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The presence of both Turkish and Russian forces in the North African country is deeply unsettling to European powers, unlike the United States, analysts say.

Libya’s electoral commission decided that no such vote could take place for numerous reasons. The presence of foreign forces on Libyan soil was unquestionably one of the delicate factors, adding complexity and controversy to the now-postponed election scheduled for December 24.

Turkey’s military or Russia’s Wagner Group will leave the country in the foreseeable future.

A confidential European Union military report calls for continuing a controversial EU program to train and equip Libya’s coast guard and navy despite growing concerns about their treatment of migrants, a mounting death toll at sea, and the continued lack of any central authority in the North African nation.

Europe’s determination to support Libya in the interception and return of tens of thousands of men, women and children to Libya, where they face insufferable abuse.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants hoping to reach Europe have made their way through Libya, where a lucrative trafficking and smuggling business has flourished in a country without a functioning government,

In Libya, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed herself to be quick to use the American military without thinking about what comes next. As the decisive voice pushing the Obama administration to war, Clinton had no serious plan for a post-Qaddafi Libya, a point driven home forcefully once again in a New York Times cover story on Sunday.

Libya was not the first time she endorsed a U.S. military operation in the Middle East without thinking ahead: Clinton voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. She has shown repeatedly that she did not learn the lessons of Iraq, and has yet to admit to the failure of Libya.

The second is to acknowledge the limits of the capacity of the United States to transform the world in our interests and image. As explained in the New York Times, "Mrs. Clinton's deep belief in America's power to do good in the world ran aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions and a staggering quantity of arms."

Few countries exemplify the tragedy of the Arab Spring like Libya. The fall of the 42-year dictatorship of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi brought a decade of anarchy as competing governments, militias and foreign powers struggled to seize control of the oil-rich country. The United States and NATO allies that had backed the anti-Qaddafi uprising with a bombing campaign largely turned their backs after he fell, and past United Nations efforts to forge a government foundered in the chaos.

Libyans have a chance to clamber out of the mess. A cease-fire of sorts has been holding since October, and a broad-based political forum convened by the United Nations in November managed to appoint a prime minister and a three-member presidential council charged with leading the country to elections this coming December.

But if there’s to be any chance for peace, the foreign powers that have flooded Libya with weapons, drones and mercenaries — primarily Russia, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates

For more than eight years, the Libyan conflict has festered and the European Union has mostly looked away. Libya mattered, if at all, as a playground for terrorism and a source of the migrants disrupting European politics.

But with the recent involvement of Russia and Turkey on opposite sides of a nasty civil war, adding to the meddling of other neighbors, Europe has suddenly woken to the implications of a new Great Game, this time in North Africa, that is rapidly destabilizing its backyard. Belatedly, the Continent is paying attention.

The new European Union foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said in an interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel that the bloc could even send troops to safeguard a potential cease-fire, a move that Italy and Greece have already suggested they would be interested in committing troops to.“If there is a cease-fire in Libya, then the E.U. must be prepared to help implement and monitor this cease-fire — possibly also with soldiers, for example as part of an E.U. mission,” he said.

Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi was missing a thumb, dressed in a gown with gold fringes and hiding in a lavish home high in the hills of northwest Libya

son of the former Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi

Then the Arab Spring came, and Seif instead joined the Qaddafi government’s brutal crackdown on the Libyan uprising. Soon after, he was captured by a rebel group and spent the following years in a kind of cave, cut off from the outside world.

Fighters aligned with Libya’s United Nations-backed unity government are advancing along the Mediterranean coast toward the Islamic State stronghold of Surt

first major assault on territory

reduced the length of Libyan coastline controlled by the Islamic State to 100 miles from about 150 miles.

The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq.

Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.

Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.

dvancing along the Mediterranean coast toward the Islamic State stronghold of Surt, signaling the first major assault on territory that

the terrorist group’s largest base outside of Iraq and Syria.

reduced the length of Libyan coastline controlled by the Islamic State to 100 miles from about 150 miles

When his defense secretary at the time, Robert Gates, and his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, told him that he would be crazy to intervene in Libya — a country where, in Mr. Gates’s words, the United States had “no significant national interests” — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Donilon’s successor, Susan E. Rice, recalled the massacre of 800,000 Rwandans during the Clinton presidency, and said Mr. Obama could not allow another genocide in the making. Reluctantly, Mr. Obama agreed, and ordered a bombing attack, alongside NATO and the Arab League. America could not stand by, he said later, because “that’s just not who we are.”

last month, as he debated with his staff what looked like imminent American strikes on Syria, he talked about how the box he found himself in differed from what he had faced on Libya. “He made the case that Libya was a lot simpler,” one participant in the conversation said recently, recounting the stages the president went through as he moved from tentatively embracing a bombing plan, to a failed effort to secure Congressional authorization, to the Russian-authored diplomacy now in place. “In Libya, he had only a narrow window of time to make the decision, or it would have been too late. He had a U.N. Security Council resolution.” The president, the aide said, ran through his long list and concluded that in Syria, “all that is missing.”

Mr. Obama had absorbed some bitter lessons. His decision to stay on in Afghanistan had not enhanced the perception of American power in the region, and Libya, once the bombing was over, descended into new chaos. Mr. Gates said last week that he saw, in the Syria gyrations, a president absorbing the lesson of a decade of American mistakes, and coming to the right conclusion after the worst possible process. “Haven’t Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya taught us something about the unintended consequences of military action?” Mr. Gates asked.

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To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.

it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.

President Obama’s campaign in Libya may be the most deceptively sold U.S. military policy since Franklin Roosevelt’s “all aid short of war” policy in 1941. In his speech to the nation Tuesday night, the president described a military action in Libya where the main U.S. military commitment had already ended, where NATO was relieving the U.S. of operational responsibility, where the U.S. mission was limited to protecting civilian populations, where the U.S. goal is strictly humanitarian, and where the U.S. took no view about Libya’s future government beyond a vague preference that Muammar Qaddafi move on. As described, this is a preposterous policy. Fortunately, the president is giving every sign of not believing a word of it.

In fact, the U.S. mission is aimed at the overthrow of Qaddafi. The U.S. is engaged in sophisticated propaganda operations urging Qaddafi’s troops to turn on him. And it’s reported that the U.S. is negotiating with Qaddafi about a secure exit from Libya. In fact, the U.S. mission is as deeply concerned with European energy security as with the humanitarian crisis. Critics correctly point out that the US has managed to ignore many other humanitarian crises – and is in fact ignoring one right now in the Ivory Coast. This particular crisis is occurring in a country from which NATO ally Italy buys more than one-fifth of all its net oil imports and in which Britain has a very large investment. We are not going to war for oil. But we very rarely go to war without oil.

Henry Kissinger used to contrast the Bush 43 and Clinton administrations: “Under Clinton, the explanations were much better than the policies; under Bush, the policies were always much better than the explanations.” The Libyan war takes the Bush frailty to extremes: the explanations are laughable on their face – but the policy seems astute and promising.

As it turns out, Syria was merely a springboard for a much larger ISIS plan — replenishing terrorist coffers by taking over oil assets in war-torn Libya.

The terror group has largely taken control of the Libyan city of Sirte and its hundreds of miles of coastline, and has ransacked two key oil terminals in an attempt to wrest control from fragile Libyan officials, ISIS is banking on taking over these oil facilities, and is now reportedly recruiting its own oil and gas engineers.

an crude should be an easier target than Iraqi oil, which has remained largely out of ISIS reach. If ISIS succeeds, it will have more revenues and more power.

Libya truck bomb targets police recruits in Zliten

At least 47 people have been killed by a truck bomb targeting a police training centre in the western Libyan city of Zliten, reports say.

