Obsidian Wings

Start Another Fire and Watch It Slowly Die: The Aftermath of Regime Change

by Eric Martin

Adam Curtis, a documentary filmmaker, traces a loose history of the modern concept of humanitarian intervention in the West and its philosophical underpinnings - punctuated, unsurprisingly, with several compelling documentary film clips.

While historians may quibble with certain aspects of his rendition, there was one passage that stood out: 

The movement had begun back in Biafra because a group of young idealists wanted to escape from the old corrupt power politics. To do this they had simplified the world into a moral struggle between good and evil.

They believed that if they could destroy the evil - by liberating victims from oppression by despots - then what would result would be, automatically, good.

But the problem with this simple view was that it meant they had no critical framework by which to judge the "victims" they were helping. And the Baghdad bombing made it clear that some of the victims were very bad indeed - and that the humanitarians' actions might actually have helped unleash another kind of evil. [emphasis added]

These concerns speak directly to my apprehensions about US military involvement in Libya.  Even a muscular No-Fly-Zone was not likely going to prove sufficient to enable an out-trained and out-gunned rebel force to topple Qaddafi, yet escalating after that fact was made clear by sending in ground forces would be ill-advised to say the least (two wars is likely enough for the moment).  Even arming the rebels (like a No-Fly-Zone, this option has a certain arms-length, antiseptic appeal on the surface) is an extremely risky endeavor, with the potential to destabilize the nation and its environs for decades to come.

More importantly, as I tried to emphasize in my prior piece, we should be careful what we wish for: if the rebels do manage to usurp Qaddafi, what comes next could prove worse in many respects.  It is not fanciful to imagine that a country with no history of democratic rule and weak civil institutions would be fertile ground for violent purges, power struggles, protracted civil wars and/or insurgencies (with forces loyal to Qaddafi attempting to re-claim the power and privilege recently lost - see, ie, the Baathists in Iraq - and rebel forces keen to settle scores - see, ie, the Mahdi Army purges in and around Baghdad).  These armed conflicts would be exacerbated if the rebels receive large amounts of weapons, and the country is awash in arms.

Would the US feel compelled to intervene if such situations were to evolve as a direct result of our armed intervention? Would we commit to policing the population and nation building lest such conflicts run rampant?  Either scenario would be enormously costly and time consuming, both of which are understatements in the extreme. 

But as the Curtis quote illustrates, we can not and should not assume that merely removing an odious regime will inevitably lead to a positive outcome, or that the forces that oppose a given despot must be, ipso facto, righteous.

The essential lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan should not be limited to the notions that wars are almost always far more costly than advertised (in monetary terms), that they unleash myriad unforeseen destructive forces that can have regional implications and that disengaging from them is exceedingly difficult (already, we have been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviets, and our impending deadline to withdraw from Iraq is causing much consternation for US military leaders). 

That list must include the proposition that unseating even a noxious regime is no guarantee that the aftermath will be easily manageable, conflict free or anything short of tragic for the populations that we are ostensibly attempting to help - or that there are not also noxious elements amongst our putative allies in the underlying population.

(cross-posted at Democracy Arsenal)

Executive Decision

GUEST POST by McKinneyTexas, NOT by Gary Farber

First, thanks to Gary Farber for the kind invitation to guest post.  Initially, I'd begun a sort of semi-reflective, Kumbaya piece but then it occurred to me that my role was to introduce of bit of diversity here at ObWi, to provoke thought from the other side of the spectrum.  So, here it is: your dose of provocation:

One glaring fault of the Left-in-Power is its lack of respect for the constitutional process on that most fundamental question of committing the country to war. 

First, under Clinton and then under Obama, US troops were committed to combat operations overseas when no US vital interest was at stake and certainly no attack on US citizens or interests anywhere was imminent.  Neither commitment was subject to public debate, or more importantly, authorized by congress.

Compare this to the much reviled Bush II administration and its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Drones Don't Declutter, And Neither Do Expulsions

by Gary Farber

We can't "win" militarily in Afghanistan any more than we could in Vietnam. 

"AfPak" is still AfPak, no matter that it displeases Pakistan, no matter how the U.S. placates.

It's one war, and it can't be won militarily without invading Pakistan.  Anyone up for that? 

2 US servicemen mistakenly killed by drone attack in Afghanistan [UPDATE, 3:41 p.m., PST: erroneous link fixed; thanks, Ugh!].

[...] The Marines under fire were watching streaming video of the battlefield being fed to them by an armed Predator overhead. They saw a number of "hot spots," or infrared images, moving in their direction. Apparently believing that those "hot spots" were the enemy, they called in a Hellfire missile strike from the Predator.

Technology will triumph.

It worked in Vietnam! We're winning.

After all, unlike Vietnam, there are no safe havens across borders: Pakistan Tells U.S. It Must Sharply Cut C.I.A. Activities:

Pakistan has demanded that the United States steeply reduce the number of Central Intelligence Agency operatives and Special Operations forces working in Pakistan, and that it halt C.I.A. drone strikes aimed at militants in northwest Pakistan. The request was a sign of the near collapse of cooperation between the two testy allies.

Pakistani and American officials said in interviews that the demand that the United States scale back its presence was the immediate fallout from the arrest in Pakistan of Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. security officer who killed two men in January during what he said was an attempt to rob him.

In all, about 335 American personnel — C.I.A. officers and contractors and Special Operations forces — were being asked to leave the country, said a Pakistani official closely involved in the decision.

It was not clear how many C.I.A. personnel that would leave behind; the total number in Pakistan has not been disclosed. But the cuts demanded by the Pakistanis amounted to 25 to 40 percent of United States Special Operations forces in the country, the officials said. The number also included the removal of all the American contractors used by the C.I.A. in Pakistan.

This is what we call "big news."

It's also, when you read between the lines, leverage, and there will be a trade-off, and you'll have to read between the lines, at best, and look carefully at the right sources, to find information about it when it happens, should said information be findable -- but traces always surface on the internet:

full circle

by russell

It is, by now, a familiar story.  Successful company in a developed country, making money and with a strong brand, wants to improve the bottom line, so it outsources labor overseas where costs of production - notably labor costs - are lower.

Lower labor costs come along with crappy conditions and generally poor treatment of workers.  Back home the owners are shocked and dismayed, of course, to discover that the kind of ill treatment that would never fly in their domestic shops are commonplace in their overseas facilities.

In this case, the story has a twist - the successful company is Swedish home furnishings giant Ikea, and the overseas sweatshop is in Danville, VA.

Laborers in Swedwood plants in Sweden produce bookcases and tables similar to those manufactured in Danville. The big difference is that the Europeans enjoy a minimum wage of about $19 an hour and a government-mandated five weeks of paid vacation. Full-time employees in Danville start at $8 an hour with 12 vacation days — eight of them on dates determined by the company.

What's more, as many as one-third of the workers at the Danville plant have been drawn from local temporary-staffing agencies. These workers receive even lower wages and no benefits, employees said.

Swedwood's Steen said the company is reducing the number of temps, but she acknowledged the pay gap between factories in Europe and the U.S. "That is related to the standard of living and general conditions in the different countries," Steen said.

Bolds mine.

Congratulations America.  After 30 years of wage stagnation, upward shift of wealth and income, and generally anti-labor public policy, all of those jobs we outsourced are beginning to find their way back.

Only now they pay eight bucks an hour.

We're on our way down, folks.

h/t Steve Benen at WaMo.

Distributed Denial of Blogging Service Part I

by Doctor Science

Livejournal[1] has been hit by waves of Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks since March 24th. I've been following this story all along, because I have an account there, as do many of my e-friends. I haven't posted about it here because I didn't feel that I knew enough, but the story has now gotten on the radar of some major news organizations, and I at least know more than they do (New York Times, Time, Wired, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post).

The Livejournal DDOS attacks are significant because LJ is the major blogging platform in Russia. One of the people whose blog has been sporadically out-of-service is Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, in fact.

