Archive for the ‘Foreign Policy’ Category

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So What the Hell is Going on in Libya?

Monday, February 21st, 2011

As a much more closed society, news is harder to come by, but depending on who you believe, there are conflicting reports that:

  • The Libyan Air Force is bombing protesters trying to enter an army base.

  • Gaddafi has fled Tripoli.
  • How strong are Islamists in Libya? Well, given the fact that they’re the ones seizing military bases, I’d say pretty strong.
  • Michael Totten offers some background.

    • As usual, the BBC has live updates.

    A popular uprising that toppled Ghaddafi would be great news, but I’m not sure I’m willing to believe he would be that easy to topple. Ghaddafi seems like the sort of dictator who would happily slaughter tens of thousands of his citizens if he thought he needed to to stay in power.

    Of course, one big difference was between Egypt and Libya is that Egypt’s military is (by Arab standards) professional and pretty competent, and even though they lost the Yom Kipur war, Egyptian troops in Sinai bloodied the Israelis enough that Egyptians felt they had sufficiently restored the nation’s honor that Anwar Sadat was able to sign to Camp David accords. (The previous three Arab-Israeli wars had resulted in Israel delivering a complete ass-kicking to all the Arab armies, so only receiving a partial ass-kicking was indeed a vast improvement.)

    By contrast, Libya’s army seems pretty incompetent: they got their asses kicked by Chad in the Toyota War, in which Chadian forces armed with Toyota-pickup-mounted anti-tank guns left a billion dollars worth of Soviet equipment burning in the Aouzou Strip. It would not surprise me at all to find that the Libyan army is too poorly trained to suppress a real popular uprising.

    Whether they want to or not, it looks like people all across the Middle East are fated to live in interesting times…

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    LinkSwarm for February 20, 2011

    Sunday, February 20th, 2011

    A small Sunday Linkswarm for you:

  • What the hell is going on in Libya? Good question. Moammar Gadhafi isn’t having any of that foolish “Democracy” talk, as clashes have left over 200 dead in Libya’s second-largest city. I don’t think Gadhafi will hesitate to slaughter protesters if he thinks he has to, and unless they can flip someone high up in the military against him, it’s tough to see them managing to oust him.
  • What’s the proper way to great a wheelchair-bound Iraqi veteran who spent two years recovering from wounds received fighting for his country? According to liberals at Columbia University, it’s booing, hissing, or calling him a racist.
  • And speaking of racism, AlterNet called Godfather’s Pizza founder Herman Cain a “a monkey in the window” for daring to be a black conservative.
  • An speaking of liberal racism, Ohio Democratic Representative Robert F. Hagan called a black Tea Party supporter “Buckwheat.”

    • (Hat tips: Ace of Spades, Instapundit, Etc..)

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    Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Military | No Comments »

    This Week in Jihad for February 17, 2011

    Thursday, February 17th, 2011
  • Weapons of mass destruction found in the U.S.?
  • Not news: Woman convicted of blasphemy against Islam. News: In Austria.
  • Adding insult to injury: Being repeatedly sexually assaulted while your assailants shout “Jew! Jew!”
  • Tunisia’s revolution ushers in new era of harmony and tolerance. Ha, just kidding. They’re standing around outside synagogues asking for death to the Jews.
  • Slowly but surely, free speech is being snuffed out in Europe when it’s critical of Islam.
  • The real face of the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • So why was the federal government spending $1.3 million to trying to make Arabic language mandatory at a Mansfield school district Middle School? More Arabic classes as electives at the high school and college level are probably a good idea, as the army will need more translators. But mandatory for a middle school?
  • Interesting Michael Totten interview with Paul Berman, author of The Flight of the Intellectuals, in which they discuss the contradictions of “moderate” Islamist Tariq Ramadan.
  • “French President Nicolas Sarkozy has declared multiculturalism a failure.” Finally.
  • “Although Muslim anti-Semitism is a widespread phenomenon in Oslo, as in other European cities, Savosnick says that most of the anti-Semitism she’s experienced has been directed at her by ethnic Norwegians. Jew-hatred is the only civilized option for an educated, right-thinking Scandinavian.”
  • Refusing to hate non-Muslims in your madressa classes? That’s a smacking. Bonus: In Yorkshire. Police have actually acted in this case, but look at the “fears of far-right attacks” spin the far-left Guardian puts on the news, with theoretical right wing violence trumping actual left-wing violence.
  • “The Islamic fifth column present throughout the West is far larger, better funded, and more dangerous than any domestic pro-fascist movement was in any democratic country in the 1930s, with the possible exception of the Czech Sudetenland. The appeasement we see all around us is more profound and will prove much harder to root out.”
  • 503 women publicly flogged in Bangladesh.
  • Human Rights Watch adds a “former” member of the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to its Middle East Advisory Board.
  • Roland Shirk thinks we’ve just seen the Czar abdicate in Egypt, and bad is about to be replaced with much worse.

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    Obama’s Handling of Egypt: The Reviews Are In

    Monday, February 14th, 2011

    And they’re every bit as warm as those for Spiderman: Turn off the Dark:

  • Mary Steyn: “For the last three weeks, the superpower has sent the consistent message to the world that (as Bernard Lewis feared some years ago) America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”
  • Niall Ferguson in Newsweek (yes, it’s evidently still being published):

    “Last week, for the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic opportunity … and missed it completely….This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration’s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried….The defining characteristic of Obama’s foreign policy has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to recognize the need to do so. A succession of speeches saying, in essence, ‘I am not George W. Bush’ is no substitute for a strategy.”

  • Michael A. Walsh in the New York Post: “No matter how things shake out in Egypt, one thing has become depressingly clear: Something is very wrong with the American intelligence services.”
  • Investor’s Business Daily:

    “As our once-stable ally Egypt hurtles down a path leading into the dark unknown, the U.S. can blame itself. The White House apparently did little after our intelligence agencies warned late last year that President Hosni Mubarak’s government was wobbly. Like Jimmy Carter’s handling of Central America, the U.S. backed a revolution, hoping it would make the revolutionaries our friends.”

  • Victor Davis Hanson in National Review: “For nearly three weeks, the Biden/Clinton/Obama policy concerning the tottering Mubarak regime was contradictory, incoherent, and predicated entirely on the perceived pulse of the demonstrations.”

    • Like Julie Taymor’s production (which I have not seen, but I have seen enough of Ms. Taymor’s previous work to trust the reviews of it I’ve read), Obama’s foreign policy is far more concerned with flash and spectacle than the boring matter of actual substance. Unfortunately, there’s no chance that Obama’s foreign policy will fold in previews, and we can’t make things better by getting Bono and The Edge to write us a few new tunes…

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    Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »

    Mubarak Resigns, Hands Control Over to the Military

    Friday, February 11th, 2011

    According the latest news flash. I’m guessing the military finally told him they’d had enough.

    What’s next? Anyone’s guess. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say talks with some elements of the opposition together with a crackdown against others.

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    Leon Panetta: Mubarak Will Step Down Today: Mubarak: The Hell I Will

    Thursday, February 10th, 2011

    Despite the predictions of all the Usual Supects, Mubarak isn’t stepping down. I guess my low opinion of the sagacity of Leon Panetta has been borne out.

    In email, Stratfor is saying that Rather than letting protesters storm the Presidential Palace, or firing on them to prevent same, the Egyptian military will replace Mubarak in a coup. I remain skeptical; except for a couple of signs early in the crises, they has been no hard evidence that the army has ever wavered in its support of Mubarak.

    It is hard to tell at this remove how effective the calls for a general strike have been. Those claiming the strike is widespread have tended to be left-leaning publications that celebrate just about any strike.

    The Magic 8-Ball has the same answer it’s been giving since unrest began: ANSWER CLOUDY, ASK AGAIN LATER.

