A woman who wanted it all, despite knowing the terror

I've always had an eager interest in women who traveled in or reported from the places where history is obviously (usually violently) happening. I've written here about reporting from the wars of the '00s by some of these women, including Anne Garrels, Carlotta Gall, and Sarah Chayes. You see, I'm envious. I came up at time when it simply would have taken more audacity than I possessed (as well as probably a heterosexual orientation) to pursue the paths these people followed into danger zones. How did they manage to do something as unattached women that I couldn't even imagine?

Lynsey Addario sets out to answer that very question in It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War. I knew Addario's photographs from the New York Times and followed the drama of her capture and release by Qaddafi-supporters in Libya. How did she come to be in that terribly exposed -- for the photographers utterly beautiful -- place? Wasn't she afraid she'd be raped? Was she raped? (No, mauled.)

It's all here as well as the rest of the story of a (still youngish) life driven by something like a calling to create irresistible images of some of the planet's most violent horrors. She's not political, except being consistently on the side of her human subjects. That's enough to make her an instinctive critic of U.S. military enthusiasms, even as she sympathizes with U.S. soldiers caught up in the horror.

Addario, more or less by accident, traveled as a freelance photographer in Afghanistan when the Taliban still ruled in 2000. She struggled to navigate that culture.

The freedom, independence, and sexuality that I, as an American woman, held at the core of my being completely contradicted the Afghan way of life under the Taliban. I knew I had to shed my own views in order to work successfully here.

...From the start of my journey, I struggled with how to skirt the Taliban photography ban: images burned my eyes and my soul, but I was too nervous about the consequences to dare to sneak a picture as I looked out the car window ... I had to remind myself not to look men in the eye. There were so many rules and restrictions, especially against photographing women.

But she persisted, negotiated, and cajoled, shooting a portfolio of images -- and returned to India to discover that, in those pre-9/11 days, big media had little interest in photos from Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, that changed when the U.S. invaded in 2001. Addario rushed from New York to Pakistan, through an anti-American Peshawar and a hostile Quetta, and on to Kandahar soon after the Taliban were forced out. Everywhere she used her access as a woman photojournalist to shoot the pictures of women that a homosocial society denied to men, while also capturing male street life.

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took the U.S. into Iraq, Addario came in through Kurdistan. It didn't take her any time at all to understand that something was very wrong. Though moved to weeping by the sight of Iraqis digging up mass graves of Saddam Hussein's victims, their kin, she immediately

... suspected that the American government was lying to us ... In the months after Saddam was deposed, Iraq fell apart. ... Nothing made sense. American troops allowed the looting of the National Museum but protected the caged lions at the house of Saddam's son Uday. To the media, the troops proudly displayed the Hussein brothers' sex dens ... while basic services like water, gas, and electricity failed to materialize. The superpower couldn't provide for a basic quality of life. ...

As the Iraqis recoiled from the U.S. troops, the troops took their mystification out on journalists -- even a short woman who by this time could identify herself as from the New York Times.

"Get the fuck out of here, you fucking bitch," he said again. ... The other soldiers still had their guns pointed at me. ... Americans wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, but a convenient form of democracy that allowed them to censor the media ...

.... something had changed in me after those months in Iraq. I was now a photojournalist willing to die for stories that had the potential to educate people. I wanted to make people think, to open their minds, to give them a full picture of what was happening in Iraq ...

Newly dedicated to stories of suffering and survival, Addario went on from Iraq to Sudan and the Congo, to Afghanistan again (this time embedded with an embattled U.S. platoon), and then to Libya. Her adventures are no less enthralling, but the theme shifts to her efforts to form an enduring relationship (she did, marrying fellow journalist Paul de Bendern), to mother a child of her own, and to continue to win conflict assignments while living a life somewhat more within conventional expectations for women. She wanted it all, and pretty much got it. She was not about to allow her new conformity to keep her from her work, risking travel in Libya, Mogadishu, and even Gaza under siege while pregnant with her son.

Wonder of wonders, Penguin Press printed this mostly text book on high quality paper which means the sprinkling of Addario's images appear more cleanly than one ever sees in a newspaper.

This is a heartening, even inspiring, auto-biography. Enjoy and marvel.

Futile war without end

The subtitle is the true theme of Andrew J. Bacevich's America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. A retired colonel, a professional Army officer before becoming a scholar, Bacevich brings a military professional's eye to decades of U.S. imperial folly, beginning with Jimmy Carter's commitment to keep oil flowing to an insatiable country, through Afghan wars I and II, through Iraq I and II, through Bosnia, Lebanon, the "Arab Spring," Libya, the Syria civil war and beyond. He judges all this violent misery harshly:

I should state plainly my own assessment of this ongoing war, now well into its fourth decade. We have not won it. We are not winning it. Simply trying harder is unlikely to produce a different outcome. ...

This is not a book that judges the morals and motives of U.S. leaders who stumbled from crisis to catastrophe leaving carnage (mostly for other people) behind. He's asking whatever were they thinking? What they thought they might accomplish? Why the military means employed seemed so utterly incapable of accomplishing much anything except destruction (mostly of other people)? And, so now what?

He's a scathing critic, for example of President Jimmy Carter who he describes as allowing domestic politics to lead him into blundering quagmires in Iran and Afghanistan:

... when it came to the exercise of power, Carter was insufficiently devious. He suffered from a want of that instinctive cunning that every successful statesman possesses in great abundance. ...he lacked guile ..."

But his real bile is directed toward his own profession, the U.S. military and permanent "national security" establishment. Victory in the Cold War

brought the armed services and their various clients face to face with a crisis of the first order. With the likelihood of World War III subsiding to somewhere between remote and infinitesimal -- with the overarching purpose for which the postwar U.S. military establishment had been created thereby fulfilled -- what exactly did that establishment and all of its ancillary agencies, institutes, collaborators, and profit-making auxiliaries exist to do?

The Pentagon wasted no time in providing an answer to that question. ... The Greater Middle East was to serve -- indeed, was even then already serving -- as the chosen arena for honing military power into a utensil that would maintain America's privileged position and, not so incidentally, provide a continuing rationale for the entire apparatus of national security. That region's predominantly Muslim population thereby became the subjects of experiments ranging from the nominally benign -- peacekeeping, peacemaking, and humanitarian intervention -- to the nakedly coercive.

Beginning in 1980, U.S. forces ventured into the Greater Middle East to reassure, warn, intimidate, suppress, pacify, rescue, liberate, eliminate, transform and overawe. They bombed, raided, invaded, occupied, and worked through proxies of various kinds. ... The results actually produced over the course of several decades of trying have never come even remotely close to satisfying ... expectations.

I appreciated this book. I learned from this book. But throughout I felt (as well as understood even if only incompletely) that far too much was missing. In particular, Bacevich never really integrates the impact of the festering moral wound that was and is Israeli theft of their homeland from Palestinians. That lurks there in the background; this history cannot be written without bringing it to the foreground, despite its adding new layers of complexity.

Bacevich's lumped together region -- his Greater Middle East -- has little texture, few sub-genres, not nearly enough local quirks, and hardly any diverse people in his telling. U.S. readers have access to far more granular and human accounts of what we have wrought. I recommend especially Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near on Iraq before we facilitated that country's dismemberment and Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.

But I would recommend this book as well. There are so many vantages from which to condemn the ongoing national war folly ... we need them all.

Dropping in on war and horror, thirty years ago and today

#110450111 / gettyimages.com

Tyler Hicks is a Pulitzer prizing winning photographer, a witness to many of the world's most violent conflicts. He was one of four U.S. journalists captured by Gaddafi's forces during the Libyan insurrection; he traveled into insurgent Syria with the reporter Anthony Shadid and brought out his companion's body when Shadid succumbed to an asthma attack; most recently, he accidentally found himself at a Nairobi, Kenya, shopping mall while invading terrorists killed 61 civilians and five security personnel in the fall of 2013. During a recent NPR interview, Terry Gross asked him how someone goes on facing that kind of death and horror and remains emotionally stable.

... I find that it's more after that you realize how much you're shaken in these things, like you -- I remember not long after that assignment, I was back in the States, I was in Connecticut with my sister, and we were just going for a run.

We were down by the beach in my hometown, and there was some work being done on a house, and there was a hydraulic nail gun that they were using, and it really sounds a lot like incoming gunfire with this thing. And as we were running, I put a few nails in, and I literally kind of like almost hit the ground. And my sister's reaction was like oh my God, you should look at yourself, man. I mean, you totally thought you were just being shot at.

I've seen that reflex. Thirty years ago today, my much loved partner flew off to spend six months in the war zones of Nicaragua, to bear witness to the Contra (counter-revolutionary) war against the popular government financed and incited by the United States.

Before she flew away, she mused about how the experience might change her:

... sometimes I am terrified. I don't want to die in Nicaragua. And you know that I give myself a good 95 percent chance of coming back whole, if not unchanged. ...There's something strange to me about being able to drop for six months into the danger the people of Nicaragua live with ...

Letters from Nicaragua

Nothing nearly so dramatic happened to her as has been lived by Hicks, but Nicargua's war was no picnic either. She escaped injury, interviewed survivors of Contra terror, and several times was present in towns that took mortar and machine gun fire, but fortunately escaped actual assault. Her exposure to war was nothing on what so many soldiers and civilians are now enduring. But unlike most of us in the United States, she has been to war.

And for several years after she returned, she had the sort of reflex reactions Tyler Hicks describes. In those days, the Fourth of July in San Francisco's Mission District meant crowds setting off every form of fireworks anyone could obtain from nearby counties where selling them was a seasonal business. You didn't drive; the streets were impassable, full of Roman candles, rockets, and cherry bombs. We had to get Rebecca out of town for the night, lest she jump under the furniture.

But this reaction passed.

Still the question remains, was she changed by dropping into someone's war? I can't assess that. I was and am too close. She remained a "brave, silly little" person, as she described herself then.

Today she starts many of her presentations about her book Mainstreaming Torture by explaining that she first met torture victims in Central America so long ago. What once was mainly visible to those who would travel to strange places is being pushed into public view at home, by journalists and by the victims. How do we internalize living in a context where seeing the unthinkable is more and more possible, if we choose to look? Do we choose to look?

A test for a President

U.S. Consulate in Benghazi burns. Esam Omran Al-Fetori / Reuters
Now we will see what Barack Obama is made of.

In an election year, can he navigate the howling of the imperial caucus, of the Israel-first caucus, and of our domestic Muslim-hating Know Nothings? A U.S. ambassador is dead in Libya, victim to passions stirred by racist xenophobes who use their freedom of speech and of religion to demean others. Meanwhile the Prime Minister of Israel pushes the United States toward an attack on Iran in response to unproven suspicions and Iranian posturing that touches no U.S. interest.

Can Obama resist election year temptations to wave the bloody shirt? Will he deploy our unequalled power, as in the last decade, simply because the United States has no military challengers?

The proper -- the patriotic -- job of any current U.S. leader is to manage imperial waning gracefully. The rest of the world was pretty much prostrate after World War II; the long Cold War and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union sealed U.S. pre-eminence; this concealed the enormous waste of time, treasure and talent that a permanent imperial pose did to our country. The costly inconclusive wars of the 1990s and the 2000s only show that, for the U.S., waging war is the default option. Meanwhile, letting the home country rot is acceptable to much of our elite.

The Obama administration's foreign policy has not been what I would have wanted. Democratic pols have learned they must prove they are as stupidly butch, as triumphantly imperial, as the other guys. Timely withdrawal from Iraq and prospective retreat from Afghanistan had to be cloaked in bellicose gestures and ongoing chest-thumping.

But the people get that more war is not in our interest. Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy has summarized some current polling on our attitudes to new wars, especially in the Middle East.

I was struck by the fact that 67% now see the Iraq war as "not worth it" -- the highest result since the Chicago Council started asking that question on 2003, and crucial context for any discussion of U.S. policy options towards Syria. 68% believe (correctly) that the invasion of Iraq has not had a positive effect on the spread of democracy in the Middle East -- neocon fantasies aside, if anything Iraq's horrors provided a cautionary tale to most in the region about what could go wrong and probably helped prop up authoritarian regimes in the region by making them look better in comparison. 

Beyond the retrospective view of Iraq, 71% in the Chicago Council survey say (correctly, in my humble opinion) that the Iraq experience should make the U.S. "more cautious about the use of military force against rogue regimes."  This is consistent with a wide range of other polling, which consistently shows very low support for U.S. military action in Syria. …The broader theme is one of humility about what the U.S. can or should attempt to accomplish through military means abroad. … And it's striking that 70% oppose a U.S. military strike against Iran over its nuclear program without UN authorization. 

There's been plenty of chest thumping but mostly the Obama administration has concentrated on trying to repair some of the damage at home, damage left by their cowboy predecessors. We need an administration that will stay on that course.

When overt military actions are avoided, the space for the struggles to restore democracy and fairness grows wider. In this election year, after the provocation in Libya, with the Israeli government and the domestic Israel Lobby yapping for war, we will see what Barack Obama is made of.

