From the Highchairanalyst.blogspot.com

In the midst of Egypt's uprising, a couple days after Mubarak stepped down, and before events in Libya spiraled the way they have, I wrote about Obama's Plan saying, "It’s not that Obama isn’t a student of history without a clue, it’s precisely BECAUSE he and his advisers have followed history that they reacted in the way that they have. The events that are occurring all over the Middle East are not about, created or directed by the United States, they are indigenous movements spawned from the aspirations of people."

Referring back to what I wrote on Monday, February 14:

"We are in an age that allows us to be both incredibly global and local at the same time, but that doesn’t mean just because we can see what’s going across the oceans that we need to be anything other than spectators. We don’t need to bring democracy to anyone, like Prometheus gifting fire to humanity, the world is a pretty capable place and it’s a symptom of American Arrogance to think anything otherwise."

Yet, an Age of American Observation doesn't mean an Age of American Isolation either. It means being a global listener and observer and entering into meaningful dialogue that is neither dictations nor ultimatums. We have an almost uniquely American need for ACTION, and often that comes at the expense of our observations and prevents measured and thought out behavior.

While unfortunately restraint indeed gave way to action in Libya, I believe that this was not Obama's first choice. If indeed American military involvement is going to last "days, not weeks," I think that much of what I've said remains true: Obama would prefer to stay on the sidelines as events in MENA play out as an extremely interested observer and not as a nation builder or in another expanded role.

Finding myself going back to Obama's Cairo speech, two moments in his address keep striking me. Firstly, Obama's acknowledgment that, "tension [between the West and Muslim world] has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations." And secondly his statement that, "[when] innocents in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective conscience. That is what it means to share this world in the 21st century. That is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings." When held together, these two lines are definitive of what is happening in Libya right now. They signify Obama's balancing act to both move away from a perspective that didn't pay any heed to Arab agency while also maintaining a global responsibility for humanitarian issues and human rights.

This is a much greater test for Obama than Egypt ever was. In Egypt he could commend the Egyptian people for taking hold of their future, while defending their human rights without having to do much more than talk. But in Libya, in order to maintain the second of these two principles, having witnessed the Libyan people's desire to claim the first, he saw it necessary to intervene. Yet by doing so, he may have risked the very thing he is seeking to protect--the independence of Libyan aspirations. Now the same powers that have played their colonial chess games have returned as post-colonial saviors in a new iteration of two steps forward, one step back.

Let's hope we, and all the interventionist powers, stick to a limited timetable, otherwise we may destroy whatever it is we are hoping to save.

1973, as drafted, is a call for stalemate if interpreted literally.
The relevant clauses cut both ways. We have a civil war and two sides East (currently viewed as the good guys) and West (Col. And friends). If the West now moves their Tanks and Armour toward Sirt, or any other civilian population centre, the resolution requires the British and French to attack them. As all the land forces are using identical Libyan army equipment there is no way to tell them apart unless you have SF embedded guiding the strikes, which I assume would be in contravention of the 'no land forces' clause. Team ‘East’ having shot down one of their own planes over the weekend were triumphant on al Jazeera at the capture of some tanks on Monday which they were going to bring back to Benghazi but how the pilots enforcing the no fly were meant to know not to attack these tanks advancing on Benghazi when exactly the same tanks advancing on Benghazi hours before were fair game is a mystery.
I think the word in Marc’s post that most influenced the US’s decision to join the resolution is ‘Rwanda’. With air superiority team ‘West’ would have prevailed and the retribution would have been merciless. Every photo and every second of news footage would have been analysed. Every face identified and disappeared after they had been interrogated with extreme enhancement and named names.
I also think the Arab Street are fully justified in wondering why there is a no-fly over Libya while at the Eastern end of the med civilians were shelled by tanks yesterday and attacked military aircraft today and yet strangely no SC resolution and if anyone were to complains the US would just play its Joker yet again.
On Bahrain, the Saudis are royal pissed off. They expected the same carte blanche protections against culpability for atrocities committed, which the US extends to Israel, to also apply to the US’s Arab friends and when it wasn’t for Mubarak they realised it might not be for them.

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You and the GCC got your war on Libya. Hope you are happy now.

Like you, to say I have serious reservations about this dalliance in Libyan affairs would be a gross understatement. You do have a point, that if it goes well it will maybe encourage other Arab powers to undergo a peaceful transformation rather than more violent conflict. But I feel like we're only being told half the story here. If these "rebels" turn out to be just as bad as Gaddafi, or if Libya spirals out of control until one of the local Islamist gangs turns it into yet another repressive, belligerent police state then we will have essentially sent an even worse message than inaction: the West is so stupid it will put warlords in power just in time for them to turn their aggression back against the West.

Has State even bothered to research the lay of the land and figure out who the good guys and bad guys are? Or is this going to be "beergate" on steroids where Obama, Sarko et al. think they have it all figured out only to have the reality of the situation blow back on them?

March 20, 2011|By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

"First, the Obama administration was handed a gift by the Arab League, when it unusually took a stand one week ago by endorsing a no-fly zone over Libya, putting it way out in front of the Obama administration, which was then dithering about whether to do anything of substance to help the rebels fighting Gadhafi. The fact that both the Arab League and the United Nations have endorsed a military action against Gadhafi strongly suggests that the Libyan intervention will not generate a renewed wave of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. Instead, it underlines a striking feature of the protests that have roiled the Middle East in the past several weeks: Strikingly absent from those protests has been the ritualized burning of American flags, something that hitherto was largely pro forma in that part of the world. That's because Arabs have finally been able to express publicly that their biggest enemy is not the United States, but their own rulers."

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