I don't claim to be an expert on Russian politics, but I know a lot about LJ as a platform and a community. There's actually a reason LJ became very popular with (on the one hand) Russians and (on the other hand) fangirls: both groups had good reason to want a controllable degree of privacy and pseudonymity with their Internet communication.

Maria Garnaeva of Kaspersky Lab explains that such DDOS attacks are coming from botnets, networks of infected computers.

We don't know exactly how many botnets took part in the latest attack but we definitely know of one botnet that was involved. It is based on the Optima/Darkness DDoS bot that is currently popular on the Russian-speaking cybercrime black market. Not only are the Trojan programs (bots) themselves on sale, but also infected computer networks that are built with the help of such programs and services offering to carry out DDoS attacks on any given Internet resource.

We have been monitoring one of these Optima botnets for some time now.

Analysis of the data acquired showed that the first DDoS attack on LiveJournal occurred on 24 March. The botnet's owners gave the command to launch an attack on the blog address of the renowned anti-corruption figure Alexey Navalny: http://navalny.livejournal.com. On 26 March, the bots received commands to attack another resource belonging to Navalny: http://rospil.info, and on 1 April, http://www.rutoplivo.ru, another site with a political slant, was targeted.

I (and other Anglophone LJ users) noticed that LJ was only intermittently available on March 24th, but we didn't think anything of it -- these things happen from time to time.

Garnaeva posts a list of targets the Optima botnet was given, and says

It should be obvious to specialists in the Russian-speaking blogosphere that the list affects some of the most popular bloggers on LiveJournal who write about a wide variety of things. It is not known if this was an attempt to "blur" the real target of the attacks, which may have been clearly designated during the first DDoS attacks, or if the list of blogs that had fallen out of favor had become bigger.

One site – kredo-m.ru – stands out from the rest on the list. It belongs to a company that makes furniture and wooden products. We can only suggest that the botnet owners are selling their DDoS attack services to anyone and this particular attack could have been ordered by business competitors. This sort of B2B attack is not uncommon.

On March 30, the attacks basically took all of LJ down for the day, and it's been up and down ever since.

Alexey Sidorenko at Global Voices says:

The possibility of an attack on LiveJournal was predictable. In January 2010, when I was asked by Ivan Sigal, GV Executive Director, what were the most probable DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) targets in Russia, I called LiveJournal the most endangered platform. Usage and seriousness of DDoS, the universal online weapon used both for commercial extortions and political assaults, are increasing every year. Russia, in this context, is famous not only for having a long history of suppressing dissent, but also for being a country with one of the widest and cheapest markets for DDoS services.
...
Historically, many Russian Internet users became bloggers with the help of LiveJournal.
..
LiveJournal's popularity and outreached have increased ever since and resulted in the core of the Russian blog"sphere being "comprised mainly, though not exclusively, of blogs on the LiveJournal platform" (Berkman Center Research, 2010).

The high concentration of political bloggers made LiveJournal a strategic element in the infrastructure of Russian free expression and digital dissent. This fact means that any disfunctionality of the platform (intended by the Russian authorities or not) automatically resulted in political consequences in the Russian political landscape.

How did this happen? Sidorenko blandly says that Being one of the oldest blogging platforms, LiveJournal had natural advantages over other platforms, but the truth is more complicated and IMHO more interesting.

Livejournal was first put together in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick, a computer science student at the University of Washington who wanted a way for his friends to keep in touch online. synecdochoic had a long tenure doing site support for LJ, and says:

I remember -- back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Brad still owned LJ -- slowly noticing that LJ was becoming more and more prevalent in Russia and in the Russian political arena. We always thought it was slightly odd -- how did this site that had been originally designed for US college students turn into this juggernaut in Russia? -- but really incredibly awesome. Even when we'd started to get incredible numbers of support requests ... I was always conscious of the fact that on the other side of the world, the website I was helping to run was, essentially, the only free press of an entire country.

The word for "blog" in the Russian language is literally 'ЖЖ' -- the abbreviation for Живой Журнал, or LiveJournal. (Although the automatic translators tended to render it as 'Alive Magazine', which always amused me.)

