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-   -   Revolution in Tunisia & Egypt, Protests in Libya, Bahrain, Oman & Yemen (https://thetfp.com/tfp/tilted-politics/163672-revolution-tunisia-egypt-protests-libya-bahrain-oman-yemen.html)

roachboy 02-23-2011 11:16 AM
i know.....let's let capitalism solve the problem....


actually, this is a consistent problem with transnational organizations, moving from saying tsk tsk tsk to actually doing anything.

there are reports that nato has warned kadhafi to use restraint. i haven't seen anything else about it. in this case, if the situation escalates, i wouldn't object to nato intervening to effectively depose kadhafi.

the e.u. is handwringing a lot...on the one hand tsk tsk violence is bad but on the other, led by italy, starting to freak out about refugee flow potentials.

the security council hasn't managed to put together a resolution even. so none of the related transnational agencies (in a loose sense, from peacekeeping forces to the international court) can do anything.

the united states has apparently been waiting to say much until a ferry with us citizens reaches malta.

it would be a bad bad idea for any individual country to go into libya. no cowboy shit. remember iraq? bad idea. bad bad idea.

nation-states are done for.
situations like this simply show it.

aceventura3 02-23-2011 11:36 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2875873)
i know.....let's let capitalism solve the problem....
Not about what I would do, you've suggested that something needs to be done.


Quote:
actually, this is a consistent problem with transnational organizations, moving from saying tsk tsk tsk to actually doing anything.

there are reports that nato has warned kadhafi to use restraint. i haven't seen anything else about it. in this case, if the situation escalates, i wouldn't object to nato intervening to effectively depose kadhafi.
Intervening how?

Quote:
the e.u. is handwringing a lot...on the one hand tsk tsk violence is bad but on the other, led by italy, starting to freak out about refugee flow potentials.

the security council hasn't managed to put together a resolution even. so none of the related transnational agencies (in a loose sense, from peacekeeping forces to the international court) can do anything.

the united states has apparently been waiting to say much until a ferry with us citizens reaches malta.

it would be a bad bad idea for any individual country to go into libya. no cowboy shit. remember iraq? bad idea. bad bad idea.

nation-states are done for.
situations like this simply show it.
So after all that what is your answer? Or, did I miss it? Remember I am an uniformed simpleton who lives in a imaginary world - perhaps it is too complicated, right?

roachboy 02-23-2011 11:46 AM
ace, the thread isn't about you, remember? stop whining.

and if you actually read the post, i said that in this situation i would not oppose a nato intervention to depose kadhafi. give way to peace-keeping forces to prevent anarchy and put into place some kind of transitional structure.

a nation-state intervention would be a catastrophic idea because it would legitimate in power what it was sent to depose.

here's some gruesome footage from libya. the headline translates:

Soldiers executed after refusing orders to kill civilians in Libya.


it's no joke, what's happening.

roachboy 02-23-2011 02:07 PM
and this to dispense with the simple-minded bloomberg-bromides about the miracles of neo-liberalism.

what bloomberg prescribes for egypt is exactly the ideology that enabled mubarak and his pals to plunder egypt....

but read on...


Quote:
To describe blatant exploitation of the political system for personal gain as corruption misses the forest for the trees. Such exploitation is surely an outrage against Egyptian citizens, but calling it corruption suggests that the problem amounts to aberrant behavior from a system that would otherwise function smoothly. If this were the case then the crimes of the Mubarak regime could be attributed simply to bad character: change the people and the problems go away. But the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state.

Although neoliberalism is now a commonly used term, it is still worth pausing a moment and think about what it means. In his Brief History of Neoliberalism[1] social geographer David Harvey outlined “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” Neoliberal states guarantee, by force if necessary, the “proper functioning” of markets; where markets do not exist (for example, in the use of land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then the state should create them. Guaranteeing the sanctity of markets is supposed to be the limit of legitimate state functions, and state interventions should always be subordinate to markets. All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions. The market becomes an end in an of itself, and since the only legitimate function of states is to defend markets and expand them into new spheres, democracy is a potential problem insofar as people might vote for political and economic choices that impede the unfettered operation of markets, or that reserve spheres of human endeavor (education, for example, or health care) from the logic of markets. Hence a pure neoliberal state would philosophically be empowered to defend markets even from its own citizens. As an ideology neoliberalism is as utopian as communism. The application of utopian neoliberalism in the real world leads to deformed societies as surely as the application of utopian communism did.

Two observations about Egypt’s history as a neoliberal state are in order. First, Mubarak’s Egypt was considered to be at the forefront of instituting neoliberal policies in the Middle East (not un-coincidentally, so was Ben Ali’s Tunisia). Secondly, the reality of Egypt’s political economy during the Mubarak era was very different than the rhetoric, as was the case in every other neoliberal state from Chile to Indonesia. Political scientist Timothy Mitchell published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in Rule of Experts[2] (the chapter titled “Dreamland” — named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by the fall of the regime; a version of this was also published in Merip). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were applied unevenly at best. The only people for whom Egyptian neoliberalism worked “by the book” were the most vulnerable members of society, and their experience with neoliberalism was not a pretty picture. Organized labor was fiercely suppressed. The public education and the health care systems were gutted by a combination of neglect and privatization. Much of the population suffered stagnant or falling wages relative to inflation. Official unemployment was estimated at approximately 9.4% last year (and much higher for the youth who spearheaded the January 25th Revolution), and about 20% of the population is said to live below a poverty line defined as $2 per day per person.

For the wealthy, the rules were very different. Egypt did not so much shrink its public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite. Privatization provided windfalls for politically well-connected individuals who could purchase state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monopolize rents from such diverse sources as tourism and foreign aid. Huge proportions of the profits made by companies that supplied basic construction materials like steel and cement came from government contracts, a proportion of which in turn were related to aid from foreign governments. Most importantly, the very limited function for the state recommended by neoliberal doctrine in the abstract was turned on its head in reality. In Mubarak’s Egypt business and government were so tightly intertwined that it was often difficult for an outside observer to tease them apart. Since political connections were the surest route to astronomical profits, businessmen had powerful incentives to buy political office in the phony elections run by the ruling National Democratic Party. Whatever competition there was for seats in the Peoples’ Assembly and Consultative Council took place mainly within the NDP. Non-NDP representation in parliament by opposition parties was strictly a matter of the political calculations made for a given elections: let in a few independent candidates known to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2005 (and set off tremors of fear in Washington); dictate total NDP domination in 2010 (and clear the path for an expected new round of distributing public assets to “private” investors).[3]
The Revolution Against Neoliberalism

and lest you imagine that this neo-liberal fiasco was restricted to egypt, read this:

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? | Rolling Stone Politics

about the american financial oligarchy that consolidated its power and looted the store while talking blah blah blah about markety capitalism.

it's horseshit, ace darling.

horseshit.

Seaver 02-23-2011 03:11 PM
I'd love to see Obama park a Carrier outside of Libya and simply say any aircraft that takes off from here-forward will be immediately shot down.

We can shoot well outside of anti-ship/air missile range, and provide at least a little assistance to the protesters.

Charlatan 02-23-2011 04:47 PM
A no-fly zone over Libya would certainly be a step in the right direction. But I agree with roachboy that the US cannot go this alone. It needs to be a collective response and, preferably, not run by the US.

roachboy 02-23-2011 04:51 PM
even though i am sympathetic to that idea, i think it'd be a Huge Mistake for the united states to act unilaterally if only because (a) the lockerbie affair and bombings of tripoli that followed it---the "museum of strength" that ghadhafi appeared before with his cute umbrella, was made from the residence of his that was bombed by the united states---this set up a us (me) against the Big Evil legitimation that ghadafi has not hesitated to use since AND (b) because of the iraq debacle (thanks george) has created an association between the discourse of democracy and american invasion.....and also (c) it's kind of hard for me to imagine how making that move could be the only one given the (apparently true) bringing in of heavily armed mercenaries from chad and niger and nigeria....i can't imagine that the us (or anyone) could simply park a carrier and not find themselves more or less compelled to intervene on the ground to stop the carnage.

because carnage there is, seemingly.
among the more shocking/dramatic eye-witness reports is here, in french sadly:

Libye : "C'était un carnage absolu", actualité Monde : Le Point

among other things he provides an estimate of at least 2000 people killed at benghazi and extensive use of mercenaries to do it. he describes the mercenaries as very heavily armed as "killing machines"---confronting largely unarmed civilians (that's been changing, especially in benghazi). the mitigating thing with what he says in the article is that it's clear he was entirely freaked out by what he experienced (justifiably so) so the account has a phantasmagoric quality to it.

but it's pretty amazing nonetheless. worth dusting off the french for.

dlish 02-23-2011 07:47 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2875884)
here's some gruesome footage from libya. the headline translates:

Soldiers executed after refusing orders to kill civilians in Libya.

YouTube - ‫???? ?? ??????? ?? ??? ????? ??????? ???? ?????? ?????‬‎

it's no joke, what's happening.

to be fair to the argument, till now Al Jazeera is still reporting that they do not know whether those people in the video are libyan army soldiers who refused to kill civilians and were summarily executed, or whether they are captured libyan army killed by the protesters.

roachboy 02-24-2011 05:05 AM
dlish...thanks. interesting....

i didn't go through al jaz for that clip.

i got to it either by way of the guardian----which likely posted the caveat along with it (so i overlooked it)----or through the "we are all khaled said" group on facebook, which has been posting a ton of video and other information from libya. the upside is that the information stream exists. the downside is that the sense of complication in terms of sourcing and interpretation are presented in 420 characters or less.

information is still fragmentary.

speaking of which there were lots of reports of checkpoints that folk trying to get out of libya passed through at which cellphone photographs/sim cards were being erased, video and computers with image of massacre etc. confiscated. information fragmentation is apparently gadhafi's friend.

on the other hand, information transparency is nowhere available.

roachboy 02-24-2011 08:08 AM
this is a really interesting article from electronic intifada that to some extent explains the peculiar turn(s) that gadhafi's speeches have taken in their attempts to frame the revolt:

ei: Libya's tragedy, Gaddafi's farce


meanwhile, perhaps the saudi's attempts to buy off the population won't work out.

1.59pm - Saudi Arabia: Leading Saudi intellectuals have urged the monarchy to make far-reaching political and social reforms. They say that Arab rulers should derive a lesson from the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and listen to the voice of disenchanted young people. The group includes renowned Islamic scholars, a female academic, a poet and a former diplomat. King Abdullah, who returned home after a three-month medical absence, yesterday unveiled benefits for Saudis worth £23bn in an apparent attempt to insulate the world's leading oil exporter. The measures announced by state media include pay rises to offset inflation, unemployment benefits and affordable housing.

Libya in turmoil - live updates | World news | guardian.co.uk

Baraka_Guru 02-24-2011 08:30 AM
I was reading about the odd situation in Saudi Arabia. Maybe it was through this thread somewhere. Isn't it the case that the King and all the heirs are all advanced geriatrics and aren't likely long for the world?

Also the situation is different in that there are no bones about the political structure. It's an absolute monarchy. You don't vote for the king. There are no elections, let alone rigged elections as pretense. Though I'm largely ignorant of Saudi politics and society. There is some voting, yes? On the municipal level? Is it like the Chinese structure in that the top-level is essentially handpicked, but the local levels are somewhat (or maybe not at all, really) chosen by the people?

mixedmedia 02-24-2011 08:54 AM
I'm sure it's not lost on anyone. The irony that some of these ME/N African countries are giving to their citizens what our lawmakers are trying to take away from us hand over fist.

It's disorienting, dismaying, discouraging. All the major disses.

Baraka_Guru 02-24-2011 09:54 AM
The position of the Obama administration and that of other governing bodies has become more clear in Obama's recent speech:

I suppose at this time it's a matter of whether anything tangible takes shape or whether it will be needed. And, of course, whether it will be enough, and whether it will be soon enough.

roachboy 02-24-2011 11:00 AM
here's some (very basic) information about the saudi political system:

The Political System of Saudi Arabia - Helen Ziegler

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat...k/geos/sa.html

this from the financial times on king abdullah's attempt to head off opposition by paying it off:

Quote:
Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - FT.com / Middle East & North Africa - Saudi?s $36bn bid to beat unrest

Saudi’s $36bn bid to beat unrest

By Abeer Allam in Washington, Heba Saleh in Cairo and Jack Farchy and Javier Blas in London

Published: February 23 2011 16:21 | Last updated: February 23 2011 18:37

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia announced financial support measures, worth an estimated SR135bn ($36bn), in a bid to avert the kind of popular unrest that has toppled leaders across the region and is now closing in on Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi.

The measures include a 15 per cent salary rise for public employees to offset inflation, reprieves for imprisoned debtors, and financial aid for students and the unemployed.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
In depth: Middle East protests - Feb-16
Interactive: Mapping Middle East unrest - Feb-21
Editorial: EU - the feeble monster - Feb-23
Bahrain opposition press royal family - Feb-23
MPs resign from Saleh party in Yemen - Feb-23
Energy Source: Reasons for oil not to hit $150 - Feb-23

Saudi Arabia’s ruling family has thus far been spared the type of popular discontent that has toppled presidents in Tunisia and Egypt and brought Libya to the brink of civil war.

The announcement of the Saudi relief measures coincided with King Abdullah’s return to the country after three months. He had been abroad for medical treatment. Among those on hand to greet him was King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of neighbouring Bahrain, which is struggling to contain a surging opposition movement.

The cash-rich Saudi government has pledged to spend $400bn by the end of 2014 to improve education, infrastructure and healthcare. “The king is trying to create wider trickle- down of wealth in the shape of social welfare,’’ said John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi. “The budget can handle that, but it is an aspirin to ease medium-term pain, not a solution for the long-term housing, and unemployment issue.”


Despite a prolonged economic surge, unemployment has remained above 10 per cent and is cited by government officials as one of their primary concerns.

Critics said the sweeteners did not address the Saudi public’s political aspirations. Protests, political parties and labour unions are banned in the conservative kingdom. “We need a new higher education minister, a new health minister, reform of the judiciary and codified laws - not hand-outs,’’ said Turki Al-Balaa, a 34 year-old businessmen.

“We want real change. This will be the only guarantee of security of the kingdom,’’ added Hassan al-Mustafa, one of 40 Saudi rights activists and journalists who signed an open letter requesting an elected parliament, more rights for women and enhanced anti-corruption measures.“A constitutional monarchy closer to the Kuwaiti model is not an impossible target to achieve right now.”

Reformists including Prince Talal bin Abdelaziz, the king’s half brother, have called for similar reforms. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy ruled by consensus among the royal family and in alliance with an austere religious establishment that preaches obedience to the king. The country’s leading clerics have warned against the “evils” of the regional unrest which they say were incited by foreigners to foment instability in Muslim countries.

Hundreds of people have signed up to a Facebook campaign calling for a “day of rage” across Saudi Arabia on March 11, although it is not clear if any protests will materialise. Analysts said the late date suggested that activists wanted to give the government time to introduce reforms, and not a real desire to take to the streets.

“We don’t want money,” a female student from Jeddah said on her Twitter feed. “I want to know that I’ll be protected under a written constitution for the rest of my short life.”

A lawyer wrote that the Saudi people seek “dignity, reform, freedom of expression, transparency, justice, respect, wise governance, not grants
FT.com / Middle East & North Africa - Saudi?s $36bn bid to beat unrest

another neo-liberal state.

roachboy 02-25-2011 01:03 PM
there's pretty clearly a cloud of vapor developing around the general idea of doing something to stem the bloodshed in libya, and that for any number of reasons including the fact that there are chemical and biological weapons. sold by champions of freedom like the united states, of course. there's a cloud of vapor but no agreement about what should happen or the institutional frame through which whatever ends up getting agreed to, assuming something does, should happen. and so there we are.

this is a moderate-seeming article....but i wonder if the suggestion that the obama administration work with the un and/or arab league would meet with opposition from the conservative wing of the american political oligarchy....

Quote:
Taking sides is Obama’s best move

By Mark Malloch Brown

Published: February 24 2011 23:17 | Last updated: February 24 2011 23:17

In 2002 I authorised publication with the apparently inoffensive title of The Arab Human Development Report. Within days of its release, a million copies of the Arabic language edition had been downloaded, and the new al-Jazeera television channel was debating it endlessly. Shortly afterwards, a closed door ministerial meeting of the Arab League condemned its calls for democracy, women’s rights and secular education – and its warnings about the region’s stagnation and youth unemployment. The region was becalmed, even as democratisation and economic
swept through so much of the rest of the world.

My career, first as a political adviser to insurgent democratic oppositions and then mediating various revolutions from the top ranks of the UN, leads me to three lessons at this point in the Arab world’s tsunami. First, it should have happened sooner. Second, it did not because countries such as Libya and Egypt were security states that allowed no opposition to grow. This will now be a handicap. Third, the US will have a much bigger, although uneven, role in steering these countries through their current conflict, and then transition, than is fashionable to acknowledge.

When I found myself up against these angry Arab League ministers it was as head of the UN’s development arm. Our report had been written by a group of Arab policy experts, so we were free of the charge of western meddling. Leading a multibillion dollar development agency, I nevertheless despaired of making any difference in the Arab region unless we could stimulate an intellectual revolution. People were locked into a serfdom of ideas and politics that shackled their national life.

So the events of recent weeks are a cause to celebrate. This really is an Arab spring. But, at best, it is only the beginning of a liberation of minds and people. In Tunisia and Egypt, decades of suppressed workers’ rights and societal inequalities are bursting to the surface. Transitional rulers may soon fall back into old habits, preferring stability over democratic chaos. After all, as big economic stakeholders in the old order, Egyptian generals have a lot to lose from democracy. This backlash may, in Bahrain, lead to a compromise where there is a coup inside the royal family rather than a full transition to democracy.

Concerns will grow about whether new regimes in Egypt and elsewhere will harm relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the US. Yet my experience is that relations abroad usually remain largely unchanged following such events. When Cory Aquino pushed President Ferdinand Marcos out of power in the Philippines in 1986, she threatened to throw out American military bases. The outcome was much more incremental: a mutually agreed reduction in the US presence that served both governments well.

Egypt will still want to triangulate relations with Israel and Palestine, the army will retain a powerful say and the US will probably continue to be the critical non-regional ally, even if a democratic Egyptian government employs stroppier rhetoric. The huge gain will be that a democratic government may be able to take risks for peace that its authoritarian precursor never could. After all, it will have a popular mandate.

It is a different story, however, on the domestic front. Here the risk is not Iran in 1979, but the Philippines in 1986, Latin America throughout the 1980s or eastern Europe in 1989. In most of these cases the eventual democratic governments proved initially weak, and in most cases unable to drive through the economic reforms that could have brought relief to those who had voted for them.

The reason for this was that a collection of workers, social activists, economic liberals, and those on the way out politically, combined to throw out what they knew they opposed – be it Mr Marcos, various ageing Latin American leaders or jowly communist apparatchiks. Once that was achieved, their agreement simply melted away. They knew what they were against, but not what they were for.

The final mixed lesson for the region is that, for all the talk of America’s best years being behind it, this crisis in some ways reaffirms how Washington’s role is as important as it has been in every democratic revolution of the past 30 years. Its reputation may not be high with the protesters, but the US ability to tell a Bahraini or Egyptian regime when it is time to leave, and to then help steer the transition, remains unparalleled.

The great exceptions are Libya, and should the protests take greater hold, Syria and Iran. Here the American writ evidently does not run. Yet leadership now devolves very directly on President Barack Obama to do two things much of Washington will resist. What he tried to do, in his Cairo speech six months into his administration, is now in reach. He can begin to detoxify America’s brand by putting it on the side of democratic change. For America’s existing allies in the region, that means helping to usher them out even when their successors are something of a gamble. But with regimes such as Libya’s Colonel Muammer Gaddafi, it means the painful (and for the US Congress controversial) process of working through the despised UN and Arab League, to build a new, legitimate multilateral consensus to isolate him and pressure him into conceding.

It is one of those global moments when a US president has to take sides. When in doubt, or when pushed back by Congress or his own State department, he should think of the courage of the Libyan protesters, and the aspirations of a generation of young Arabs who have made this moment possible.

The writer is a former international political consultant, former UN deputy secretary-general and author of The Unfinished Global Revolution
FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Taking sides is Obama?s best move


a quite interesting piece, too long to paste up (even i have limits) about the relation of the farce that is the "War on Terror" to direct military/police support from the west of the types of governments that are getting blown down...

Anti-terrorism and uprisings - Features - Al Jazeera English

you know:

British government approved sale of crowd control equipment to Libya | World news | The Guardian

and more generally:

Arms trade | World news | guardian.co.uk

aceventura3 02-25-2011 02:38 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2875941)
and this to dispense with the simple-minded bloomberg-bromides about the miracles of neo-liberalism.

what bloomberg prescribes for egypt is exactly the ideology that enabled mubarak and his pals to plunder egypt....

but read on...




The Revolution Against Neoliberalism

and lest you imagine that this neo-liberal fiasco was restricted to egypt, read this:

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? | Rolling Stone Politics

about the american financial oligarchy that consolidated its power and looted the store while talking blah blah blah about markety capitalism.

it's horseshit, ace darling.

horseshit.
Can you go on record and state that anything less than unconditional equal rights for women in the ME is unacceptable?

Can you go on record and state than anything less than unconditional rights to life, liberty - and the means of acquiring and possessing property, pursuing and obtaining happiness, and safety in the ME is unacceptable?

I will stop there and simply ask do you know what the implication of your response is, regardless of how you answer?

But, I am pretty sure it is too complicated for simple and direct response.

---------- Post added at 10:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:30 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2876673)
there's pretty clearly a cloud of vapor developing around the general idea of doing something to stem the bloodshed in libya, and that for any number of reasons including the fact that there are chemical and biological weapons.
Now wait a minute...Saddam Husein actually used chemical weapons to kill thousands among other things and you did not stand with the Bush administration when they wanted to remove Saddam from power....what is the difference in your stance now and your stance then?

Seaver 02-27-2011 07:14 AM
Honestly I hope Saudi Arabia stays the way it is. That is one country that if given democracy would go balls-crazy.... their population honestly scares me.

dlish 02-27-2011 08:55 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seaver (Post 2877202)
Honestly I hope Saudi Arabia stays the way it is. That is one country that if given democracy would go balls-crazy.... their population honestly scares me.

this comment would be funny if it wasnt scary. I'd love to hear what you think about this and why.

as much as you could push for democracy in saudi, even if it hit them in the head, i dont think they'd be able to see it.

FYI - last week kuwait offered all citizens a year of free food as well as all utility bills paid. At least they'll stave off a revolution for at least a year before it's people wake up again.

Oman - 2 people killed in the Sultanate today as part of protests against its rulers.. its coming closer to here....nothing to report here yet except for murmurs of a protest. here the population is quite happy, well off and paid enough to keep them from protesting. Although i could be wrong... i've been wrong in the past...

Willravel 02-27-2011 10:50 AM
Apparently the people of Saudi Arabia, for whatever reason, don't deserve the right to self-determination. They're scary, after all.

Walt 02-27-2011 02:00 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by mixedmedia (Post 2876139)
I'm sure it's not lost on anyone. The irony that some of these ME/N African countries are giving to their citizens what our lawmakers are trying to take away from us hand over fist.
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2875873)
nation-states are done for. situations like this simply show it.
I don't follow. Please explain.

roachboy 02-27-2011 03:19 PM
i dont see the nation-state as a coherent socio-economic unit at this point...capital flows are transnational and outside the control of states; production flows, armament flows...what the nation-state remains is a military unit. since world war 2, the americans have developed the national-security state as a model---it is the preferred patronage system of the american right. from the reagan period, the national-security state, which never really made sense in any kind of democratic way (quite the contrary) during the cold war somehow managed to persist (conservative political patronage, etc.)...and the kinds of realpolitik that were of a piece with the national-security state (support for "friendly" tyrants whose friendliness was reflected in purchase of american weapons systems for example) managed to persist.

but that's coming apart. the revolutions across north africa and the middle east seem to me against neo-liberalism, against the national-security state model, against the kind of oligarchy that the united states seemed willing to present to itself and the world as if it were not a problem that is of a piece with neo-liberal/national-security states. it's against the old american empire---but not necessarily against american presence in the world as an important player.

the international community has instituted no mechanism for addressing humanitarian crises since rwanda. the reactionary politics of nationalisms, of nation-states, are a central obstacle.

nation-states are historically a creation of the 20th century. hopefully they'll soon be relics of an unfortunate past.

Charlatan 02-27-2011 04:11 PM
I think part of the fear surrounding Saudi Arabia has to do with the fact that, like other nation states in the region, because of the lack of free speech and the repressiveness of the regime, there are only two voices we ever get to hear -- the official voice of the government and the voice of fundamentalist church. Everything else is either absent or (I suspect) underground. The moderate voice has mostly been squashed into submission. The fundamentalist voice has been allowed to speak, a) because it's from a church and b) because it's mostly speaking against and laying blame at the feet of foreign powers (i.e. the US and its allies).

Add to this, the idea that the government has been buying off it's opposition (much like we see happening all around the Middle East) with oil money and concessions (eg no driving for women, etc.). So long as the moderate voice of change doesn't have a platform, change is difficult to make. I'd be a lot more comfortable about unrest in Saudi Arabia if I knew there was an alternative to the increasingly fundamentalist voices that appear to be the only other voice.

roachboy 02-27-2011 05:12 PM
i think there is secular political opposition within saudi arabia. this blog is pretty good...

Fantastic | Crossroads Arabia

in helping to get a sense of it in terms of what it is where it operates and what kind of demands/problems are potential problems. the entry that the link takes you to argues that saudi arabia isn't that different from other countries in the region, particularly in the linkages between oligarchy and choked-off opportunities for younger people in particular--it's just wealthier. and, as is clear if you read it, the writer doesn't think abdullah can simply bribe these problems away.

so i suspect this information gap that shapes the concerns about saudi arabia....

note too that there are protests to come in saudi and kuwait.
bahrain continues to develop.
oman has had turmoil.
there's a lot of trouble brewing in iraq for lots of obvious reasons.
jordan's attempts to head off protests are tenuous.
libya appears headed into civil war....

dlish 02-28-2011 05:20 AM
ok, do you guys remember the journalist friend of mine who was on the turkish flotilla that was headed into israel last year?

well, he's managed to get into Libya now.. we werent sure that he'd be let in since he only arrived there a few days ago, but he's there now...

here's his interesting blog!

gulfnews : Libyan Diary: Eyewitness account

roachboy 02-28-2011 08:00 AM
nice, dlish. interesting blog...look forward to tracking it.


here's another blogger who's tracking opposition politics as it's taking shape/surfacing in saudi arabia.

Now we’re talking Saudi Jeans

it looks like the "post-islamicist" character of these actions could carry over to saudi as well...

meanwhile, tunisia continues to be the most advanced of the revolts; demonstrations over the weekend forced to prime minister and minister of industry and commerce to resign. that makes 2 people left who were in government under ben ali. so the pressure from below is forcing the oligarchy to relinquish power by degrees. this is a very good thing.

---------- Post added at 04:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:57 PM ----------



=======================

some additional factoids for your delectation.


1. of course, there is the trans-national armaments bazaar, pillar of neo-liberal states, center of the national-security state model, product of conservative patronage everywhere and a strong reason for advocating the breaking up of the "globalizing capitalist" system as it currently exists. it routinely produces this sort of result:


Western arms helping Libyan forces massacre anti-regime rebels, EU documents reveal - Telegraph

and this is not to begin speaking about the french foreign minister who was forced to resign on the weekend for offering direct aid to ben ali's government to suppress those pesky demonstrators. this before things took off, of course. back in the days of the old status quo. when such things were still routine.

2. it turns out that in the recommendation that was sent along to the international criminal court that recommended prosecution of gadhafi and/or the regime for war crimes, that there's an exemption for "mercenaries" who originate in countries which are not signatories of the rome protocol that authorizes the icc itself.

why is that?

Quote:
Why would a clause be inserted to expressly protect war crimes-committing mercenaries on Gadaffi's payroll from international prosecutions? Because, as The Telegraph's John Swaine reports, the Obama administration insisted on its inclusion -- as an absolutely non-negotiable demand -- due to a fear that its exclusion might render Bush officials (or, ultimately, even Obama officials) subject to war crimes prosecutions at the ICC on the same theory that would be used to hold Libya's mercenaries accountable:

[T]he US insisted that the UN resolution was worded so that no one from an outside country that is not a member of the ICC could be prosecuted for their actions in Libya.

This means that mercenaries from countries such as Algeria, Ethiopia and Tunisia -- which have all been named by rebel Libyan diplomats to the UN as being among the countries involved -- would escape prosecution even if they were captured, because their nations are not members of the court.

The move was seen as an attempt to prevent a precedent that could see Americans prosecuted by the ICC for alleged crimes in other conflicts. While the US was once among the signatories to the court, George W. Bush withdrew from it in 2002 and declared that it did not have power over Washington. . . . It was inserted despite Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, saying that all those "who slaughter civilians" would "be held personally accountable".

Speaking to reporters outside the council chamber, Gerard Araud, the French UN ambassador, described the paragraph as "a red line for the United States", meaning American diplomats had been ordered by their bosses in Washington to secure it. "It was a deal-breaker, and that's the reason we accepted this text to have the unanimity of the council," said Mr Araud.
U.S. shields foreign mercenaries in Libya to protect Bush officials - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Libya: African mercenaries 'immune from prosecution for war crimes' - Telegraph


3. this, which i was tipped to via the greenwald column above, speaks for itself:

Eschaton

sadly.

mixedmedia 02-28-2011 01:01 PM
Can you pass the Saudi Arabia quiz?

linked from another noteworthy blog: Informed Comment: Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion

roachboy 03-01-2011 07:09 AM
the saudi quiz is really interesting. good find.

here's something from foreign policy outlining in some detail why saudi arabia is a prime candidate for a revolt:

Yes, It Could Happen Here - by Madawi Al-Rasheed | Foreign Policy

dlish 03-01-2011 09:57 AM
the quiz was quite interesting. some of the answers were a surprise.

is $36B going to keep the saudis quiet? and for how long?

the arab youth are fed up with the level of disservice their tyrant leaders have delivered in the last 50 years. no amount of money can stop the fervour and yearning of freedom.

In Syria the government has said that they will spend 250M on reform, Kuwait has said it will give free food for a year and pay for utilities, Saudi will write off bank debts and spend $36B, Oman will write off bank debts and create jobs etc etc. These regimes have milked their countries dry since WW2, and think that bribing their constituants will taper their peoples yearning for freedom.

Cimarron29414 03-01-2011 10:01 AM
dlish -

10 yard penalty, gross misuse of the word constituent! :)

constituent - one who authorizes another to act as agent

Baraka_Guru 03-01-2011 10:27 AM
Yes, neither a monarch nor a despot have constituents.

I think dlish meant "subjects."

Cimarron29414 03-01-2011 11:10 AM
Well that's the convenient thing about subjects, you rarely have to give a shit what they think. BTW, aren't you two subjects? Prince Willie is going to have a right nice wedding on your dime. :)

roachboy 03-01-2011 11:24 AM
what it looks like when tens of thousands of people try to cross a border. libya/tunisia version

YouTube - unhcr's Channel

Quote:
UNHCR steps up relief efforts as huge numbers flee Libya to Egypt and Tunisia

News Stories, 1 March 2011

RAS ADJIR, Tunisia, March 1 (UNHCR) – UNHCR emergency staff said here Tuesday that the situation at the Libya-Tunisia border is at crisis point, with 14,000 people crossing the day before from Libya. It was the highest number of crossings in a single day since anti-government protests turned violent in mid-February. A further 10,000-15,000 are expected to cross on Tuesday.

"We can see acres of people waiting to cross the border. Many have been waiting for three to four days in the freezing cold, with no shelter or food," said Ayman Gharaibeh, head of the UNHCR emergency response team at the border. "Usually the first three days of the crisis are the worst. This seems to be getting worse by the day," he added.

The Tunisian authorities said 70,000-75,000 people have fled to their country from Libya since February 20. With tens of thousands of them stuck at the border, and more expected, UNHCR spokesperson Melissa Fleming told journalists in Geneva that it was "becoming critically important that onwards transport becomes quickly available to avoid a humanitarian crisis."

On Monday, UNHCR erected 500 tents close to the border in a new transit camp. A further 1,000 tents were expected to go up on Tuesday, giving shelter to a total of about 12,000 people by this evening. Two airlifts are planned for Thursday with tents and supplies for up to 10,000 people.

The water and hygiene situation at the border remains precarious. UNHCR has asked the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) to help with improving these facilities. Tunisian civilians, the Tunisian Red Crescent and the military have all been unstinting in their support, but are seriously overstretched.

UNHCR staff who have visited the border entry point to Tunisia were worried about the huge numbers on the Libyan side. Fleming in Geneva said the refugee agency was particularly concerned "that a large number of sub-Saharan Africans are not being allowed entry into Tunisia at this point. UNHCR is in negotiations with self-appointed volunteers from the local community who are guarding the border."

The emergency response leader Gharaibeh said most of those crossing the border were fit young men. "This is the only reason why the situation has not degenerated into a huge crisis so far."

Meanwhile, the Egyptian government reported that some 69,000 people had crossed into Egypt from Libya since February 19. "The majority of those who have crossed are Egyptians, most of whom have already been transported to other towns and cities. Around 3,000 people remain in the arrival/departure area awaiting onward transportation," Fleming said. On Monday, UNHCR distributed relief items and food prepared by the Egyptian Red Crescent.

Today, the Egyptian Red Crescent was due to transport a consignment of UNHCR medical supplies and food into eastern Libya. The food and medicine is being sent in response to requests from tribal leaders who UNHCR met over the weekend, and is expected to arrive tomorrow. Further convoys are being prepared.

In Libya itself, UNHCR national staff have kept the organization's office in Tripoli open for refugees. UNHCR has been offering assistance to those who are able to reach the office. Staff there are also manning a 24-hour hotline. This phone link, and a hotline manned from Geneva, continues to receive desperate calls from refugees in Libya and their family members outside, saying they feel trapped, threatened and hunted.

"We have heard several accounts from refugees who tell us their compatriots have been targeted and killed. Others tell us about forced evictions and attacks on their homes," Fleming said in Geneva.
UNHCR - UNHCR steps up relief efforts as huge numbers flee Libya to Egypt and Tunisia

dlish 03-01-2011 12:17 PM
yeah my bad cimm. constituents is definately the wrong word to use in this instance. But i'd prefer you use the word metre instead of yard please :P

yeah im a subject, but i'm not forking a dime for Big Willies Wedding ;)

living in a tax free country for the last 4 years and havent paid a penny in tax since i left. Willie can go and spend all he wants on his pissy wedding. Im not even sure if Australia contributes any money towards the monarchy either. But I cant wait for the next referendum on whether we should become a republic. I'll show him what i think of them. Damn pommies...

ahhh democracy...

Baraka_Guru 03-01-2011 12:52 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cimarron29414 (Post 2877813)
Well that's the convenient thing about subjects, you rarely have to give a shit what they think. BTW, aren't you two subjects? Prince Willie is going to have a right nice wedding on your dime. :)
Nah. Most of the political power resides in elected officials, which means the monarchy is authorized by the Canadian public. And even the Queen herself is restricted by our constitution.

Our head of state may be a monarch, but the state is actually governed by parliamentary powers. You see, your head of state is also a part of your government, in addition to being your military commander-in-chief and your chief diplomat. If anything, your president is more like a monarch to your nation than the Queen is to ours.

/threadjack

No, wait! I think Saudi Arabia should become a constitutional monarchy!

Cimarron29414 03-01-2011 01:17 PM
So, what you are saying is that I actually have a positive ROI with my "monarch" and you are the sucker who pays for a monarch and gets nothing in return...except pictures of the really pretty houses they live in...on your dime? Hey, you do like distribution of wealth and they are the premier parasites. You are living your dream, baby!:thumbsup:

Baraka_Guru 03-01-2011 01:38 PM
We only pay the Queen when she's "queening it up" on our behalf. It's like less than a buck fifty per capita. So for the price of a cup of coffee, I support the awesome idea of having someone as esteemed and distinguished as Her Royal Majesty the Queen of Canada Elizabeth II.

No, seriously. The Crown is compensated for things that the Royal Family and the Governor-General (and the lieutenants) do on our behalf. Much of that is for ceremonies, honours, and designations. A part of our heritage, a part of our national pride. Many artists dream of one day winning a Governor-General's Award and many hard-working Canadians have been given the distinction of the Order of Canada, both of which are bestowed upon them by the Governor-General on behalf of Her Majesty.

But if you simply look at the big picture, the powers that the president has is simply distributed between a few people: the prime minister, the Queen, and the Governor-General.

/threadjack (for reals)

roachboy 03-01-2011 02:18 PM

ASU2003 03-01-2011 02:22 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Seaver (Post 2875958)
I'd love to see Obama park a Carrier outside of Libya and simply say any aircraft that takes off from here-forward will be immediately shot down.

We can shoot well outside of anti-ship/air missile range, and provide at least a little assistance to the protesters.
I think that we should tell the pilots to fly north and land in Malta (or some other remote air strip) or else get shot down. We can tail them in our fighter jets, but there is no reason to blow up perfectly good jets or not let the pilots live (they get shot if they don't fly, they get blown out of the sky if they do)

Cimarron29414 03-01-2011 03:30 PM
1 Attachment(s)
10 cents solution

mixedmedia 03-01-2011 04:19 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2877888)
I used to hear this song all the time in the strip club we used to go to...which makes it oh so much more fun to watch.

dlish 03-01-2011 07:47 PM
so how can these oil rich states make this problem go away? its facebook's fault after all isnt it? ohhhh..i know, let's buy out facebook!

Saudi Arabia denies offering $150bn to buy Facebook

Baraka_Guru 03-01-2011 08:08 PM
Wow. Just to put that into perspective, Facebook's market capitalization is around $50 billion. Google's is just over $193 billion.

Charlatan 03-01-2011 09:09 PM
Wow. If that really happened, it would be a very interesting turn of events. Somehow, I think it's just a lot of hot air.

Cimarron29414 03-02-2011 06:07 AM
I think it would be really cool to try to enforce Sha'ria on Facebook! Women's avatars could get virtually stoned after they posted their springbreak pics.

