This whole humanitarian intervention is going to end up just swell, huh?
Libya uprising: Libyan rebels appear to take leaf from Moammar Kadafi’s playbook - latimes.com
Not even a week into our war on Libya, the White House has already peppered Americans with a handful of falsehoods, equivocations and misleading statements.
On Tuesday, for instance, Obama was asked by Spanish-language Univision about an “exit strategy” from Libya. “The exit strategy,” Obama said, “will be executed this week — in the sense that we will be pulling back from our much more active efforts to shape the environment. We will still be in a support role. We will be supplying jamming, intelligence and other assets unique to us.”
It depends on what the meaning of “exit” is, I guess. ABC News White House reporter Jake Tapper responded to Obama’s word games: “Planes in the air? Ships in the Mediterranean? Intelligence being provided? Doesn’t sound like an exit strategy at all.” But it was a typical Obama play of redefining words to mean something they have never meant before.
According to news accounts, Samantha Power was one of the leading Obama administration advocates of US intervention in Libya.
Here’s what I wrote about Power back in 2005. As it turns out, there are several inaccuracies in the original. For instance, I think I assumed she was an undergraduate when she was really a law student. Also, I might not have even been in college at the time. I kept dropping out in the 1990s, and it gets hard to keep track of whether I was a student, a drifter, or a political operative at any given time.
My first reaction to seeing Samantha Power’s comment in the New Yorker on John Bolton’s appointment as ambassador to the United Nations was to recall that she was pretty cute when we were in college together. She wasn’t much of a drinker and seemed entirely immune to my many charms but she had a great smile, eyes that sparkled whenever she spoke, and an impressive figure.
My second reaction was to remember how annoying her politics were. She was always saying that what the world needed was another government with weapons, fighting men, and the power to tax, jail and destroy. She seemed entirely immune to any evidence about the dangers of global governance.
A typical conversation with Samantha would go something like this.
Samantha: “The lack of an international enforcement mechanism is a terrible weakness for international law that needs to be remedied through creating new institutions and stregthening existing ones.”
Me: “It’s pretty when you push your hair back like that and get excited.”
Samantha: “Can you take your hand off my knee? Did you know you’re spilling whiskey on your shirt?”
Me: “Let’s find some place quieter to talk.”
What I should have told her was that she needed to learn more more about how laws are made, adjudicated, and enforced, how institutions are subject to popular accountability or captured by special interests, and how liberty can be protected or eroded through the structure of government. International law as conceived by Power lacks any effective mechanisms for constraining arbitrary authority, preventing manipulation by private agenda and safeguarding liberty.
I’m of two minds on John Bolton. One the one hand, he’s expressed a healthy skepticism of nation building and humanitarian warfare. It’s to to be a good thing to have someone in the Bush Administration foreign policy aparatus who things that “the idea that we can national build for somebody else is just unrealistic.”
Great. Can we bring the lads and lasses home from Iraq now?
On the other hand, he’s been a reliable ally of the neoconservatives who got us into Iraq and seem to be sharpening their knives for battle with Iran, Syria, Korea and China.
Samantha, however, doesn’t suffer from multiple-mindedness on the subject of Bolton. Or rather, she’s dead against him, even if she has to have it both ways.
On the one hand, she describes coming confirmation as a failure of “independent judgment” on the part of the Senate. On the other hand, she points out that Bolton is “a longtime skeptic of tools that are increasingly part of the Bush Administration’s arsenal.” So is the problem that Bolton is a tool of the Bush Administration’s “Democracy Project” or an opponent of it?
It’s a trick question. The right answer is that Samantha’s real objection is that Bolton doesn’t like “humanitarian intervention” and the International Criminal Court, which are Samantha’s pet projects. The core of Bolton’s argument—that the creation of unaccountable sovereign entities is simply unacceptable to free people—is entirely sound. Why should Americans ever agree to subject themselves to a foreign court? There’s really no more concise statement of the American concept of free government than John Steinbeck’s Tom Joad declaring, “throw out the cops that aint our people.” Samantha, however, wants a world policed by cops that aint no-one’s people.
