's Notes (John Gordon)
Bruce Sterling
Ian McDonald
Antick Musings (Andrew Wheeler)
I, Cringely
I Blame The Patriarchy
LawClanger (Simon Bradshaw)
Carrie Vaughn
The Sideshow (Avedon Carol)
This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow)
Jesus's General
Mick Farren
Dave Clements
Early days of a Better Nation (Ken MacLeod)
Terra Nova
Whatever (John Scalzi)
Michael Swanwick
GNXP
Demography Matters
Justine Larbalestier
The Law west of Ealing Broadway
Inspector Gadget
The Yorkshire Ranter
Newshoggers
Kung Fu Monkey
Pagan Prattle
Gwyneth Jones
Brain Windows
Informed Comment: Global Affairs
RBN Exploits
Progressive Gold
Kathryn Cramer
Halfway down the Danube
Fistful of Euros
Orcinus
Shrillblog
Joe Conason
Frankenstein Journal (Chris Lawson)
The Panda's Thumb
Martin Wisse
Wave Without a Shore
Kuro5hin
Scrivener's Error
Advogato
Talking Points Memo
The Register
Plagiarism Today
Cryptome
Juan Cole: Informed comment
Global Guerillas (John Robb)
Information Warfare Monitor
Shadow of the Hegemon (Demosthenes)
Simon Bisson's Journal
Econospeak
Ethan Zuckerman
MetaFilter
NTKnow
Encyclopaedia Astronautica
Fafblog
Warren Ellis
Sociopath World
Brad DeLong
Hullabaloo (Digby)
Jeff Vail
Jamais Cascio
Rebecca's Pocket (Rebecca Blood)
Mark Safranski
Dan Drake
Geoffrey Wiseman
Libby Spencer of The Impolitc
Zeno is always HalfWay There
Aaron Krager may Have A Point
Scholars & Rogues
Blog Sisters
Better Things to Waste Your Time On
Taking Barack To The Movies
Not An Accident: Peace To All
Scott McLoud
The Secret Recipe Blog
Terri Windling's The Drawing Board
Damn Dirty Hippies Are Everywhere
Progressive PST
Ryan Harvey's Even If Your Voice Shakes
Matthew Cheney's The Mumpsimus
Jazz From Hell
The Angry Black Woman
Computational Legal Studies
Laure lives at Apt. 11D
Vylar Kaftan
Spocko's Brain
bastard.logic
Twistedchick's Wind in the trees
Greg Palast
Jeff VanderMeer has Ecstatic Days
Nadyalec Hijazi has Velvet Migrations
Emily Jiang is Writing with Iceberg in Tow
Global Voices Online
Ethan Siegel Starts With A Bang
Don Herron goes Up And Down These Mean Streets
Punditry Nation
Frank Denton still has a Rogue Raven
Geri Sullivan is On The Funway
Emily L. Hauser – In My Head
The League of Ordinary Gentlemen
Carl Brandon Society
John Hodgman
PsyPost
Streetsblog San Francisco
William Cronon is a Scholar As Citizen
SourceWatch
Right Wing Watch
Democracy For America
Hoyden About Town
Bernard Avishai Dot Com
CrunchGear
RealTimeSatelliteTracking &ISS
Rachel Holmen's Maple Leaf Rag
SF Signal
Tachyon - Saving the World One Good Book at a Time
The Duck Of Minerva
Abu Muqawama
Abi Sutherland's Noise2Signal
Clarisse Thorn
Whirled View
Adam Serwer
Stuff White People Like
LiberalLand
Berkeley Today
Berkeleyside
The Disorder Of Things
Howling Curmudgeons
The Gun is fired by C. J. Chivers
Raven Brooks's Coffee Is For Closers
Spin Your Web
paidcontent.org
More Red Ink
infotropism
Rickety Contrivances Of Doing Good
Brad Ideas
Asking The Wrong Questions
Ambling along the Aqueduct
Committee To Protect Journalists
The Bloggess
Ultraphyte


People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost, Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry, Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny. It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out. And She of whom I must write someday.










Amygdala
 
Sunday, April 10, 2011
 
POTTERY BARN LIBYA, PT 2: ANTHONY CORDESMAN, ONE MAN ARMY, OR GIVE PEACE A CHANCE?


Part 1 on Amygdala!

In Pottery Barn Libya, Part 1 (or do you prefer ObWi?), I began explaining the situation in Libya.  Now, more, and what America and NATO should do.