A woman and her country against the "Afghan Model"

Malalai Joya at a book signing, April 2011.

Robert Farley wonders whether "the Afghan Model" -- foreign airpower and special forces assisting local fighters to overthrow an international pariah regime arousing minimal nationalism in the target country and minimal domestic opposition in the imperial power -- has been vindicated in Libya. He doubts Gadhafi's end will prove an unqualified success for the stratagem; for now, " the grade is mixed."

Malalai Joya contends that the grade should be far worse than "mixed" in Afghanistan itself. Joya is the author of A Woman Among Warlords: the extraordinary story of an Afghan who dared to raise her voice. This really is an extraordinary book -- a detailed life story from a woman who has stood up against both the Taliban and the thuggish criminal warlords who the U.S. "Afghan model" has put in power in her country. I heard her speak last spring and put her autobiography away for summer reading; when I finally got to it, I was much rewarded.

Like many Afghans, Joya grew up in a refugee camp in Pakistan where her family fled the war against Russian domination that lasted from 1979-89. Her father lost a leg in the fighting. While many refugee boys were being educated by fundamentalists whose rigid variant of Islam made them ripe to become Taliban, her family settled in a camp where there were equal educational opportunities for girls. She thrived.

As students, we didn't always realize how lucky we were. I have a vivid memory of how one teacher reacted after some of us complained that we were tired from studying. Her response was firm: "You should realize that these years, with the chance to focus on your education, will be the best time of your lives." I know now that she was right. I only wish that all Afghan children could have the chance to get "tired" by many years of education.

Unfortunately, these happy times didn't last. Victory in the nationalist war in 1992 didn't lead to a peaceful developing country. After the Soviets left, Afghans found they were largely ignored by the interfering powers that had funded the war --Pakistan, Iran, and the United States -- and left to the violence of competing warlords who had thrived on foreign subsidies.

It is difficult for outsiders to understand, but our people divide the mujahideen into two types: the real mujahideen and the criminal. In the early days of the Soviet-Afghan war, the majority of those who struggled against the Soviet forces called themselves mujahideen -- or "holy warriors." They were, like my father, Afghan patriots, united to fight against an oppressive invader. When the Soviet-backed regime of Najibullah finally collapsed on April 28, 1992, the real mujahideen laid down their arms, but it was on this date that the extremists and power hungry groups began their civil war. It is these criminals that today we call jihadis to distinguish them from the honorable mujahideen.

Even though the mujahideen were battling an atheistic Soviet empire, it is not true that they were fighting just for their religion, which is a personal matter. They were fighting for our right as Afghans to be free from foreign domination.

Joya never wavers in this perspective on what has happened to her country. It is her nationalism, mixed with a tolerant feminism, that has put her at odds in sequence with fundamentalists, greedy and violent warlords, and foreign occupiers such as the United States and NATO.

Joya secretly taught women and girls during the 1990s when Taliban ruled in the Herat region. When the Taliban were overthrown in 2001 by Northern Alliance warlords with U.S. help -- the Afghan Model's debut -- she was a known and trusted local figure. She was elected to an assembly, a grand Loya Jirga, where in theory new governing arrangements would be decided. There she bravely denounced the rapacious criminal thugs with guns who also sat in hall and was shouted down. This scene is available on video.

In the autobiography, Joya describes the welcome she received when she returned home from making this shocking and courageous outburst.

There were so many people outside the plane that it was difficult for me to move through them. Young girls had brought flowers for me, and many people shouted kind greetings my way. As I walked slowly through the throng, women called out, "Thank you for telling the truth!" ... There was a big tent and stage set up in the courtyard, and a huge crowd had gathered in our honor. My dear uncle Azad -- who in the coming months would take charge of my security -- greeted me warmly and helped me up to the front of the crowd.

Waiting for my turn to speak, I watched and listened to a number of speakers and performers onstage. There were tribal elders and young students making speeches, musicians dedicating songs to me. People were performing local traditional dances. The whole scene was almost unbelievable to me. I knew many of these people, but for every face I recognized there were many more strangers. These were the ordinary people of Farah -- the poor and forgotten who had inspired me to become active politically -- and they had obviously been moved by my message. Many had traveled great distances to attend the ceremony. I scanned the crowd in front of me looking for my mother and father, but I couldn't see them anywhere. ...

This was one of those moments where I could see the depth of support I had, and it confirmed for me that the power of people is like the power of God. In front of the clinic, waiting for me, was my father. I had never seen him so emotional. He was beaming and gave me a big hug. I asked him if he had been at the rally. "Of course," he responded. "I was behind the stage, but I heard everything."

I have quoted this passage at length because it contains an answer to the question which people in the United States immediately ask ourselves when we hear of Malalai Joya: how can such an outspoken champion of women's freedom and Afghan freedom survive in a country we've learned to think of as dominated by burqa-imposing, thieving fundamentalists?

The autobiography answers that question: this is a woman whose values are supported by her immediate and extended family and by a significant fraction of the Afghan population to whom she is known and whom she has served. If we were to pay attention, we would learn that we should understand that another Afghanistan is possible -- but only when all the outsiders get out and leave Afghans to sort out their own future. This does not seem to be imaginable to anyone in the Pentagon or Washington. But the U.S. will leave -- this is not a question of if, but when.

Meanwhile, catch glimpse a different Afghanistan in Malalai Joya's life story.***One more thought on "the Afghan Model" as carried out in Libya from Adam Server:

... nothing will vindicate the Obama administration's decision to ignore the advice of the Office of Legal Counsel, the Pentagon and the Attorney General that congressional approval wasn't required for war in Libya. ...Whatever the long term consequences of intervention in Libya, Obama has made it easier for his successors to unilaterally start wars without congressional approval.

People will migrate if survival depends on it

As the NATO/US Libyan adventure goes sour, with charges of rebel responsibility for civilian casualties, I want to return to something I've written about before: for European nations, the problematic Libyan war aims to create a bulwark state that will inhibit the flow of climate change refugees from Africa to their continent.

The current drought in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya provides a preview of the migration that increasing desertification caused by human-induced warming is likely to set off. This is only the beginning. Here's al Jazeera's report.



Meanwhile, people suffer and aid agencies are doing what they can. Here's Oxfam America's drought appeal.

H/t International Relations.

Libya war reveals constitutional rot

Apparently the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly against authorizing Obama's war in Libya this morning. Seventy Democrats joined all but eight Republicans to knock the measure down.

For a nice change, the vote quite accurately reflects feelings in the country. According to Gallup, in aggregate, 39 percent of us approve, 46 percent disapprove, and 15 percent aren't saying. The issue has become mildly partisan. Republicans and independents disapprove more than they approve (47-39 and 52-31 respectively) while Democrats were always more supportive of the president they elected and still approve, 54-35 (pretty much the same as in March).

I was uncertain but worried in March. These martial adventures have universally been bad news in my lifetime. I am horrified by the aspect of this one that amounts to assisting anxious Europeans to hold back a feared hoard of dark immigrants. But I was aware that thee are people who know more about these things than I do, such as Conor Foley and Marc Lynch, who think NATO's war on Gaddafi is a right action. So I'm a little conflicted though instinctively disapproving.

However, I am absolutely certain that the President's ludicrous explanation for blowing off the requirement that Congress approve the mission -- his claim that the Libyan adventure does not amount to "hostilities" -- signals a deep disdain for any legal limit to his executive power. Responsible lawyers, including many past allies, have called "foul." When presidents can get away with taking us to war without seeking even a fig leaf of approval from the legislative branch of government, we are well on the way to one man rule.

Since Democrats in the majority in the Senate are not likely to go along with the House in repudiating their President's war, today's vote against the Libya adventure is not likely to have any practical effect. It's all just one more sign that our creaky Constitutional edifice is rotting away.

Photo is of a Libyan demonstrator in San Francisco, several weeks before NATO began bombing. I have to wonder, what does she think now?

The whens, hows, rights and wrongs of humanitarian intervention

Conor Foley, the author of The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, reminds readers that, in 1999, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan posed a question that must haunt anyone wishing to prevent and relieve human suffering:

"How should we respond to another Rwanda or Srebrenica [massacre]?"

Foley is an experienced humanitarian worker who has served with a variety of non-governmental agencies in disaster and war zones in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In this book, he breaks down some of what has helped and what has harmed in the various international forays into war-torn and/or disaster-struck countries over the last 20 years. He is not confident that much good has been achieved, but this book certainly provides a lot of context about these civilian interventions.

British and other internationalists have more nuanced categories for thinking about these issues than people in the United States. I had trouble at first disentangling Foley's terminology. Here's what I figured out: when he writes of "humanitarianism," he means non-governmental organizations that devote themselves to the immediate needs of suffering people and that usually have taken up some rhetoric and practice aimed at sustainable development: think Oxfam or CARE. Writing of "human rights," he means proliferating efforts to bring principles of international law to states and people in distress: think Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. In most of the world, the most significant non-governmental organizations of both types are various United Nations bodies -- in this country we remain largely oblivious to the UN, except when our rulers congratulate themselves on obtaining the fig leaf of UN assent to adventures such as the current war in Libya.

Foley begins by sharing one of humanitarianism's dirty and little discussed insights: the 1970 campaign to feed starving Biafrans in Nigeria's southeast separatist corner -- an intervention that set the template for much subsequent non-governmental work in conflict areas -- was badly ill-conceived and executed.

... the Biafra intervention is also now widely recognized, in humanitarian circles at least, as a huge political error. The Igbo leadership used it to raise money to keep the war going by effectively taxing the NGOs who were delivering supplies. They turned down the offer of a supervised 'land corridor', realizing how dramatic the night flights had become. The flights were also used as cover for bringing in weapons along the same route, in clear violation of international humanitarian law.

...when Biafra finally surrendered in January 1970, the central government was noticeably conciliatory to its defeated foes. ... The conflict was also marked by a willingness of aid agencies and the international media to collude in a skillful campaign by the Biafran political leaders who hired a PR company to promote their cause. ...Most aid organizations now admit that the main effect of their efforts was to prolong the conflict by a further eighteen months ...

One trouble is that relief organizations have to spotlight human suffering and then make their own work highly visible within any disaster context in order to persuade donors to fund their efforts. Any of us who've raised money for a non-profit know this well. In the immediate aftermath of a calamity that happens in a place without major prior ongoing conflict, this necessary dramatization may not have such bad consequences. Foley holds up the response to the 2005 Pacific tsunami as such a relatively benign intervention.

If the tsunami diverted resources from elsewhere it was mainly due to the action of humanitarian agencies who understood its fund-raising potential from a business point of view. Aid agencies need to follow the high-profile disasters because it is what their supporters expect. They may well know they are duplicating the efforts of others, but it would be impossible to ignore a disaster on the scale of the tsunami. ...

... Despite the waste, the tsunami relief operation deserves to be remembered as a qualified success. ... Two million people were displaced by the disaster and there were initial fears of a second catastrophe through the spread of infectious diseases. But no public health emergency occurred and within days the majority of people affected received food, water, sanitation, shelter and healthcare. Within a month, the emergency response phase geared to saving lives was completed, and the focus moved to recovering livelihoods and getting children back to school.

In war zones, efforts that Foley has seen and worked within haven't gone so well, especially those that tried to go beyond relieving immediate suffering to promotion of human rights. Most visibly, in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. invading armies made no secret that NGO work was welcome as a "force multiplier" -- a cheap means of providing some benefits to win over occupied populations. The occupied people were not so happy about that; conflict zones have become death zones for "humanitarian" workers who were too often viewed as just more invaders.

NGO's understand the problems; they work hard to transfer their work to local, native country, staff. That means training them in the values of international human rights -- and that process often has an Alice in Wonderland quality as the norms prescribed have so little to do with the experience and society into which agencies are trying to plant them. Foley recounts the response of Kosovan co-workers to a training on children's rights.

A young Scandinavian lawyer working for UNICEF gave one of the speeches, during which she went through the Convention on the Rights of the Child that came into force in 1989, and is one of the most extensive of the human rights conventions. ... I noticed that everyone took copious notes while she was speaking but no one challenged any of her assertions, though they must have jarred with the cultural ethos of the society in which they were raised.

Walking back to the office with one of my national colleagues, 1 asked her about this. She replied that in order to be appointed to any professional position in the former Yugoslavia it was necessary to pass an exam in Marxist-Leninism. "Everyone knew it was nonsense, but we just learned it off by heart and repeated what the examiner wanted us to say. Then we forgot about it and just got on with our jobs. The communists ruled us then and now you do. It is basically the same thing though," she concluded.

So much for facile assumptions of universal values.

Foley is very skeptical of the International Criminal Court -- and not only because the United States has undermined it at every turn, refusing to allow any possibility that possibly criminal actions by our own military might ever be subject to review by an international body. (That's the content of our beloved "American exceptionalism" in the real world: impunity.) Without genuine assent from all the world's great military powers, the ICC remains a backwater functional only "for dealing with mid-level thugs and warlords or retired dictators" -- yet too often the threat of punishment from this ineffectual body only makes ending local conflicts more difficult.

Even some people in Britain and other parts of the rich world who might be expected to be friends of NGO aid work rather lightly refuse to engage imaginatively with the implications of Annan's question. Foley laments

a long-standing ambivalence by a section of the left towards human rights and humanitarianism. The idea that rights should be defended for their own sake or that interventions should be judged by the criteria of whether they help or harm people is derided as naive. The more important issue, these leftists argue, is 'whose side you are on' in a global ideological struggle. This used to be defined in cold war terms but is increasingly presented as one of 'anti-imperialism' versus 'liberal interventionism'. Traditionally, many on the left and right of the political spectrum were prepared to overlook human rights violations when committed by their allies, or refrain from denouncing them lest it provide 'propaganda' for their opponents.

The UN intervention that didn't happen in the Sudan's Darfur region in the last decade -- despite the diligent urging of some humanitarian organizations that the refugee crisis there amounted to "genocide" -- provides Foley with an example of what he considers culpable political incapacity on the part of humanitarian organizations.

One of the noticeable differences between human rights and humanitarian organizations is that the former err on the side of caution when reporting violations, whereas the latter never knowingly understate the scale of a crisis. Advocacy reporting is not humanitarianism's core business and many organizations often use their reports for other purposes, such as fund-raising. Even with the best intentions, there may be a temptation to dramatize a particular crisis, since the general view is that no harm can come from making people care too much about suffering. This means there will always be potential issues of fact-checking, quality control and manipulation...

Yet despite these dangers, there remain the suffering people; in response, aid agencies inevitably undertake compromised missions, at least some of the time.

If a government is deliberately starving a civilian population as a means of waging war, then humanitarian organizations are legally and morally justified in taking the 'borderless doctors' approach in flouting its authority to deliver life-saving aid. Beyond this though, once humanitarians assume responsibility for aspects of state-building, adopt a rights-based approach to aid delivery or the use of such aid for peace-building purposes, they inevitably compromise their principles of independence and impartiality.

There will probably be situations in the future when humanitarian organizations feel that only international intervention will prevent mass killing or where their programme activity can help promote peace, justice and reconciliation, but the experience of recent years strongly suggests that the principle 'first, do no harm' is best preserved by humanitarian neutrality.

Humanitarian interventions are at best a necessary evil since by their very nature they cause harm to the societies they are trying to help. Even at their most benign, relief assistance operations, such as the one following the tsunami, lead to economic and social distortion, weaken local capacity and encourage dependence. Military interventions are even more destabilizing and result in significant costs for both the occupier and occupied. It is noticeable how few places where large-scale humanitarian interventions took place in recent years have succeeded in making the transition to stability. ...

The Thin Blue Line was published in 2008. Reading the book in 2011, I wondered what Foley thought of the current NATO/US campaign in Libya. He is someone who might have a nuanced view. Fortunately, he's told us what he thinks in a post at Crooked Timber. On March 22 he wrote:

... the case for or against a ‘humanitarian intervention’ rests on answering two broad questions: has the level of violence reached such a threshold that the use of counter-force is morally justifiable and is it a practical, strategic option that will actually make things better for the people concerned?

...On balance I am in favour of the current intervention in Libya. ... I think that the UN resolution authorizing it puts the protection of civilians at the centre of its mandate and sends a clear signal to governments of the world that they cannot massacre their own people with impunity.

I do not know what the end game is. I accept that the campaign will result in people being killed by allied airstrikes and I presume that the intervening governments have selfish as well as altruistic motives for their actions. However, I think that the situation in Libya immediately prior to the intervention passed the threshold test that I set out above. I think that the UN is fulfilling its responsibility to protect the lives of civilians in this case.

I wonder whether Foley still looks at the Libya intervention the same way. I've lost any hope I had in the project, in good part because I am watching our president make up transparently flimsy legal excuses for violating our own principles of government in order to carry it out. If jumping in encourages bad conduct here, I tend to think it is not likely to bring good fruit in someone else's country. But maybe I ask too much moral clarity.

The Thin Blue Line concludes by reinforcing that even the most dedicated humanitarians end up living with moral ambiguity.

Tens of thousands of humanitarian aid workers are confronted with [a] moral dilemma every day. They might help individual people in a crisis zone, but they can never be absolutely certain that the overall impact of their presence does more good than harm. While their presence pricks the world's conscience that 'something must be done' it simultaneously reinforces the delusion that humanitarian action can ever be enough. In reality they are just another part of the problem.

Long term humanitarian workers have to be made of tough moral stuff.

Hypocrisy watch

U.S. Imposes Sanctions on Syrian Leader and 6 Aides
WASHINGTON — President Obama imposed sanctions on Syria’s leader, President Bashar al-Assad, and six other senior Syrian officials on Wednesday, ratcheting up American pressure in the wake of a bloody crackdown on political protests in the country.

New York Times, May 19, 2011

Afghanistan: 12 die in Afghanistan protest over U.S.-led raid
Furious anti-American protesters poured into the streets of a city in northern Afghanistan on Wednesday, shouting out objections to an overnight U.S.-led military raid that killed four people, including two women. Subsequent clashes with security forces trying to quell the demonstration killed 12 people, provincial officials said. ...

The Taloqan raid and its explosive aftermath pointed up the striking degree of discord between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and ordinary Afghans over nighttime operations aimed at capturing or killing insurgent figures.

Many people here are skeptical of Western military claims that the targets are carefully vetted, and believe in any case that such home invasions carry too great a risk of harming or killing innocent people in the confusion of nighttime. They particularly fear that U.S. forces, flush with success over the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan this month, will increasingly rely on the tactic of swooping down in darkness on residential compounds.

Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2011

What's to say? One country is a designated enemy, so shooting protesters is grounds for penalties. It can even be grounds for siccing NATO to overthrow a dictator in Libya. In the other case -- and in such "friendly" jurisdictions as Iraq, Bahrain, and Israel -- shooting people who protest brutality is just an unfortunate necessity to keep order.

I wonder what President Obama can say to an international audience less inured to these contradictions? He tries to square circles today.

Photo from Afghanistan protests by way of IndiaVision News

Lest peace break out ...

