Monthly Archives: March 2011

The fight for Libya

The New York Times reports:

As rebel forces backed by allied warplanes pushed toward one of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s most crucial bastions of support, the American military warned on Monday that the insurgents’ rapid advances could quickly be reversed without continued coalition air support.

“The regime still vastly overmatches opposition forces militarily,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, the ranking American in the coalition operation, warned in an email message on Monday. “The regime possesses the capability to roll them back very quickly. Coalition air power is the major reason that has not happened.”

Why make this point now? Because those outside Libya who believe that Western powers have stepped outside the terms of UN Res 1973 are eager to call for a timeout, insisting that the only legal conclusion to this war will come from a negotiated settlement.

Tony Karon writes:

The rebels’ own military capabilities, by measure of weaponry, training, organization and command remain distinctly limited. So, as NATO powers and others involved in the campaign convene in London on Tuesday to plot their next steps, they face the question of whether to use their military leverage to assault the regime on its “home” turf and effectively bomb it out of existence. There are good reasons to believe they’re unlikely to go that far.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Sunday that the alliance’s actions would be limited to implementing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, “nothing more, nothing less.”

And that resolution mandates foreign powers to protect Libya’s civilians through imposing no-fly zone and an arms embargo, and destroying armor and other heavy weaponry that menaces civilian population centers. But it says nothing about regime-change; on the contrary, it requires member states to work for an immediate cease-fire and a democratic political solution to Libya’s civil conflict.

If this is really a “civil conflict,” why hasn’t Gaddafi handed out weapons to all his loyal supporters? He said he’d arm a million civilians, but the fact that he hasn’t probably indicates that there are nowhere near that many Libyans he can trust.

If the Obama administration can be derided for using Orwellian language when calling this war a “time-limited, scope-limited military action,” the Gaddafi government’s own language should be viewed just as critically.

With good reason “civil conflict” is the exact term they have adopted in the hope that observers who find the intervention objectionable will help promote a narrative that legitimizes Gaddafi’s rule. The revolution is aimed at toppling a despotic regime, but if this is a civil war, who are we to take sides?

Brian Whitaker writes:

Amid repeated claims that Libya could turn into another Iraq or Afghanistan, there are growing calls for a negotiated solution. Such talk at the moment serves no purpose, apart from throwing a lifeline to the Gaddafi family and helping them maintain their grip on the country, or at least some of it.

Calls for negotiation are predicated on the idea that the situation in Libya will reach a political/military impasse. It might do, but it hasn’t yet – so there is no need to start behaving as if it had.

A more likely scenario, though, is that the Gaddafi regime will implode suddenly and fairly soon – in a matter of weeks rather than months or years. We should at least wait to see if that is what happens. Hardly anyone in Libya seriously believes in the leader’s eccentric Green Book ideology, and most of those who currently support him can be expected to abandon him once they perceive that he is on the way out.

So the effect of negotiations at this stage would be to help the Gaddafis salvage something. That certainly seems to be the aim of the leader’s son, Saif al-Islam, who has reportedly been trying to interest the US, Britain and Italy in a “transition plan”. Not surprisingly, Saif’s plan envisages Saif taking over from his father for a period of two to three years, while Libya is transformed from a revolutionary jamahiriyya into a liberal democracy. In the meantime, all the Gaddafis – despite their crimes over the years – would be granted immunity from prosecution.

The Guardian reports:

Rebel Libyan forces were halted about 50 miles from Sirte on Monday as reinforcements loyal to Muammar Gaddafi were seen moving towards the strategically vital city.

Revolutionary forces had advanced more than 150 miles in two days, helped by coalition air strikes, breaking the stalemate at Ajdabiya and paving the way for hundreds of men to stream forward along Libya’s coastal road.

But despite a Libyan rebel claim that Sirte had been captured, there was no sign on Monday that the opposition was in control of the city, which marks the boundary between the east and west of Libya and has great symbolic importance as Gaddafi’s home city.

Instead, pro-Gaddafi troops in Sirte were being rallied by forces travelling east from Tripoli and other strongholds in 4×4 vehicles with light weaponry mounted on the rear, a break from the heavier artillery used so far by Gaddafi’s forces, which has been picked off with relative ease by coalition air strikes.

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Juan Cole: An open letter to the Left on Libya

Juan Cole writes:

As I expected, now that Qaddafi’s advantage in armor and heavy weapons is being neutralized by the UN allies’ air campaign, the liberation movement is regaining lost territory. Liberators took back Ajdabiya and Brega (Marsa al-Burayqa), key oil towns, on Saturday into Sunday morning, and seemed set to head further West. This rapid advance is almost certainly made possible in part by the hatred of Qaddafi among the majority of the people of these cities. The Buraiqa Basin contains much of Libya’s oil wealth, and the Transitional Government in Benghazi will soon again control 80 percent of this resource, an advantage in their struggle with Qaddafi.

I am unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on, and glad that the UNSC-authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed. I can still remember when I was a teenager how disappointed I was that Soviet tanks were allowed to put down the Prague Spring and extirpate socialism with a human face. Our multilateral world has more spaces in it for successful change and defiance of totalitarianism than did the old bipolar world of the Cold War, where the US and the USSR often deferred to each other’s sphere of influence.

The United Nations-authorized intervention in Libya has pitched ethical issues of the highest importance, and has split progressives in unfortunate ways. I hope we can have a calm and civilized discussion of the rights and wrongs here.

On the surface, the situation in Libya a week and a half ago posed a contradiction between two key principles of Left politics: supporting the ordinary people and opposing foreign domination of them. Libya’s workers and townspeople had risen up to overthrow the dictator in city after city– Tobruk, Dirna, al-Bayda, Benghazi, Ajdabiya, Misrata, Zawiya, Zuara, Zintan. Even in the capital of Tripoli, working-class neighborhoods such as Suq al-Jumah and Tajoura had chased out the secret police. In the two weeks after February 17, there was little or no sign of the protesters being armed or engaging in violence.

The libel put out by the dictator, that the 570,000 people of Misrata or the 700,000 people of Benghazi were supporters of “al-Qaeda,” was without foundation. That a handful of young Libyan men from Dirna and the surrounding area had fought in Iraq is simply irrelevant. The Sunni Arab resistance in Iraq was for the most part not accurately called ‘al-Qaeda,’ which is a propaganda term in this case. All of the countries experiencing liberation movements had sympathizers with the Sunni Iraqi resistance; in fact opinion polling shows such sympathy almost universal throughout the Sunni Arab world. All of them had at least some fundamentalist movements. That was no reason to wish the Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians and others ill. The question is what kind of leadership was emerging in places like Benghazi. The answer is that it was simply the notables of the city. If there were an uprising against Silvio Berlusconi in Milan, it would likely unite businessmen and factory workers, Catholics and secularists. It would just be the people of Milan. A few old time members of the Red Brigades might even come out, and perhaps some organized crime figures. But to defame all Milan with them would be mere propaganda.

Then Muammar Qaddafi’s sons rallied his armored brigades and air force to bomb the civilian crowds and shoot tank shells into them. Members of the Transitional Government Council in Benghazi estimate that 8000 were killed as Qaddafi’s forces attacked and subdued Zawiya, Zuara, Ra’s Lanuf, Brega, Ajdabiya, and the working class districts of Tripoli itself, using live ammunition fired into defenseless rallies. If 8000 was an exaggeration, simply “thousands” was not, as attested by Left media such as Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! As Qaddafi’s tank brigades reached the southern districts of Benghazi, the prospect loomed of a massacre of committed rebels on a large scale.

The United Nations Security Council authorization for UN member states to intervene to forestall this massacre thus pitched the question. If the Left opposed intervention, it de facto acquiesced in Qaddafi’s destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya’s workers and poor, along with large numbers of white collar middle class people. Qaddafi would have reestablished himself, with the liberation movement squashed like a bug and the country put back under secret police rule. The implications of a resurgent, angry and wounded Mad Dog, his coffers filled with oil billions, for the democracy movements on either side of Libya, in Egypt and Tunisia, could well have been pernicious.

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Libyan rebels take back oil towns of Brega and Ras Lanuf in westward push

The Guardian reports:

Libyan rebels have entered the key oil town of Ras Lanuf after routing Muammar Gaddafi’s forces in Brega with help from UN-backed airstrikes that tipped the balance away from the military.

Brega, the main oil export terminal in eastern Libya, fell after a skirmish late on Saturday, with rebels continuing their push westwards to Ras Lanuf and its large oil refinery. “There is no Gaddafi army in Ras Lanuf,” said rebel fighter Walid al-Arabi, quoting rebels who had returned from the town, and that the frontline was now west of Ras Lanuf.

Earlier, rebel commander Ahmed Jibril, manning a checkpoint on the western edge of Brega, said: “There are no Gaddafi forces here now, the rebels have Brega under their full control, it is free.”

The two oil towns are responsible for a large chunk of Libya’s oil production, which has all but stopped since the uprising that began on 15 February and was inspired by the toppling of governments in Tunisia and Egypt.

The Gaddafi regime on Saturday acknowledged the airstrikes had forced its troops to retreat and accused international forces of choosing sides. “This is the objective of the coalition now, it is not to protect civilians because now they are directly fighting against the armed forces,” Khaled Kaim, the deputy foreign minister, said in the capital, Tripoli. “They are trying to push the country to the brink of a civil war.”

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Inside Gaddafi’s brutal prison: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s Libyan ordeal

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad writes:

We ran into Gaddafi’s troops on the outskirts of Zawiya, less than a mile beyond the last signs of rebel activity: a destroyed checkpoint, a bullet-ridden building and five burnt-out cars.

The soldiers were blocking the main highway to the coast with pickup trucks and armoured vehicles, so our driver took to the desert, skirting the roadblock in a wide arc before cutting back to the road. He was edgy after that, spooked even by the sight of a distant abandoned car parked in the middle of the road.

We – the Brazilian journalist Andrei Netto and I, travelling in the company of rebels from western Libya – would not be able reach Zawiya that night as planned. Instead we made for Sabratha, 12 miles to the west.

It was clear that Sabratha had been reclaimed by Gaddafi loyalists. The police and intelligence service buildings were charred, but they had new green flags of the regime flying above them.

We separated from our rebel escorts and took shelter in an empty half-built house, away from the militiamen roaming the streets. Later that night we saw four men approaching, dressed in dark tracksuits and carrying sticks except for one, who had a gun. When they surrounded the house there was no way to escape. They took our phones then frogmarched us, heads down, to an SUV, ranting as we went. “You sons of bitches! You Jews and Zionists! You Arab traitors! You want to topple Gaddafi? We will rape your mothers! Gaddafi will show you!”

I was put in the pickup first, then Netto. As he was getting in, a tall militiaman swung a metal pipe that struck him on the head. Inside the car the man sat behind us, jabbing at us with a stick as he continued his tirade.

We were taken a short distance to a compound guarded by armed men, where we were interrogated, then blindfolded and driven for two hours to a prison that I now know is in Tripoli. We were separated there; I have not seen Netto since.

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Who is afraid of Julian Schnabel?

Jordan Elgrably writes:

Miral, currently in theatres, portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an entirely Palestinian perspective. It is nothing earth-shattering (a brief filmography at the end of this article offers other films that do this far more effectively) except that it was made by a Jewish filmmaker.

Several Jewish organisations and the Israeli government have seen fit to protest against the film. They say it does not tell both sides of the story. But that is precisely the point. When director Julian Schnabel – previously lauded for his lavish features Basquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – decided to make this film, based on the book by Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, his intention was to tell the story Rula tells in Miral.

Schnabel is an Academy-Award nominated director, and his film has brought “the conflict” into the mainstream. The fact that he happens to be Jewish while representing the Palestinian perspective inflames some in the Jewish community, who consider his film an act of betrayal.

I saw the film earlier this week in a special screening hosted by Javier Bardem, who starred in Before Night Falls and wanted to support Schnabel’s “brave film”. The director was there with his daughter Stella, who appears in the film, and with his new wife – Rula Jebreal. I could not help but wonder what the Jewish community thinks when a Jew marries a Palestinian.

More to the point, why are some Jews afraid of Jews who embrace narratives other than those officially sanctioned in the Jewish and Israeli community? Why do such narratives when told by Jews – including books by Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, and Israeli revisionist historians such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Tom Segev – cause such ire?

I am one of these contrarian Jews. Why do I strive to see things not only from the Jewish perspective but the Arab one? Because my father’s family lived for centuries in an Arab country, Morocco, and because long ago I recognised that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about nothing else if not conflicting narratives.

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Israel may have squandered its last best chance for peace

Patrick Cockburn writes:

The bomb attack on a bus in Jerusalem this week killed one woman and wounded 24 people. The casualties were not high compared with similar bombings in the city over the last 20 years. I lived off the Jaffa Road for four years in the mid-1990s when bus bombings were common. I used to walk to look at the smouldering carcass of the latest bus to be hit, its metal panels bulging out from the force of the explosion. The latest bombing is having more impact than its predecessors because it is the first in Jerusalem for seven years. It comes just as there is an increase of violence between Israelis and Palestinians on the West Bank and in and around Gaza. None of this might have serious repercussions except that these incidents are happening just as the political landscape of the Arab world is being radically transformed to a degree that has not happened for half a century.

Suppose the uprisings across the Middle East had happened five years ago: Israel could not have been certain of the inaction of Arab leaders as it launched two limited wars. The Israeli bombardment and ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006 created a furious popular reaction in the region. But this did not much matter because power among Israel’s neighbours was in the hands of kings and presidents who covertly hoped that the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon would be destroyed or crippled.

The same thing happened during “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008-9 when Israel launched a three week-long air and land bombardment of Gaza which killed at least 1,200 Palestinians. Thirteen Israelis died during the conflict. Throughout, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak cooperated with Israel, in sealing off Gaza from the outside world. The political cost to Israel and the US was not high because condemnation by the “Arab street” – that patronising and dismissive term that encapsulates the media’s contempt for the Arab public – did not count.

This is not going to happen again in quite the same way. No wonder the Israeli establishment was aghast as it watched Mubarak being gradually forced from power. Israeli leaders bad-mouthed Barack Obama for not supporting the Egyptian leader more effectively. Egypt is not going to abrogate its peace treaty with Israel, but it is likely to react more forcefully than in the past to Israeli actions of which ordinary Egyptians disapprove.

Previous political calculations about the outcome of Israeli actions in the Middle East have all changed over the past three months. States like Egypt will no longer be politically neutered by being wholly under the control of a decrepit and unpopular ruler who was not going to go against US wishes. That said, the degree of change is still unclear. Elites that got rid of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt and possibly, in the next few weeks, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, are doing so in order to make sure that uprisings do not turn into real revolutions.

The US has much the same aim. But it may not be able to achieve this if, in future, its tolerance of Israeli colonisation of the West Bank remains automatic. It has to grapple with the fact that in Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan – together with Saudi Arabia the three Muslim countries that matter most to the US – an average of 17 per cent of people view US policies favourably, according to a poll by the Pew Research Centre.

Democratisation in the Middle East was always going to produce governments that the US and Israel would not like.

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The fight for Libya

Chris McGreal reports:

Khalif Ameen leaped on the blackened tank, its innards hollowed out by the blast of a missile from an unseen plane, and waved his Kalashnikov as he declared the war all but won. “Now Gaddafi is finished. We have won Ajdabiya. We will not stop. Next Brega, Ras Lanuf, Sirte, Tripoli. Gaddafi will go quick,” said the young man who a few weeks ago was an engineering student.

But the burned-out remnants of the Libyan dictator’s armour abandoned on the outskirts of Ajdabiya after the strategic town finally fell to rebel forces told a different story that does not bode well for Ameen’s dream of marching all the way to Tripoli.

The fall of Ajdabiya after days of artillery duels and air bombardment delivered the Libyan revolutionaries their first significant victory over Muammar Gaddafi’s forces since the coalition air strikes began a week ago. The Libyan army sat outside town, astride the main coastal highway, blocking the rebels’ attempts to advance west toward the capital and recapture territory lost as Gaddafi found his footing after the initial shock of the uprising.

On Friday, the insurgents moved rocket launchers and other weapons down the road from Benghazi, then said they fought through the night with the dug-in enemy. “We hit them with our rockets and RPGs,” said Mohammed Rahim, a former regular soldier wearing a makeshift uniform of blue camouflage jacket and green trousers who went over to the rebels at the beginning of the uprising last month. “The fighting went on all night. It was a big battle. All the fighters came from Benghazi for it.”

However, the destruction of tanks on the edge of the town suggested it was air strikes by coalition forces, ostensibly to protect civilians, that had finally broken the back of strong resistance by army forces before the rebels moved in. The length of time it took the insurgents to overcome the army, and the rebels’ reliance on air strikes to destroy the bulk of its armour before finally taking Ajdabiya, confirmed how dependent the poorly armed and inexperienced revolutionaries are on foreign air forces to fight their war for them.

Al Jazeera reports:

Libyan rebels are advancing westwards after recapturing the strategic eastern town of Ajdabiya from government controls with the help of coalition air strikes.

Reports late on Saturday suggested rebels had already pressed onto the key oil-port town of Brega, 80 kilometres to the west.

“We are in the centre of Brega,” rebel fighter Abdelsalam al-Maadani told the AFP news agency by telephone. But Reuters said rebels were only on the outskirts of Brega.

Al Jazeera’s James Bays, who reached Ajdabiya on Saturday, said that while it appeared that rebels had taken over the town of Brega, it remained unclear who controlled the nearby oil port.

Meanwhile, pro-Gaddafi forces were attacking the opposition-held city of Misurata in the west of the country with heavy shelling, witnesses said, drawing coalition air strikes against government military targets.

On Thursday, CNN reported:

For days, the wounded just kept coming to the 60-bed central hospital in Misrata, a city under siege from forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. But there were no empty beds, no electricity — only generator power. No anesthesia or painkillers.

A doctor said 109 people have died in Misrata over the past week. Six were killed Thursday by Gadhafi’s rooftop snipers — unseen but too often precise. More than 1,300 others have been wounded since the protests erupted in the western city last month.

A minaret for a mosque in Misrata comes under continuous shelling until it collapses, March 19:

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The rebels of eastern Libya have found much to condemn about the police state tactics of Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi: deep paranoia, mass detentions, secret prisons and tightly scripted media tours.

But some of those same tactics appear to be creeping into the efforts of the opposition here as it seeks to stamp out lingering loyalty to Kadafi. Rebel forces are detaining anyone suspected of serving or assisting the Kadafi regime, locking them up in the same prisons once used to detain and torture Kadafi’s opponents.

For a month, gangs of young gunmen have roamed the city, rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies.

Over the last several days, the opposition has begun rounding up men accused of fighting as mercenaries for Kadafi’s militias as government forces pushed toward Benghazi. It has launched nightly manhunts for about 8,000 people named as government operatives in secret police files seized after internal security operatives fled in the face of the rebellion that ended Kadafi’s control of eastern Libya last month.

“We know who they are,” said Abdelhafed Ghoga, the chief opposition spokesman. He called them “people with bloodstained hands” and “enemies of the revolution.”

Any suspected Kadafi loyalist or spy who does not surrender, Ghoga warned, will face revolutionary “justice.”

Rebels have also detained scores of Libyans they say were captured during battles with government forces in the last week or so.

On Wednesday, 55 terrified detainees were paraded in front of a busload of international journalists.

It was the first time the opposition’s month-old transitional national council had organized such a controlled bus tour, and it featured some of the same restrictions placed on journalists taken on tours in Tripoli by the Kadafi regime: no interviews and no close-up photographs of prisoners.

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Art challenges Tunisian revolutionaries

Al Jazeera reports:

A crowd has gathered to ponder the black-and-white photographs which have been pasted across the face of building that was, until recent, the local offices of the former president’s much-loathed party.

“I have no idea what these photos mean. Do you know?” Meddeb Nejeb, a high school teacher, asks Al Jazeera.

He might be yet to grasp the meaning of the photographs, but Nejeb wants to know more.

For the artists behind what is one of the most ambitious contemporary street art projects to vibrate the Arab world, the artwork is about replacing the once all-pervasive presidential photography with mosaics of ordinary, anonymous Tunisians who rose up against their government.

The group are using street art to kick-start conversations and to challenge their compatriots to see the familiar in a new, post-revolutionary, light.

In the spirit of people-power, the project, titled “INSIDE OUT: Artocracy in Tunisia”, features a hundred ordinary Tunisians, putting their images where only presidents once hung. The portraits were taken by six Tunisian photographers, in collaboration with the renowned French street artist known as JR and other international artists.

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How soon before Gaddafi expels the foreign press?

For a couple of weeks now, Libyan authorities have clearly believed that a carefully chaperoned foreign press corps could be useful for presenting images to the world suggesting that, at least in Tripoli, Colonel Gaddafi does not lack popular support.

That hasn’t stopped reporters complaining about the restrictions that prevent them from real news-gathering and naturally the government’s blatant effort to control reporting has become a story itself. But an incident today inside the hotel where the press spends much of its time sequestered, has effectively ripped back the veil. It looks like it’s going to be just a matter of time before all the foreign press gets kicked out of Gaddafi-controlled Libya.

The New York Times reports:

A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli on Saturday morning in an attempt to tell journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s militia. After struggling for nearly an hour to resist removal by Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces, she was dragged away from the hotel screaming.

“They say that we are all Libyans and we are one people,” said the woman, who gave her name as Eman al-Obeidy, barging in during breakfast at the hotel dining room. “But look at what the Qaddafi men did to me.” She displayed a broad bruise on her face, a large scar on her upper thigh, several narrow and deep scratch marks lower on her leg, and marks that seemed to come from binding around her hands and feet.

She said she had been raped by 15 men. “I was tied up, and they defecated and urinated on me,” she said. “They violated my honor.”

She pleaded for friends she said were still in custody. “They are still there, they are still there,” she said. “As soon as I leave here, they are going to take me to jail.”

For the members of the foreign news media here at the invitation of the government of Colonel Qaddafi — and largely confined to the Rixos Hotel except for official outings — the episode was a reminder of the brutality of the Libyan government and the presence of its security forces even among the hotel staff. People in hotel uniforms, who just hours before had been serving coffee and clearing plates, grabbed table knives and rushed to physically restrain the woman and to hold back the journalists.

Ms. Obeidy said she was a native of the rebel stronghold of Benghazi who had been stopped by Qaddafi militia on the outskirts of Tripoli. After being held for about two days, she said, she had managed to escape. Wearing a black robe, a veil and slippers, she ran into the Rixos Hotel here, asking specifically to speak to the news service Reuters and The New York Times. “There is no media coverage outside,” she yelled at one point.

“They swore at me and they filmed me. I was alone. There was whiskey. I was tied up,” she told Michael Georgy of Reuters, the only journalist who was able to speak with her briefly. “I am not scared of anything. I will be locked up immediately after this.” She added: “Look at my face. Look at my back.” Her other comments were captured by television cameras.

A wild scuffle began as journalists tried to interview, photograph and protect her. Several journalists were punched, kicked and knocked on the floor by the security forces , working in tandem with people who until then had appeared to be members of the hotel staff. A television camera belonging to CNN was destroyed in the struggle, and security forces seized a device that a Financial Times reporter had used to record her testimony. A plainclothes security officer pulled out a revolver.

Two members of the hotel staff grabbed table knives to threaten both Ms. Obeidy and the journalists.

“Turn them around, turn them around,” a waiter shouted, trying to block the foreign news media from having access to Ms. Obeidy. A woman on the staff shouted: “Why are you doing this? You are a traitor!” and briefly put a coat over Ms. Obeidy’s head.

There was a prolonged standoff behind the hotel as the security officials apparently restrained themselves because of the presence of so many journalists, but Ms. Obeidy was ultimately forced into a white car and taken away.

“Leave me alone,” she shouted as one man tried to cover her mouth with his hand.

“They are taking me to jail,” she yelled, trying to resist the security guards, according to Reuters. “They are taking me to jail.”

Questioned about her treatment, Khalid Kaim, the deputy foreign minister, promised that she would be treated in accordance with the law. Musa Ibrahim, a government spokesman, said she appeared to be drunk and mentally ill. “Her safety of course is guaranteed,” he said, adding that the authorities were investigating the case, including the possibility that her reports of abuse were “fantasies.”

Charles Clover of The Financial Times, who had put himself in the way of the security forces trying to apprehend her, was put into a van and driven to the border shortly afterward. He said that the night before he had been told to leave because of what Libyan government officials said were inaccuracies in his reports.

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Syria’s Day of Dignity

The Guardian reports:

Demonstrations in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and elsewhere were met with force as security forces struggled to contain unrest that had begun in the southern city of Deraa a week ago.

Thousands once again joined funeral processions in Deraa on Friday, chanting: “Deraa people are hungry, we want freedom.”

Hundreds took to the streets in the cities of Homs, Hama, Tel and Latakia and in towns surrounding Deraa, with smaller protests in the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo, which are more firmly under the watch of security forces. Troops reportedly opened fire in some cases.

Protests in the capital are rare and not tolerated by the Ba’athist regime. A witness told the Guardian that efforts at protests in Damascus were broken up by plain-clothed agents using batons.

By nightfall, a counter-demonstration had been mounted near the historic Umayyad mosque in the heart of the capital. Brief clashes were reported between anti-regime demonstrators and loyalists. A large rally then began in support of President Bashar al-Assad. Hundreds drove around the capital beeping horns and waving flags, whilst posters of the president were put up in the city.

The violence in Syria came after the government had pledged on Thursday to look into reforms. But activists using the Syrian Revolution Facebook page had called for a day of solidarity with Deraa, where according to unofficial reports at least 44 have been killed in the past week.

In the past, many young Syrians had been willing to overlook corruption, a lack of freedom and the slow pace of reforms in return for what they have seen as dignified leadership brought about by Assad’s anti-Western foreign policy. He has also had a youthful appeal. Both appear to now be wearing thin.

“Regimes become really weak when their image turns to brutality. The killings in Deraa have done that,” said Ziad Malki, an activist living in exile in Switzerland. “The Syrian people want more now.”

Others agreed that a turning point had been reached. “Syrians [normally] never come out to protests. This shows how the killings, the worthless reforms announced yesterday and the government propaganda is insulting and is only making us angrier,” said a 32-year-old man.

Demonstration in Damascus:

Demonstration in Hama:

Joshua Landis writes:

The Baathist regime that has ruled Syria for 48 years is on the ropes. Even President Bashar al-Assad himself seems to have been shocked by the level of violence used by Syria’s security forces to suppress demonstrations that began a week ago, and on Thursday afternoon his office announced unprecedented concessions to popular demands. But the question of whether those concessions assuage protesters’ concerns or prove to be too little too late may be answered in the escalation of clashes that followed Friday prayers, with a number of demonstrators reportedly killed when security forces again opened fire.

The protests began a week ago in the dusty agricultural town of Dara’a, near the border with Jordan, over the arrests of high school students for scrawling antigovernment graffiti. Those demonstrations quickly spun out of control, with thousands joining in, inspired by the wave of revolutions that have rocked the Arab world, to demand political freedoms and an end to emergency rule and corruption. The government responded brutally, killing over 30 demonstrators and wounding many more, according to activists. Gruesome videos of the crackdown, disseminated via the Internet in recent days, have enraged Syrians from one end of the country to the other.

On Thursday, the regime began to try a different tack, with Assad’s spokeswoman Buthaina Shaaban offering the President’s condolences to the people of Dara’a and acknowledging their “legitimate” demands, even as she insisted that reports of the scale of protests and the number of casualties had been exaggerated. Oddly, the President has himself not appeared on TV since Syria’s political troubles began, apparently hoping to protect himself from criticism. But Shaaban insisted that Assad was completely against the use of live fire in suppressing the demonstrations. She emphasized that she had been present in the room when the President ordered the security agencies to refrain from shooting at protesters — “not one bullet.”

But the only promised concessions that can be taken to the bank are pay rises for state employees of up to 30%, and the release of all activists arrested in the past weeks. Other reforms, which the regime undertook to study, are job creation, press freedom, permitting the formation of opposition parties and lifting emergency law. Should they be implemented, those changes would be nothing short of revolutionary. But many activists have already dismissed Assad’s offer as a stalling tactic to make it through the next few days of funerals and demonstration. The opposition had called for Syrians to assemble in large numbers in mosques for a day of “dignity” and demonstrations.

In order to mount a serious challenge to the regime’s iron grip on power, opposition activists will have to move their protest actions beyond Dara’a and its surrounding villages, and extend it to the major cities. Their attempt to do so presents the country with a choice of great consequence: they must decide if Syria is more like Egypt and Tunisia, where the people achieved sufficient unity to peacefully oust their rulers, or whether Syria is more like Iraq and Lebanon, which slipped into civil war and endless factionalism.

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What does social science tell us about intervention in Libya… or much else?

Stephen Walt writes:

Before France, Britain, and the United States stumbled into its current attempt to dislodge Muammar al-Qaddafi from power in Libya — and let’s not kid ourselves, that’s what they are trying to do — did anyone bother to ask what recent social science tells us about the likely results of our intervention?

I doubt it, because recent research suggests that we are likely to be disappointed by the outcome. A 2006 study by Jeffrey Pickering and Mark Peceny found that military intervention by liberal states (i.e., states like Britain, France and the United States) “has only very rarely played a role in democratization since 1945.” Similarly, George Downs, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita of New York University found that U.S. interventions since World War II led to stable democracies within ten years less than 3 percent of the time, and a separate study by their NYU colleague William Easterly and several associates found that both U.S and Soviet interventions during the Cold War generally led to “significant declines in democracy.” Finally, a 2010 article by Goran Piec and Daniel Reiter examines forty-two “foreign imposed regime changes” since 1920 and finds that when interventions “damage state infrastructural power” they also increase the risk of subsequent civil war.

The best and most relevant study I have yet read on this question is an as-yet unpublished working paper by Alexander Downes of Duke University, which you can find on his website here. Using a more sophisticated research design, Downes examined 100 cases of “foreign imposed regime change” going all the way back to 1816. In particular, his analysis takes into account “selection effects” (i.e., the fact that foreign powers are more likely to intervene in states that already have lots of problems, so you would expect these states to have more problems afterwards too). He finds that foreign intervention tends to promote stability when the intervening powers are seeking to restore a previously deposed ruler. But when foreign interveners oust an existing ruler and impose a wholly new government (which is what we are trying to do in Libya), the likelihood of civil war more than triples.

It’s not as though Susan Rice and Samantha Power lack grounding in the social sciences, but if President Obama, when being pressed to authorize an urgent intervention in Libya, had responded by calling for a report to see what useful lessons social scientists had drawn from previous interventions, his request might have been greeted with an exclamation: “give me a break!” or at least a polite admonition: “we don’t have the time.” But even if the situation was not quite as urgent, how much could social science reveal about the situation in Libya?

The problem is, social science isn’t science. In real science, you can test theories by running multiple experiments, changing the variables and comparing the different outcomes. You can’t prove that something is true if there are no means by which it could be proved false. In this case, all a social scientist can do is posit a number of what are deemed to be parallel cases, pointing to the outcomes there and then and predict a similar outcome in Libya.

But whatever generalizations you want to make, it’s hard to dispute the Colonel Gaddafi is one of a kind and however important the lessons from history might be, they do no more than suggest a number of possible outcomes. Indeed, we do well to remember that only a matter of weeks ago scholarly opinion was quite confident in asserting that Egypt was not ripe for revolution. History is not a process of endless repetition and there are periods of change when it becomes foolish to predict with much conviction what is going to happen.

In real life we make choices and the nature of most major decisions is that they foreclose the possibility of backtracking and finding out the consequences of each alternative.

The US and its allies chose to intervene in Libya and now those who doubt the wisdom of that choice can second guess it and make all sorts of claims about how things would have worked out better if that choice had not been made. These are to a significant degree idle forms of speculation because they involve making unprovable claims. There is no parallel reality in which we can observe what would have happened had UN Res. 1973 not passed and the intervention thus not occurred. The only incontrovertable statements are of the kind, we wouldn’t be spending $300 million a week on an intervention in Libya if we hadn’t intervened in Libya. You don’t say?

Walt concludes, “these various scholarly studies suggest that the probability that our intervention will yield a stable democracy is low, and that our decision to intervene has increased the likelihood of civil war.”

Who claimed this intervention was going to lead to a stable democracy? At this point there has yet to be a clear consensus on what the operation’s aims are. I haven’t heard any grand predictions about the dawn of a new democracy. This sounds like another instance of the echoes of Iraq emerging out of silence.

As for the risks of civil war, many of the skeptics claim that a civil war had already started. That, I would dispute.

By the point at which Gaddafi’s power briefly appeared not to reach far out of Tripoli, the uprising had all the marks of being a popular and contagious rejection of his rule. Had he not already anticipated the need to guard his power by relying on foreign mercenaries, he would most likely already be gone.

And as for the danger of instability in a post-Gaddafi Libya, the truth is that in a revolutionary society, stability is just another name for oppression. It might look appealing to those of us outside for whom it has tangible benefits, like lower oil prices, but for the Libyans who have risen up to overthrow a tyrant, the prize of freedom they seek is all that they can now accept — even if the price is turmoil.

Does that sound like Rumsfeld’s view of the collapse of civil order in Baghdad? Superficially, but the rupture Iraq went through was triggered by an American invasion. This time around the outsiders have inserted themselves (though not literally stepped in) at a point at which a society was already being ripped apart. We didn’t make this happen.

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