The tactical day to day sway of battle does not matter, save to those brutally slaughtered in it, and suffering from itSuffering greatly.

What matters are the choices America and Europe make.

Naturally, Joe Lieberman and John McCain want bombs away, all-out regime change.

Nothing makes John McCain happier: Back on the Battlefield: How the Libya debate snapped John McCain out of his 2008 funk—and into a fresh fight with Obama.

John McCain has never met a country he wouldn't like to bomb:
[...]
McCain, who insists on visiting Iraq and Afghanistan twice a year, often favors a muscular approach to projecting U.S. military power but is wary of entanglements with no exit strategy. The old aviator, who had both arms repeatedly broken in a Hanoi prison camp, says that experience has “also given me a sense of caution in light of our failure in Vietnam.” While McCain opposed the U.S. military actions in Lebanon and Somalia, he is sympathetic to humanitarian missions—and would even consider sending troops to the war-torn Ivory Coast if someone could “tell me how we stop what’s going on.”
Pressed on when the United States should intervene in other countries, McCain sketches an expansive doctrine that turns on practicality: American forces must be able to “beneficially affect the situation” and avoid “an outcome which would be offensive to our fundamental -principles—whether it’s 1,000 people slaughtered or 8,000…If there’s a massacre or ethnic cleansing and we are able to prevent it, I think the United States should act.”
McCain: bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran.



Bombs away.

"There will be other wars."

McCain: "We are all Georgians now."

Tough guy Anthony Cordesman naturally wants to fight.  Unsurprisingly, he used to be national security assistant to Senator John McCain.

Cordesman, who has, see previous links, always been deeply wired into the militarist networks of the Washington, D.C. village of talking heads and millionaire journalism, has a (surprise!) widely-quoted piece advocating we (surprise!) go all in.

Let's not.

 Where is Cordesman cited authoritatively?  The Los Angeles Times
[...]
"The truth is, time isn't on anybody's side yet," said Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "If Kadafi can prevent the east from getting oil, he can consolidate power and outwait the rebels."
Over time, the world might lose its enthusiasm for challenging Kadafi. "Interest flags, support flags and you don't get the military backing," Cordesman said.
ABC News.

Senator Lindsay Graham also wants to attack, of course:
[...] "The idea that the AC-130s and the A-10s and American air power is grounded unless the place goes to hell is just so unnerving that I can't express it adequately," said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C. "The only thing I would ask is, please reconsider that."
Cordesman is in the Christian Science Monitor:
[...]
“From a Libyan viewpoint, dragging the country into a long political and economic crisis, and an extended low-level conflict that devastates populated areas, the net humanitarian cost will be higher than fully backing the rebels, with air power and covert arms and training,” writes Anthony Cordesman, national security expert at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a commentary Wednesday on the CSIS website.
A middle path between regime change and the status quo?

Mr. Cordesman says that the international political environment precludes the US, as it does NATO, from openly adopting “regime change” as its Libya policy. But he says that, given the alternative of an “unstable stalemate” in which civilians could suffer “for months or years,” something he calls a “quietly escalating regime kill” is the best option.
Among the essential elements of such a policy would be stepped-up airstrikes on Qaddafi forces and weapons, arming the rebels, sending in teams of Special Forces to guide coalition airstrikes (at Qaddafi assets and away from civilian populations), and fully enforcing United Nations sanctions to deny Qaddafi funds and supplies.
Cordesman acknowledges that Obama may have already approved some steps covertly. Indeed, administration officials quietly confirmed last week that the president OK’d dispatching CIA operatives to Libya to provide intelligence on the rebels and to help guide airstrikes.
The intel on the rebels – who they are and to what degree, if any, they are infiltrated by elements of Al Qaeda – will form the basis for Obama’s next important decision concerning Libya: whether or not to arm the rebels, either directly or through third parties.
Time's Swampland:
[...] Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, said Wednesday that "essentially, the no-fly zone is not going to succeed." [lots more]
Associated Press:
[...]
"The fact is, day by day, we're going to confront the reality that a no-fly zone is probably a misnomer," said Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "If this structure can't stop Gadhafi's ground forces, then it fails."
"If we want to basically get rid of the regime, then we have to go much further and attack Gadhafi's centers of power and land targets," Cordesman said.
USA Today. Bloomberg NewsMS-NBC.

You name a mainstream media outlet, and they've all gotten Tony Cordesman's memo:
Libya: “No Fly” to “Unstable Stalemate” or “Regime Kill?”

That's right, you have three guesses which he's for.  Who wants to be a winner?

And Tony is ready with some good quotes, and is in everyone's rolodex.

Cordesman is the One Man Army Corps.

OMAC6

Not particularly re-imagined.

Let's go back to Jason Pack, from Pottery Barn Libya, Part 1, and look further at who these rebels are.
The next most organized units are those composed of bearded men with Islamist leanings. These fighters are likely to be from certain cities -- most famously Darnah -- and of certain backgrounds, such as unemployed men with university degrees. Some have attended Salafi seminaries; a smaller proportion have trained together secretly in Libya. A minuscule inner core fought in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and created the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) upon their return to Libya in the early 1990s. That group's raison d'être was to violently overthrow Qaddafi. After failed putsch attempts at the end of the 1990s, the Libyan state effectively crushed and co-opted the LIFG during the 2000s. Over the last five years, prominent former LIFG leaders have renounced their previous ties to al Qaeda and articulated an innovative anti-extremist Islamic theology. As the Wall Street Journal's Charles Levinson, who has met with prominent former LIFG elites in Darnah, has reported, "Islamist leaders and their contingent of followers represent a relatively small minority within the rebel cause. They have served the rebels' secular leadership with little friction. Their discipline and fighting experience is badly needed by the rebels' ragtag army."
Although hard-core Islamists are likely to remain bit players politically in the rebel movement, it would be unrealistic to expect Islam not to play a significant role in post-Qaddafi Libya. Much of eastern Libya remains traditional and religiously conservative. Adherence to the Senussi Sufi order served as the defining social, religious, and political lodestar of the Cyrenaicans from the mid-19th century until 1969, after which point Qaddafi suppressed them. Indeed, because Qaddafi excluded all conservative Muslim sensibilities from having a say in politics after 1969, Muslim groups must be granted their rightful seat at the table from now on.
Islam has always served to unite disparate tribal, social, and regional groupings in Libya. In Qaddafi's wake, assuming he falls, we can expect moderate Islam to be a key rhetorical factor in both popular discourse and politics. This should not frighten Western observers, as the use of Islam as a uniting, stabilizing factor will be a bane to jihadi recruitment efforts.
Should we worry about those "al Qaeda flickers"?  Ever-alarmist Con Coughlin inevitably thinks so! (Coughlin has always been a mouthpiece for rightwing elements of MI6.)

