UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (which you can download here) authorizes a no-fly zone in Libya, as well as some other things. The scope of those other things, though, is the source of much contention. The no-fly zone, as far as I can tell, is pretty straight forward. Paragraph 8 authorizes member states “to take […]
I’ll be away this week, so despite all that’s going on in the world, I’ll have to wait until next week to write about it. Good thing the rest of the FPA-o-sphere is doing such a good job of covering everything! Until next week…
Accusations abound that the West’s intervention in Libya is all about oil. Qaddafi has painted Western intervention as imperialist from the start of no-fly zone talks. “The colonialist countries are hatching a plot to humiliate the Libyan people, reduce them to slavery and control the oil,” he has said. But the Left is exploring this […]
“Violence produces violence,” said Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in his initial statement following last weekend’s Itamar attack, in which five Israeli settlers were murdered. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack except for Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, who no one seems to believe actually did it because they have claimed responsibility for things they […]
In the PBS Newshour segment to which I linked last week, Richard Haas said: Why are we so confident that we know enough about the tribal structure of Libya, about the various clans that are competing for power, that if we intervene, that the guys we want are going to win, that we’re not, for […]
Last year I coined a phrase: getting 527-ed. It comes from the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Bush was asked whether he would condemn the Swift Boat ads against Kerry, and instead, Bush condemned all ads made by 527 organizations. Bush 527-ed Kerry. This, apparently, is also what Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, did over the weekend. […]
The debate about whether the United States should use military force in Libya (and if so in what capacity) is on. Here’s one version of the debate from the PBS Newshour. It’s between two former State Department Directors of Policy Planning: Richard Haas (who served under George W. Bush) and Ann-Marie Slaughter (who just left […]
Unsurprisingly, after the UN Security Council referred the Libya situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC), John Bolton took the opportunity to criticize the ICC and, more generally, international law itself. He dubs the ICC “one of the world’s most illegitimate multilateral institutions,” argues that the threat of ICC prosecution will not alter Gadhafi’s behavior, […]
So there’s now officially a debate on the right about the idea of lawfare. One side says: the U.S. is in danger because its weaker enemies are using international law to undermine its objectives. The other side says: there’s nothing to worry about because international law, and even domestic law, is fairly impotent when it […]
Here are two radical proposals for Afghanistan. Neither of them has yet been attempted by the United States. They are: engage in counterinsurgency and attempt to make peace deals with the Taliban. As I’ve noted before (here, here, and here), though there’s a lot of talk of counterinsurgency, the current NATO effort does not very […]
Though the ultimate outcome of Egypt’s revolution remains uncertain (it’s still possible that it might wind up not being a revolution at all), it is worth asking: what factors make security forces more likely to decide to side with protesters? Michael Auslin flirts with this question in relation to China at the National Review. He […]
There’s been a story brewing for a couple weeks about a lawsuit against Jimmy Carter and Simon & Schuster, who published Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The plaintiffs in this $5 million lawsuit claim that the book should not be classified as non-fiction because they dispute some of the Carter’s assertions. As Kevin Jon […]
Joshua Pollack at Arms Control Wonk predicts that the IAEA is preparing to refer the Syria situation to the UN Security Council. The situation has been strange since it began in September 2007, when Israel bombed a suspected nuclear facility in Syria. The initial Syrian response was to denounce the Israeli violation of Syria’s sovereignty […]
In my first post about Egypt, I noted the view articulated by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, that in revolutions, the members of the army and/or the police force are the ones who decide what happens. If the government loses control of its coercive forces, the revolution succeeds. So the question we, and […]
Some people on the right are trying to do to same thing with Egyptian democracy promotion that they’ve done with the International Criminal Court (ICC) – fallaciously argue that Obama’s policy has been drastically different than that of Bush. From Clifford May at the National Review: …[T]he fact is that Bush did push for democratic […]