On the one hand: U.S. foreign policy elites know that the national swoon over the killing of Osama bin Laden makes for a great chance to cut our losses in wars across the globe. So we get people like Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, declaiming in the Wall Street Journal:

Afghanistan is no longer a war about vital American security interests. It is about the failure of America's political elites to face two plain facts: The al Qaeda terrorist threat is no longer centered in that ancient battleground, and the battle against the Taliban is mainly for Afghans themselves.

With Osama bin Laden now swimming with the fishes, the U.S. has but one sensible path: to draw down U.S. forces to 15,000-25,000 by the end of 2013, try cutting a deal with the Taliban, and refocus American power in the region on containment, deterrence and diplomacy.

That's not exactly what I (or probably the Afghans) would call peace, but it's moving in the right direction.

In the National Journal, Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley have spelled out in detail what the ill-conceived "war on terror" has cost, in money, deaths, and other paths not taken.

As we mark Osama bin Laden’s death, what’s striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we’ve gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.

What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden’s terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.

Read it all; it's worth taking in. The smarter defenders of American exceptionalism -- of empire -- are ready for a changed strategy.

On the other hand: the dumber defenders of empire in the Republican House of Representatives are making an effort to ensure the "war on terror" is permanent. They are afraid that the historical specificity of language in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, adopted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, might suggest a limit on Presidential authority to send troops chasing around the world. So, according to a summary in Politico,

The new language drops any reference to 9/11 and “affirms” a state of “armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces.” The measure also explicitly gives the president the right to take prisoners “until the termination of hostilities” – something the courts have found to be implicit in the current version of the AUMF, though the new proposal could be seen to extend that power. ...

But critics say the Republican-sponsored measure amounts to the first full-scale declaration of war by the U.S. since World War II – at a moment when counter-terrorism efforts are succeeding, the U.S. is withdrawing from Iraq, and about to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan. And, they say, it gives Obama and any successor carte blanche to attack any individual or any nation without further approval from Congress.

“The U.S. is trying to finish up and pull out of two wars right now [but] Congress is involved in declaring, for the first time in 70 years, worldwide war,” said Chris Anders, a legislative liaison for the American Civil Liberties Union.

In addition, Anders said, the legislation would result in “a huge transfer of authority from the Congressional Branch to the Executive Branch” that would give “ authority to this president and all future presidents to use military power, war power wherever a terrorism suspect resides.”

The article indicates the Obama administration has not taken a position on this legislation. We probably can't count on Democrats to reject this endless extension of an ill-defined "war" unless the administration uses its influence against it.

War and a society endlessly anxious about threats, real and imagined, remains popular among our rulers; among most of us, instinctively, not so much so.

Photo via US Army Flickr feed.

CIA works to overthrow Qaddafi, now and 35 years ago

So Obama has signed a "finding" sending our spooks to do something about that Libyan dictator, according to Reuters. The New York Times has more.

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has inserted clandestine operatives into Libya to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and to contact and vet the beleaguered rebels battling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, according to American officials.

Apparently we've been there and done that before. Early this month Terry Gross on WHYY's Fresh Air interviewed a couple of retired CIA agents. One of them told a story from 35 years ago.

Mr. BAER: ... Terry, this was in the mid-'80s. I was assigned to Khartoum, Sudan, and I was told to take care of these people that were going to get rid of Gadhafi.

And I didn't know much about them. I'd just gotten to Khartoum, and it was one morning about 4 that there was pounding at my door, and my door was kicked down.

And it was these Libyans. They had beards and robes, and they were carrying Kalashnikovs, and they rushed into my apartment, said, Save us, Gadhafi's going to come murder us.

What had just happened was that their arms depot in Khartoum had been overrun. A couple Milan missiles were taken. So while we were figuring out what to do with these people, how to protect them, I sat with them all night, and what I realized by the morning was that the Reagan administration, which was behind this, was supporting the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood.

And these people described to me how they had tried to kill Gadhafi in 1984 at Aziziya barracks and that none of this was coordinated with the CIA, but what happened was that one morning they woke up and their leader said that he had been visited by Allah and now was the time to kill Gadhafi.

And they commandeered four or five trash trucks and were going to ram them through his front gate. They were so excited they jumped out of the trucks before they were through the gate and there was a battle in Tripoli, and most of them were killed.

And you know, it was funny because there's always been this accusation that we've supported the Muslim Brotherhood, and I'm sitting there listening to this. This conversation's all in Arabic, by the way, and I said: Oh my God, we are supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

These are the same groups that are fighting and are in Benghazi right now and that are fighting Gadhafi. You know, this is 30 years later.

GROSS: Did you think that the coup was going to succeed then? I guess it had already failed by the time you got... yeah.

Mr. BAER: You know, I just found the Libyan exiles to be totally unreliable. We could never get any good intelligence out of them. They were - they were mystics as well. They used to boil pages from the Quran, you know, boil ink off and then drink it for inspiration. I mean it was that kind of, you know, weirdness that just wasn't good for - we had no idea whether they could even get to Gadhafi or the rest of it, and this was all politically driven by the White House.

My emphasis. Apparently high risk gambles on a Libyan coup are nothing new. Maybe somebody in this White House should have talked with some old hands before jumping into this particular frying pan.

Four photojournalists' Afghanistan

The other day I found myself in San Francisco City Hall with time to kill. I remembered that my friend SFMike had written up an exhibit of photos from the Afghanistan war. Fortunately for me, the show is still on exhibit in the basement corridors. They will be up until May 13.

The four photographers, James Lee, Eros Hoagland, Teru Kuwayama, and Lynsey Addario, have all trekked with US, other NATO, and Afghan National Army troops. But these are not battle photos, but photos of life, even if life among armed forces. There's a lot of praying, some eating, and a surprising numbers of photos of troops sleeping. In a war zone, grabbing a nap must sometimes be a blessed escape. Many of the images are arresting; most broaden what we can know of that faraway place and those ever-s0-different people.


This photo by Teru Kuwayama especially grabbed me, reminding me of Greg Mortenson's framing story of the Kyrgyz horsemen who invited him to build a school in the Wakhan corridor.

***Addario was recently captured, abused and finally released by Gaddafi's force in Libya along with three male New York Times journalists. She has responded to comments about their account of their ordeal in the Lens blog:

[They ask] “How dare a woman go to a war zone?” and “How could The New York Times let a woman go to the war zone?”

To me, that’s grossly offensive. This is my life, and I make my own decisions.

If a woman wants to be a war photographer, she should. It’s important. Women offer a different perspective. We have access to women on a different level than men have, just as male photographers have a different relationship with the men they’re covering.

In the Muslim world, most of my male colleagues can’t enter private homes. They can’t hang out with very conservative Muslim families. I have always been able to. It’s not easy to get the right to photograph in a house, but at least I have one foot in the door. I’ve always found it a great advantage, being a woman.