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    Mubarak to be Replaced by Military?

    Thursday, February 10th, 2011

    So goes the rumor de jour. Of course, since Obama’s CIA director Leon Panetta is one of the sources of information, I would take that with a huge grain of salt…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | 1 Comment »

    Israeli Army Training (and some desert mysteries)

    Monday, February 7th, 2011

    I saw this dandy Michael Totten piece on Israeli military preparation (including building an entire town for training exercises) a few weeks ago, and meant to write something about it, but got busy with other things.

    Being a curious sort, I went searching for that training center on Google maps, and think it might be at 31.163869, 34.532279; you may have to zoom out or scroll south and to the west to see it, since Google Maps centers on the nearest road. (I don’t think anything visible on Google Maps is a military secret, and I doubt anyone in Hamas reads my blog anyway.)

    However, even more interesting is the structure due south of it at 31.139718, 34.531937:

    There are a lot of structures in the Nagev with a sort of circular berm around them, and I guess those are just oases or something equally benign. But the interesting thing about this one is the big X across the top of it. what is that? Storage facility? Secret silo? For all I know it could be a hazardous waste dump.

    But given the Big X, I’m guessing this is the entrance for Professor Charles Francis Xavier’s secret Israeli academy for mutants…

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    This Week in Jihad for February 3, 2011

    Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

    All eyes are still on Egypt, but that’s not the only hotspot for jihad:

  • Suicide bomber prematurely detonates thanks to spam text message. (Via Slashdot)
  • “Barack Obama has endorsed a role for the Muslim Brotherhood in a new, post-Mubarak government for Egypt.”
  • The current unrest in Egypt makes makes things look pretty grim for the Copts: “I’ve pored over every news report I can find, and have seen no sign that local Christians are involved in this uprising against Mubarak. This tells me all I need to know about the calls for ‘democracy’ and ‘reform’ in Egypt. They know that Mubarak’s fall would mean to them what Hussein’s fall meant to Iraqi Christians: the end.”
  • More from JihadWatch’s indefatigable Robert Spencer on the Muslim Brotherhood’s involvement in the unrest in Egypt. The amount of writing and analysis keeps up on the topic of jihad is positively dizzying. It’s hard to keep up just summarizing him…

    Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey (whom I linked to a few days ago), has been arrested and then released by the Egyptian government. “I am ok. I got out. I was ambushed & beaten by the police, my phone confiscated , my car ripped apar& supplies taken”

  • While everyone was paying attention to Egypt, Hamas fires rockets into Egypt.
  • Fifteen-year old Bangladeshi girl whipped to death in Koranic punishment for fornication.
  • Tell a Muslim their food smells bad and lose your house in Canada. This decision was overturned, but it proves Mark Steyn’s point that all Canadian “Human Rights Tribunals” need to be eliminated as threats to free speech…
  • Add New York City building code to the list of rules that are no longer applicable to Muslims.
  • A white Vietnam Veteran jihadi?
  • More reports of an al Qaeda dirty bomb.

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    Mubarak is Lying. Mubarak is Telling the Truth

    Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

    The latest from the beleaguered President of Egypt:

    Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has said he would like to resign immediately but fears the country would descend into chaos if he did so.

    In his first interview since anti-government protests began, he told ABC News he was “fed up” with power.

    It came as Cairo saw another day of violence with clashes between the president’s opponents and supporters.

    Mr Mubarak warned that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood party would fill any power vacuum if he stepped down.

    Mubarak is lying. Dictators almost never want to give up power, except to pass it on to their heirs. (There are exceptions, such as Turkey or Chile, where a military dictator stepped in to prevent a radical regime from inflicting further damage, only to step back and restore control once the danger (and the lives of some political opponents) had passed, but these are the exception rather than the rule.) If Mubarak was really tired of power, he could have stepped down any time in the last 30 years.

    However, his statement that that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood party would fill the power vacuum are, sadly, probably true.

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