Reuters is reporting a leak disclosing that President Obama signed a finding “within the last two or three weeks” authorizing the covert arming of rebel forces seeking to oust Muamar Qaddafi.
We certainly wouldn’t want weapons we supplied winding up in the wrong hands.
Members of Congress have expressed anxiety about U.S. government activities in Libya. Some have recalled that weapons provided by the U.S. and Saudis to mujahedeen fighting Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s later ended up in the hands of anti-American militants.
There are fears that the same thing could happen in Libya unless the U.S. is sure who it is dealing with. The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, said on Wednesday he opposed supplying arms to the Libyan rebels fighting Gaddafi “at this time.”
“We need to understand more about the opposition before I would support passing out guns and advanced weapons to them,” Rogers said in a statement.
————————————-
But, President Obama assured CBS News that he knows what he’s doing.
Well, first of all, I think it’s important to note that — the people that we’ve met with have been fully vetted. So, we have — a clear sense of who they are. And so far, they’re saying the right things. And most of them are professionals, lawyers, doctors — people who appear to be credible.
The key text guiding European and American policy today is the British diplomatist Robert Cooper‘s The Postmodern State and the World Order, a thoughtful and concise (merely 20 pages) monograph published in 2002.
Cooper observes that the ethos and goals of the advanced European and American states have changed fundamentally, producing the post-modern state.
The post-modern state is one that sets value above all on the individual. Hence its unwarlike character. War is essentially a collective activity: the struggles of the twentieth century have been the struggles of liberalism – the doctrine of the individual – against different forms of collectivism: class, nation, race, community, state. In their different ways both fascism and communism were systems designed for war. Fascism was open about it: its ethos and rhetoric – the uniforms, parades, the glorification of war: the state did not just have a monopoly on violence; violence was its raison d’être.
The post-modern state is the opposite. The individual has won and foreign policy becomes the continuation of domestic concerns beyond national boundaries and not vice versa. Individual consumption replaces collective glory as the dominant theme of national life. War is to be avoided; empire is of no interest.
The result is the neglect of, and the post-modern world’s abandonment of the responsibility for governing, the premodern uncivilized and undeveloped portions of the planet.
What is different today is that the imperial urge is dead in the countries most capable of imperialism. Land and natural resources (with the exception of oil), are no longer a source of power for the most technologically advanced countries. Governing people, especially potentially hostile people, is a burden. No one today wants to pay the costs of saving distant countries from ruin. The pre-modern world belongs, as it were, in a different time zone: here, as in the ancient world, the choice is again between empire or chaos. And today, because none of us sees the use of empires, we have chosen chaos.
As a result we have, for the first time since the nineteenth century, a terra nullius. It may remain so or it may not. The existence of such a zone of chaos is nothing new; but previously such areas, precisely because of their chaos, were isolated from the rest of the world. Not so today when a country without much law and order can still have an international airport. …
The zone of chaos, nonetheless, will at times require attention, even intervention.
What of the pre-modern chaos? What should we do with that? On the basis of a rational calculation of interest, the answer should be: as little as possible. Chaos does not represent a threat, at least not the kind that requires a conventional military response. One may need to bar one’s door against its by-products – drugs, disease, refugees – but these are not threats to vital interests that call for armed Western intervention. To become involved in a zone of chaos is risky; if the intervention is prolonged it may become unsustainable in public opinion; if the intervention is unsuccessful it may be damaging to the government that ordered it.
Besides, what form should intervention take? The most logical way to deal with chaos is by colonisation, or hegemony. But this is unacceptable to post-modern states: so if the goal is not colonisation, what should it be? Usually the answer will be that the goals will be ambiguous.
The risk of ‘mission creep’ is therefore considerable. Those who become involved in the pre-modern world run the risk that ultimately they will be there because they are there. All the conventional wisdom and all realistic doctrines of international affairs counsel against involvement in the pre-modern world.
And yet such ‘realistic’ doctrines, for all their intellectual coherence, are not realistic. The post-Cold War, post-modern environment is one where foreign policy will be driven by domestic politics; and these will be influenced by the media and by moral sentiment. We no longer live in the world of pure national interest. Human rights and humanitarian problems inevitably play an important part in our policy-making.
A new world order may not be a reality but it is an important aspiration, especially for those who live in a new European order. The wish to protect individuals, rather than to resolve the security problems of states, is a part of the post-modern ethos. In a world where many states suffer breakdowns, there is wide scope for humanitarian intervention. Northern Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia and Rwanda are only the beginning of a trend. Operations in these areas are a halfway house between the calculation of interest which tells you not to get involved and the moral feeling which tells the public that something must be done. In different ways, all these operations have been directed towards helping civilians – against the military, the government or the chaos. The results are not always impressive and the interventions are in some respects half-hearted. That is because they live in the ambiguous halfworld where interest tells you to stay out and conscience tells you to go in – between Hobbes and Kant. Such interventions may not solve problems, but they may salve the conscience. And they are not necessarily the worse for that.
Thus we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are going to get involved in situations where interest and calculation would tell us to stay out. In this case, there are some rules to observe. The first is to moderate the objectives to the means available. The wars of ideology called for total victory; the wars of interests call for victory; in the premodern world victory is not a relevant objective.
Victory in the pre-modern world would mean empire. The postmodern power who is there to save the lives of individual civilians wants to stop short of that. In consequence, goals must be even more carefully defined than in wars of interest. They will be goals of relatives and not of absolutes: more lives saved, lower levels of violence among the local populations; and these must be balanced by low casualties for the interveners. At the same time, we must be prepared to accept, indeed we must expect, failure a good deal of the time. And then we must be prepared to cut our losses and leave.
The post-modern state, thus, finds itself guided in its policies by the media, crafting news reports to maximize readership through sensationalism and emotionalist appeals and framing all of its analysis to fit favored stereotypes, and by the sentimental response of its mass audience.
Mr. Cooper fails to observe the further obvious conclusion, which is that the foreign ministry of the post-modern state has been, de facto, turned over to an ill-informed, irresponsible mass entity with essentially the powers of reasoning and analysis and emotional maturity of an adolescent girl.
Michael Oren, yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, makes the same point.
America and its allies, empowered by the United Nations and the Arab League, are interceding militarily in Libya. But would that action have been delayed or even precluded if Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi had access to nuclear weapons? No doubt Gadhafi is asking himself that same question.
Barack the Unready’s intervention against the un-nuclear-developing Qaddafi contrasts so strongly with the immunity from external threats of regime change enjoyed by the nuclear-developing or equipped even more loathsome tyrannies in Teheran and Pyongyang that the president has undoubtedly sent a very loud and very clear message to dictators everywhere: Get yourselves some nukes and you’re safe from us! Without nukes, we might just intervene.
Richard Kahlenberg, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, reviews a book by Toronto sociologist Ann L. Mullen, looking at the differences in student demographics, life style, academic major, and expectations between Yale and Southern Connecticut State University, a nearby former Normal School (i.e., a teacher’s training school) upgraded in recent years to university status.
Mullen examines two four-year colleges located within two miles of one another: Yale University and Southern Connecticut State University. In racial terms, the two institutions are not all that different. Yale is 69 percent white, while Southern is 70 percent white. But as Mullen finds in interviews with 50 Yale students and 50 Southern students, the class divide is significant, and that difference has enormous implications for the attitudes, experiences, and expectations of students.
Mullen’s insightful new book, Degrees of Inequality, notes that Southern students tend to be the sons and daughters of “shopkeepers, secretaries, teachers, and construction workers,†about half of whom never completed college. By contrast, about 80 percent of Yale students sampled had parents with BA’s, two-thirds had some form of graduate education, and more than half came from the top 15 percent by income nationally. These students often “arrived on the back of tremendous childhood advantages.â€
Among the advantages, she writes, were high parental expectations. In interviews, she writes, it was clear that most Yale students “never actually decided to go to college; it was simply the next step in their lives, one not requiring a rationale.†Although less than one percent of four- year college students attend Ivy League institutions, for some Yale students interviewed, “it was a question of which one.†She writes, “It is not simply that they aspired to attend the most elite institutions; rather, they planned on it.
Southern students, by contrast, made a conscious decision to pursue higher education and then mostly chose Southern based on “cost and convenience.†Neither factor was mentioned by a single Yale student. Over 90 percent of Yale students were from out of state, while over 90 percent of Southern students came from in-state. The Southern students never thought of applying to Yale, and the Yale students have never even heard of Southern.
The differences in opportunities and outlooks of Yale and Southern are then amplified once they reach college, Mullen finds. Yale, founded 300 years ago, has a $15-billion endowment “about two thousand times greater†than the endowment of Southern, which became a four-year institution in 1937 and became part of the Connecticut State University system in 1983.
The economic chasm between the schools and their students also drives profound differences in the experiences at each institution. To save money, only about one-third of Southern students live on campus and only 24 percent participate in extracurriculars, as many have to work 20-30 hours a week. By contrast, almost all students at Yale live on campus, and 67 percent participate in extracurriculars, from playing tennis to singing a capella.
Asked what they value most about college, Yale students tended to mention learning from friends and peers and participating in extracurricular activities. Southern students were only half as likely as Yale students to mention peers and friends.
Academic pursuits also differ greatly. Deciding on a college major is usually portrayed as a matter of individual choice, Mullen notes, but economic constraints are strongly felt. “For the Southern students,†she says, “majors represented not bodies of knowledge or academic disciplines, but rather occupational fields.†By contrast, Yale students were “quite cognizant†that their Ivy League degrees made the field of study chosen less important. One student told Mullen, “I’m getting a diploma with four letters Y-A-L-E on it. I should be able to have the sky be my limit.â€
Surprise, surprise! Professor Mullen discovers the third-oldest and one of the most competitive colleges in the country attracts a more affluent and more cosmopolitan student body with larger ambitions and wider career options than those of students attending the local neighborhood’s uncompetitive teacher’s college.
Certainly a lot of Yale students come from more affluent and better educated family backgrounds, but comparing Yale and Southern most meaningfully would have to be done on the basis of academic talent. Southern’s students have average SAT scores in the 480-490 range on the three parts of the current test. Yale quotes different 25%/75% figures, which indicate that only 25% of Yale students got under 700 on any of the three parts of the SAT, and another 25% got 780 to 800. Yale admits around 7.5% of applicants these days. Southern admits 71% of applicants.
Yale students have different majors and different career options from students at Southern Conn, not because Yalies have inherited clout, but because they are, on the average, a great deal more academically competent and competitive.
In my day, Southern and Yale did interact a bit socially, most commonly via contact within the Connecticut Intercollegiate Student Legislature (CISL). Yalies dated girls from Southern, and I knew some people who married them.
“We Took A Series of Swift Steps:” Oh, you mean after you dithered around with the same basic facts for three weeks.
You mean after all that delay, you finally made a decision, and then the military acted swiftly.
“I Refused to Let That Happen:” Ah, okay, just as long as I know who the hero is here.
By the way, he’s super-proud that he waited until the last possible moment to save Benghazi (but none of the towns and cities along the decimated way to Benghazi). Apparently those other towns he let be demolished as he dithered didn’t count.
Only the dramatic, last-second decision to spare Benghazi specifically should matter.
Hilarious: He says that he’s all about getting other countries to bear the burdens. He says, to that end, that he’s transferred command to NATO.
Um, so, if I’m getting this right, our pilots and seamen are still fighting this war, they’re just being bossed around by a foreign general, right?
And that general isn’t actually in the fight, right?
Seems to me that all Obama is doing is distancing himself from any possible failure while keeping our troops in harm’s way.
———————————–
AndyLevy summed up Obama’s rhetorical style: If the straw men ever unionize, Obama’s gonna be in trouble.
The Boston Globe has 35 landscape images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
Philip F. Laverriere Sr. in his office, ego wall behind him.
85-Year-Old Philip F. Laverriere Sr. has been head of the city of Lawrence, Masachusetts’ non-profit anti-poverty agency since 1974. 37 years later, Lawrence still has poverty, but the Greater Lawrence Community Action Council, funded almost entirely by federal and state tax dollars, has grown into a $30 million-a-year operation with 310 employees overseeing an array of poverty programs including child care; immigration assistance; Head Start; low-income heating and weatherization; lead abatement; and even a youth baseball league. Over the years, Mr. Laverriere’s annual salary, allowances, and benefits have grown to $144,641.
The local Eagle-Tribune investigated between Jan. 28 and March 14 (as the result of a tip) and found Laverriere was working 15 hour weeks, visiting his office weekdays between 9 AM and 12 Noon, then retiring to spend the entire afternoon relaxing at his Elks Lodge.
, notes that Southern students tend to be the sons and daughters of “shopkeepers, secretaries, teachers, and construction workers,†about half of whom never completed college. By contrast, about 80 percent of Yale students sampled had parents with BA’s, two-thirds had some form of graduate education, and more than half came from the top 15 percent by income nationally. These students often “arrived on the back of tremendous childhood advantages.â€
