We all owe a debt to Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros for their commitment, however costly, to chronicling man’s inhumanity to man.
In Death, Hetherington and Hondros Stand in Mute Witness to Mankind’s Latest Savagery
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Libya
Taking R2P to the Next Level
Done properly, the U.N.’s Responsibility to Protect entails deployment of peacekeepers, provision of food and shelter, and democratic elections.
Postcard from…Libya
Sixty years after the conclusion of World War II in North Africa, destroyed European weaponry once again litters Libya’s coastal roads as the civil conflict there enters its second month. But Europeans are not fighting on the ground in the former Italian colony. Rather, their arms are. In Libyan hands, European-made arms are part of a proxy battle that demonstrates the unintended consequences of the international arms trade.
Robert Kaplan Continues to Flog His Tribal Ruler Meme With Gaddafi, Gbagbo and Saleh
You might think that the poor critical reception he received for his book about tribal politics would make Robert Kaplan think twice before resurrecting the “warrior” leitmotif in relation to Gaddafi, Gbagbo, and Saleh.
The No-Doctrine President
Zoologists get pretty excited when they discover an unusual animal. They happily devote many hours to the task of classifying the beast and, if it qualifies as a new species, giving it a name. A great deal of money and prestige rides on these scientific endeavors. The same applies to the political sphere, where new and unusual creatures frequently turn up. When it comes to Barack Obama, however, political zoologists remain undecided whether he is a new kind of political animal and if his foreign policy represents a unique departure from the same old, same old.
Confronting the Urge to Urge on the Libyan Intervention
Humanitarian intervention, as in Libya, will never work until a time of — gasp! — world government.
No Moral Consistency in Obama’s Middle East Policy
Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and now Libya. In the last decade the U.S. military has fought Muslims across the Middle East (Iraq and Libya) and South Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan) for a number of reasons: national security, protection of vital interests such as oil supply, and humanitarian crises. Though our recent foray into Libya can be considered more nuanced than our earlier interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, our poorly defined words and actions have called into question our intent, with a mistrust of U.S. policy becoming a worldwide issue. In Libya, the U.S. lead role in the military intervention has proven that its advertised intentions and actions clash with reality on the ground.
Libya and the Law of Unintended Consequences
Coming to terms with NATO’s intervention in the Libyan civil war is a little like wresting a grizzly bear: big, hairy, and likely to make one pretty uncomfortable no matter where you grab a hold of it. Is it a humanitarian endeavor? A grab for oil resources? Or an election ploy by French President Nicolas Sarkozy?
Strategic Dialogue: Libya War
In the second part of our strategic dialogue on the Libya War, Robert Naiman and Ian Williams respond to their initial essays. You can read the original essays here: Naiman’s anti-intervention essay Surprise War for Regime Change in Libya is the Wrong Path and Ian Williams’ pro-intervention essay Armchair Anti-Imperialists and Libya.
Surprise War for Regime Change in Libya is the Wrong Path
The Obama administration set a bad precedent by launching a surprise war for regime change in Libya without congressional authorization or informed public debate, in violation of the letter and spirit of the War Powers Resolution enacted by Congress in 1973.