Baraka_Guru 03-02-2011 06:21 AM
Nah, with the resources of Saudi Arabia, they'd surely come up with a killer mandatory app for profile all pics of women: the Auto-Abaya app.

Now picture all the shots of Panama City Beach of spring break, with all the CG abayas as far as the eye can see. Don't worry, you will still see all those young girls' eyes smiling.

dlish 03-02-2011 09:50 AM
cimmaron - its spelt Shari'a. Just saying :D

well i think it would be a swell idea to buy facebook out. think about it. instead of spending $36billion on your people for reforms without ever recouping those costs, why not buy out face book for 150B, give those jobs to saudis and still have a thriving business that generates more money for the government. whilst at the same time shutting down one of the mouthpieces of your opponents.

im sure somebody would have tabled this in a meeting somwhere. This has got winner written all over it.

roachboy 03-02-2011 10:26 AM
this is pretty great.

Quote:
Kate Adie: The Gaddafi I knew

Gaddafi's Libya ran on farce mingled with fear, recalls the BBC reporter he nearly ran down in a small, battered Peugeot


I feel obliged to dip into books which have been given to me as a present. "In need freedom is latent . . ." Late at night in Tripoli in 1984 I found Colonel Gaddafi's Green Book hard going. He'd signed the book that morning, in revolutionary green ink of course, a curious V-shape, as if an inky fly had slid down the page and staggered back up. He'd also given me a Qur'an and wished me Happy Christmas.

Nothing was ever straightforward dealing with Gaddafi.

There was little to do in revolutionary Libya in the evenings. Television was dreary, full of the Leader's speeches and only occasionally enlivened by pirated foreign programmes, including the nation's favourite: Monty Python's Flying Circus. Libyans watched it, not laughing but nodding. They said: "That's our country they're showing." It was an oil-rich country with broken pavements and an atmosphere that discouraged taking a walk in the dark. No obvious threat, no armed men prowling the street, just hotel employees and anonymous regime officials twitching with an unexpressed fear that "things might happen . . ." So I read on: "No democracy without popular congresses, and committees everywhere."

In frequent visits since, I've noticed that the Colonel's slogans plastered on the walls of public buildings have faded somewhat, but he still looms large, even when cornered. And when the possibility of freedom emerged in the city of Benghazi a few days ago, a bright-eyed young man was shouting joyfully, "We're forming a committee." This is the new Libya, which needs a government – and old habits die hard.

The young man had grown up with the obligatory sign in his school saying "Committees everywhere". And before this latest revolution, it felt like a threat, as if a committee was a species of lurking animal that might pop into view at any moment, trailing paperclips and agendas and demanding that You at The Back Pay Attention or Else. No one needed reminding that the nation was ruled through fear.

Committees were the Colonel's pet instruments of government, theoretically. In the Green Book, he set out his arguments, or rather decisions, about how a nation should be run. It begins somewhat discouragingly with a chapter entitled The Solution of The Problem of Democracy.

The Book has handy diagrams involving People's Committees, Basic Popular Congresses, People's Congresses and Municipal Congresses, with lots of arrows, all in revolutionary green. In the 80s, I made repeated attempts to find out if this system actually functioned.

Admittedly, Libyan television frequently carried footage of circles of traditionally white-clad elderly men in the desert sitting and talking animatedly. In the cities, eager young men pounded fists and yelled slogans in similar gatherings. However, the minimum of viewing confirmed that the same two meetings appeared most evenings. I put the suggestion that I should sit in on one of these sessions to the ubiquitous Ministry of Information minders assigned to all foreign journalists. There was blank incomprehension.

"What for?" asked one, in his curious Libyan-Welsh accent acquired on a course in Newport.

I replied I'd like to see his country's form of democracy in action. There was a long discussion. Had I stepped into a sensitive area? Easily done, as the precise size of the population, of the military forces, of the police force and of Gaddafi's family were all out of bounds.

Some discussion followed, and an unwilling minder went off to find transport. Hours later, we were still touring the suburbs of Tripoli trying to find a Committee. Eventually we arrived at a scruffy bit of wasteland on which a marquee sagged. I congratulated the minders, who rolled their eyes. "Is there a problem?" I inquired. Forcefully, a Welsh-sounding voice hissed: "Booooring."

He was dead right. A score of men, several snoring in the morning heat, were inside the marquee. Careful questioning produced no agenda, no evidence of discussion, but an animated realisation that having been there for several hours, it was time for tea again.

"Do they ever discuss politics?"

The minders looked horrified and confided that such matters were absolutely off-limits.

Perhaps in the first flush of revolution there had been some elements of participation and debate, but they had long-since withered. Occasionally, when the international press descended for a major event, someone stage-managed a noisy forum and stuck up a notice saying People's Congress. Much shouting and sloganeering would fill the air. Actual debate was absent. The regime was intolerant of any dissent, retribution was frightening and people disappeared. It was not unknown for human limbs to be found in skips awaiting rubbish collection.

So how did the nation function?

There were ministries – just about. Some able men managed to push various policies into practice, but were frequently thwarted by capricious and instant legislation. One afternoon the Colonel addressed a deliriously enthusiastic meeting and suddenly announced that all imported luxury cars were to be got rid of. Fifteen minutes later, a bodyguard sidled up to him to mention that several vehicles in his own motorcade were on fire outside. The order was rescinded on the spot.

Appointments were made without relevance to merit. A nervous civil service never questioned the coming and goings. At the Interior Ministry I asked the man in the biggest office (with a broken fax machine and no working telephone) if he were the minister.

"Maybe," he replied, adding that he had been last year, then someone else had been appointed while he was still in post, but had subsequently . . . er . . . left town . . . "So, maybe I'm the minister," he added helpfully.

The Transport Ministry – like many in other countries – was inured to grandiose schemes. One consequence was the construction of 34 fly-overs to deal with Tripoli's chaotic traffic. They were quite elegant, designed in Europe and built without the usual chunks of concrete missing in many Libyan building works. Unfortunately, no one commissioned any roads to join them together, so for many years they decorated the landscape like giant public sculptures.

The Justice Ministry struggled in a country where summary justice, secret police and the personal clout of Gaddafi's henchmen meant so much more than the mere judicial process.
Katie Adie reporting from Tripoli after the Americans bombed the city in 1986 Katie Adie reporting from Tripoli after the Americans bombed the city in 1986. Photograph: Frank Zabci/Rex Features

I witnessed this during the trial of a young English oil-worker who had been picked up by young "Revolutionary Guards" during a nasty period of radical outrages against the ordinary population and unfortunate foreigners in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We, the British press, had been assured by the Colonel that we would see justice being done. We might have, had the ministry minders managed to find out the date, the time and the place of the hearing. Realising they hadn't delivered what was expected, they went into complete panic-mode. An hour later, I and my TV crew hurtled into a courtroom, empty save for a lone figure on a bench. It was Malcolm, the defendant. "You're too late. I've been convicted."

I turned on the senior minder to deliver my views – and he scooted out the back door of the court like a rabbit from a fox. A short while later, the door opened and three men in the Italianate robes of Libyan judges walked in quickly and sat down. A small swarm of lawyers and officials cantered behind them.

"Set up the camera," said the panting minder.

"We've missed the trial," I pointed out.

"No, no – we're going to do it all again – for you."

The only thing that slightly surprised me was that the verdict remained the same.

Farce mingled with fear. That is how the country ran. At the very heart of the mysterious administration was a clutch of men loyal to – but still very scared of – the Colonel himself.

There are few times when any of us experience total fear. To tremble with fear is a cliche. However, on two occasions I noticed officials in his presence start to shake. I wondered if they were ill, then realised that they were unable to control their fear, sweating and twitching and trying to edge out of his direct gaze. I once asked one of his inner circle – we were not in Libya – why his close colleagues behaved that way. He thought and then said that the Colonel's rages were occasionally so terrible that many thought he might kill. "It's terrible," he said. "But what can we do? He has the power. There are no alternatives in this kind of world. I'd rather not talk about it."

The outside world mostly saw the circus, the oddities, the bizarre behaviour. "Flaky," chuckled President Reagan.

Gaddafi called himself Colonel occasionally and refused to acknowledge the phrase President, preferring the term Leader. He was costumed theatrically – admiral, desert Bedouin, Italian lounge-lizard. He occasionally used the trappings of conventional power – long motorcades – or the occasional white horse. However, he was just as likely to turn up driving a battered small Peugeot with the bumpers missing. I know, because he nearly ran me over one morning trying to park the wreck very inexpertly outside my hotel.

He had a troupe of women all usually referred to as his bodyguards – and indeed, one or two seemed as if they might be quite useful in a tight corner. However, there was always one, perhaps two, quiet, physically compact Berbers unobtrusively just a few yards away: amiably ruthless men, who smiled when I pointed to the women, and remarked that it was useful that the foreign press concentrated on the women . . .

Gaddafi grew notorious for weird behaviour – pitching tents in cities, spouting seven-hour speeches and making absurd claims. However, ignorance drove this as much as instability.

What actually went on in his innermost circle was virtually impossible to learn with any certainty. As his sons grew up, appeared in public, travelled abroad, partied and disgraced themselves with the behaviour of wilful rich brutes, there was no public mention of the succession. It became harder to pin all gestures from the country on the Colonel himself: his second son, Saif al Islam, ex-LSE, shrewd and calculating but much more sophisticated than his father, seemed to be acquiring his own powerbase. He spoke for the regime, travelled and negotiated. However, the Colonel has not retired – and there is no doubt that within the family circle, his word is law.

In the past few years I've raised the subject of what would happen in the future with those who see the Leader regularly: a smooth succession? A violent family quarrel? It has always occasioned shrugs and a nervous silence. It was not to be talked about. Even the recent feverish development, the lucrative oil contracts, the business opportunities being snapped up by foreigners and entrepreneurial Libyans had not sharpened the outline of the future.

True, more foreign travel and the advent of the satellite dish with its Arab news have widened the experience of many of the young. But they have had to contend with a complete lack of available reliable information within their own borders. Factual news is an unknown element in Libyan newsrooms. Ordinary folk have relied much more on gossip and what they hear from family and neighbours – leading to a mind-set ill-equipped to deal with the chaotic implosion of a society. Some of the wilder stories of the past week are the consequence of believing anything other than the official – and rubbish – version of events.

And when the Middle East rebellions started, there was little reaction from the family who have had the power of life and death for more than 40 years, who retain a chilling, arrogant confidence.

Even when Benghazi – always a truculent city for Gaddafi – made its bid for freedom, there was merely the usual public stream of ludicrous accusations and dotty excuses.

However, this time in the Bab el Azzizya barracks they're watching 24-hour Arabic TV – and they must be seeing joyful young people across their nation, unafraid, talking about the hitherto unthinkable – about the future. And, ironically, mentioning committees.

So, down with "committees everywhere", and up with really democratic gatherings, with people speaking up without fear.

Kate Adie: The Gaddafi I knew | World news | The Guardian

roachboy 03-03-2011 07:28 AM
on the precariousness of the american position in all this and a demonstration of the idiocy behind neo-con claims that the bush administration is in any way vindicated by people trying to make a democratic path for themselves.

Rage Comes to Baghdad | Foreign Affairs

Baraka_Guru 03-03-2011 07:52 AM
Re: Western Intervention

filtherton 03-03-2011 08:17 AM
I don't know why anyone is talking about the Bush administration. Clearly these folks were inspired by Green Bay's win over Pittsburgh in the super bowl.

As long as we're going out on limbs here.

roachboy 03-03-2011 08:59 AM
o, i was reading something about the plight of the neo-cons on foreign policy in the washington post i think on the weekend. for reasons i will never quite understand, the paper actually sent someone out to interview the range of fossils from the bush period--you know wolfowitz and abrams and so on. some of them were arguing that line, that the bush people had it right. which made the foreign policy piece about the growing protest movement in iraq---which curiously gets little press here in the u s of a go figure---kinda apposite.

you know.

aceventura3 03-03-2011 10:30 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2878388)
on the precariousness of the american position in all this and a demonstration of the idiocy behind neo-con claims that the bush administration is in any way vindicated by people trying to make a democratic path for themselves.
Or, how about the idiocy in revisionist history - to suggest the invasion of Iraq has had no influence on current events is beyond belief.

Quote:
A Free Iraq Prevented Nuclear Libya

Posted 03/02/2011 07:02 PM ET

Leadership: For years, Barack Obama called Iraq "a dumb war." But considering how that conflict undeniably scared Libya's Moammar Gadhafi into ending his WMD program, the 2003 invasion has never looked smarter.

'I don't oppose all wars," future President Barack Obama told Chicagoans Against War in Iraq during a 2002 rally. "What I am opposed to is a dumb war ... a rash war ... the cynical attempt by ... armchair, weekend warriors in this (Bush) administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."

Obama called the plan to liberate Iraq an "attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us." And he warned that it "will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida."

Goading the then-commander in chief, Obama said: "You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure that the U.N. (nuclear) inspectors can do their work ... let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people."