While the Russians were gradually moving into LJ, a sizeable part of online media fandom was moving there too:

When blogging software started to become more available in 1999, some fans started up blogs on services like Blogger or Livejournal. Blogs on Blogger and similar services offered total control and could be integrated into a fan's personal webpage, for one-stop shopping. Livejournal was restricted to its own site and to specific layouts, but offered something new: the friends list, a site-specific form of RSS feed, and icons, to personalize posts.

Particularly important, IMHO, was that LJ offered easy ways to make blog-like posts that were only visible to other, specified LJ users. On LJ, not all conversations needed to be public.

Media fandom -- from Star Trek fandom forward -- has tended to tilt female. Online media fandom, especially the part that writes and reads fanfiction, has tended to have a large majority of women plus gender nonconformists of all sorts -- straight males are a minority. Women know we are more likely to be harrassed online; fanfiction writers have long tried to stay below the radar of corporate copyright holders and their attack-lawyers. I got an LJ in late 2002 basically because of peer pressure, but part of the pressure was wanting to read LJ posts that were "friends-locked", visible only to LJers chosen by the author.

I'm guessing that similar processes were involved on the Russian side of LJ. Bloggers wanted to be able to write without having to be completely "in public", but then the only way to read those bloggers was to get an LJ. If I'm right, what has concentrated Russian blogging on LJ isn't mere inertia or a crowd mentality, it's the perceived need for friends-locking.

This has gotten to about 1000 words, so I'm going to post before I go on to discuss what media fandom has learned from being on LJ, and what that might imply for the future of livejournal and Russian blogging.

---

[1] Livejournal = LJ = livejournal.com. I'm deliberately not linking directly to LJ in this post to reduce load on their servers.

Pottery Barn Libya, Pt 2: Anthony Cordesman, One Man Army, or Give Peace A Chance?

by Gary Farber

In Pottery Barn Libya, Part 1, I began explaining the situation in Libya.  Now, more, and what America and NATO should do.

The tactical day to day sway of battle does not matter, save to those brutally slaughtered in it,  and suffering from it.  Suffering greatly.

What matters are the choices America and Europe make.  

Naturally, Joe Lieberman and John McCain want bombs away, all-out regime change.  Nothing makes John McCain happier: Back on the Battlefield: How the Libya debate snapped John McCain out of his 2008 funk—and into a fresh fight with Obama.

John McCain has never met a country he wouldn't like to bomb:

[...]

McCain, who insists on visiting Iraq and Afghanistan twice a year, often favors a muscular approach to projecting U.S. military power but is wary of entanglements with no exit strategy. The old aviator, who had both arms repeatedly broken in a Hanoi prison camp, says that experience has “also given me a sense of caution in light of our failure in Vietnam.” While McCain opposed the U.S. military actions in Lebanon and Somalia, he is sympathetic to humanitarian missions—and would even consider sending troops to the war-torn Ivory Coast if someone could “tell me how we stop what’s going on.”

Pressed on when the United States should intervene in other countries, McCain sketches an expansive doctrine that turns on practicality: American forces must be able to “beneficially affect the situation” and avoid “an outcome which would be offensive to our fundamental -principles—whether it’s 1,000 people slaughtered or 8,000…If there’s a massacre or ethnic cleansing and we are able to prevent it, I think the United States should act.”

McCain: bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran.

 

Bombs away.  "There will be other wars."

McCain: "We are all Georgians now."

Tough guy Anthony Cordesman naturally wants to fight.  Unsurprisingly, he used to be national security assistant to Senator John McCain.

Cordesman, who has, see previous links, always been deeply wired into the militarist networks of the Washington, D.C. village of talking heads and millionaire journalism, has a (surprise!) widely-quoted piece advocating we (surprise!) go all in.

Let's not.

Pottery Barn Libya, Part 1

by Gary Farber

What is to be done?

Colin Powell famously said of Iraq, quoting Tom Friedman (who got it wrong)

'You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people,' he told the president. 'You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You'll own it all.' Privately, Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage called this the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.

Does anyone want to buy Libya, and own it for the next decade?

That's what's on order.

That, or negotiating a way out of this thing.

The Libyan rebels are a mess.  April 3rd:

[...] The rebel army’s nominal leader, Abdul Fattah Younes, a former interior minister and friend of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi whom many rebel leaders distrusted, could offer little explanation for the recent military stumbles, two people with knowledge of the meetings said.

Making matters worse, the men could hardly stand one another. They included Khalifa Heftar, a former general who returned recently from exile in the United States and appointed himself as the rebel field commander, the movement’s leaders said, and Omar el-Hariri, a former political prisoner who occupied the largely ceremonial role of defense minister.

“They behaved like children,” said Fathi Baja, a political science professor who heads the rebel political committee. 

Little was accomplished in the meetings, the participants said. When they concluded late last week, Mr. Younes was still the head of the army and Mr. Hariri remained as the defense minister. Only Mr. Heftar, who reportedly refused to work with Mr. Younes, was forced out. On Sunday, though, in a sign that divisions persisted, Mr. Heftar’s son said his father was still an army leader. [....]

On March 29th,  Obama's press secretary, Jay Carney told the press gaggle on AF1 that, in essence, he didn't know who the hell these people are, but let's hope for the best:

[...] Q    One of NATO’s military leaders testified on the Hill today that there had been signs of al Qaeda seen amongst Libyan rebels.  How does that affect the White House thinking on engaging with them?

MR. CARNEY:  Well, what I would say is that, as you know, we spend a lot of time looking at the opposition and now meeting with opposition leaders.  And the folks who are in London, the people that -- and the leader that Secretary Clinton met in Paris, have made clear what their principles are and we believe that they’re meritorious -- their principles.  I think they had a statement today that had some very good language in it that we support. 

But that doesn’t mean, obviously, that everyone who opposes Moammar Qaddafi I Libya is someone whose ideals we can support.  But beyond that, I don't have any detail about individual members of the opposition.

Q    Does it concern you about how much you don't know about the opposition?

MR. CARNEY:  Well, what I would say is that we have met with opposition leaders and we're working with them, but as the President said, and as the opposition leaders who put out a statement today said, it’s up to them to decide who their leaders are going to be.

But we do know something of who they are right now, as Jason Packer explains:

If you let strangers know that you research Libya for a living, there seems to be only one question on their minds: "Who are the Libyan rebels?" I've been asked it at cocktail parties, on ski lifts, at academic seminars, and even by Western journalists in Benghazi who have developed the flattering habit of Skype-ing me at odd hours. Americans seem captivated by this question, perhaps because they have heard senior U.S. officials from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to various Republican congressmen proclaim that they do not yet know enough about who the rebels are. I do not take such statements at face value. U.S. statesmen know quite well who the rebels are -- but pretend otherwise to obscure the fact that the United States has yet to formulate a comprehensive policy toward them.

The rebels consist of two distinct groups: the fighters and the political leadership.

place your bets

by russell

OK, short and sweet for Friday.  What do you think?  Will they shut it down?

My money says they won't actually want to shut it down, but they'll fail to make a deal happen due to sheer spleen and inertia.

What a mess.

at night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines

by fiddler

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is taking aim at the single biggest killer of teenagers -- car crashes. For the second year she's sponsoring a bill to require all states to make 18 the minimum age for an unrestricted driver's license. At this point only a few states and DC keep teen drivers from unrestricted licenses until age 18; the others are divided between 16 and 17-1/2. States that let a driver have an unrestricted license at 18, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, include Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey and Virginia. Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts and Ohio requires drivers to be 18 to drive at night. The article above, from Congress.org, said 12 states plus DC, which means they're including Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, when young drivers turns 18 their licenses automatically become unrestricted; otherwise, restrictions are removed after a year of driving without a crash or conviction if the driver has completed a driver's education course.

There are good statistical, practical reasons for this change. 'Motor Vehicle Traffic' accounts for 39.98 percent of fatalities for people age 16-19, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Funny t-shirts Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

I've got a packed schedule this weekend, so I thought I would get this up, though in my defense, it actually is Friday here. Content, or something that purports to be content, below: