Iraq: What I Got Wrong, and What I Still Believe by Jonathan Chait

The biggest single conceptual failure of my argument for war is that I gave absurdly little thought to the post-invasion phase. I was aware that the Bush administration was deploying far too few troops to the front for a workable occupation while blatantly lying about the war’s likely costs. I assumed that its real plan was to decapitate the Iraqi leadership, install a more pliant and less brutal military figure in Saddam’s place, and call it democracy. 

In other words, I deemed the administration’s rhetoric about democracy to be a pack of lies. Now, I could accept this, because I assumed the successor regime would be less brutal than the psychotically cruel one that was being deposed. The quality of the regime was an important predicate for my support of the war — I would not have supported it had I believed it would make life harder for Iraqis, on the whole — but not the necessary rationale. I assumed these things because at the time Bush appeared — from the 2000 campaign through Florida through his push to cut taxes — to be a dishonest but ruthlessly effective figure. A messy, undermanned occupation would be politically fatal, I reasoned, therefore Bush wouldn’t actually undertake one. 

But my view of the postwar was facile. I really focused nearly all my attention to the legitimacy of the war, and almost none to its advisability. Indeed, I essentially mistook one for the other: In my mind, establishing that the United States had a moral right to enforce the truce terms of the Gulf War closed the case. 

Now, why didn’t I think very hard about the occupation? I think I was probably influenced by the recent history. And here is where I depart most sharply from most other liberals, especially the younger ones, who have responded to the war by adopting dramatically more anti-interventionist views on foreign policy.

Saddam Hussein should have complied with the weapon inspectors. Instead he ended up in a spider hole and then lynched.

Libya and the Left by Michael Berube

Pace Berube, my recollection is that the left and liberals were pretty quiet about the Arab Spring.* When Yglesias deigned to blog about it, he argued it was caused by rising commodity prices not freedom in Iraq. When the Green revolution was happening in Iran he actively trolled it. To me it wasn't entirely surprising because after Bush failed to find WMDs in Iraq he switched to the rationale of freedom and democracy in the Middle East.

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* one exception being Juan Cole.

One of my favorite scenes in Will Ferrell's one man show about Bush, was the dance sequence with Condi set to Michael McDonald's "I Keep Forgeting." Everytime I read about Condi I think of it.

She has a memoir of her time during the Bush years coming out.

First as national security adviser and later as secretary of state, Ms. Rice often argued against the hard-line approach that Mr. Cheney and others advanced. The vice president’s staff was “very much of one ultra-hawkish mind,” she writes, adding that the most intense confrontation between her and Mr. Cheney came when she argued that terrorism suspects could not be “disappeared” as in some authoritarian states.

As for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, who was killed Thursday after a revolution, Ms. Rice adds details about his well-known “eerie fascination with me.” She writes that he made a video showing pictures of her while a song called “Black Flower in the White House” played. “It was weird,” she writes, “but at least it wasn’t raunchy.”
...

For the most part, though, Ms. Rice defends the most controversial decisions of the Bush era, including the invasion of Iraq. The wave of popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring this year, she writes, has vindicated Mr. Bush’s focus on spreading freedom and democracy.

The New Libya’s First Mistake: Muammar Qaddafi should not have been killed, and his surviving son should be captured. by Hitchens

broadcast of Marjane Satrapi's film Persepolis roils Tunisia before election

The episode began when a relatively small group of ultraconservative Islamists attacked the television station that had broadcast the 2007 film, about a Muslim girl growing up in post-revolutionary Iran, because of a scene in which she rails at God. He is depicted as she imagines him, violating an Islamic injunction against personifying him.

But it soon became clear that ultraconservatives were hardly the only ones offended. The broadcast has touched a nerve among a far broader section of Tunisia’s Muslims, even in the coastal regions where many pride themselves on their cosmopolitanism. “It is true we do not all fast, and we do not all pray,” said Saleh Mohamed Khoudi, 53, a director of technology at a private company. “But this is too much.”

Semiha Sehli, 33, who works in finance, said she wanted nothing to do with the Islamists and did not trust Ennahda. But even she was shocked when she saw the offending scene on Facebook. Sure, she acknowledged, all little children imagine a personified God. “You can imagine it, but you shouldn’t put it in a movie,” she said.

In Protest, the Power of Place by Michael Kimmelman

We tend to underestimate the political power of physical places. Then Tahrir Square comes along. Now it’s Zuccotti Park, until four weeks ago an utterly obscure city-block-size downtown plaza with a few trees and concrete benches, around the corner from ground zero and two blocks north of Wall Street on Broadway. A few hundred people with ponchos and sleeping bags have put it on the map.

Iraq calls for change of Syrian Regime

The Crimes of Col. Qaddafi: In the euphoria of the current celebrations, we must not lose sight of the former leader's foul deeds. by Hitchens

How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy. by Ryan Lizza

During the peak of the protests in Iran, Jared Cohen, a young staffer at the State Department who worked for Slaughter, contacted officials at Twitter and asked the company not to perform a planned upgrade that would have shut down the service temporarily in Iran, where protesters were using it to get information to the international media. The move violated Obama’s rule of non-interference.

White House officials "were so mad that somebody had actually 'interfered' in Iranian politics, because they were doing their damnedest to not interfere," the former Administration official said. "Now, to be fair to them, it was also the understanding that if we interfered it could look like the Green movement was Western-backed, but that really wasn’t the core of it. The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters. To the Secretary’s credit, she realized, I think, before other people, that this is ridiculous, that we had to change our line." The official said that Cohen "almost lost his job over it. If it had been up to the White House, they would have fired him."

Clinton did not betray any disagreement with the President over Iran policy, but in an interview with me she cited Cohen’s action with pride. "When it came to the elections, we had a lot of messages from people inside Iran and their supporters outside of Iran saying, 'For heaven’s sakes, don’t claim this as part of the democracy agenda. This is indigenous to us. We are struggling against this tyrannical regime. If you are too outspoken in our support, we will lose legitimacy!' Now, that’s a tough balancing act. It’s easy to stand up if you don’t worry about the consequences. Now, we were very clear in saying, 'We are supporting those who are protesting peacefully,' and we put our social-media gurus at work in trying to keep connections going, so that we helped to provide that base for communicating that was necessary for the demonstrations."

Failing to ask Twitter to not make the upgrade would have been, in effect, interfering on behalf of the Iranian regime.

The French and the British were shocked by the quick turn of events. Instead of the President announcing the Administration’s position from the East Room of the White House, the U.N. envoy quietly proposed transforming a tepid resolution for a no-fly zone into a permission for full-scale military intervention in Libya. Some officials thought it was a trick. Was it possible that the Americans were trying to make the military options appear so bleak that China and Russia would be sure to block action?

Gradually, it became clear that the U.S. was serious. Clinton spoke with her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, who had previously told her that Russia would "never never" support even a no-fly zone. The Russians agreed to abstain. Without the cover of the Russians, the Chinese almost never veto Security Council resolutions. The vote, on March 17th, was 10-0, with five abstentions. It was the first time in its sixty-six years that the United Nations authorized military action to preëmpt an "imminent massacre." Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, wrote, "It was, by any objective standard, the most rapid multinational military response to an impending human rights crisis in history."

As the bombs dropped on Libyan tanks, President Obama made a point of continuing his long-scheduled trip to South America. He wanted to show that America has interests in the rest of the world, even as it was drawn into yet another crisis in the Middle East.

The key appears to be the Arab League's decision to get involved.

The Tyrants Strike Back by Juan Cole

 David Foster Wallace: The Last Audit by Tom McCarthy

The first is as a coherent, if incomplete, portrayal of our age unfolding on an epic scale: a grand parable of postindustrial culture or "late capitalism," and an anguished examination of the lot of the poor (that is, white-collar) individual who finds himself caught in this system’s mesh. The setting that Wallace has chosen as his background (and foreground, and pretty much everything in between) could not be more systematic: the innards of the Internal Revenue Service -- the sheer, overwhelming heft of its protocols and procedures. If, as one of Wallace’s characters asserts, "the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy," then the I.R.S., "a system composed of many systems," not only represents that world but also furnishes the ultimate stage on which its moral dramas are enacted. In the words of Midwest Regional Examination Center Director DeWitt Glendenning Jr., one of the more shadowy (or pale) presences in this ­multicharactered and multivoiced book, "The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity."

