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Spiky Ooze posted:Not really a question, they use everything against Obama regardless of what it is. Healthcare? NOT IN MY COUNTRY, rear end in a top hat.
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# ¿ Mar 19, 2011 17:19 |
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 12:09 |
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Ramms+ein posted:Not his argument at all (as far as I can tell). I can definitely see the justification for using our military assets against Qaddaafi's, I would just like it to be done in a way that acknowledges that it's politically very easy and takes little courage to attack and invade pariah states, while we would never do something like that to extremely similar and equally brutal dictators who are our allies. If you want to make a deeper analysis on the civilian toll of intervening versus not, or the moral cost of being selective in backing revolutions, by all means do so. But this is a very superficial and shallow argument that really does state the basic "we can't act like non-hypocrites so we should just cry in a corner lamenting" theme that's been pretty prevalent.
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# ¿ Mar 19, 2011 17:42 |
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Baddog posted:Well, lets just be honest with ourselves, and admit that we don't do poo poo unless its in our strategic interests. Or in this case, France's. I don't know why they can't do it on their own though, that is my problem. They aren't helping us out a great deal with our other wars. We're loving broke. They should be able to carry their own (dirty) water in Africa. And for once, we do have strategic goals (aiding a potentially friendlier (proto)government in a nation that exports a critical resource) aligning with more idealistic ones, all wrapped up in the package that at this stage in the game it can be done within modest means. Time may prove any or all of the above to be illusory, but since the main argument espoused against are some broadly sweeping statements that completely ignores all possible nuance to see things in strict black and white, I'm willing to give the current action the benefit of the doubt.
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2011 19:19 |
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The Angry Bum posted:The War Powers act itself is unconstitutional and the Supreme Court needs to abolish it NOW. And Obama himself specifically said he would NEVER use the act to commit to a military operation that was not any threat to the United States. He broke his own promise, and his words are as useless as Qaddafi's. Obama is currently breaking the law and the US Constitution and should pay for it with his job IMMEDIATELY. So clearly, by failing to uphold the constitution, Rep Kucinich is committing an impeachable offense in unlawfully restraining the President's authority as commander in chief of the armed forces to deploy them as he sees necessary. Good to know!
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2011 21:31 |
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Shitpost Gaze posted:It's just that I thought I read that there was some clan-related animosity in there and a little bit of an East vs. West thing too. Not trying to say that the (very) vast majority isn't fighting for new governance or that the rebels aren't genuine!
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2011 21:55 |
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Young Freud posted:Let's not forget Misurata is still a hot spot for the rebels and Zawiya and Zwara had to be occupied to keep them from rebelling, all of which are in the western quadrant of Libya and near Tripoli.
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2011 22:02 |
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Umiapik posted:No, he's not sure at all. We in the West are seeing the TV pictures and immediately fitting them into our own Middle East narrative: Evil despot vs resolute populace. Other people, in other parts of the world, might see something else entirely. There's a good article on this here (read it!): Taken as a whole, it's strongly suggestive that this isn't some backdoor attempt to install Al Qaeda or anything (suggestions that they were AQ pawns were met with reported eye-rolling in rebel held areas when Qadaffi made that particular claim), and that fractures in any ruling coalition are strictly speculative at this point.
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2011 22:36 |
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DeclaredYuppie posted:The concern isn't that we're helping our enemies, it's that we're charging in to a situation where few people understand the tribal and regional politics driving events, and that there are reasons for this rebellion happening aside from the good guys wanting to institute a good country and big jerk Gadaffi won't let them. Another thing to keep in mind is that Libya is now very heavily urbanized. When Qadaffi took power, where one lived in the interior was important, but now some like 90% of the population lives in a city along the coast. There's been a steady erosion of said ties to familial lands and peoples, something which we can ironically thank Qadaffi for. I won't expect a fairy tale ending where everyone lives happily ever after, but I think also people are giving too much thought on supposed tribes when the entire nation at some point has been in protests.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2011 15:39 |
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DeclaredYuppie posted:Agreed- I don't necessarily think we're getting into Iraq/Afganistan 2.0 (3.0?) in Lybia, although it's a possible outcome.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2011 16:42 |
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Baddog posted:I thought it just made politicians even more reluctant to talk of "genocide" when they don't want to get involved (see sudan). Kissinger would be aghast at such sloppy geopolitical calculations.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2011 16:59 |
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Baddog posted:mmm hmmmm
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2011 17:14 |
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He's done nothing to stop said flow of oil, grudgingly or not, and that he's had no indications whatsoever of changing course (being that, you know, he likes his oil revenue). If it was only about oil in our friend's completely simplistic view of things, why mess with something that's been well enough for a while? Secondly, Qadaffi as recently as 2008 was held up as an example of a "reformed" Arab leader who can be a "partner" with the West. He went in and slammed a bunch of Al Qaida training camps within Libya, as an example. If our only intentions in the international politics world is purely about our strategic needs, we should have been screaming AL QAIDA AL QAIDA until Bengzhali was a crater and then promptly forgot the whole mess. In any event, gambling that we get a more favorable government while we can deal with the truculent one we know of is simply bad strategic sense, if we're going by Baddog's particularly simplistic analysis.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2011 17:25 |
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HeroOfTheRevolution posted:The problem is we don't know anything about what that government will look like. There's not a whole lot of political rhetoric coming from the rebels and what's there is disorganized and sporadic, much like the organization of the rebels themselves. We don't even know if we can achieve what you're saying we can achieve. There's just so many question marks, and I feel like the last time we went into a conflict with this many question marks, without knowledge of the endgame, we ended up with Iraq. The logical answer is that against strict rational sense, we let our ideals sway the decision, and we're going in because we feel it's the "right thing" to do. It may in time be a stupid decision, it may even turn out to have that cynical lining (of that I have no doubt), but it cannot be discounted that at some level there's an altruistic element in ramming the resolution through the UN.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2011 17:37 |
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It's funny because according to the NYTimes, no one wants control. It's like everyone realized well after the US that taking command would mean holding the bag if the whole thing goes to hell so watching all the NATO and EU diplomats try to shirk it is a special form of comedy. Relevant quote: NY Times posted:But divisions persisted on Tuesday over how the campaign should continue and under whose command.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2011 18:04 |
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God, if the USAF got caught flat out lying about something like this they'd be crucified. Given how many reporters there are from news agencies all around the world, it'd not be a question of if but when such a thing would be exposed. Always better to get ahead of the story and spin it for damage control than to engage in a ham-fisted coverup. Have there been no further developments in the story? That really seems unusual.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2011 21:13 |
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Haha, he's using the "consistent with the War Powers Resolution" phrasing at the bottom of the letter. He doesn't want to change the idea that some president may challenge the act as being unconstitutional. (Remember boys and girls, the WPR has been held by every president since Nixon to be an unlawful infringement on the executive's power by Congress, not the other way around.) Edit: thefncrow posted:I agree. Specfically, in this case, it's specifically attempting to deny the ability of the President to claim powers to send the armed forces whereever he so wishes, without regard for the traditional limitation that the armed forces be used only with the prior authorization of Congress or in the case of a national emergency. kw0134 fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Mar 23, 2011 |
# ¿ Mar 23, 2011 01:51 |
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Ticonderoguy posted:I took it to mean that the if we let the rebels win then we will effectively create a weak democracy with all kinds of different factions (tribes etc.) trying to seek power for themselves only which and factions (NOT POLITICAL PARTIES) will eventually be the downfall of that government and a new Dictator will take power once again.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2011 03:30 |
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Presumably because state TV is staffed by non-combatants and regardless of the nature of their "news" it would set a bad precedent for letting governments target the media.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2011 03:40 |
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Ramms+ein posted:Everyone in the opposition does indeed bear grievances against Gaddaafi, but unfortunately all do not likewise share a unified desire for what the country should look like after his removal (as far as we have been able to tell from watching and reading the news). We have already seen that the opposition is indeed extremely fractured, with some groups like the professional unions rejecting negotiation with Gaddaafi out of hand while their self-appointed leader and former minister of justice `Abd Al-Jalil engaged in back-door talks. Shouting TRIBES! obviously doesn't help explain the situation, but it's important to remember that, to date, the opposition has shown itself to be extremely fractured, and there is no reason to expect that everyone will unite and calmly transition into democracy once Gaddaafi is gone. There are a lot of disparate groups, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that they have different visions of a future Libyan state, and that they might easily resort to violence when it comes time to determine the form of that future state. By many definitions, the American revolution was severely fractured on regional, ideological and social lines. How can 13 colonies with unique identities form a united country? Preposterous. But that's the same sort of "analysis" being trotted out, over and over again. And of course, Libya may yet descend into a truly internecine charnel house, as the US did itself a little belatedly after the revolution. But we can't know that, and we shouldn't deny the rebels aid on that basis alone, which was the argument presented.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2011 05:20 |
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:There isn't much of an argument for the Libyan intervention being illegal, but the decision certainly was undemocratic as all hell. It's understandable that sometimes the executive will have to use military force without legislative consent because there is an emergency threat to the country, but that wasn't the case here. Based on what has come out in public, Obama clearly had the time for a lot of back and forth within his own administration over the extent and manner of American involvement, even whether it should have happened in the first place. You're welcome to try to change that, and god knows there's been a constant tug-of-war since Washington and the first Congress. But Kucinich is definitely not in the mainstream in demanding this level of oversight on the President in a case like this, and the way the rest of Congress views his motion here as a stunt than actual lawmaking tends to speak for itself.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2011 20:38 |
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evilweasel posted:True, but it's not one yet and although the repression sounds pretty horrible, it doesn't appear to have the same risk of large-scale civilian reprisals against entire cities. That would be really ugly and messy, and I'm not sure the US could stay above the fray in something like that, with so many interests being juggled.
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2011 18:29 |
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Competition posted:Stop this poo poo, people were claiming potential proxy civil war for Iraq which had ten times to potential than Syria does and that didn't happen. I also find it funny that you're saying that there wasn't elements of foreign manipulation in the Iraq war. Iran had a hand in there once the dust cleared, and while you're not going to go send armed troops to contest the world's largest military, you sure as hell can help provide monetary and material aid to a large and angry Shiite majority in a destabilized nation. Hmm, as if they were go-betweens or maybe, you know, proxies. Eh.
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2011 18:57 |
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Competition posted:Because half the people commenting on Syria are predicting some massive proxy war where Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Hezbollah, etc... will all pick a fraction and get them to duke it out, it betrays an utterly simplistic and lacking understanding of the country and the region. Syria quite frankly isn't diverse enough for these fractions to emerge, it has it's particular religious minority which holds power but is too small for an actual civil war to be sustained, even Libya isn't being called a civil war (yet) however it has far bigger ethnic divides and historical reasons behind the fractions we see (hint: go look up why Gaddaffi lost the East so totally). quote:I didn't claim there wasn't an element of foreign intervention, just that it didn't become this massive proxy war which people predicted which included Iran supporting the Shiites, Saudi the Sunnis, PKK the Kurds, along with a Turkish invasion, people were predicting an Islamic civil war which would spread throughout the Muslim world.
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2011 19:36 |
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Competition posted:Bull, if you knew the history of Libya you would see why the East is such a stronghold while the West has been a struggle (and it's got little to nothing to do with troop distribution). quote:You idiots are citing Hezbollah having influence in this pseudo-Syria proxy civil war, it displays complete loving stupidity and can only come from glances at headlines associating the two.
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2011 20:22 |
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Competition posted:I'm going to state that Gaddaffi totally lost the East due to the historical resistance of Cyrenaica from the rest of Libya, his losses in the West of Libya have been less total and were caught up with the momentum of the total loss of the East and the general Arab revolts, historically understanding Libya is key to seeing which parts of it have fallen and have little to do with troop deployments. quote:It's what has been cited by those who started claiming civil/proxy war. Very few civil wars don't have any demographic elements in their divisions (I can only really think of one off the top of my head), for this fantasy proxy war to develop there would have to been deep and multiple divisions creating large fraction of which no-one has actually outlined yet (hint: because they don't exist).
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2011 21:13 |
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Competition posted:Yes, by stating that there was a historical reason for the quick uprising in the East I am somehow stating that it is an impossibility in the West. quote:1. Wealth division is a demographic (By the way, the English Civil War was entirely about the right of a king to rule without the consent of parliament. Charles I lost that fight badly to a group of rich nobles and their bourgeois supporters. But but demographics.)
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2011 21:33 |
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So Libya understands that Western intervention is categorically bad, so they invited them to intervene militarily on their soil for the purpose of...yeah. It's so logically faulty I can't finish the sentence, nothing would fit.
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2011 13:39 |
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Jut posted:Just realised, the 60 day limit on the War Powers Act is drawing near...then what?
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# ¿ May 13, 2011 18:42 |
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Fangz posted:Makes you wonder if they haven't figured out a newer way of destroying documents these days. Shredders are hardly effective, and burning is pretty apparent from the outside (and documents can be recovered if improperly burned). Stroh M.D. posted:All the pro-Gadaffi people accusing NATO of breaching Resolution 1973 by not sticking to the no-fly zone or protecting civilians wording of it got me thinking: how does this actualy work? In short, it's purely theoretical. The UNSCR says it's legal, and since the only entities capable of substantiating a resolution, both de jure and de facto, are the ones accused of violating it, there's literally no recourse to be had.
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# ¿ Aug 26, 2011 17:38 |
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farraday posted:
Whether or not arms sales to the rebels was "approved in advance by the Committee" is debatable, but really the loophole is that arms sales are illegal in Libya unless they're not. The quibbling might matter later when China wants to do something and this gets trotted out as "proof" that China doesn't respect the UNSCR's authority, etc., etc., etc. And again, I'll make mention of my earlier discussion of what constitutes "legal" in the confines of international law: it's whatever is deemed legal by the nation-states that end up enforcing the resolution or the body that authorized it. The UNSC is the most powerful diplomatic body in the world and its imprimatur is more or less carte blanche legally since there are no higher bodies to challenge or appeal any legalistic determination it makes. That would mean China won't even get a slap on the wrist because it'll just veto any mention of such, but it conversely means that NATO will just say it's legal and will politely inform you into which orifice you can stuff differing interpretations.
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# ¿ Sep 4, 2011 02:57 |
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Xandu posted:Wrong, they are definitely not identical. Most unsc states didn't participate in the Libyan campaign. farraday posted:As an organization representing democratic institutions I insist that they would give you your choice of orifices into which you could stuff your differing interpretation.
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# ¿ Sep 4, 2011 04:14 |
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farraday posted:I'm actually not sure we disagree at all, legally right and wrong are not really applicable given the structure. I've tried to use the term justification since I think that's probably the accurate way to consider state actors working under an umbrella of inherently faulty international law.
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# ¿ Sep 4, 2011 05:33 |
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 12:09 |
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Xandu posted:The issue is that countries like BRIC and South Africa would not agree to arming the rebels, whereas NATO would. So while in practice it was NATO's decision to arm the rebels, it wasn't their decision to make according to the resolution. It should fall to the UN Security Council. farraday posted:Accordingly, the argument that some states made to justify their supply of weapons to the rebels were simply that, justifications. The legalistic argument necessary to make it work is fairly weak, as evidenced by it's lack of acceptance even among coalition partners, but at the same time it is enough of a smoke screen to do what they were going to do anyways. With that in mind, my trying to pretend any superiority to a similar argument justifying sales to Gaddafi would be hypocrisy. As far as your distinction between the legal and the justified, I think you're misplacing the concern here. The domestic audiences weren't spending their days parsing 1973 looking for inconsistencies between policy and authorization; they were worried about budget cuts or unemployment or the debt crisis or how we're spending more billions on another foreign adventure. The dog and pony show, as you put it, was aimed solely for the benefit of the other nations who need to defend their own geopolitical interests or ideological stances. The domestic audience in the UK understood what they were going for because it was debated in Parliament and in any case were more concerned about austerity cuts; the US was more focused on how the Republicans were going to flip flop on the issue to try and make Obama look bad for brownie points. At no point I don't believe serious political questions about overstepping the UN's resolution were raised, versus any domestic acts (like the WPA) regulating any foreign action at all.
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# ¿ Sep 4, 2011 08:12 |