She goes on to describe receiving hospitality in war-torn lands as well as assistance from fixers and drivers, finding a grudging acceptance from male photojournalists and sharing hazards in the midst of the chaotic Libyan battlefield. It's all worth reading.

The Decider-in-Chief speaks

We all probably heard something that fit our predispositions, listening to the President speak about his Libyan war tonight. My predisposition is simple: I've nearly reached retirement age. In my lifetime, no U.S. war has lived up to the moral billing offered by its supporters. Most -- Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan -- have been dreadful, immoral quagmires. The few brief ones (think Grenada, Panama) have been shameful atrocities built on lies. I'm hard to sell on wars.

In truth, the President sounded like his predecessor speaking tonight -- the one who said told us baldly, "I am the Decider." Here's Obama:

I made it clear that Gaddafi had lost the confidence of his people and the legitimacy to lead, and I said that he needed to step down from power. ...

I ordered warships ...

I refused to let [a potential massacre] happen ...

I authorized military action ...

And as President, I refused to wait ....

... I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.

As Commander-in-Chief, I have no greater responsibility than keeping this country safe. And no decision weighs on me more than when to deploy our men and women in uniform. I have made it clear that I will never hesitate to use our military swiftly, decisively, and unilaterally...

Being Commander-in-Chief ("CoC" in military speak -- "Cock of the walk" I usually hear) seems to have this effect on an incumbent president.

Historically, though we usually look back with fond pride on my parents generation's war, on World War II, some decider has just about always plunged the country into wars without the consent or enthusiasm of much of the population.

President James K. Polk led the country off to conquer much of Mexico; in response, Henry David Thoreau famously refused to pay his taxes and much of the Northeast was in near revolt. When President William McKinley coveted Cuba and the Philippines from the decaying Spanish empire, it took the best efforts of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers, the Fox News of that day, to whip up a war frenzy.

President Woodrow Wilson's 1917 war in Europe was so unpopular that the government preemptively outlawed speaking against it and imprisoned several thousand people for that crime. Even in the case of the "good" WWII, there was a quite widespread conspiracy theory that President Franklin Roosevelt allowed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in order to bring the US into the war on Hitler and Hirohito.

We don't easily rush to war if we actually deliberate about it. It takes the work of a decider to move a fractious democratic nation to war. We have such a one; he announced it tonight.

Let us hope this war is brief; that minimal numbers of people are killed; and that the hopes of Libyans for a freer, safer, better life are realized. I'd like to believe this war would be different, that everything would work out as the current Decider claims it will. I can distrust the likelihood of good outcomes and still hope.

But nothing in my lifetime or knowledge of past U.S. wars suggests that good will come of this adventure.

Warming Wednesdays: is the Libya bombing about blocking climate change migration?

A Libyan rebel sits on the back of a pick up truck (AFP/Patrick Baz)

A warmer planet means more drought, more desertification -- and less land area suitable for human life. More poor people contribute to environmental degradation as they strip drying land bare. Humans became the dominant species on the globe because we move on when our home patch turns on us. A warming world with rising seas is going to push humans to move. A lot of humans.

According a 2009 report in The Economist,

... the International Organisation for Migration thinks there will be 200 million climate-change migrants by 2050, when the world’s population is set to peak at 9 billion. Others put the total at 700 million.

The article takes up the question whether people gradually pushed out of their current habitats must be treated as refugees by more fortunate populations. A few islanders displaced by higher ocean levels may be welcomed, but there's a tendency among rich populations to envision invading dark and dangerous hordes. Here in the US, we still look to the oceans to protect us, but Europeans look south at Africa and worry that they'll be swamped.

The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) sets the current Libyan campaign by France, Britain and the United States in the context of those fears.

In France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, immigration from Africa is a white-hot potato, not only because (as in the US) native-born Europeans resent competition from low-wage labor, but also because white Europeans fear their liberal laws and post-Christian culture will be overrun by unruly, yet doctrinaire Muslims. The EU has spent billions of euros to assuage this fear, both on tightened border security and on the “Euro-Med” family of socio-economic development programs, which are intended to lessen the poverty and despair propelling migrants northward.

In the 2000s, the concern with stanching the North African migrant flow was augmented by worries about transmigration -- the movement of black Africans across the Sahel and Sahara, through North Africa and then into Europe. Qaddafi’s Libya, along with Morocco, Algeria and Ben Ali’s Tunisia, became an increasingly watchful sentinel along the byways of transmigration, as the local press stoked anxiety about black Africans, unable to reach the promised land, settling in the Arab-Berber spaces en route.

A scantly governed Libya, wracked by revolt and starved of revenue by external sanctions, would be unable to block transmigration, even as it produced its own stream of refugees. The southern-tier EU states cannot abide a “Somalia,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton labeled the scenario of non-intervention, across the Mediterranean. ...

The entire analysis is worth a read.

Bombing other peoples' countries doesn't come cheap

The "allied" intervention in Libya may or may not serve the aspirations of Libyans. Presumably, since this is some kind of coalition effort, the United States taxpayer won't be on the hook for all the costs.

But those costs aren't small. Andrew Exum has an estimate for the first day.

A Tomahawk Missile cost $569,000 in FY99, so if my calculations are correct, they cost a little over $736,000 today assuming they are the same make and model. The United States fired 110 missiles yesterday, which adds up to a cost of around $81 million. That's twice the size of the annual budget of USIP, which the House of Representatives wants to de-fund, and is about 33 times the amount of money National Public Radio receives in grants each year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which the House of Representatives also wants to de-fund in the name of austerity measures.

How long will it be before Republicans and some Dems start telling us we have to cut Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit that is being inflated by the Libyan adventure?

Just asking.

Obama the gambler

When Barack Obama was elected, I knew I wasn't going to like everything he did. But I took comfort from the confidence that, finally, after 8 anxious years, I wouldn't have to wake up to NPR telling me about the latest country the US had bombed. This guy was too smart to take the country breezily into unsupported and unsupportable wars.

Oops. Here we go again. The Libyan adventure may prove to be a blow for emerging international civilization -- or just the beginning of yet another bloody stalemate that devolves into a seemingly inescapable quagmire. Time will tell. Our careful, cautious President throws dice.

He also adopted what Andrew Sullivan has rightly called a "Shut up and leave it to us" posture. No Congressional discussions (not that the current bunch have shown themselves capable of serous deliberation); no effort even to sell this adventure to the people. There's contempt in the President's stance both for constitutionally mandated process and for democratic politics itself. He's betting this can be done and over before most of us become engaged with what is happening.