To its own agents and enforcers, the I.R.S. even offers a role and status akin to that of the lone, righteous gunslinger in the Wild West or the caped crusader in Gotham. "Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is," accounting students are informed with evangelical zeal by their instructor. "To retain care and scrupulosity about each detail from within the teeming wormball of data and rule and exception and contingency which constitutes real-world accounting -- this is heroism." The proposition is comic (one of the novel’s would-be heroes practices saying "Freeze! Treasury!" in front of his mirror) but sincere as well: the instructor is a Jesuit priest, and the scene is redacted with a genuinely epiphanic air. In a universe of veiled and veiling numbers, the task of drawing the true ones out into the light and holding them up for inspection, clear and remainder-­less, really is a sacred one. "Gentlemen," the instructor rounds off his sermon by saying, "you are called to account."

The problem, as I.R.S. recruits soon discover, is that neither moral nor heroic codes hold true anymore. The bulk of "The Pale King" takes place in the mid-1980s, as the Spackman Initiative is being implemented. Pure invention (as far as I can tell) on Wallace’s part, the initiative nonetheless describes an all too recognizable shift in administrative culture, with the supplanting of a public service ethos (tax enforcement is an affirmation of all citizens’ duties toward others) by a free-­market one: the I.R.S. is a revenue-­generating business and, as such, should audit only those returns that promise the highest yield-to-man-hour-spent-­investigating ratio. Post-Spackman, the tax agency is a godless space whose commandments are simply those of the profit motive, and whose driving logic is being automated at an alarming pace thanks to emerging software. "It was frightening," writes David Wallace (a character who shares his name not only with the author but also with another David Wallace at the I.R.S., causing yet further blurring of identities and voices), "like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human."

The Power of Mockery by Kristof

The juiciest story behind the Middle East uprisings doesn’t concern Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s "voluptuous" Ukrainian nurse or C.I.A. bags of cash. Rather, it’s the tale of how a nonviolent revolutionary strategy crafted by Serbian students and an octogenarian American scholar came to challenge dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and many other countries.

This "uprising in a bottle" blueprint was developed by the Serbian youth movement, Otpor, to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. One of Otpor’s insights was that the most effective weapon against dictators isn’t bombs or fiery speeches. It’s mockery. Otpor activists once put Milosevic’s picture on a barrel that they rolled down the street, inviting people to hit it with a bat. 

Why Obama Had to Act in Libya by Marc Lynch

Answer to Glenn Greenwald by Juan Cole

The Iraq Effect: If Saddam Hussein were still in power, this year's Arab uprisings could never have happened. by Hitchens

Fiddling While Libya Burns by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Don't Let Qaddafi Win by Hitchens

Libya's Legacy by Michael J. Totten

Fighting Near Tripoli

TOBRUK, Libya -- Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya kept his grip on the capital on Wednesday, but large areas of the east of the country remained out of his control amid indications that the fighting had reached the northwest of the country around Tripoli.

Libyans fleeing across the country’s western border into Tunisia reported fighting over the past two nights in the town of Sabratha, home of an important Roman archeological site 50 miles west of Tripoli. Thousands of Libyan forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi have deployed there, according to Reuters.

"The revolutionary committees are trying to kill everyone who is against Qaddafi," said a doctor from Sabratha who had just left the country, but who declined to give his name because he wanted to return.

There were also reports of fighting in Misurata, a provincial center 130 miles east of the capital. A witness said that messages being broadcast from the loudspeakers of local mosques were urging people to attack government opponents, following Colonel Qaddafi’s defiant television address Tuesday night calling for ordinary citizens to assist in eliminating opponents, promising that the "cockroaches" would be tracked and killed "house by house."