Certainly Qadaffi keeps claiming we should but there's little evidence, as David Zucchino reports: Rebels in Libya insist they're no fans of Al Qaeda.
Col. Moammar Kadafi has depicted this coastal city of squat concrete homes and graceful blue harbor as the staging ground for an Al Qaeda takeover of Libya.
A radical Islamic caliphate, Kadafi claims, is based in Derna, inside rebel-held eastern Libya, and is directing the uprising against him.
That characterization draws a belly laugh from Mabrouk Salama, an Irish-educated chemistry professor who serves on the rebel leadership council in Derna.
"Al Qaeda? Here? Ha!" Salama said, shaking his head. "It's just Kadafi's way of trying to scare America."
[...]
It is impossible for an outsider to discern the motives, intrigues or heartfelt beliefs of Libyans in cities like Derna, which was sealed off from the outside world for four decades under Kadafi. But appearances, at least, do not suggest a deep Al Qaeda presence here.
Zahi Mogherbi, a retired political science professor in Benghazi who wrote a research paper on radical Islamic influences in Libya, said 63 men from Derna and 23 from Benghazi were among 120 Libyans who went to Iraq in 2006 and '07. Calling those numbers "fairly insignificant" in a nation of 6.5 million, Mogherbi said radical Islam had not taken root in Derna or anywhere else in eastern Libya.
[...]
"I have not seen any doctrinal movement to espouse any radical brand of Islam," he said, describing Derna as moderate and progressive by Arab standards.
"It would not be tolerated," Mogherbi said. "The people are rebelling against a dictatorship. They will not substitute this dictatorship for a radical Islamic dictatorship."
Leaders of the 15-member opposition council here say that only about half the local men who went to Iraq even survived the war, and that the rest now support the rebellion against Kadafi. Few actually had contact with Al Qaeda or returned bent on radicalizing Libya, they say.
"They're the same as us: revolutionaries who want to get rid of Kadafi and bring democracy and freedom to Libya," said Moftah Mahkrez, a member of the Derna opposition council. "This is Libya, not Afghanistan."
Anis Mahkrez, the friend and follower of Hasadi, said Al Qaeda's philosophy was alien to Libya and had little appeal here. He said Hasadi had joined the fight to depose Kadafi and that he reported to the rebel council.
[...]
Rebel leaders here hardly look or sound like Al Qaeda operatives.
Salama, who was jailed under Kadafi and said he holds a doctorate from the University of Dublin, was dressed in a pinstriped business suit. Except for a neatly clipped mustache, he was clean-shaven.
Moftah Mahkrez, 44, a businessman, wore a blue blazer and designer jeans. Brother Anis, 48, who was jailed for five years by the Kadafi regime, wore a stylish black tracksuit.
Anis was once a well-known soccer player. Photos of the brothers in soccer uniforms adorn the home they share in downtown Derna.
Anis nodded vigorously when his brother said he and fellow council members controlled the Hasadi militia that includes Anis.
"My brother is loyal to football, not Al Qaeda," Moftah said.
Moftah described extremists who went to Iraq as poorly educated young men weary of living in Kadafi's police state. "Now they need pencils and paper, not Kalashnikovs" rifles, he said.
Mogherbi, the Benghazi professor who advises the rebel national council, said radical Islam provided a natural outlet for young men living under Kadafi's dictatorship.
"Their radicalization was a reflection of their antagonism toward the Kadafi regime and his neglect of the east," Mogherbi said. "Now that Kadafi no longer controls the east, there is no appeal in this radical form of Islam."
In Senate testimony last week, Navy Adm. James Stavridis, commander of NATO forces, described "flickers in the intelligence of potential Al Qaeda, Hezbollah" influence in Libya. But he said there was no evidence of "significant Al Qaeda presence or any other terrorist presence."
In Benghazi, the rebels' political leadership is dominated by Western-educated lawyers, doctors, businessmen and academics, along with several former Kadafi ministers or diplomats.
Mustafa Gheriani, a rebel spokesman who earned a master's degree from Western Michigan University, says Al Qaeda will try to take advantage of the chaos in Libya. Western-led airstrikes and missile attacks against Kadafi's forces are a bulwark against extremist overtures to young Libyan men, he said recently.
But that could change if U.S. and Western support fades, Gheriani warned. Rebel fighters might be persuaded that radical Islam is the best way to overthrow Kadafi, he said.
"They would align with the devil to get rid of this guy," Gheriani said.
Reasons for concern?  Of course.  Alarm?  Not for now.

Jason Pack:
In any case, the Islamists, like the army defectors, don't comprise the bulk of rebel fighters. The most prevalent form of unit organization is ad hoc: a few brothers or friends sharing gas money, a few rifles, a rebel flag, and a pickup truck. Occasionally, whole villages or subsections of tribes have joined the rebels as a semicoherent unit. Yet even then, village headmen or tribal sheikhs do not appear to be leading or orchestrating the fighting. In fact, military leadership at the front, inasmuch as it exists, is entirely spontaneous. In late March, for example, the top military brass in Benghazi strongly advised the fighters not to push past Ajdabiya when it was retaken due to coalition airstrikes. The fighters did not obey orders and were quickly routed by Qaddafi's counterattacks.
Indeed, it is nearly impossible to imagine that the revolutionaries can defeat Qaddafi by military force alone. Lacking an effective chain of command or training, they have not yet learned to employ guerrilla tactics, siege tactics, or any formal coordinated military maneuvers. Arming the rebels with more sophisticated munitions will not help them congeal into a coherent fighting force. Training them might help, but it would take too much time.
The best hope for the rebels is that the Qaddafi regime crumbles from within -- a distinct possibility as key defections, daily hardships in Tripoli under international siege, and Qaddafi's diplomatic blunders all progressively demoralize his supporters. So far, coalition air power has been crucial in keeping the rebels alive long enough that Qaddafi's forces may self-destruct. But merely preventing slaughter and a rebel defeat is not enough. Now that the no-fly zone has fulfilled its key humanitarian and strategic mission, it is time for the coalition to shift gears. As Oliver Miles, former British ambassador to Libya, puts it, "Precisely because it is unlikely that the rebels will be able to militarily defeat Qaddafi even with increased coalition air support or more arms, Western and Arab countries can best help the rebels through politics, diplomacy, and propaganda -- all of which, if employed with savoir-faire, may tip the scales away from Qaddafi."
Helping the rebel political leaders effectively requires understanding who they are and how the Libyan uprising began. [...]
Exactly.
[...]
Youth activists were quickly joined by lawyers, judges, local administrators, and technocrats who opposed Qaddafi's repressive response to the protests. Many of these individuals were previously government officials or consultants who had become increasingly disillusioned by the failure of Libyan détente with the West to produce genuine political reform at home.
On Feb. 27, the most prominent among them banded together in Benghazi to form the Transitional National Council (TNC). The TNC has gained legitimacy as grassroots committees have sprung up across eastern Libya to select local town notables, who have in turn endorsed the TNC.
(Ironically, this practice is akin to Qaddafi's ideology of "direct democracy" with its imperative for the creation of local Basic People's Congresses.) Thus, what began as a youth revolt has been taken over by reformist regime technocrats and defected diplomats, who are the only groups capable of representing the rebels to the outside world.
The TNC top leadership has extensive experience interfacing with Western governments and the international business community. The rest of its members were deliberately chosen to represent the various major factions of the opposition.
It includes relatives of the former Libyan king, human rights lawyers, former Qaddafi intimates upset with the slow pace of reforms, conservative Muslims who are against al Qaeda, pro-Western businessmen, technocrats with American Ph.D.s, and representatives for women and youth.[...]
Revolutions eat their young.  Ask Alexander Kerensky, say. Look to the French Reign of Terror.

 Potential problems?  Various:
One potential shortcoming of the rebels' current political structure is its heavily Cyrenaican, Arab, and elite makeup. If the rebels succeed in overthrowing Qaddafi, they will face enormous pressure to rapidly incorporate new players from western Libya, the Libyan diaspora, and the Berber, Tuareg, and Tabu ethnic groups. Simultaneously, they would have to focus on the social and economic issues that concern the youth and the unemployed, not merely those of reformist technocrats. Most crucially, after a hypothetical rebel victory the predominantly Cyrenaican fighters will no doubt clamor for their place in the sun as the saviors of Libya. It would be highly inappropriate for outside powers to attempt to micromanage or pre-empt the delicate evolution of the representative structure for the new Libya.
Exactly.  We don't want to own the Pottery Barn of Libya.  We can't try another Paul Bremer.  The last one didn't work out too well.

We're still in Afghanistan, still mired, and things are getting worse.

Two hours ago in Iraq: "Iraqi officials: 6 killed in bombings, assassinations in Baghdad."

Today: Hardline Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr rallied thousands of followers Saturday. 

Their message: United States civilians as well as troops must leave by the end of the year.
Hardline Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr mobilized tens of thousands of followers Saturday, using the anniversary of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime to issue a warning to American civilians as well as soldiers that it was time to go.
[...]
Far from Baghdad's Firdous Square, where US Marines helped Iraqis bring down Saddam Hussein’s statue in 2003, the cleric’s supporters marched from Sadr City to Mustansiriya Square, near a major university in northeast Baghdad.
Black smoke rose from the square from the burning American flags, and protesters set up a grisly display of Americans in business suits being burned in cages.
“We are time bombs,” the protesters chanted between a choreographed wave of young men dressed in the satin colors of Iraq's flag.
[...]
Asked whether that meant that the Sadrists were opposed to even a US diplomatic mission here if US forces were gone, several officials said the Sadr movement opposed any expansion of the US civilian presence here and considered the embassy the headquarters for the occupation.
US Ambassador James Jeffrey told reporters April 1 that the embassy, already the biggest in the world, planned to double in size next year to 18,000 personnel. That would include security, support staff, and diplomatic offices outside of Baghdad.
Sadr ended his message by calling on all his followers who could to register at the political party’s offices to engage in an open-ended protest until the Americans left.
Most Iraqis are deeply cynical about US intentions here.
“Iraq is a very rich country,” said Sabah al-Amiri, a government employee who came out to the protest. “Logically, I can’t believe the Americans will leave and ignore these interests easily.”
In the complex political climate here, the countdown for US forces to exit Iraq has placed the United States in a bind.
How many more countries can we afford to occupy?  How many more Muslim lands do we want to invade?