The training centre had been a military base during the rule of ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Geography is, in part, destiny for Italy: The country will always be a bridge between Africa and Europe, as the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean so starkly shows.

A surge of refugees this year, usually transported by smugglers on overcrowded vessels, has sought to reach Europe via the Libyan coast. A boatload of 900 migrants who embarked from Libya are now feared dead in the latest sinking. Over 10,000 were rescued off the coast of Italy in the last week alone. European leaders are scrambling to deal with this emergency.

Many of the refugees involved in recent disasters come from some of Italy's former colonies in North and East Africa, namely Eritrea (occupied from 1890-1941) and Somalia (1908-1941). As migrants, Libyans are fewer in number, but Libya (1912-1941

U.N. investigators are seeking to verify reports of mass graves thought to contain the corpses of migrants at a trafficking hub in Libya, they said in a report published on Monday that also documented incidents of rape, murder and torture.

Libya has been in turmoil for a decade following a 2011 NATO-backed uprising. A comparative lull in east-west fighting has set in since 2020 but U.N.-backed efforts to organise elections as part of a peace process collapsed in December, intensifying a political crisis.

In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, Washington toppled regimes and then failed to plan for a new government or construct effective local forces—with the net result being over 7,000 dead U.S. soldiers, tens of thousands of injured troops, trillions of dollars expended, untold thousands of civilian fatalities, and three Islamic countries in various states of disorder.

We might be able to explain a one-off failure in terms of allies screwing up. But three times in a decade suggests a deeper pattern in the American way of war.

In the American mind, there are good wars: campaigns to overthrow a despot, with the model being World War II. And there are bad wars: nation-building missions to stabilize a foreign country, including peacekeeping and counterinsurgency.

What I find striking is the background assumption that whether the United States military has a role to play here is taken to be a simple function of how much we care about other people's suffering. One obvious answer is that caring or not caring simply doesn't come into it: That the function of the U.S. military is to protect the vital interests of the United States, and that it is for this specific purpose that billions of tax dollars are extracted from American citizens, and for which young men and women have volunteered to risk their lives. It is not a general-purpose pool of resources to be drawn on for promoting desirable outcomes around the world. A parallel argument is quite familiar on the domestic front, however. Pick any morally unattractive outcome or situation, and you will find someone ready to argue that if the federal government plausibly could do something to remedy it, then anyone who denies the federal government should act must simply be indifferent to the problem. My sense is that many more people tend to find this sort of argument convincing in domestic affairs precisely because we seem to have effectively abandoned the conception of the federal government as an entity with clear and defined powers and purposes. We debate whether a particular program will be effective or worth the cost, but over the course of the 20th century, the notion that such debates should be limited to enumerated government functions largely fell out of fashion. Most people—or at least most public intellectuals and policy advocates—now seem to think of Congress as a kind of all-purpose problem solving committee. And I can't help but suspect that the two are linked. Duties and obligations may be specific, but morality is universal: Other things equal, the suffering of a person in Lebanon counts just as much as that of a person in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Once we abandon the idea of a limited government with defined powers—justified by reference to a narrow set of functions specified in advance—and instead see it as imbued with a general mandate to do good, it's much harder for a moral cosmopolitan to resist making the scope of that mandate global, at least in principle.

Stipulate, purely for the sake of argument, that Americans do have some collective obligation to prevent suffering elsewhere in the world, and that this obligation is properly met, at least in part, via government. (Perhaps because governments are uniquely able to remedy certain kinds of suffering—such as those requiring the mobilization of a military.) Given that we have finite resources, surely the worst possible way to go about this is by making a series of ad hoc judgments about particular cases—the "how much do I care about Steve?" method. The refusal to consider whatever global duty we might have holistically is precisely what leads to irrational allocations—like spending billions to protect civilians and rebel troops in Libya when many more lives would be saved (again, let's suppose for the sake of argument) by far less costly malaria eradication efforts. Unless there's an argument that we have some specific or special obligation to people in Libya—and I certainly haven't seen it—then any claim about our obligation to intervene in this case is, necessarily, just a specific application of some broader principle about our obligation to alleviate global suffering generally. The suggestion that we ought to evaluate this case in a vacuum, then, starts to seem awfully strange, because if we are ever going to intervene for strictly humanitarian reasons (rather than to protect vital security interests), then the standard for when to do so has to be, in part, a function of the aggregate demands whatever standard we pick would place on our limited resources.

We all know that individuals often make quite different choices on a case-by-case basis than when they formulate general rules of action based on a longer view. We routinely make meta-choices designed to prevent ourselves from making micro-choices not conducive to our interests in the aggregate: We throw out the smokes and the sweets in the cupboard, and even install software that keeps us from surfing the Internet when we're trying to get work done. Faced with a Twinkie or a hilarious YouTube clip, we may predict that we will often make choices that, when they're all added up, conflict with our other long-term goals. Marketers, by contrast, often try to induce us to make snap decisions or impulse purchases when, in a cool hour of deliberation, we'd conclude their product isn't the best use of our money.

"I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity." freddie7 AT gmail DOT com My brother is a tailor and dressmaker. Check him out. Blog Archive ▼  2011 (81) ▼  April (6) seriousness and honesty are only conditionally vir... all by yourself straight fire failing students drop classes reason for optimism today in unfortunate yet amazing errors, Freddie e... ►  March (30) winning is fast, humanitarianism is slow we don't have a worker shortage quote for the day "you see an old woman...." amen sympathy for the juice box set first principles an open letter to Juan Cole on Libya they should have done a miniseries about Benjamin ... next big thing anniversary note the more things change ad hominems left-wing non-interventionism sorry about comments system how perfect is your knowledge? here they come France and the UK Libya gentrification involves more than the gentry the profession that wants to destroy itself they're bringing back all the classics marijuana legalization is a human rights issue Bobby Sands was an MP damn you, DVD clearance fees links and such a man from somewhere today in insanity the incredible naivete of the incredibly savvy ►  February (33) marked bodies What does it mean for a movie to be experimental a... subversion and containment IOZ on Reason's absurdity Reihan and progressivism/neoliberalism/leftism California good people are everywhere what I want submitted without comment welcome to lottery ticket America another perfect opportunity what's before us by the way the Atlantic and the working class ►  January (12) archivedate collaps

Paradoxically, what I find more and more is that the Internet is a place for people to affirm and support each other. It's as if the understanding of the fundamental weakness of these electronic proxies to represent human connection causes people to push for it more and more. And this could be beautiful. But it can also be dangerous. Because of the depth of the loneliness, I blame no one for how they interact and connect with others online. I just worry. I worry about the urge towards conformity. I worry about Twitter. I worry that all of those retweets and all of those "right on"s contribute to a kind of coarse postmodernism, where what the truth becomes what is most agreed on. I worry that dissent is confused with a lack of etiquette. And I particularly worry about the echo chamber effect, and the way that small groups of people who are just like each other can come to think of themselves as representing the opinions of everyone. On the Internet, we all make the world in our own image.

The pressure, online, will always be to tack towards the crowd, and people will look endlessly towards their peers-- not intending to undermine the individual voice, but getting there, often, anyway. Don't get judgmental about it, but keep saying your piece. In the tenor of the single voice, you can find strength, and if you keep saying what you think is true, in spite of it all, you will find what is incorruptible in yourself.

World leaders have pledged not to interfere in Libya's ongoing civil conflict, and have vowed to uphold a UN arms embargo.

Leaders from the EU, Russia and Turkey were among those who committed to an end to foreign intervention in Libya's war, and to uphold a UN arms embargo.

The commitment by foreign backers of the conflict - which include Russia, Egypt and Turkey - to respect the UN arms embargo on Libya will only be taken seriously if the UN Security Council acts on violations. This is something it has failed to do in years of conflict.