Today, after two years of President Obama, our "so-called allies" like Egypt are destabilized, or threatened, and in danger of becoming enemies — nothing "so-called" about it.

Turns out that if it hadn't been for those "armchair warriors" and their "dumb war" in Iraq, Libya might well be a nuclear weapons power today. All the U.N. inspectors in the world wouldn't be able to stop Gadhafi from using atomic and chemical weapons to slaughter tens or even hundreds of thousands of his own people to keep himself in power, instead of just conventional weapons to kill a fraction of that number.

Robert G. Joseph, senior scholar at the National Institute for Public Policy in Fairfax, Va., led the nuclear weapons negotiations with Libya nearly a decade ago as undersecretary of state for arms control and special envoy for nuclear nonproliferation during the Bush administration. Joseph recounts what may be the most successful nonproliferation success of modern times in his book "Countering WMD: The Libyan Experience."

"Multiple motivations were in play as the Libyan leadership worked through the decision to abandon WMD and longer-range missile programs," Joseph writes. The motivations included ending U.S. sanctions.

"There is no evidence to suggest, however, that the goal of ending sanctions would have been sufficient to induce Libya to acknowledge, remove and destroy its WMD programs," according to Joseph. "All evidence suggests that other motives were essential to this outcome."
Joseph stresses that "the timing of the Libyan approach to the United States and United Kingdom, coming as hundreds of thousands of coalition forces were being deployed to the region to enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions on Iraqi WMD, was more than coincidental."

Gadhafi, in fact, told visiting U.S. congressional delegations in January and March 2004 that "he did not want to be a Saddam Hussein and he did not want his people to be subjected to the military efforts that were being put forth in Iraq."

Italian Prime Minister Sergio Berlusconi, in a September 2003 interview, said Gadhafi told him: "I will do whatever the United States wants, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."

As Joseph points out: "Words — that those who seek such weapons will put their security at risk — were being backed by action. In Libya, which had long possessed chemical weapons and had embarked on a large-scale effort to be able to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, the message was clearly received ... after Iraq, it would be the next target for U.S. military action."

Had that then-unknown, anti-war Illinois state senator been listened to in 2002, he would today be a president facing possible nuclear war in the Mideast.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnal...ear-Libya.aspx

Do you even stand with those wanting democracy in the ME?
Do you support freedom of expression, including the practice of a religion other than Islam in the ME?
What about homosexuality in the ME, do you stand in support of any rights for homosexuals in the ME?

Or are you all about the pretense, perhaps the switch from one form of tyranny for another? I guess your views are too complicated, I don't expect any type of a rational response. Just tell me, again, about how wrong it is to post something from IBD.

roachboy 03-03-2011 10:45 AM
ace, don't be an ass. did you actually read the foreign policy article i posted above? or is that too much to expect?

if you're not going to even pretend to engage with the same information stream, why do you waste your time---and mine and that of everyone who is importuned by your posts?

aceventura3 03-03-2011 10:54 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2878450)
ace, don't be an ass. did you actually read the foreign policy article i posted above? or is that too much to expect?
I have no objection to a discussion of the article you cited, however, my response was to your comment not the article. If you acknowledge that your comment was pure b.s. we can move on.

Quote:
if you're not going to even pretend to engage with the same information stream, why do you waste your time---and mine and that of everyone who is importuned by your posts?
I don't waste time, however it appears that you do based on how you respond. You know what to expect from my posts. I will always cut through the b.s. Every time you pretend to support the democracy movement in the ME, I will point out that you really don't. You clearly can not make a definitive statement regarding what you would support in the ME and therefore who you stand with in the ME. Why don't you think your positions through before posting on matters of life and death importance.

roachboy 03-03-2011 11:01 AM
the comment was about the article, a teaser for it.
you haven't offered fuck all in the way of a coherent counter even for that, and basically acknowledge that you didn't read the article.

great job.

it's a waste of time interacting with you.

aceventura3 03-03-2011 11:18 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2878459)
the comment was about the article, a teaser for it.
you haven't offered fuck all in the way of a coherent counter even for that, and basically acknowledge that you didn't read the article.
B.s., the point of the article was related to something I posted a while ago (see post #296 in this thread) - and even in Iraq, without true economic reforms (which take time), no lasting change will occur and there will be unrest.

The words you used where your words, the did not come from the article. The words you used distorted the article and the truth.

Quote:
great job.

it's a waste of time interacting with you.
Donate a $1 to a charity for every time you have said that and make a difference in the world.:rolleyes: Writing it here has absolutely no value, no impact. For the umpteenth time, ignore my posts if you have a problem with them. I won't ignore yours because I feel a need to correct the record.

roachboy 03-03-2011 12:03 PM
this is an interesting account of watching egyptian television for the coverage of the debate between then prime minister shafik and folk from the opposition:

Egyptian Chronicles: Unforgettable night in the Arab TV history

following on which:

Quote:
Bowing to Opposition, Egypt Premier Resigns
By LIAM STACK

CAIRO — Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq resigned on Thursday, bowing to one of the main demands of Egypt’s opposition movement which has demanded his ouster for days from its informal headquarters in a resurrected tent city in Tahrir Square.

Egypt’s transitional military government, which has ruled since the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, announced its decision to replace Mr. Shafiq on a Facebook page.

The new prime minister will be Essam Sharaf, who served as transportation minister from 2004 to 2006.

Mr. Shafiq’s resignation was one of several demands protesters said had to be met by the military and comes one day before a planned major demonstration in Tahrir Square to call for the removal all Mubarak-era ministers, including Mr. Shafiq and Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit.

Other demands which have yet to be met include an end to Egypt’s decades-old state of emergency, the dismantling of the country’s feared state security service, and the release of political prisoners jailed during the 30-year tenure of former President Mubarak.

Mr. Shafiq was appointed prime minister in the final days of Mr. Mubarak’s tenure after anti-government demonstrations forced him to dismiss the entire cabinet on January 29.

Many protesters and opposition figures viewed Mr. Shafiq as tainted by his association with the former president and feared that Mr. Mubarak, who has not been publicly seen or heard from since stepping down, would continue to rule through him.

“Ahmed Shafiq and Hosni Mubarak are working together,” said Gaby Osman, a 19-year-old protester in Tahrir Square on Monday night. “He became prime minister because of Hosni Mubarak, and we hear rumors that he calls Mubarak on the phone and asks him what he should do to look like he is doing something for the people.”

Mr. Shafiq has been heavily criticized over the last two weeks, and several hundred protesters have camped out in Tahrir Square since Saturday calling for his removal.

On Wednesday night, he fumbled an appearance on a popular satellite channel’s current events talk show during a roundtable discussion with the Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris and the opposition figure Alaa al- Aswani.

Mr. Shafiq defended Egypt’s State Security Force against questions about its use of torture, which has been described by Human Rights Watch as “routine and systematic.”

When pressed on possible reforms, Mr. Shafiq suggested that the s name of the security force be changed to the State Safety Force and that Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the Egyptian uprising, be cleaned up and turned into a version of London’s Hyde Park.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/wo...gewanted=print

so the egyptian revolution makes another step, following more or less the pattern in tunisia (more or less)....

meanwhile, in iraq, from the foreign policy article quoted above:

Quote:
Saddam Hussein may have been overthrown in 2003, but the dawn of more representative government in Iraq has not inoculated the country from the popular unrest now sweeping through the Arab world. Over the past month, demonstrations protesting the woeful lack of services and widespread corruption have taken place throughout the country. These culminated in a violent “day of rage” in a number of Iraqi cities, including one in Baghdad on February 25 that left more than 20 protesters dead.

These protests have not reached the scale of those witnessed in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, and demonstrators have not demanded regime change per se. Nonetheless, the tight security measures taken to contain the “day of rage” protests in Baghdad -- including blocking access to the city and putting a tight military cordon around Tahrir Square, the focal point of the demonstrations -- and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s efforts to link the unrest to al Qaeda and Baathist provocateurs suggest that his government is rattled. And with good cause, because if Baghdad cannot respond effectively to popular demands, the current government’s political survival is no less at stake than those in Cairo, Tripoli, and Tunis.

Although there is undoubtedly an element of contagion influencing events in Iraq, which began with small demonstrations in Baghdad led by intellectuals and professionals, the protests there are driven by local grievances. Popular anger at the persistent lack of services -- especially electricity -- has been rising steadily over the past few years. Demonstrations protesting power shortages occurred in Basra last summer, expressing a frustration common to Iraqis across the country; some parts of Baghdad, for example, received around two hours of electricity per day from the national grid in early February. Iraqis also share growing resentment toward pervasive government corruption, a factor that has been particularly important in driving demonstrations against the regional administration in Kurdistan. Iraq ranked 175 out of 178 countries on Transparency International’s 2010 corruption index. Meanwhile, there is broad resentment of the high salaries and generous benefits that public officials have granted themselves, especially given the government’s apparent ineptitude.

None of these grievances is new; Iraqis have complained about poor services and unresponsive government since the U.S. invasion in 2003. But in the bloody, chaotic years that followed Hussein’s fall, security was the biggest popular concern. Now that levels of violence have diminished, Iraqis’ patience with their government’s inadequacies is wearing thin.
Rage Comes to Baghdad | Foreign Affairs

no resemblance. no relation between the bush "democracy" and the democracy that people are now demanding. no way to justify bushwar by pointing to what's going on now. because in the heart of bushwar, it's corruption and incompetence and an inability to deliver basic services. cronyism and stupidity and an increasingly restive population. with the american military acting to suppress protests demanding democracy.

here's a country-by-country summary from the ny times:

Middle East Protests: A Country-by-Country Look - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

and here is a peter singer edito from al jazeera about the question of intervening in libya, one which i do not think has been posed correctly much less resolved:

Global Justice and Intervention - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

aceventura3 03-03-2011 12:12 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2878477)
meanwhile, in iraq, from the foreign policy article quoted above:
Also from the article cited:

Quote:
An Egypt- or Tunisia-style revolution is not in the cards for Iraq -- at least not yet. But if Iraqis are forced to endure another hot summer without sufficient electricity supplies, protests will continue and pressure on the government will grow. Worse yet, the Iraqi people may lose faith altogether in electoral politics, which would put not just Maliki’s future at risk but also the stability of the entire post-2003 political order.
Rage Comes to Baghdad | Foreign Affairs


It is all about the economy, even in Iraq.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_35kDzNt-gT...0/carville.jpg




My new hero.

roachboy 03-03-2011 01:27 PM
right. nothing to see here, folks. ace has determined that the Problem in iraq has nothing to do with incompetence or corruption or american colonial domination.

rather is "the economy stupid" which is exactly correct----it is stupid to imagine that the economy is separable from the political institutions that enable it, that channel it and limit it and so on, so it is in fact only the stupid who would think that "the economy stupid" taken in isolation is in fact an explanation for much of anything.

but it makes some sense that american conservatives would try to enforce such a split given the debacle for they've presided over in these pathetic neo-liberal times, the largest redistribution of wealth toward the top 1 percent in terms of wealth ever seen, the consolidation of the entertainment-security complex, the continuation against all reason of the national-security state, a massive expansion of prisons as an instrument of class warfare, the institution of an intellectual-integrity optional approach not only to politics but information...lots to answer for....so it's not a real shock that its the economy stupid would emanate from those waters.

i don't think anyone else in the world is fooled by this nonsense. certainly not the people protesting in iraq. certainly not those in libya or egypt or tunisia. or algeria or morocco or bahrain or oman or yemen. nor in most of the united states. just over there in the shrinking island of the american right.

Baraka_Guru 03-03-2011 01:41 PM
But there's nothing wrong with the economy in Iraq. The GDP growth in 2010 was 5.5%, which was almost double that of the U.S. and isn't too shabby compared to red-hot India (8.2%) and the Chinese dragon (10.3%).

Why the unrest? The economy is doing fiiine...

dc_dux 03-03-2011 01:43 PM
Right...it has nothing to do with corruption, lack of oversight of elections and human rights, secret prisons....
Quote:
Mr Maliki is becoming still more authoritarian. In January a supreme federal court ruling allowed several independent institutions, including the central bank and various committees that are meant to oversee elections, fight graft and uphold human rights, to fall under the control of the executive. Mr Maliki has been trying to place his allies in several of these outfits. Qassim Aboudi, who heads the electoral committee, said he feared that Mr Maliki would interfere even more in the next election than he did in the past one. Worst of all, reports have been circulating that security forces loyal to Mr Maliki are again running secret prisons where detainees are being tortured.

Protests in Iraq: Even a democracy is not immune | The Economist

Cimarron29414 03-03-2011 01:51 PM
Facts in Green
Opinions in Yellow
Unsubstantiated bullshit in Red

Quote:
Mr Maliki is becoming still more authoritarian. In January a supreme federal court ruling allowed several independent institutions, including the central bank and various committees that are meant to oversee elections, fight graft and uphold human rights, to fall under the control of the executive. Mr Maliki has been trying to place his allies in several of these outfits. Qassim Aboudi, who heads the electoral committee, said he feared that Mr Maliki would interfere even more in the next election than he did in the past one. Worst of all, reports have been circulating that security forces loyal to Mr Maliki are again running secret prisons where detainees are being tortured.
So, all we know is that the supreme court shuffled the oversight committees under the president (Czars) and Adoudi heads the electoral committee.

dc_dux 03-03-2011 02:08 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cimarron29414 (Post 2878522)
Facts in Green
Opinions in Yellow
Unsubstantiated bullshit in Red



So, all we know is that the supreme court shuffled the oversight committees under the president (Czars) and Adoudi heads the electoral committee.
I guess it depends on how much credibility you give to a report from Human Rights Watch released last month.
Quote:
The rights of Iraq's most vulnerable citizens, especially women and detainees, are routinely violated with impunity, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Human Rights Watch conducted research in seven cities across Iraq during 2010 and found that, beyond the country's continuing violence and crimes, human rights abuses are commonplace.

The 102-page report, "At a Crossroads: Human Rights in Iraq Eight Years After the US-led Invasion," calls on the government to protect the rights of vulnerable groups and to amend its penal code and all other laws that discriminate against women and violate freedom of speech. The report also urges Baghdad to open independent and impartial investigations into all allegations of abuse against detainees, minorities, and journalists....

...Increasingly, journalists find themselves harassed, intimidated, threatened, detained, and physically assaulted by security forces attached to government institutions or political parties. Senior politicians are quick to sue journalists and their publications for unflattering articles....

...Human Rights Watch also found that Iraqi interrogators routinely abuse detainees, regardless of sect, usually to coerce confessions. Despite knowing there was a clear risk of torture, US authorities transferred thousands of Iraqi detainees to Iraqi custodians, who have continued a tradition of torture that was also the case under Saddam Hussein and coalition forces.

Iraq: Vulnerable Citizens at Risk | Human Rights Watch

roachboy 03-03-2011 02:16 PM
At Least 29 Dead in Iraq Protest Crackdowns -- News from Antiwar.com

Failure and Frustration Mar Baghdad's Day of Protest - Ben Van Heuvelen - International - The Atlantic

interesting information about iraq.
the first to confirm what dc's posted above.
the second as a description of protests from more ground-level perspectives.

---------- Post added at 10:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:15 PM ----------

At Least 29 Dead in Iraq Protest Crackdowns -- News from Antiwar.com

Failure and Frustration Mar Baghdad's Day of Protest - Ben Van Heuvelen - International - The Atlantic

interesting information about iraq.
the first to confirm what dc's posted above.
the second as a description of protests from more ground-level perspectives.

this is an interesting resource:

http://www.iraqoilreport.com/politic...andscape-5419/

the link takes you to an analysis of the protests by the same guy as wrote the atlantic piece.
it requires either a subscription or a free trial to access the whole thing.
i've got to go now, but maybe will free-trial it up later.
or if someone else feels so inspired, please do.
and give an idea of the contents more generally please.

Charlatan 03-03-2011 05:00 PM
Ace is right. It is the economy. The problem, Ace, is that you can't seem to see, or aren't willing to concede, that in order for the economy to be increasingly liberal, the levers of power must be held by those who will take care of the people first and their own corrupt selves second.

As has been pointed out, the economy in Iraq isn't neccessarily the problem. It's access to the benefits of that economy that is.

Healthy nations are ruled by laws rather than people. And the law needs to be impartially enforced, regardless of who breaks them.

Corruption and rule of law may be highfalutin mumbo-jumbo to you, but you've never lived in a place that doesn't have little of the former and plenty of the latter.

aceventura3 03-08-2011 08:45 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlatan (Post 2878576)
Ace is right. It is the economy. The problem, Ace, is that you can't seem to see, or aren't willing to concede, that in order for the economy to be increasingly liberal, the levers of power must be held by those who will take care of the people first and their own corrupt selves second.
I see that. My point has been that given real economic opportunity it does not matter what form of government is employed. When people are empowered economically, corruption can be self-correcting, with the exception of military force being employed in a "free market".

---------- Post added at 04:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:34 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2878506)
right. nothing to see here, folks. ace has determined that the Problem in iraq has nothing to do with incompetence or corruption or american colonial domination.
Roach, you clearly don't get it. Hilery Clinton does. I knew I liked her for some reason. Perhaps she is also a neo-con capitalist pig. When large percentages of people in a nation are not allowed capitalistic opportunity, the nation will have perpetual problems in a competitive world economy. Try to get up to speed and connect your own dots.


Quote:
By Hillary Rodham Clinton - Mar 8, 2011 12:05 AM ET

One of the biggest growth markets in the world may surprise you.

You’ve heard about the opportunities opening up in countries like China, regions like Asia and industries like green technology. But one major emerging market hasn’t received the attention it deserves: women.

Today, there are more than 200 million women entrepreneurs worldwide. Women earn more than $10 trillion every year, which is expected to grow by $5 trillion over the next several years. In many developing countries, women’s incomes are growing faster than men’s.

Facts such as these should persuade governments and business leaders worldwide to see investing in women as a strategy for job creation and economic growth. Many are doing so. Yet the pool of talented women is underutilized, underpaid and underrepresented in business and society.

Throughout the world, women do two-thirds of the work, yet they earn just one-third of the income and own less than 2 percent of the land. Three billion people don’t have access to basic financial services we take for granted, like bank accounts and lines of credit; the majority of them are women.

Certainly we are seeing the impact of excluding women in the Middle East, where the lack of their access to education and business has hampered economic development and helped lead to social unrest.

Ripple Effect

If we invest in women’s education and give them the opportunity to access credit or start a small business, we add fuel to a powerful engine for progress for women, their families, their communities and their countries. Women invest up to 90 percent of their incomes on their families and in their communities.

When women have equal access to education and health care and the freedom to start businesses, the economic, political and social benefits ripple out far beyond their own home.

At the State Department, we are supporting women worldwide as a critical element of U.S. foreign policy. We are incorporating women’s entrepreneurship into our international economic agenda and promoting women’s access to markets through the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the Pathways to Prosperity Initiative and women’s entrepreneurship conferences.

The U.S. is hosting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum 2011 to help foster growth and increase opportunities for women throughout the region. We are working with the private sector to provide grants to local non-governmental organizations around the world that are dedicated to women and girls.

Closing the Gap

We are encouraging governments and the private sector to use the tools at their disposal to provide credit, banking and insurance services to more women. Through our mWomen initiative, we will begin to close the gender gap in access to mobile technology, which will improve health care, literacy, education and economic potential.

This is a central focus of my diplomatic outreach. Wherever I go around the world, I meet with governments, international organizations and civic groups to talk about economic policies that will help their countries grow by expanding women’s access to jobs and finance.

Many powerful U.S. businesses have embraced this mission as their own. ExxonMobil Corp. is training women entrepreneurs to help them advocate for policies to create more opportunities. Coca-Cola Co. has issued an ambitious challenge in its “5 by 20” program to empower and train 5 million new women entrepreneurs across the globe by 2020.

Improving Access

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. started the “10,000 Women” initiative to open the door for women who would not otherwise have access to a business education. Ernst & Young is tapping into the productive potential of women with its “Winning Women” program to help female entrepreneurs learn growth strategies from some of the most successful leaders in the U.S. Companies all over the world are committed to increasing productivity, driving economic growth and harnessing the power of emerging markets through greater diversity.

As Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank said, gender equality is smart economics.”

Governments are passing laws that support women’s economic empowerment and building awareness of women’s rights. Botswana lifted restrictions on the industries in which women can work, for example. Morocco now allows women to start businesses and get jobs without their husbands’ approval. Bolivia began a land titling effort to recognize that women and men have equal rights to own property.
Astonishing Achievements

This week, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. It’s an occasion for honoring the achievements of women. Without question, the past century has brought astonishing progress, by just about every measure, in women’s health, their economic opportunities, political power and more. Today, women are leaders in every field.

Never in history have there been so many forces working together for gender equity.

But International Women’s Day is also an occasion for recognizing how much more needs to be done to support women and girls worldwide. I encourage everyone reading this to reflect on what you and your friends can do to support women -- to put words and ideas into action.

If we decide -- as societies, governments and businesses -- to invest in women and girls, we will strengthen our efforts to fight poverty, drive development and spread stability. When women thrive, families, communities and countries thrive -- and the world becomes more peaceful and prosperous.
I Know the Secret to Economic Growth: Hillary Rodham Clinton - Bloomberg

Oh, my. Another Bloomberg article. I already know Bloomberg is not on the Roach list of approved sources of information. Consider, that may be the reason he is not up to speed. Ha, Ha, he thinks US "colonialism" is the reason for the failure of economic development in places around the world. Wow, it ain't the 60's any more.

roachboy 03-08-2011 09:36 AM
Quote:
Oh, my. Another Bloomberg article. I already know Bloomberg is not on the Roach list of approved sources of information. Consider, that may be the reason he is not up to speed. Ha, Ha, he thinks US "colonialism" is the reason for the failure of economic development in places around the world. Wow, it ain't the 60's any more.
drivel, ace. of the kind that one sees when the poster's got nothing to say at all but vanity requires that one go on anyway.

dc_dux 03-08-2011 09:59 AM
Latest developments in Iraq:

Quote:
Two political parties that led demonstrations in Baghdad over the past two weeks said Monday that security forces controlled by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had ordered them to close their offices.


The actions, which the government said were merely evictions, came amid growing concerns that Mr. Maliki’s American-backed government is using force and other measures to stifle dissent in this fragile democracy, where tens of thousands of demonstrators have seized on the upheaval sweeping the Arab world to rally for government reforms and better services...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/wo....html?_r=2&hpw
SO now its not just journalists being harassed, intimidated, threatened, detained, and physically assaulted by security forces attached to government institutions, but its the government attempting to shut down opposition parties.

These are not economic issues.

roachboy 03-08-2011 10:09 AM
over the weekend, egyptian protestors sacked the state police offices in alexandria, giza and nasr city after word leaked out that the police were shredding and otherwise destroying documents pertaining to their activities, presumably to avoid prosecution (though the motive is not clear exactly).

here's an account:

Egyptian Chronicles: The night the capital of Hell fell down !!

tunisia abolished their secret police altogether:

It’s Official: Tunisia Now Freer than the U.S. | Informed Comment

prompting this commentator to say the obvious: tunisia is now more free than is the united states and will remain more free until the national security state is dismantled here.

these are not economic issues.

aceventura3 03-08-2011 11:28 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2880100)
drivel, ace. of the kind that one sees when the poster's got nothing to say at all but vanity requires that one go on anyway.
Understanding the causes of economic strife in the ME is drivel?
Connecting the causes of economic strife to protests and revolution in the ME is drivel?

I must say you are my favorite non-neo-con, anti-capitalist pig that I have ever had the privilege of interacting with. Please tell me more about "the man" and how "the man" is oppressing the masses in a vast conspiracy that is only known to the most elite intellectuals, such as yourself.

roachboy 03-08-2011 11:33 AM
ace--you offer nothing remotely like an understanding of anything in the middle east. you offer the same lame warmed-over neoliberal bullshit you always offer.

the thread has been about trying to understand things by looking at actual information.

you offer nothing. why waste your time with this? go play somewhere else.

aceventura3 03-08-2011 11:40 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by dc_dux (Post 2880104)

These are not economic issues.
So, the government reforms and better "services" are related to...what? I am betting that some are a bit upset that they have yet to get the benefit of economic opportunity, and that when they do they will be satisfied. I acknowledge that there will always be people fighting for political power and political control, but that as a given, is not the reason people at the grassroots level revolt against their government.

---------- Post added at 07:40 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:38 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2880144)
ace--you offer nothing remotely like an understanding of anything in the middle east. you offer the same lame warmed-over neoliberal bullshit you always offer.

the thread has been about trying to understand things by looking at actual information.

you offer nothing. why waste your time with this? go play somewhere else.
You say that because you can't get passed my style of posting and actually read what I have shared. Pretty much a "you" problem.

roachboy 03-08-2011 12:23 PM
right ace. your simplistic take on things--which can't even get by the self-evident fact that economic relations are not separable from other forms of social relations on the one hand, and that the economy is only *one* of the issues that's driving the revolts happening in north africa now, and bubbling in the middle east---is a "me" problem.

got it. my problem that i can't get with your simple-minded viewpoint.
right.

aceventura3 03-08-2011 12:59 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2880165)
right ace. your simplistic take on things--which can't even get by the self-evident fact that economic relations are not separable from other forms of social relations on the one hand, and that the economy is only *one* of the issues that's driving the revolts happening in north africa now, and bubbling in the middle east---is a "me" problem.

got it. my problem that i can't get with your simple-minded viewpoint.
right.
You see, your problem is you think it is just me. Anyone who has read anything from the sources I have shared knows better. Even what you may consider liberal organizations and people agree with the causes if not the solutions. Here is another example:

Quote:
Unlike the 2008 global food crisis, when 37 countries faced food riots, ousting the Haiti president in the process, spiralling fuel and food prices, especially since September 2010, have been more piercing this time resulting in a strong political tsunami. It all began when Russia, faced with extended drought and widespread wildfires, brought in an export ban till the next year’s wheat harvest, thereby propelling global prices to an unreasonable hike.

Deadly food riots were witnessed in September in Mozambique, killing at least seven people. According to news reports, anger was then building up in Pakistan, Egypt and Serbia over rising prices. In the first week of January, Algeria faced food riots. A few days later, Tunisia sounded the first bugle, ousting its president, and Egypt followed.

As early as in September, Financial Times had reported that wheat futures had taken advantage, and that wheat prices internationally had gone up by 70 percent since January 2010. This happened at a time when there was neither shortfall in production nor any appreciable rise in demand. Egypt, which imports nearly 50 percent of its food requirement, was hit badly when Russia decided to ban wheat exports. Many believe that the Switzerland-based food major Glencore actually forced the Russian government, which had enough wheat reserves, to impose a ban on exports thereby sparking a killing in the futures market.

The social and political unrest that has swept the Arab hinterland is a pointer to a grave crisis ahead. Although Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) agrees that the rising food and fuel prices in recent months are the major factors behind the massive anti-government protests, he suggests more of the same prescription: “As tensions between countries increase, we could see rising protectionism – of trade and of finance.”
Caught in the food pirates? trap | Environment/Nature |Axisoflogic.com

Do you acknowledge the statement from the head of the IMF?

I repeat the same themes because you want what I post to be about me and not the issue. You want to pretend there is some grand conspiracy at the root of these revolts and that people are responding to the conspiracy - when all they really want is 3 squares, a place to call home and a thing called opportunity to improve their lives (or as we capitalists pigs think, make excessive profits and get rich from the fruits of our labor, property and intellect). As Clinton says, open economic opportunity to all, including women, and see big improvements in society.

roachboy 03-08-2011 02:36 PM
ace--what is your problem?

OF COURSE THERE IS AN ECONOMIC DIMENSION THAT LAY BEHIND THESE ACTIONS.
THERE ARE ALSO POLITICAL DIMENSIONS THAT ARE NOT REDUCIBLE TO THE ECONOMIC.


pages and pages into this thread and you continue to repeat the obvious as if somehow or another that's not been taken into account---repeatedly---in the course of the thread.


and you insist on a useless frame that sometimes separates the economic from everything else or---worse---reduces absolutely everything to the econmic-----and then because your way of framing the obvious isn't taken at all seriously----and it isnt----you come back and pretend that therefore the economic dimension of these actions is being excluded.

and that's in your imagination, that exclusion of economic factors. nowhere else.
the exclusion of your way of looking at those factors is absolutely everywhere in this thread. over and over.

i don't know what you think you're accomplishing.

Willravel 03-08-2011 02:52 PM
Did RB just use caps?

dc_dux 03-08-2011 03:20 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Willravel (Post 2880209)
Did RB just use caps?
When one is repeatedly confronted with ignorance and/or obstinance despite the facts, one might tend to express frustration in a manner outside the norm of one's behavior.

ring 03-08-2011 04:42 PM
In the not too recent past,
Ace has admitted to posting his drivel just to get a rise out of folk.

Oh oh oh, roach used caps!
Now Ace is sitting with his feet up on the desk chuckling, "Winning!"

I'm off to find some links worthy of the serious discussion that this thread has been mostly about.

Here's two:

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index...etry-of-revolt

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index...ward_-vote-now

---------- Post added at 07:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:01 PM ----------

two more:

The Associated Press: Egyptian women's rights protest marred by hecklers

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index...nd-petition%29

roachboy 03-09-2011 07:40 AM
a couple accounts of what happened to the march in support of expanded political rights for women in the new egypt yesterday:

people were handing out this flyer:

Quote:
The flyer had the following demands:

1. Women's participation in shaping Egypt's constitutional, legal and political future.
2. A new civil constitution that respects citizenship, espouses equality and abolishes discrimination.
3. Amending laws so that it give full equality and rights, including personal status law.
4. Not allowing women's reproductive role to take over her participation in public and private life.
5. Establishing law for criminalization of violence against women inside and outside their home.
6. The constitution must allow women to run for presidency.
which personally i cannot imagine not supporting...but that was apparently not the attitude taken by folk around tahrir square:


Rebel With A Cause: Faggots for Whores? Or What happened to Women March in Tahrir

another:

International Women's Day inCairo - Blog - The Arabist

it's a process. it's good that these issues are on the table and that the demo got the amount of exposure that it did. and sad.

aceventura3 03-09-2011 12:07 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2880205)
ace--what is your problem?

OF COURSE THERE IS AN ECONOMIC DIMENSION THAT LAY BEHIND THESE ACTIONS.
THERE ARE ALSO POLITICAL DIMENSIONS THAT ARE NOT REDUCIBLE TO THE ECONOMIC.
For example one of those political dimensions involves the rights of women, or the rights of non-Muslims. I am the only one who has been willing to make declarative stances in support of for example, equal rights for women, and people of all religions in the ME, and that any revolution or change in leadership is empty without those rights. You have been silent on the political issues of most importance.

---------- Post added at 07:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:57 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by dc_dux (Post 2880212)
When one is repeatedly confronted with ignorance and/or obstinance despite the facts, one might tend to express frustration in a manner outside the norm of one's behavior.
What facts are you talking about?

---------- Post added at 08:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:58 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by ring (Post 2880225)
In the not too recent past,
Ace has admitted to posting his drivel just to get a rise out of folk.
No doubt that I pick on Roach, but there is a reason. I would have to go back over the course of a year or two and read our exchanges if you don't understand why.

Quote:
Oh oh oh, roach used caps!
Now Ace is sitting with his feet up on the desk chuckling, "Winning!"
I can not win or lose anything here. What I get is a better understanding of the points of view of people who disagree with me. I continue to ask pointed questions and tolerate the insults because of a personality flaw that does not allow me to easily walk away when normal people would. I assume when people respond to me rather than the point presented, they actually have no response to the point presented. I often find that enlightening. I do it here because in normal life I make a special effort to avoid painting people into corners based on il-conceived points of view they may hold.

roachboy 03-09-2011 12:26 PM
on the weekend protestors broke into state security/secret police officees in alexandria, giza and---especially----nasr city, the main headquarters, the capital of hell.

a summary:

Quote:
Egyptian activists move to shut down infamous secret police
Emad Mekay, The Electronic Intifada, 9 March 2011

CAIRO (IPS) - The much-feared secret police and intelligence service that protected the regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak by arresting, torturing and even killing opponents has started a wave of burning documents and evidence that could incriminate them, as calls escalate for abolishing the force altogether and bringing its officers to justice.

Hundreds of protesters surrounded the main office Saturday of Amn al-Dawla, the State Security Police, in 6th of October City, 30 kilometers south of Cairo, to try to stop the burning of files believed to contain incriminating evidence of human rights abuses.

Protesters were shouting "Justice, justice for they fired bullets on us." Army tanks and armored vehicles were cordoning off the offices to protect the besieged secret police officers.

Heaps of documents and files were on fire. Dozens of protesters used wooden ladders to take a peek from above a three-meter-high fence. Some managed to salvage lightly burned files. The documents could provide insights on how the secret police operated with complete impunity under Mubarak for thirty years.

Similar protests broke out in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and in Sharkia, a province northeast of Cairo. Protesters asked for disbanding the force after word spread on Friday night that officers were shredding documents and setting fire to "top secret" documents.

Eyewitnesses in Alexandria told local TV stations that officers cornered inside the building opened fire on the protesters, injuring at least three.

Disbanding the force would be the next most important landmark in the process of the Egyptian revolution, after it succeeded in ousting the Western-backed Mubarak on 11 February, and the dissolution of parliament a few days later.

Amn al-Dawla resembles the Iranian Savak force under the Shah of Iran in the 1970s. That force was later eliminated by the Islamic revolution.

The draconian force had instilled fear among most Egyptians and was often the main friction point between the public and the Mubarak regime. Thousands have been kidnapped and tortured by Amn al-Dawla officers.

The force, whose exact number and budget remain a secret, controlled almost all aspects of life in the nation of 85 million. Its reports are said to have shaped the future of most professionals in the country.

No government appointments were made without approval of the secret police. Political activists risked at the least a ban on travel overseas. Young army officers were put under surveillance to ensure loyalty to Mubarak. Spies were planted everywhere, including in shopping malls and sports clubs to monitor public sentiment.

"They banned all of us men over sixty years old from gathering inside mosques after prayers to read the Quran," says Hajj Mohammed Ali. "They banned any gathering. They wanted to control the people with an iron fist."

Others tell more dramatic stories. Sayed al-Gazzar, a secondary school teacher, recounted how his brother Khaled was detained by Amn al-Dawla in Sharkia for three days for not carrying an ID card.

"He came out a sick person with lots of mental problems because of the heavy torture he endured," al-Gazzar told IPS. "We spent a year going from one doctor to the other to find a cure for him. But he died a year later leaving behind three children and a wife without any income. They killed him."

It is such heart-wrenching stories that started off a campaign in Egypt to disband and investigate the force after the toppling of Mubarak.

Calls are mounting on Facebook and Twitter to surround more offices of the secret police force to save the important documents.

The coalition of the 25 January revolution (25 January is when the first big protest was held) -- a loosely formed grouping of young leaders of the uprising -- threatened to launch sit-ins around the country if the army doesn't order the end of the Amn al-Dawla, or moves to preserve evidence of its human rights abuses.

"Our unequivocal request is the elimination of that police force," the group said in a statement sent to IPS. "We will continue to escalate pressure within hours ... including issuing calls for masses of Egyptians to demonstrate until that police force is abolished."

But the spread of protests to other offices of Amn al-Dawla could lead to renewed violence as the force is well-armed, and its members didn't hesitate in the past to shoot at demonstrations.

New Prime Minister Essam Sharaf is more responsive to disbanding the force, probing abuses by the force and holding its officers accountable. Sharaf has made statements against the force before.

Interior Minister Mahmoud Wagdy, an old guard figure, has resisted calls to dissolve the powerful force, preferring instead to "restructure" it.

Human rights groups and revolution activists have vowed to press ahead with their demands to remove all symbols of the former regime.

On Thursday, the Cairo-based Arab Network for Human Rights Information published a series of leaked documents that detail the "crimes" of the secret police. In a statement, the group entitled the release: Countdown to End Amn al-Dawla.
ei: Egyptian activists move to shut down infamous secret police

a more detailed blog account with clips, photos, eyewitness accounts:

Egyptian Chronicles: The night the capital of Hell fell down !!


meanwhile, tunisia abolished its secret police altogether:

It’s Official: Tunisia Now Freer than the U.S. | Informed Comment

but here in the imperial backwater, it's national-security state business as usual

Obama's new executive order on Guantanamo - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

and the neo-fascist wing of the republican party goes still further:

The Peter King "Radicalization of Muslims" Hearing and American Democracy


it's curious watching people struggling to free themselves in north africa as conservatives work to limit freedom in the states, isn't it?

aceventura3 03-09-2011 12:40 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2880473)
it's curious watching people struggling to free themselves in north africa as conservatives work to limit freedom in the states, isn't it?
All you folks on my back - ignore stuff written like what is shown above. Am I to believe that I am the only one who finds the above to be the most problematic statement in a post today? I assume, yes. And so it will continue...

mixedmedia 03-09-2011 12:43 PM
yes, it is very problematic. because it's true.

aceventura3 03-09-2011 12:48 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by mixedmedia (Post 2880484)
yes, it is very problematic. because it's true.
A young woman in the ME can be raped and then murdered by her own family in many parts of the ME with no justice (and they are not even fighting for any rights for the young woman in this revolution), and you find that comparable to...what that "conservatives" are doing in the country? Unbelievable.

roachboy 03-09-2011 12:50 PM
from the article about that neo-fascist fuckwit peter king's circus hearings:

Quote:
In this atmosphere, King’s selective hyperbole and his planned hearing on “American Muslim radicalization” has been criticized extensively as a terrible idea by people including Representative Michael Honda (D-CA), hundreds of Christian, Je...wish, and Muslim religious leaders and members of the clergy. Even conservative commentator and frequent Muslim-basher Daniel Pipes thinks that King's hearing is misguided. The liberal advocacy organization Muslim Advocates and other advocacy groups all agree: the hearings are counterproductive to stopping terrorism at best, and will very likely be nothing more than a prominent showcase of racist misinformation. A cadre of experts gathered on Capitol Hill last week to offer a briefing to Congress on Islamophobia and to show why the King hearing would be counterproductive. Many advocates have implored King to change the focus of his hearing away from singling out Muslims and toward investigating violent extremists of all kinds. The lack of any evidence that the hearing is necessary for improving counterterrorism efforts shows that it isn’t really about “Muslim radicalization” at all. The hearing is all about Peter King, and his role as an ideological kingmaker for his party.
racist paranoia. imaginary conspiracies.
conservative politics 101.
check.

people in north africa are revolting against the neo-liberal state, which is essentially meaningless blah blah blah about democracy and free markets and all that nonsense sitting atop a neo-fascist identity politics the main function of which is the justify the existence of a national-security state apparatus, which takes more or less directly oppressive forms in different places. in the u.s. of a., a fake issue of "balanced budgets" is taken on by the republicans in the house through cuts that do not touch a single military program, they do not reduce the unbelievable waste of resources that have gone down the toilet of the surveillance and paranoia system:

Top Secret America | washingtonpost.com

from the piece that argues tunisia is more free than the united states, above:

Quote:
The Fourth Amendment is on the verge of vanishing, and this attack on the Constitution is being abetted by pusillanimous and corrupt judges and fascistic elements in our national security apparatus. Freedom of peaceable assembly is also being whittled away in the United States of America via devices such as ‘free speech zones;’ the founding generation intended that the whole of the United States be a free speech zone. Many of the protests in the Middle East being cheered on by Americans would be illegal in this country.

Few among the public even seem to care about these assaults on our liberties here. At least the youth of the Middle East can generate a little passion over censorship and unreasonable surveillance. Makes an old Madisonian tear up a little.

it is of no consequence what you find "problematic" ace.
you don't read what's posted to the thread.
you don't know what you're talking about.
it's obvious.


and as for this bit of uninformed, sanctimonious idiocy:

Quote:
A young woman in the ME can be raped and then murdered by her own family in many parts of the ME with no justice (and they are not even fighting for any rights for the young woman in this revolution), and you find that comparable to...what that "conservatives" are doing in the country? Unbelievable.
why don't you actually read post 379.

aceventura3 03-09-2011 01:22 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2880489)
why don't you actually read post 379.
Late as usual. I put the issue on the table weeks ago and your weak endorsement appears false.

Regarding the rest, do you really want to take this thread in the direction of your il-conceived ideology driven snide comments regarding conservatives in the US? Do you really want your views on those comments challenged? I don't think that you do.

roachboy 03-09-2011 01:59 PM
ace...you cannot possibly expect that i take anything you say seriously at this point, can you?


i would welcome a real debate.
you have made it obvious is you are neither capable of it nor interested in it. apparently, that's just not how you roll.
so why bother?

have a nice day.

dlish 03-17-2011 11:28 PM
the UN backs a no-fly zone

..about fucking time UN!

you finally grew some balls when you realised that there was going to be a massacre in a few hours, even though the arab league had given you the green light for a no-fly zone days ago.

this should be interesting from here on in. now i wonder which arab nations or people will side with their libyan brethren. not many if any i assume. i presume that the rebels' morale must be back after a number of consecutive defeats over the last few days.

i want to see Ghaddafi gone for good. I'd wipe his arrogant pissy little son out while im at too.

Libyan rebels celebrate UN no-fly zone | News.com.au

Cimarron29414 03-18-2011 05:41 AM
I certainly hope that not a single U.S. warplane flies over Libya. The Arab league can do it. Let their bullets be responsible for the inevitable "civilian" deaths.

Baraka_Guru 03-18-2011 06:01 AM
From what I've read, the French and the U.K. are more than willing to do it.

roachboy 03-18-2011 06:46 AM
...and gadhafi "declares a cease fire"

except for the continuing to shoot people part.

this is an interesting turn of events, i think. gives the lie to the crazy person thesis about gadhafi....


btw normally i oppose military interventions on principle. but this is an exception.

i am baffled by what took so long....well not really....in significant measure, what took so long was the continuing gift given us by the bush people in iraq and afghanistan.

ASU2003 03-18-2011 07:34 AM
Very well played on Gaddafi's part. I have to give him credit. Instead of decimating all of the big guns that might be used to fire in the air, and taking out the runways/airplanes, they will 'quit' fighting...

Why does it feel like he is like a 5 year old boy beating up on his younger brother and now that their parents caught them, he says he will stop...

The bigger question now is where does this go from here? Will the rebels be able to stay in control and run the eastern part of the country? Will the rebels stop fighting? Will the peaceful protests resume? Will the people who fled the country come back?

Baraka_Guru 03-18-2011 09:51 AM
It looks like we Canucks are sending in our CF-18s.

Calling Libyan strife 'intolerable'; PM dispatches fighter jets - The Globe and Mail

dlish 03-18-2011 09:55 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cimarron29414 (Post 2882836)
I certainly hope that not a single U.S. warplane flies over Libya. The Arab league can do it. Let their bullets be responsible for the inevitable "civilian" deaths.
from what ive read, the US has requested that the Jordanians and Omani's do the flying and lend a hand. but like Baraka said, the french and brits are more than willing. the aussies with all their big talking 2 weeks ago now said that they wont be contributing to the effort.

Cimarron29414 03-18-2011 10:45 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by dlish (Post 2882884)
from what ive read, the US has requested that the Jordanians and Omani's do the flying and lend a hand. but like Baraka said, the french and brits are more than willing. the aussies with all their big talking 2 weeks ago now said that they wont be contributing to the effort.
For all the overly-parsed, meekly-composed resolutions of condemnation that the UN musters through its quagmire of veto threats, it is completely ineffective at actually getting things done. In the mean time, the Libyans real chance at an ouster is gone.

How many times has the UN condemned a dictator's actions and demanded results? In my lifetime? Dozens. And when it comes right down to it, guess who has to be the bad guy every fucking time?

Mark my words, Canada will contribute a dozen jets for a few months. France? Less than that, if any. Britian? Slightly more than Canada. And guess who will end up spending billions enforcing a UN-sanctioned no-fly-zone over Libya for another decade? Sound familiar? And how convenient it will be when, a decade from now, the World forgets exactly WHY those jets are flying over yet another Muslim land.

dlish 03-18-2011 11:22 AM
with the potential to tap Libyan oil reserves and win major contracts and beat the europeans to it, i think the US wont be doing this under any kind of duress. lets face it, the US almost always get involved for their own interest, and thats understandable.

with the arab league disowning Muammar, i think his fate has been sealed. The arabs have for a long time wanted to get rid of this looney. Now is their chance. The longer the world waits to take down the regime, the harder it will be. They no longer regard his government as the legitimate government, and he's in political and commercial isolation. I dont think the world can blame the US for this. I see why the US has waited for so long to take a stand, and why they are insistant on the arabs taking a bigger role in Muammars removal. But commercial interests have never stopped the US from going to war, so i dont see this as any different.

will the world remember the US as a scapegoat? personally i dont think so. with the wave of world support against Muammar, its hardly likely. The US may have to mop up after the brits and french, but they can also pic up the pieces and the oil contracts too. Probably the reason why the brits are so trigger-happy right now.

Cimarron29414 03-18-2011 12:24 PM
dlish,

I have to say that a fraction of your post offends me.

It isn't like the US (and Britian) go into these places and STEAL the oil. It is paid for at the market rate. Never once have I seen any evidence that the US gets some some sort of sweetheart deal for "mopping up" these places. Not from Kuwait, not from Iraq. We pay the same price as everyone - except we don't. We pay the market rate plus blood to maintain the supply lines, not only to ourselves but to the rest of the world who doesn't spill their blood. So, rather than excoriating the US for "protecting its commerical interests," perhaps it would be more appropriate to thank the US for protecting Australia's commercial interests when Australia seems unwilling...based on your earlier post.

roachboy 03-18-2011 12:46 PM
on the security council vote, this take from the financial times is kinda interesting:

Quote:
Bric abstentions point to bigger UN battle

By Harvey Morris at the United Nations

Published: March 18 2011 16:26 | Last updated: March 18 2011 16:26

If the western powers go to war with Muammer Gaddafi, it will be without the support of one of the key emerging components of the new global architecture – the Brics.

Brazil, Russia, India and China all abstained in Thursday’s UN Security Council vote to mandate military action against the Libyan regime.

Russia and China are permanent members of an institution that reflects the global power structure in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. Brazil and India, presently serving two-year terms, are seeking permanent seats on a reformed council that would more closely reflect the realities of the 21st century.

The Russians and Chinese take a consistent line against what they regard as interference in the internal affairs of UN member states. They could have vetoed resolution 1973 but that would have meant turning their backs on a direct appeal from traditional friends in the Arab League to impose a no-fly zone.

China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that Beijing did not use its veto because of the “concerns and stance of Arab countries and the African Union as well as the special situation in Libya”.

Reservations expressed by India and Brazil at the close of Thursday’s debate indicated an expanded council would strengthen the hand of the non-interventionists and weaken that of the west with its three permanent seats – the US, France and UK.

Manjeev Singh Puri, Indian ambassador, noted: “It is very important that there is full respect for sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Libya.”

“It was a clear signal to the international community that they will not be the west’s lapdogs,” said Carne Ross, who heads the New York-based Independent Diplomat consultancy. “And there was certainly an element of posturing for permanent seats.”

He doubted there was any active collusion among the Brics on how to vote but said council dynamics reflected an element of “follow my leader”. “If China and Russia had voted in favour, it’s very unlikely India and Brazil would have abstained.”

According to Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs: “That was the best solution for all Bric countries – not to disturb relations with the west, but to distance themselves from responsibility.”

Brazil, which is non-interventionist at heart, has long believed in the seductive power of its rainbow diplomacy, which it claims can open doors and broker peace deals that other countries cannot.

Brazil has a professional diplomatic corps that is long hardened in trade negotiations, but despite an extensive diplomatic network it remains a newcomer to global security concerns and lacks the foreign policy experience and think-tank framework of some of its Bric peers, particularly Russia.

Jorge Castañeda, political scientist and former Mexican foreign minister, wrote in Foreign Affairs earlier this year: “It is the traditional powers in the west that will determine the international response to this [Middle East] crisis – not because they are favoured by global institutions, but because their word is backed by military and diplomatic weight. In contrast, the world's rising economies lack the ability – and the values – to project their power on the world stage.”

Thursday’s vote was a close-run thing. Germany, another aspirant to permanent membership, also abstained but that almost certainly had more to do with domestic resistance to the use of military force.

The outcome is unlikely to deter western leaders from paying at least lip service to an expansion of the security council.

President Barack Obama might well express US support for Brazil’s elevation to permanent status when he visits the country at the weekend. Western leaders, however, know that wrangling over the format for expansion, and indeed competition among rival aspirants, is likely to stymie reform for many years to come.

Additional reporting by Neil Buckley, John Paul Rathbone and Jamil Anderli
FT.com / Emerging Markets - Bric abstentions point to bigger UN battle


i don't get the whining:
o-poor-united-of-states!
we give and give and give and nobody appreciates us
ALAS!

fact is that the us imports oil from canada, mexico, saudi arabia and venezuela in that order. us policy about oil has been imperial from the outset--about controlling supplies politically rather than getting sweetheart deals economically. realpolitik. check out michael klare's book resource wars for a good (if a little outdated in 2011) history of the policy logic and how it developed.

libya could well be the first military action that's post-imperial for the united states---another step forward in the fading of empire. the refiguring of the security council is interesting in this regard.

it took a l o n g time for the administration to decide to back some kind of action at the international level, during which time a whole lot of people ended up dead in libya.

when there is an action, it will simply not be the case that the united states is manfully at the lead of it. the us will be part of a broader coalition. a lot of the hardware will come from france and england. they have a more direct economic stake (oil) in the outcome (oil).....this isn't to say the us won't do anything---but thanks to neo-conservative realpolitik and its surreal consequences, the us simply is not in a position to run this show. three wars at once is many.

i expect that what the new situation is will clarify in the next couple days. something is definitely about to happen.

ASU2003 03-18-2011 03:00 PM
I also think that we didn't want another repeat of Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, and Somalia happening in Africa with mass genocide...

I wonder if we have an exit strategy...

Charlatan 03-18-2011 04:32 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cimarron29414 (Post 2882930)
dlish,

I have to say that a fraction of your post offends me.

It isn't like the US (and Britian) go into these places and STEAL the oil. It is paid for at the market rate. Never once have I seen any evidence that the US gets some some sort of sweetheart deal for "mopping up" these places. Not from Kuwait, not from Iraq. We pay the same price as everyone - except we don't. We pay the market rate plus blood to maintain the supply lines, not only to ourselves but to the rest of the world who doesn't spill their blood. So, rather than excoriating the US for "protecting its commerical interests," perhaps it would be more appropriate to thank the US for protecting Australia's commercial interests when Australia seems unwilling...based on your earlier post.
Actually Cimarron, it's not that the US pays a rate the same as everyone else. The point is to ensure that the contracts granted for extraction of the oil go to American companies. It's these companies that will benefit.

The US corporation pays royalty to the nation of Libya to extract the oil. Then Australia will then purchase the oil from that US interest directly.

This isn't neccessarily that case in Libya but that appears to be what the plan was in Iraq, and it was certainly the plan when Roosevelt met with the King of Saudi Arabia back at the end of WWII.


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