Theoretical implications of moving the Libyan government to Tobruk

  By

A few weeks back, the newly elected government made the decision to move the parliament and government functions temporarily to Tobruk in light of the very heavy fighting in Tripoli (the capital) between two major rival Western Libyan militias, the Zintan Brigade and the Misrata-based Dawn of Libya militia coalition.

Libya, of course, has long been split in many directions (partially by intentional policy of Col. Gaddafi), but has been particularly increasingly divided between its western and eastern halves as a result of the 2011 Civil War. That war saw eastern Libya become independent of the prior regime for almost half a year before the country was reunited. Tripoli is one of the major cities in western Libya and was one of the last to fall during the 2011 Civil War.

In contrast, Tobruk is so far east along the Libyan coast that it’s the district capital of the district bordering Egypt. It’s not the biggest center of power in eastern Libya — that would be Benghazi — but it’s still significant and is probably the runner-up. Tobruk was actually the former core of the post-World War II Libyan monarchy, prior to its overthrow by Gaddafi. It was also one of the earliest cities to rebel in 2011.

Map of three coastal cities in Libya. Adapted from Wikimedia.

Map of three coastal cities in Libya. Adapted from Wikimedia.

Overall the eastern part of the country (and especially Benghazi) is the part most strongly under the influence of the anti-Islamist and probably anti-democratic faction led by General Khalifa Hifter (see all our coverage of Hifter), which is attempting a slow-motion coup. Tripoli is the least under his influence and had been substantially more favorable toward Islamist-aligned militias, instead of the secular militias. Hifter’s prior attempts to seize control of the government in Tripoli were met with mockery in no small part because the members of parliament and the cabinet were out of his reach from Benghazi. And his relative strength in the capital has further declined as the Zintan Brigades, the Tripoli militia most closely aligned with Hifter’s agenda, are pushed out of their power position in the capital by the Islamist-aligned Misrata militia forces.

The people who moved the parliament and cabinet temporarily from Tripoli are, in addition to being the newly-elected administration, represent the parliamentary faction that is most friendly to General Hifter. Now the semi-official interim capital has suddenly moved all the way from western Libya to eastern Libya and stands between General Hifter’s Benghazi and (like-minded) General Sisi’s Egypt. (There have been much-denied rumors of Egyptian military involvement in some of the recent air operations against Hifter’s enemies and Sisi has ominously not ruled out military involvement in Libya against Islamist militias, given his own authoritarian secularism and anti-Islamist counterinsurgency campaign in Egypt. || Update 8/25/14: U.S. officials now say Egypt supported an attack in Tripoli by the pro-Zintan United Arab Emirates Air Force.)

No wonder the opposing faction was furious about the government being moved “temporarily” from Tripoli to Tobruk: It’s now sitting there for the taking by the secular-militarists following General Hifter, if they decide they want it. They just have to reach out and take control.

Of course, as always, that assumes one can really “seize power” in a country as fractious and decentralized as Libya.

Troubling double standard on besieged Iraqi town of Amirli

  By

The UN is trying to draw attention to Amirli, Iraq, which ISIS has laid siege to for the past two months. The town, located several dozen miles east of Tikrit or south of Kirkuk, is home to 20,000 Shia Iraqi Turkmen living at the nexus of the Sunni Arab heartland and greater Iraqi Kurdistan — and ISIS plans to wipe them out. No Iraqi, Kurdish, or Western military force has stepped in to help. [Update: On Saturday, August 30, 2014, U.S. airstrikes began, while relief aircraft from Australia, Britain, and France dropped in supplies. Iraqi ground offensives began several days earlier.]

Though surrounded by more than 30 villages (presumably Sunni Arab) that have defected to ISIS, the town was able to seal itself off and maintains a tenuous lifeline to the outside via periodic helicopters. So far they’ve held out without much help since June — essentially just a small number of Iraqi soldiers and any weapons they had on hand — but they are now running out of food. Children are reportedly eating only once every three days.

amirl-iraq-map
Click on the map above to zoom out to the wider region.

Here’s one eyewitness report:

No Kurdish peshmerga, who have been fighting the Islamic State, have reached Amerli. There are only a few Iraqi soldiers who have remained after the retreat of the armed forces in June.

Haider al-Bayati, an Amerli resident, said the town is sealed off in all directions, with the nearest Islamic State position only 500 meters. With only helicopters able to bring in food, residents face starvation. Electricity has been cut off. The town has no hospital — the sick and injured must either be treated at a clinic staffed by nurses or evacuated by air.

With the helicopters only able to carry about 30 people per day, women have died in childbirth because of the lack of doctors, and according to residents, “People are dying from simple wounds because we don’t have the means to care for them.”