Libya? Pack:
Amid reports that personality clashes may be enveloping the top TNC leadership, I remain reasonably hopeful that the TNC will be able to successfully incorporate most elements of Libyan society and that political infighting and factionalism can be kept to normal levels. Libya is an artificial colonial creation. But unlike other colonial entities, it lacks the social fissures and historical grievances that have led to sectarian or ethnic violence in places like Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The idea that a civil war might ensue between east and west after Qaddafi's departure is overly pessimistic.
Paradoxically, as Qaddafi repressed so many of Libya's social groups other than the Qadhadhfa and Magarha tribes, it is foreseeable that all the former out-groups will be able to strike a rough consensus about building a post-Qaddafi Libya.
The rebels appear to be hard at work in paving the way for this new Libya.
They insist that they have organized secret cells in the country's west, a plausible claim given Qaddafi's evident unpopularity in towns like Misrata, Zintan, and Zawiyah. And even though tribesmen of the Magarha and Qadhadhfa will probably stick by Qaddafi and fight on until the end, other more urban and technocratic pillars of the regime are likely to wither if the major Arab and Western players give the TNC more effective support.
But that support should primarily be political, not military in nature. The Western and Arab allies are beginning to recognize this, yet more sophisticated and high-level efforts are urgently needed. Prominent defectors like Moussa Koussa should be harnessed for all their propaganda value and asked to speak out against Qaddafi on Arabic satellite TV. Additionally, the coalition could help rebel leaders voice their cause to their potential comrades in Qaddafi-controlled western Libya. Qatar has already set up a satellite channel for the rebels; more countries should give them airtime, funding, and more diplomatic support. French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- who has recognized the TNC as the legitimate government of all of Libya and seems the most politically committed of Western leaders -- could extend another invitation to Mahmoud Jibril, the rebels' de facto foreign minister, this time to the Élysée Palace, granting him international prestige and a platform to ask for more specific assistance.
Moral power, not firepower, is what will ultimately defeat Qaddafi. The fighters are the heart and soul of the Libyan revolt, but they will never be able to lead it. Savvy diplomatic support and a little bit of good fortune could very well produce a tipping point over the next weeks or months. Until then, the international community must not take its eye off the ball as other crises emerge in the Arab world or the situation on the ground appears to become stalemated. Libya's future depends on it.
If we "Regime Kill," we're in the same damn place we are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And Obama has a mini-AUMF of his own from his Office Of Legal Counsel.  Obama has accomplished little in dismantling the legal regime of George W. Bush, even if John Yoo isn't around to advocate some nice boy's testicle-crushing.

