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wmulnea

Strife in Libya Could Presage Long Civil War - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...libyan-unrest.html

shared by wmulnea on 21 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Salah Badi, an ultraconservative Islamist and former lawmaker from the coastal city of Misurata.
  • Mr. Badi’s assault on Libya’s main international airport has now drawn the country’s fractious militias, tribes and towns into a single national conflagration that threatens to become a prolonged civil war. Both sides see the fight as part of a larger regional struggle, fraught with the risks of a return to repressive authoritarianism or a slide toward Islamist extremism.
  • the violence threatens to turn Libya into a pocket of chaos destabilizing North Africa for years to come.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • Ansar al-Shariah, the hard-line Islamist group involved in the assault on the American diplomatic Mission in Benghazi in 2012
  • Their opponents, including the militias stocked with former Qaddafi soldiers
  • The ideological differences are blurry at best: both sides publicly profess a similar conservative but democratic vision.
  • an escalating war among its patchwork of rival cities and tribes.
  • Motorists wait in lines stretching more than three miles at shuttered gas stations, waiting for them to open. Food prices are soaring, uncollected garbage is piling up in the streets and bicycles, once unheard-of, are increasingly common.
  • Tripoli, the capital and the main prize, has become a battleground
  • The fighting has destroyed the airport
  • Constant shelling between rival militias has leveled blocks
  • Storage tanks holding about 25 million gallons of fuel have burned unchecked for a month
  • with daily blackouts sometimes lasting more than 12 hours.
  • many Libyans despaired of any resolution
  • In Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, the fighting has closed both its airport and seaport, strangling the city.
  • the rush toward war is also lifting the fortunes of the Islamist extremists of Ansar al-Shariah, the Benghazi militant group.
  • The United Nations, the United States and the other Western powers have withdrawn their diplomats and closed their missions
  • “We cannot care more than you do,” the British ambassador, Michael Aron, wrote
  • Until now, a rough balance of power among local brigades had preserved a kind of equilibrium, if not stability
  • the transitional government scarcely existed outside of the luxury hotels where its officials gathered, no other force was strong enough to dominate. No single interest divided the competing cities and factions.
  • But that semblance of unity is now in tatters, and with it the hope that nonviolent negotiations might settle the competition for power and, implicitly, Libya’s oil.
  • In May, a renegade former general, Khalifa Hifter, declared that he would seize power by force to purge Libya of Islamists, beginning in Benghazi. He vowed to eradicate the hard-line Islamists of Ansar al-Shariah, blamed for a long series of bombings and assassinations.
  • General Hifter also pledged to close the Parliament and arrest moderate Islamist members
  • he has mustered a small fleet of helicopters and warplanes that have bombed rival bases around Benghazi, a steep escalation of the violence.
  • moderate Islamists and other brigades who had distanced themselves from Ansar al-Shariah began closing ranks, welcoming the group into a newly formed council of “revolutionary” militias
  • a broad alliance of Benghazi militias that now includes Ansar al-Shariah issued a defiant statement denouncing relative moderates like the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. “We will not accept the project of democracy, secular parties, nor the parties that falsely claim the Islamic cause,”
  • the general’s blitz has now stalled, it polarized the country, drawing alarms from some cities and tribes but applause from others.
  • the loudest applause came from the western mountain town of Zintan, where local militia leaders had recruited hundreds of former Qaddafi soldiers into special brigades
  • the rival coastal city of Misurata, where militias have allied with the Islamists in political battles and jostled with the Zintanis for influence in the capital
  • the Misurata and Islamist militias developed a reputation for besieging government buildings and kidnapping high officials to try to pressure the Parliament. But in recent months the Zintanis and their anti-Islamist allies have stormed the Parliament and kidnapped senior lawmakers as well.
  • the newly elected Parliament, led at first, on a seniority basis, by a member supportive of Mr. Hifter, announced plans to convene in Tobruk, an eastern city under the general’s control.
  • About 30 members, most of them Islamists or Misuratans, refused to attend,
  • Tripoli’s backup airport, under the control of an Islamist militia, has cut off flights to Tobruk, even blocking a trip by the prime minister.
  • a spokesman for the old disbanded Parliament, favored by the Islamists and Misuratans, declared that it would reconvene in Tripoli
  • In Tobruk, a spokesman for the new Parliament declared that the Islamist- and Misuratan-allied militias were terrorists, suggesting that Libya might soon have two legislatures with competing armies
  • Each side has the support of competing satellite television networks financed and, often, broadcast from abroad, typically from Qatar for the Islamists and from the United Arab Emirates for their foes.
  • Hassan Tatanaki, a Libyan-born business mogul who owns one of the anti-Islamist satellite networks, speaking in an interview from an office in the Emirates. “We are in a state of war and this is no time for compromise.”
  • Fighters and tribes who fought one another during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi are now coming together on the same side of the new fight, especially with the Zintanis against the Islamists. Some former Qaddafi officers who had fled Libya are even coming back to take up arms again.
  • “It is not pro- or anti-Qaddafi any more — it is about Libya,” said a former Qaddafi officer in a military uniform
  • Beneath the battle against “extremists,” he said, was an even deeper, ethnic struggle: the tribes of Arab descent, like the Zintanis, against those of Berber, Circassian or Turkish ancestry, like the Misuratis. “The victory will be for the Arab tribes,”
  • andrea_hoertz on 21 Sep 14
     
    Article explains the civil war that is erupting in Libya. Islamist extremists are trying to take over the country and towns and tribes of Libya are choosing sides. Tripoli has been the biggest battle ground and its airport was destroyed.
  • wmulnea on 11 Apr 15
     
    This NYT article gives an excellent outline of the prominent factions fighting in Libya, and the purpose and goals of those factions as of Aug, 2014.
  • wmulnea on 11 Apr 15
     
    This NYT article gives an excellent outline of the prominent factions fighting in Libya, and the purpose and goals of those factions as of Aug, 2014.
ysenia

Iran's Duplicitous Nuclear Strategy | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s-duplicitous-nuclear-strategy

iran nuclear program military analysis deal

shared by ysenia on 08 Feb 16 - Cached
  • ysenia on 08 Feb 16
     
    Satellite views of the nuclear test facilities in Iran. Speculate that Iran has been covering traces of previous activity before the International Atomic Energy Agency came in September of 2015.
allieggg

Can Libya Rebuild Itself After 40 Years of Gaddafi? - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/f-after-40-years-gaddafi-68601

Gaddafi libya Arab Nationalism recontruction political tabula rasa Revolution politics middle east

shared by allieggg on 12 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • the man has hollowed out the Libyan state, eviscerated all opposition in Libyan society, and, in effect, created a political tabula rasa on which a newly free people will now have to scratch out a future.
  • Jamahiriya, a political system that is run directly by tribesmen without the intermediation of state institutions
  • the problem is, of course, that much like in the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, virtually everyone at one point or another had to deal with the regime to survive.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Libya is truly a case apart.
  • the disastrous Italian legacy in Libya, has been a constant element in Gaddafi’s speeches since he took power
  • inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser, neighboring Egypt’s president, whose ideas of Arab nationalism and of the possibility of restoring glory to the Arab world, would fuel the first decade of Gaddafi’s revolution.
  • he was unimpressed with the niceties of international diplomacy,
  • In a brilliant move that co-opted tribal elders, many of whom were also military commanders, he created the Social Leadership People’s Committee, through which he could simultaneously control the tribes and segments of the country’s military.
  • When it turned out that Libya, which was still a decentralized society in 1969, had little appetite for his centralizing political vision and remained largely indifferent to his proposals, the young idealist quickly turned activist.
  • Green Book, a set of slim volumes published in the mid-1970s that contain Gaddafi’s political philosophy, a blueprint is offered for a dramatic restructuring of Libya’s economy, politics, and society. In principle, Libya would become an experiment in democracy. In reality, it became a police state where every move of its citizens was carefully watched by a growing number of security apparatuses and revolutionary committees that owed loyalty directly to Gaddafi.
  • Having crushed all opposition by the mid-1970s, the regime systematically snuffed out any group that could potentially oppose it—any activity that could be construed as political opposition was punishable by death, which is one reason why a post-Gaddafi Libya, unlike a post-Mubarak Egypt, can have no ready-made opposition in a position to fill the vacuum.
  • The tribes—the Warfalla, the Awlad Busayf, the Magharha, the Zuwaya, the Barasa, and the smallest of them all, the Gadafa, to which he belonged—offered a natural form of political affiliation, a tribal ethos that could be tapped into for support. And perhaps, in the aftermath of Gaddafi, they could serve as a nucleus around which to build a new political system.
  • Gaddafi feared they might coalesce into groups opposing his rule. So, during the first two decades after the 1969 coup, he tried to erase their influence, arguing that they were an archaic element in a modern society.
  • comprehensive reconstruction of everything civic, political, legal, and moral that makes up a society and its government.
  • After systematically destroying local society, after using the tribes to cancel each other out, after aborting methodically the emergence of a younger generation that could take over Libya’s political life—all compounded by the general incoherence of the country’s administrative and bureaucratic institutions—Gaddafi will have left a new Libya with severe and longstanding challenges.
  • the growing isolation of Libya as international sanctions were imposed.
  • Lockerbie was the logical endpoint for a regime that had lost all international legitimacy.
  • while the regime still had the coercive power to put down any uprisings that took place in the 1990s, it became clear to Gaddafi’s closest advisers that the potential for unrest had reached unprecedented levels.
  • way out was to come to an agreement with the West that would end the sanctions, allow Libya to refurbish an aging oil infrastructure, and provide a safety valve by permitting Libyans to travel abroad once more.
  • intent to renounce weapons of mass destruction in December 2003—after a long process of behind-the-scenes diplomacy initially spearheaded by Britain
  • “The Revolution Everlasting” was one of the enduring slogans of his Libya, inscribed everywhere from bridges to water bottles.
  • regime that had, for four decades, mismanaged the country’s economy and humiliated its citizens
  • country was split in half, with eastern Cyrenaica and its main city Benghazi effectively independent—a demonstration of the kind of people’s power Gaddafi had always advocated. Reality, in effect, outgrew the caricature.
  • used a set of divide-and-rule policies that not only kept his opponents sundered from each other, but had also completely enfeebled any social or political institution in the country.
  • Beyond Gaddafi, there exists only a great political emptiness, a void that Libya somehow will need to fill.
  • the creation of a modern state where Libyans become true citizens, with all the rights and duties this entails.
  • the terrorist incidents
  • Regimes can use oil revenues strategically to provide patronage that effectively keeps them in power.
  • allieggg on 12 Nov 14
     
    This article from News Week basically paints a picture of Libyan history and how Gaddafi's reign devastated the state economically, socially, and politically. Author Dirk Vandewalle uses the phrase "a political tabula rasa" which in Latin means a blank slate, to describe the fate of Libya after Gaddafi's rule and convey the extent to which the country has to literally reconstruct every component that makes up a society and its government. He highlights major events that led to the downfall of both the Gaddafi regime and the Libyan state as a whole such as Arab nationalism, Jamahiriya, the Green Book, security apparatuses snuffing all opposition, terrorist incidents, isolation and international sanctions, the Lockerbie bombing, weapons of mass destruction, human right violations, divide and rule policies, and his use of oil revenue to fuel his insurgency. Vandewalle concludes the article with uncertain ideas thoughts towards Libya's future and the way the state is going to literally rebuild themselves from this "blank slate" that Gaddafi left behind. 
aacosta8

Egypt I: Cyberactivism - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...egypt-i-cyberactivism

Egypt Cyberactivism History of Egypt

shared by aacosta8 on 23 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • aacosta8 on 23 Feb 16
     
    Egypt exerts a spell: the Luxor Sphinx, Cleopatra VII, those marvels of engineering, the Pyramids. Yet modern ills shook this legendary landscape as pro-Mubarak mobs brandished Molotov cocktails and satellite dishes ripped from rooftops.
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