Dr Ali al-Bayati, who works for a humanitarian foundation has been moving in and out of the town by helicopter, added, “We are depending on salty water, which gives people diarrhoea and other diseases. Since the siege started, more than 50 sick or elderly people have died. Children have also died because of dehydration and disease.”

Former MP Mohammed Al-Bayati claimed that the town was being targeted by the Islamic State because of its Turkmen population. Noting the high-profile international effort to help the refugees of Sinjar after that town was overrun by the jihadists, he asserted, “Unfortunately, the situations are treated with two different standards”.

 
The question, then, is why the United States and the international community has not rallied to relieve the besieged town as they have done for the 40,000 starving Yazidis who were encircled for a week or so on Mount Sinjar.
Read more

Syrian regime finally turns on ISIS (after helping it rise)

  By

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Assad government has dropped its “blind-eye” strategy and flipped to start attacking ISIS head-on. The Journal has assembled a very comprehensive explanation of how Bashar Al-Assad’s government in Damascus manipulated mutually opposing rebel factions to weaken coherent opposition to the regime and enable them to crush the US/Western-backed side of the three-way war. They describe this new review as being “pieced together from interviews with Syrian rebel commanders and opposition figures, Iraqi government officials and Western diplomats, as well as al Qaeda documents seized by the U.S. military in Iraq.”

Here’s a concise account by an Assad supporter in Iraq about the evolution of the strategy:

Earlier in the three-year-old Syrian uprising, Mr. Assad decided to mostly avoid fighting the Islamic State to enable it to cannibalize the more secular rebel group supported by the West, the Free Syrian Army, said Izzat Shahbandar, an Assad ally and former Iraqi lawmaker who was Baghdad’s liaison to Damascus. The goal, he said, was to force the world to choose between the regime and extremists.

“When the Syrian army is not fighting the Islamic State, this makes the group stronger,” said Mr. Shahbandar, a close aide to former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who said Mr. Assad described the strategy to him personally during a visit in May to Damascus. “And sometimes, the army gives them a safe path to allow the Islamic State to attack the FSA and seize their weapons.”

“It’s a strategy to eliminate the FSA and have the two main players face each other in Syria: Assad and the Islamic State,” said Mr. Shahbandar. “And now [Damascus] is asking the world to help, and the world can’t say no.”

 
Backed into a corner, we saw senior UK officials just today having to deny that Britain would switch to supporting the Syrian government again, in response to ISIS. So while the world may still “say no” to Assad, they’ve certainly be put into an awkward position.

Back to the Wall Street Journal account, we learn that the government in Western Syria has finally turned its attention toward the threat in the east: Read more

Is the US trying to build a new case for war in Syria?

  By

Various hints become more concrete today as the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that ISIS could only be stopped by entering the Syrian civil war directly:

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday afternoon that it would not be possible to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria without attacking its fighters in Syria.

General Dempsey, speaking at a news conference with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, did not commit the United States to carrying out airstrikes in Syria, and the Obama administration’s broader strategy for defeating the Sunni militant group remained unclear.

 
Although I think it’s fair to say that acting against ISIS in Iraq only would not really defeat or destroy them, I also don’t think that’s an automatic case for escalating to jump into the mess in Syria. The policy so far has been a sort of updated version of the Cold War “containment doctrine,” but taking the further step of intervening in Syria (rather than just Iraq) would be a bit like the U.S. trying to contain the spread of communism into South Vietnam by attacking North Vietnam from the air. On paper, it may have made logical sense (cut the external support, contain the threat outside the borders), but we never really had a coherent plan there either — since we didn’t invade the north and we never really committed to toppling the regime or replacing it with anything — and look how that turned out.

I’m sure they think it’s a similar situation and therefore also shouldn’t be done piecemeal (like Vietnam was, which bled us out). But going into Syria at all opens the door to having to go in completely. Containment requires enough energy on its own without having to go the extra mile of ending the threat everywhere and filling the vacuum it leaves behind.

I’m particularly frustrated by the fact this is coming up again, given that members of Congress and the US public (as well as the UK parliament and British public) made very clear last August and September that they were not interested in getting U.S. forces directly involved in Syria’s civil war. On top of today’s pronouncement by Dempsey, there were claims last weekend by Syrian rebel leaders who oppose both ISIS and the Syrian government that the US had asked them to try to drum up global support for U.S. military actions in Syria. Which, combined with the official outrage over the beheading of an American photojournalist, makes this all sound like a manufactured government effort to whip up public outrage and by extension support for military actions the public rejected a year ago.