This seems a rather cavalier high stakes bet with human lives to me.***The good news this morning is that four New York Times journalists captured last week by Colonel Qaddafi's forces have been released. Two of them are people whose work I was following because it gave me some flavor of the Libyan fighting.

Anthony Shadid reported extensively from Iraq for the Washington Post; he's gone on to travel the Arab world for the Times. His picture of the Libyan rebels in this March 13 dispatch is the most close-up description I've seen of folks we've now gone to war for.

... the front at Ras Lanuf is the most militarized version of Tahrir Square in Cairo, where hundreds of thousands wrote a script of opposition and street theater that brought down a strongman everyone thought would die in office. The fighting here feels less like combat in the conventional sense and more like another form of frustrated protest.

Some vehicles bear the inscription Joint Security Committee, but nothing is all that coordinated across a landscape that seems anarchic and lacking in leadership. Fighters don leather jackets from Turkey, Desert Fox-style goggles, ski masks, cowboy hats and World War II-era British waistcoats.

Slogans are scrawled in the street just miles from the fighting. “Muammar is a dog,” one reads. A man who bicycled for three days from Darnah, far to the east, became a local celebrity at the front. Free food is offered, as it was in the canteens in Tahrir, and fighters rummaged through donated clothes. “These are American jeans!” one shouted.

Young men revel in the novelty of having no one to tell them not to play with guns. “God is great!” rings out whenever a volley of bullets is fired into the air.

Go read it all as you wonder what Obama has gotten the country into.

As someone who has tried to photograph strange and chaotic scenes myself, I have been in awe of the stark yet sometimes beautiful pictures of desert combat from the Libyan fighting. Before he was captured, Times photographer Tyler Hicks was interviewed about the extraordinary images he was filing.

No one realized that this was going to escalate in the way it has, given how things happened in some other Arab countries. No one really thought this was going to become such a war, fought on open ground.

One unusual thing is the access we have to frontline fighting. Despite what a lot of people think, when you go to a war zone, there are a lot of formalities and difficulties to reach the fighting. You can get into a country but to get to where the conflict is happening can be very difficult. This is a very rare situation: complete access to a war, from the opposition side. ...

Conflict is very difficult to capture in a still photograph. Once you take away the sound and the motion, when you’re trying to capture that feeling and that atmosphere, it’s very difficult to translate — what it feels like to be there, the confusion and gunfire and bombs and all these things that envelop you in battle. To take a single photograph of that is a challenge.

Q.
Did you do it today?

A.
I always try.

Here's one of his photos. Go read the whole article.

No fly zone over Libya; end or beginning?

Over at DailyKos, the excellent Meteor Blades, who knows something about Libya since he has family there, responds to UN approval for a no-fly zone and maybe much more with the words:

The endgame begins.

I hope he's right and that we are not seeing the beginning of something unexpectedly long and mistaken.

I am not trusting; the US security establishment is involved. How could I be trusting? I can't offhand think of any military engagement these people got right in my lifetime and the more recent ones have been getting stupider, not smarter. The other day, Tom Ricks, an experienced journalist chronicling military matters who has supported imposition of a no fly zone, admitted that the list of proponents who were urging one gave him pause. It included:

Stephen E. Biegun, William Inboden, Danielle Pletka, Bruce Pitcairn Jackson, John Podhoretz, Ellen Bork, Ash Jain, Randy Scheunemann, Paul Bremer, Robert Kagan, Gary J. Schmitt, Scott Carpenter, David Kramer, Dan Senor, Elizabeth Cheney, Irina Krasovskaya, William Taft, Eliot Cohen, William Kristol, Marc Thiessen, Seth Cropsey, Tod Lindberg, Daniel Twining, Thomas Donnelly, Ann Marlowe, Ken Weinstein, Michele Dunne, Cliff May, Leon Wieseltier, Eric Edelman, Joshua Muravchik, Rich Williamson, Jamie Fly, Michael O'Hanlon, Damon Wilson, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Martin Peretz

No -- I don't know who they all are either. But every name I do recognize was a fan of the discredited Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld adventure in Iraq. With friends like these, it becomes close to impossible to believe this no fly zone we've just bought into will end well.

Marc Lynch (Abu Aardvark) spent the last week at an al-Jazeera forum in Qatar talking with journalists from all over the Arab world. He had previously supported a no fly zone. But he came away with a new perspective.

While Arab public opinion should not be the sole consideration in shaping American decisions on this difficult question, Americans also should not fool themselves into thinking that an American military intervention will command long-term popular Arab support. Every Arab opinion leader and Libyan representative I spoke with at the conference told me that "American military intervention is absolutely unacceptable." Their support for a No Fly Zone rapidly evaporates when discussion turns to American bombing campaigns. This tracks with what I see in the Arab media and the public conversation. As urgently as they want the international community to come to the aid of the Libyan people, The U.S. would be better served focusing on rapid moves toward non-military means of supporting the Libyan opposition.

The deep concern for Libya is real, intense, and passionate. Arab activists and opinion leaders repeatedly warned that if Qaddafi survives it could mean the death of the Arab revolutionary moment. This is part of the wider identification across the unified Arab political space which has palpably emerged among young activists and mass publics. This includes Bahrain, by the way, where the intervention by GCC security forces against the protestors has had a comparable chilling effect even if it has received less coverage on al-Jazeera than has Libya. There is no question that most Arabs desperately want something to be done to save Libya from Qaddafi, and that this is seen as having broad and deep regional implications.

When it comes to military intervention, however, this deep identification with the Libyan protestors intersects uncomfortably with the enduring legacy of Iraq. The prospect of an American military intervention, no matter how just the cause, triggers deep suspicion. There is a vanishingly small number of Arab takers for the bizarre American conceit that the invasion of Iraq has somehow been vindicated. The invasion and occupation of Iraq remains a gaping wound in the Arab political consciousness which has barely scabbed over. Any direct American military presence in Libya would be politically catastrophic, even if requested by the Libyan opposition and given Arab League cover.

My emphasis. He came away slightly more sanguine about a UN- and Arab League-endorsed intervention by someone else's air power (who?).

If outsiders are going to get in, help the Libyan opposition, and get out, it is going to take some fancy footwork. I'd be a lot more comfortable with all this if I thought we had a President who dared resist pressure from the screamers on the right who just love projecting US military power. But we have not seen any sign we have such a President.

Whose endgame?

Photo from a demonstration in support of the Libyan opposition in San Francisco, February 26.