 Moreover, Libya is awash in arms. Peter Bouckaert warns:
[...]
Libyans are extraordinarily welcoming people, and they don't seem to mind when I poke my nose into the backs of the battle-ready pickups at the front line and snap some pictures of the weapons and munitions the rebels are carrying. Even at the military bases and weapon depots under rebel control, a few words of introduction normally led to a warm welcome and a tour of the facilities. That is, if there is anyone guarding the facilities in the first place. When I went to the main military weapons depot in the contested town of Ajdabiya on March 27, just after Qaddafi's forces had fled the city and rebels were still busy celebrating their victory, I had the entire base and its 35 munitions bunkers, stacked to the rafters with weapons, all to myself for several hours.
What we found was shocking. Qaddafi's weapon stocks far exceeded what we saw in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein; some of the weapons, such as the surface-to-air missiles capable of downing a civilian aircraft, now floating around freely in eastern Libya are giving security officials around the world sleepless nights. After I began circulating some of the pictures I had taken, I began getting anxious calls from arms-control officials, asking for more details about what I had seen. There is good cause for U.S. and European officials to worry -- there are rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-air missiles, and artillery shells full of explosives that can easily be refashioned into car bombs.
[...]
Among the weapons of greatest concern to Western security officials is the SA-7 "Grail" surface-to-air missile, a Soviet-designed, heat-seeking, shoulder-launched missile designed specifically to shoot down low-flying planes. The SA-7 -- basically a long green tube with the missile inside -- belongs to a family of weapons known as man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS. Although these weapons date back to the 1960s, they remain extremely deadly, especially against civilian planes without defense systems. Two SA-7 missiles were fired by al Qaeda operatives at an Israeli chartered Boeing 757 during a November 2002 attack in Mombasa, Kenya, narrowly missing the plane. During the past month and a half, we have seen literally hundreds of SA-7s floating around freely in eastern Libya. The SA-7s require assembly with a trigger mechanism and a battery cooling pack attached to the launch tube, and many of the launch tubes we saw were unassembled. However, some of the SA-7s had been fully assembled.
While the SA-7s have caused the greatest alarm among Western security experts, the rest of Qaddafi's extensive arsenal is nothing to laugh at. We found many varieties of guided anti-tank missiles, including the advanced laser-guided AT-14 "Spriggan" (known in Russia as the Kornet), which was reportedly used by Gaza-based militants one day ago in an attack on a school bus in southern Israel that critically injured a teenager. The Spriggan also served as one of Hezbollah's most effective weapons against Israeli tanks in the 2006 Lebanon war. And there are tens of thousands of some of the nastiest anti-tank mines in the world in Qaddafi's warehouses -- nasty because they are made mostly out of hard-to-detect plastic and can be armed with an anti-lifting device that causes the mine to explode when attempts are made to remove it from the ground.
We also found thousands of 122-mm "Grad" rockets, which are used in a launcher that fires salvos of 40 rockets at one go and are capable of sowing destruction up to 40 miles away. The Grads were the Afghan mujahideen's weapon of choice during their deadly civil war in the early 1990s following the Soviet withdrawal -- they used these rockets to reduce Kabul to rubble. Eastern Libya is also home to tens of thousands of rocket-propelled grenade launchers, which are powerful enough to blow up a tank or punch a hole in a concrete building. We found tens of thousands of artillery, tank, and howitzer shells of various calibers, all loaded with high explosives easily convertible into car or roadside bombs. We even found HESH (high-explosive squash-head) shells, which are filled with plastic explosives  -- a dangerous tool in the hands of terrorist groups.
The dangers we saw were not limited to the unguarded stockpiles of weapons. There are vast amounts of abandoned munitions and unexploded ordnance everywhere on the constantly shifting front lines along the coastal highway in eastern Libya. The recent airstrikes by international coalition forces on Libyan government military targets have added to the battlefield debris, leaving behind destroyed ammunition, vehicles, tanks, Grad launchers, and artillery pieces, often still loaded with munitions. Families, often with their children, have been visiting some of these strike sites, taking away potentially deadly mementos. Qaddafi's forces have added to the dangers by laying new minefields -- we discovered two such fields, containing dozens of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, in Ajdabiya after pro-regime forces withdrew. Who knows how many more such minefields have been laid, only to be discovered when someone steps or drives over these concealed hazards?
Libya is a minefield.

If America haplessly wanders into it, we'll have more dead friends, brothers, sisters, parents, children.

None of us, Libyans, Americans, Europeans, Africans, anyone, should have to face that.

Funerals are not fun.

Let's not have more than we need to, and let's not say we did.

The White House is reportedly struggling to form policy.

We have Marines Gearing Up For Deployment Off Libyan Coast.

There was no likely bloodbath prevented in Benghazi.

Alan J. Kuperman proposes Five Principles:
•Do not intervene on humanitarian grounds in ways that benefit rebels unless the state's retaliation is grossly disproportionate. This policy discourages both rebel provocation and state reprisals against civilians. In Libya, we should intervene no further unless Gadhafi's forces massacre civilians.
•Deliver purely humanitarian aid — food, water, sanitation, shelter, medical care — in ways that minimize the benefit to rebels. The United States admirably is delivering supplies to Libyan refugees across the border in Tunisia and Egypt. But we should ensure that relief sites do not become rear bases for Libya's rebels. If local governments are unwilling to patrol the refugee encampments, we should organize multilateral policing.
•Expend substantial resources to persuade states to address the legitimate grievances of non-violent domestic groups. Ironically, Obama has applied little pressure on Yemen and Bahrain, which slaughtered peaceful protesters, but he bombed Libya for responding to armed rebels. This sends precisely the wrong message to the Arab street: If you want U.S. support, resort to violence.
•Do not coerce regime change or surrender of sovereignty unless also taking precautions against violent backlash — such as golden parachutes, power-sharing, or preventive military intervention. If the White House insists on Gadhafi's departure, it should guarantee asylum for him and a continuing share of power for his senior officials and allied tribes. Simply demanding regime change could drive him to genocidal violence as a last resort, while the international community lacks the will for a preventive deployment of ground troops.
•Do not falsely claim "humanitarian" grounds for intervention driven by other objectives. If Obama is intervening because of Gadhafi's past misdeeds, rather than recent humanitarian offenses, he should say so publicly. Otherwise, the White House encourages further rebellions that aim to lure U.S. intervention by provoking retaliation.
Let's follow those.  America needs to break its addiction to war.  There is little enthusiasm in America for another war.  The rebels are confused at best.