In other words: if at first you don’t succeed (in rallying public support for illegal, unilateral involvement in a quagmire by choice), try, try again … 365 days later.
Read more

St Louis County: When cops become revenue collectors

  By

Fines and court fees are Ferguson’s second largest source of city revenue, according a report by St. Louis-based ArchCity Defenders (a pro bono legal defense group) that was quoted in an article in Newsweek last week. That has created an extremely strong incentive for police to hassle residents (who are predominantly Black) and, based on the statistics, just about everyone has had a run-in. Worse, this trend appears to match the situation around the wider county:

“Despite Ferguson’s relative poverty, fines and court fees comprise the second largest source of revenue for the city, a total of 2,635,400,” according to the ArchCity Defenders report. And in 2013, the Ferguson Municipal Court issued 24,532 arrest warrants and 12,018 cases, “or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household.”

Exacerbating the problem, the report says, are “a number of operational procedures that make it even more difficult for defendants to navigate the courts.” A Ferguson court employee reported, for example, that “the bench routinely starts hearing cases 30 minutes before the appointed time and then locks the doors to the building as early as five minutes after the official hour, a practice that could easily lead a defendant arriving even slightly late to receive an additional charge for failure to appear.”

Thomas Harvey, co-founder and executive director of ArchCity Defenders and one of the paper’s authors, says that residents’ perception that the system is unfairly stacked against them gives important context for the depth of the present outrage.

“There are 90 municipalities in St. Louis County that range from 12 people to 50,000 people. Eighty-six of them have their own courts. They have their own police forces,” he explains. “What ends up being the product of all that is just a low-level sense of harassment on a daily basis. The clients that we represent feel that. It’s palpable for them.”

“They resent it because it’s not about public safety,” he adds. “These aren’t violent criminals. These are poor people.”

 
For my interviews with locals who have each had multiple experiences of police harassment in Ferguson, St. Louis County, and the City of St. Louis, please listen to Arsenal For Democracy 96 (open full page or at click the audio bar below).

AFD 96 – Ferguson / NMOS14

Ferguson is particularly notorious, as the report demonstrates, but is far from unique. This is a big-picture story of the area around (and including, to some extent) St. Louis, Missouri.

(hat-tip to Phoebe Loosinhouse on Daily Kos for flagging that part of the article and digging up the cited ArchCity report)

one-dollar-bill-slider

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Missouri Republicans keep making the case for Missouri Democrats

  By

Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” comments during the 2012 U.S. Senate election may be the most famous example of Missouri Republicans being so effortlessly terrible that voters are forced to pick the Democratic nominee regardless of that candidate’s merit, but he’s far from the only one.

Recently, of course, I blogged about the Missouri state legislator who said he would rather let everyone overdose on prescription drugs than have Missouri implement a database to track misuse of prescriptions for medications, just as every other U.S. state has done.

Today we were treated to three-term Republican Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder’s views on the crisis in Ferguson, which were either the loudest dog whistle of the decade or the most tone-deaf political remark uttered in the Show Me State since Congressman Akin’s non-scientific beliefs on rape “shut that whole thing down,” in terms of his career.

Here’s the quote from Kinder via RawStory:

“We do not do justice in America in the streets though,” he argued. “We have legal processes that are set in motion, that are designed after centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence tradition, they’re designed to protect the rights and liberties of everyone involved.”

“That includes the Brown family, for justice for them and for the community. It also includes the officer who has not yet been charged,” he added. “Our constitutional and our Bill of Rights protections have to be followed here, and we do not do justice in the streets.”

“That’s one of the great advances of Anglo-American civilization, is that that we do not have politicized trials. We let the justice system work it out.”

 
Anglo-American civilization and jurisprudence? We do not do justice in the streets?

For someone commenting on a racially charged crisis, resulting from a White police officer unilaterally gunning down an unarmed Black teen he did not suspect of any crime, in a state (and country) with a long and ugly history of White lynch mobs enacting “justice in the streets,” this is about the worst possible thing he could have said short of actually just dropping n-bombs and death threats all over the broadcast.

Democratic Governor Jay Nixon’s policy response to Ferguson has been pretty terrible, and his rhetoric has been pretty misguided, but this line by the Lieutenant Governor is a pretty good demonstration of why Nixon ended up as the only credible option for reasonable voters, Democrats or otherwise… Complete awfulness as an alternative makes a great case for living with mediocrity.

Jake Tapper asks why police keep massing against peaceful protests in Ferguson

  By

“Now why they’re doing this, I don’t know. Because there is no threat going on, none, that merits this. There is none. Ok? […] There is nothing going on, on this street, right now, that merits this scene, out of Bagram. Nothing. So if people wonder why the people of Ferguson, Missouri are so upset, this is part of the reason. What is this?? This doesn’t make any sense.” — Jake Tapper, CNN, live on the scene. Watch below: