#1
Great post there ryuge. With Ramadan in about three weeks the rebels will go home. Then "no shortage of rebel fighters willing to defend Benghazi, but they become more reluctant to fight when asked to move out of their own territory and advance on Tripoli". This is how it's done for who knows how long. African and Arab support is showing itself more and more for al-Gaddafi.Time now for the politicians to meet before Ramadan to do a deal while everyone holds their nose.
#2
This fiasco threatens to become a defeat. There is no point in beginning hostilities unless you are willing to see them through to victory. With retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, O'Bumble is sending exactly the wrong message to our enemies. On top of the economy, foreign affairs will make him vulnerable next summer. Let's hope our countrymen understand what's at stake.
#4
Not so sure about that, phil_b. The resources that are in doubt are those of the British and the French. If it gets too expensive for them they might quit and without the no-fly zone the rebels are gonna be in trouble.
#6
Obama is an opportunist. He only fights because its expedient at the time. He has no commitment to anything but the moment's advantage. He will abandon the fight when he sees no advantage to himself politically. That's the only reason he got into it in the first place.
The French and the Italians are EUroweenies. They will abandon the fight against Khadaffy when they cant get any more money out of it. Their moral will is practically non-existant and it always was. Militarily they are fairies.
Khadaffy is a thug and he doesnt have anyplace to hide or run to, no one on Earth wants to give him safe haven. He cant leave Tripoli and all he can do is move from one basement to another and hold on, by threat or bribe. Essentially he is a rat bastard whom some fear and no one respects.
Khadaffy has NO choice except to hold on. He will be meat on a hook inevitably, men like him dont die natural deaths. Until then, he hides and pays for air.
The EUroweenies are worthless, they always were. Obama is a moral zero, who will follow the political wind. The "rebels" are not our friends anyway. How can we get our hands on all that Oil? If the EUroweenies "negotiate" what is that to us if we get a dividend of the Oil available. The rebels are all expendable and what happens to them is not our concern. If they cant finish Khadaffy they arent any use to us. If they lack the ability they are meat ...and they ARE Moslems. Who will miss them?
Khadaffy could hold on for a while, but he wont be going anywhere and he will get killed anyway. THAT is only a matter of when.
How can we benefit from the Frenchies and the Italians queering out? Can we manipulate them to advantage. Obama is going to lose the coming election, he wont stay the course. He's ready to puss now. By next year Obama wont be steady for anything. He's doomed too.
Obama+rebels+EUroweenies+ kadaffy= Buboes.
Posted by: de Medici ||
07/11/2011 21:41 Comments ||
Top||
[Dawn] THE MQM and the PML-N have agreed to establish a combined opposition in the elected assemblies. The controversy about the MQM`s decision to opt out of the PPP-led coalition being a mere repeat performance or a final parting of ways seems to be over in favour of the latter option.
But is it? The positions of the MQM ministries in Islamabad and governor of Sindh remain vacant. The PPP government continues to throw feelers about a possible reconciliation. There are no indications about a debate over the MQM`s decision to switch sides within the party ranks, because of the peculiar hierarchical situation of the leadership.
Apparently, the brinkmanship of the PPP and the MQM went wrong at some point as each tested the nerves of the other. In the end, the PPP gambled and lost. The MQM`s reaction was rooted in its war of attrition over the last three years of tightrope walking, with occasional breakdowns. The MQM`s unfulfilled demand for two seats of the AJK Assembly proved to be the last straw.
The latest spate of violence in Bloody Karachi has been blamed on the activists of the two ethnic parties the MQM and the ANP. The MQM`s style remains characteristically high-pitched. The fact that it has developed high stakes in the system would have transformed it from a street-savvy radical party to a status-quo one, adept at devising ways and means of staying in power.
The fact that the MQM enjoys a monopoly on representation of Mohajirs in the Sindh and federal legislatures is both its strength and weakness. It is its strength because its Mohajir vote gives the party a viable and visible platform to assert its organizational interests. Its weakness lies in its propensity to consider its relations with other parties in terms of `with us or against us`. In recent times, its relations with Imran Khan ... who isn't your heaviest-duty thinker, maybe not even among the top five... , Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Müslim League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... , the PPP and the ANP have been shaped by this binary opposition.
This adversarial framework of discourse has led the party to ethnic overbidding. Control over Mohajir representation gives it enormous potential to keep its organizational and ideological resources at high alert most of the time. The idea is to make its presence felt in the politics of the province from a position of strength. Various issues of governance -- relating to inflation, electricity and petrol charges, and law and order -- made it oppositionist even within, and now outside, the government.
The MQM twice opted out of the alliance with PPP (1988-89, 2008-11) and twice with the PML-N (1990-92, 1997-98). Its alliance with the army under Musharraf (2003-07) was relatively longer. While its years of political wilderness (1992-97, 1998-2002) weakened it considerably, a share in the government in the 2000s expanded its political clout. The party is obliged to adopt a strategy to come back to power one way or the other. The PML-N, the only other contender of power at the national level, was the obvious choice.
The option of going back to the PPP was least destabilising for the two parties and the system on the lam. Will the party now manoeuvre an eventual alliance with the PML-N? Only, the latter`s absence in Sindh is not promising for the next round of elections in that province, where the PPP comprehensively dominates the Sindhi vote. An attempt at government formation by the new alliance would require a new round of rigging and horse-trading much as in the 1990s.
As a party of angry young men -- not necessarily by virtue of age -- the MQM feels alienated by its poor advance in pursuit of its ambition of becoming an all-Pakistain party with a political presence in Punjab and a middle-class party instead of a Mohajir ethnic party. The PML-N may have even greater reservations about these matters than the PPP. However, there is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened... at this moment the two parties are guided by their shared though different grievances against the PPP.
Securing electoral representation outside Sindh -- in Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Kashmire and south Punjab, and demonstrating its `progressive` nature in comparison with other parties (condemned en masse as feudal) have been the party`s serious concerns. The non-seriousness of the PML-N and other parties about the MQM`s agenda in view of the perceived contradiction between its Mohajir character and an all-Pakistain profile may not diminish that party`s ambition. The MQM has declared a strategy of bringing the elections forward through street power and starting the countdown for the PPP government. This strategy is based on simultaneously increasing the pressure on the government through muscle-flexing and exploring the space for an electoral alliance. These developments have landed a crisis at the door of the PPP government.
There is a new home minister in charge in Bloody Karachi. There is the initiative to restore the commissionerate system, along with division of the metropolis into five districts. The shutdown in Bloody Karachi on Friday could have been bloodier had the MQM not withdrawn its call for strike. There is an indication that the anti-terrorist courts could be revived. The use of modern technology, including satellite, is also on the cards. Thus, the MQM`s withdrawal from the government has transformed a political issue into an administrative one of law and order.
The intriguing question is whether the MQM`s leadership has gone too far in its decision to call it a day for reverting to a position of sharing the political management of the province of Sindh with its erstwhile coalition partner. Obviously, the coming days and weeks will harden positions on the two sides. There is no clear picture on the horizon about the way the city and the province will get out of the quagmire.
The PML-N has kept a discreet distance from what is happening in the province. It realises that indulgence on its part will not bring about any political dividends and that the party will only lose by taking sides. That means that the onus for urban peace lies squarely on the three parties the PPP, the MQM and the ANP.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/11/2011 00:00 ||
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AS WITH so many absolutist projects that make up in vehemence what they lack in nuance and realism, it should probably come as no surprise that R2P is a doctrine borne of a combination of institutional crises and guilt, conceived in the offices of then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the thirty-eighth floor of the UN in New York and largely fashioned in Ottawa at the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS).
For Annan, the global failure to respond effectively either to the war in Bosnia or to the Rwandan genocide was both a moral stain and a potentially grave threat to the legitimacy of the UN-based international system. Not unreasonably, he believed that one of the principal reasons for these devastating and tragic failures was the absence of any international consensus over how to reconcile respect for a nation's sovereignty (on which the international system has been based, at least in theory, since the Peace of Westphalia) with the need for outside "humanitarian intervention."
That somewhat misleading term had been attached to various outside efforts at least since the UN went into Somalia in 1992. At times the armed missions were imbued with the goal of preventing states from systematically committing crimes against their own people--as had been the case with Belgrade's rule in Kosovo; at others, with stepping in when governments were too weak to prevent such crimes from being committed--as had been the case in Sierra Leone when the Revolutionary United Front guerrillas came close to destroying that country. R2P, which began to take shape in 2000, was an attempt to remedy what had become an ad hoc interventionism.
#1
The 1648 Peace of Westphalia and the notion of 'preventing states from systematically committing crimes against their own people' are incompatible, cannot be reconciled, can't carry out both policies/standards at the same time.
#2
In the old days, this was called colonialism, and resulted in railroads being built and suttee forbidden. That it also resulted in countries being raped of their resources to benefit the colonizers (as well as women, and men being drawn and quartered at crossroads throughout the Belgian Congo for whatever annoyed the hangers at the moment), is part of the insoluble problem that results from the intersection of one set of human imperfection with different set of human imperfection.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
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Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
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Nawaz Sharif
Punjab