Samantha also objects to Bolton’s appointment to the UN on the grounds that it is “an institution he openly disdains.” Now it’s not immediately obvious why people who are critics of government institutions shouldn’t be appointed to head them. I understand why shareholders wouldn’t want a CEO who disdains their company, but that’s because the shareholders interest lies in the success and expansion of the company.
When it comes to government, the interest of citizens often lies in constricting institutions. This is one reason the founding fathers provided for a system of checks and balances. The “disdain” objection is only persuasive to those who have internalized the perspective of the government (or, in this case, international) agency.
If only Samantha had accepted my invitation. Maybe I could have taught her a bit about whiskey, love and human liberty.
The conviction that history is on your side is disadvantageous to the conduct of politics, and particularly foreign affairs and warfare. It leads to an overconfidence in one’s chosen means of carrying out one’s chosen policies. The left has its international institutions and diplomacy while the right has its military campaigns and leading by doing. But the effect is the same. If they bring a knife to a fight, you are meant to bring a gun. If you bring the “moral direction of history” you are more or less showing up to the battle disarmed. It’s not hard to see how marching toward Baghdad atop History leads directly to the expectation that our troops would be greeted with flowers rather than IEDs.
If you suspect that the direction of history might be terrible and perverse, beyond our control or perhaps absent all together, you are far more likely to choose your battles more wisely and show up to them properly armed. Surrender, as John Bolton says, may not be an option. But defeat is always a possibility. The tragic view of history, or at least a decadent appreciation of the possibility of a decline and fall, actually makes your better able to attend to the defense of the republic than the heroic view.
” —Rise If You Must - Striding Atop History Yelling ‘Let’s Roll!’: February 9, 2008
The one thing I got wrong is that I assumed, after so many years of left-wing peace mongering, that brash military adventurism had become the exclusive province of the right. Now I know better.
You check into ingredients you are cooking, share photos of your food, get recipe recommendations from friends, receive discounts from local merchants.
Right now we’re beta testing on twitter. Use hastag #KitchOn. iPhone and android app coming soon.
Never cook alone again!
To quote D.I.: “Weapons! Weapons! Weapons!”
Pressure is building for the US to take action in Libya.
The Arab League formally proposed that the UN authorize the creation of a no-fly zone. France and Britain have drafted a resolution authorizing the no fly zone. The matter is being debated among UN Security Council members. France and Britain are trying to forge an agreement on a no-fly zone among G-8 members at a meeting in Paris. Russia has softened its stance—saying it wants more information on the Arab League proposal.
You’ll notice that one group absent from all this talk about the US imposing a no-fly zone is the one that matters most—the American people, whose lives, honor and treasure would be put on the line to keep Gaddafi’s planes on the ground. Officially, the Pentagon still claims that no decision has been made to take action. Al Jazeera, however, says that the United States, Britain and France have promised rebels in eastern Libya to set up a “no-fly” zone.
Germany and Turkey are opposing a NATO-led no-fly zone, which appears to rule out that possibility.
Net-net: We move closer to waging a No Fly War against the Libyan government.
Closer and closer.
1. We’ll have to kill a lot of civilians to set up a no fly zone.
2. The no fly zone won’t work anyway. (We had one in Iraq for 12 years before we invaded.)
3. The atrocities will continue, and we’re likely to wind up invading.
4. Once we invade, we’ll be stuck there forever.
5. World opinion will turn against us. We’ll be fighting another Iraq-style insurgency.
For what?
“This is what we’ve waited for, this is it boys, this is war.”
We’re not really going to let ourselves get talked into another mid-east war, are we?
Testing the theory that you might not be able to fool all of the people all of the time, but you can totally piss them off.
I’m not sure CNBC ran this kind of thing before I showed up.