Jacob Zuma says that Gaddafi has accepted the African Union cease-fire proposal.  Zuma claims optimism.
[...]
Zuma, who led a five-strong African Union (AU) delegation to the Libyan capital, said he was optimistic that a settlement would be reached. The delegation, minus Zuma, who was leaving Libya on Sunday night, will travel to Benghazi today to present the plan to the rebel opposition leadership.
Referring to officials of the regime, Zuma told reporters inside Gaddafi's compound at Bab al-Azizia that "the brother leader delegation has accepted the roadmap as presented by us". He also called on Nato to stop airstrikes on Libyan military targets "to give a ceasefire a chance".
Asked about the prospects of a deal, Zuma said: "I am optimistic."
The AU proposal is thought to centre on a negotiated political settlement between the Libyan regime and the rebel opposition, but no details have been disclosed.
However, opposition forces insist they will not consider any political deal that involves Gaddafi or members of his family retaining power.
Proposals put forward by the regime so far have included Gaddafi or one of his sons overseeing political change in Libya. It is far from clear how this gap could be bridged.
"The delegation ... will be proceeding to meet the other party, to talk to everybody and present a political solution to the problem in Libya," Zuma said.
"We also ... are making a call on Nato to cease the bombings to allow and to give a ceasefire a chance."
The AU delegation, consisting of the presidents of South Africa, Congo-Brazzaville, Mali, and Mauritania, plus Uganda's foreign minister, landed at Tripoli's Mitiga airport after Nato gave permission for their aircraft to enter Libyan airspace. The planes were the first to land in Tripoli since the international coalition imposed a no-fly zone over the country more than two weeks ago.
Should the U.S. refuse all military options?  No.  Should we remove all air assets and send them home?  No.  We need leverage.  There's no place for romanticization in peace and war.  We need to be hard-headed, and sometimes people need to be killed so that others may live.  Sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

There may be a role for military aid, overt or covert.  There are, as President Obama has stated, many who can do that.  There may be a role for future military involvement by American air power in Libya.

There are many possibilities.  I am not a seer.  I don't know what will happen.  I don't know for sure what's best.  The way to fewer deaths and less suffering is often unclear.

But, first: do no harm.  Should the argument by OMAC Cordesman for striking hard to kill the head of the snake be listened to?  Yes. Arguments should always be weighed and considered.

All I am saying, for now, is simply: let's give peace a chance.



Just give it a chance.

We can say:
[War] is instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands! But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers ... but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill - today!
We can always bomb the crap out of Libyans next week.  They'll still be there. Tomorrow we may be "needing" to bomb rebels.

Our policy has been proclaimed to be:
[...] that Muammar Qaddafi is no longer fit to lead and should leave power.  And we are obviously pursuing a number of different means, non-lethal means, non-military means, to help bring that about, to pressure Qaddafi, to isolate him, and to create an environment where the Libyan people hopefully will be able to create their own future with the leaders that they deserve and that they pick.  And that's the endgame that we envision.
Let's try not killing today, and giving peace a chance.

Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings

UPDATE, April 11th, 2011, 1:08 p.m. PST: Just lost another $50 subscriber moments ago, and keep losing subscribers as I'm on fewer and fewer blogrolls, get fewer and fewer links, and I'm rather hoping not to have to do another fund-raising post again, but... links appreciated, blogrolling appreciated, subscriptions unbelievably appreciated -- see left sidebar for how to subscribe or donate.  Thanks!

Also, C. J. Chivers gives a terrific example of how Libya being awash in weapons results in absurd adaptions with danger to all -- in this case, the mutating by rebels of air-to-ground rocket pods onto pickup trucks.

Imagine this war lasting a couple of years, or even six months, and more and more of Qaddafi's weapons stores being grabbed up, a la Iraq, and used by both sides (which may yet splinter into further factions, keep in mind!  And then who are we fighting for, exactly?)!  Libyan Road Warrior, Redux.  And More Photographs From Eastern Libya.


4/10/2011 06:02:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | | 0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Bookmark and Share



 
This page is powered by Blogger.



Visitor Map
<