Hard to argue with your elitist, ivy league ass on this one. (wink)

Though, one issue comes to mind. We do have to worry that this endeavor will embolden NATO/chicken hawks.

Similar to how the Tunisian revolt wouldn't spread and wasn't that big of a deal, as you said back in January? You flagrantly misjudged the entire Arab Spring, and this post simply continues the trend.

By highlighting completely unrelated issues, you ignore what is important about the Libyan revolution:

1. The destruction of Gaddafi's Panafricanism, under which banner Libya supplied and sustained sub-Saharan autocrats with money from oil receipts.

2. A major potential challenge to the "conventional wisdom" that the Western habit of interfering in others' politics is counterproductive, especially when compared to hands-off, business-only approach pursued by China or Russia. The Libyan rebels have already talked about refusing to give oil contracts to the gutless BRICS who gave de facto support to Gaddafi.

3. A reaffirmation of just how powerful the West is, not just in terms of military strength, but in terms of its ideas and political institutions. Likewise, the revolution demonstrates that even the most entrenched autocracies are vulnerable.

4. A blow to realists who spout off cliches about "imperial overstretch," the decline of NATO, and how all of this was inevitably going to be a major quagmire. Can you all stop calling yourselves realists now that it is clear that none of your theory bears any relation to real events in the world?

I think you're making the "mission accomplished" fallacy. There is much reason to suspect that Libya is a CIA, MI6 operation, and not an organic part of the "Arab Spring."

1. was feckless
2. time will tell, the coalition is still prone to fracturing, though we haven't likely incurred the resentment that typifies our Iraq experience
3&4. again, time will tell, Libya is lightyears from having democratic, bureaucratic and social institutions needed to advance development that crosses ethnic boundaries.

Given how many pixels you waste on Israel/Palestine, I'm glad that patch of desert ranked relatively low on your list. I'd put it below South Asia but ahead of Egypt.

i would say the jingoistic sounding alexbc should not be my cup of tea. but he does sound closer to the heart of the matter in this post than sir walt (hope uall see the dig with the title sir). i too was rather annoyed by an elderly scholarly thinktank type i forgot who and on which news media, but he had used a pompous tone saying Libya carries little weight one way or the other. if Libya's populace is in the same league with NYC then might we also give it the same political gravity as that city in world affair--only couple of towers fell there to turn the world upside down. (as we are at it, what importance Afghanistan could possibly have had, except it did.)

your wish list--1) getting the United States and Eurozone economies restarted (which would have lots of positive secondary effects), 2) preventing an intense security competition between the United States and China, 3) finding some way to reduce U.S.-Iranian tensions, 4) settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 5) ensuring that democracy takes firm root in Egypt, or 6) preventing more bloodbaths in South Asia (just to name a few)--are important, but also intractable and impotent (from the view point of what we could do).

i would hope a happier Libya can be beneficial towards #2,3,4,5, even 6, but particularly, 4 and 5.

This war is very similar to the afghan war. The strategy of using rebels to overthrow government is not new, the US used afghan's Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban government, the taliban government was overthrew very quickly, but after 10 years, the taliban is still strong. I think the western media is underestimating Gaddafi, In fact, from the analysis i've read, gaddafi is planning to adopt the taliban's strategy and wage a gureilla warfare against the new NATO-installed libyan government.

Robert Fisk: History repeats itself, with mistakes of Iraq rehearsed afresh
With

Doomed always to fight the last war, we are recommitting the same old sin in Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi vanishes after promising to fight to the death. Isn't that just what Saddam Hussein did? And of course, when Saddam disappeared and US troops suffered the very first losses from the Iraqi insurgency in 2003, we were told – by the US proconsul Paul Bremer, the generals, diplomats and the decaying television "experts" – that the gunmen of the resistance were "die-hards", "dead-enders" who didn't realise that the war was over. And if Gaddafi and his egg-headed son remain at large – and if the violence does not end – how soon will we be introduced once more to the "dead-enders" who simply will not understand that the lads from Benghazi are in charge and that the war is over? Indeed, within 15 minutes – literally – of my writing the above words (2pm yesterday), a Sky News reporter had re-invented "die-hards" as a definition for Gaddafi's men. See what I mean?

Needless to say, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds as far as the West is concerned. No one is disbanding the Libyan army and no one is officially debarring the Gaddafi-ites from a future role in their country. No one is going to make the same mistakes we made in Iraq. And no boots are on the ground. No walled-off, sealed-in Green Zone Western zombies are trying to run the future Libya. "It's up to the Libyans," has become the joyful refrain of every State Department/ Foreign Office/Quai d'Orsay factotum. Nothing to do with us!

But, of course, the massive presence of Western diplomats, oil-mogul representatives, highly paid Western mercenaries and shady British and French servicemen – all pretending to be "advisers" rather than participants – is the Benghazi Green Zone. There may (yet) be no walls around them but they are, in effect, governing Libya through the various Libyan heroes and scallywags who have set themselves up as local political masters. We can overlook the latters' murder of their own commanding officer – for some reason, no one mentions the name of Abdul Fatah Younes any more, though he was liquidated in Benghazi only a month ago – but they can only survive by clinging to our Western umbilicals.

Of course, this war is not the same as our perverted invasion of Iraq. Saddam's capture only provoked the resistance to infinitely more attacks on Western troops – because those who had declined to take part in the insurgency for fear that the Americans would put Saddam back in charge of Iraq now had no such inhibitions. But Gaddafi's arrest along with Saif's would undoubtedly hasten the end of pro-Gaddafi resistance to the rebels. The West's real fear – right now, and this could change overnight – should be the possibility that the author of the Green Book has made it safely through to his old stomping ground in Sirte, where tribal loyalty might prove stronger than fear of a Nato-backed Libyan force.

Sirte, where Gaddafi, at the very start of his dictatorship, turned the region's oil fields into the first big up-for-grabs international dividend for foreign investors after his 1969 revolution, is no Tikrit. It is the site of his first big African Union conference, scarcely 16 miles from the place of his own birth, a city and region that benefited hugely from his 41-year rule. Strabo, the Greek geographer, described how the dots of desert settlements due south of Sirte made Libya into a leopard skin. Gaddafi must have liked the metaphor. Almost 2,000 years later, Sirte was pretty much the hinge between the two Italian colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.

And in Sirte the "rebels" were defeated by the "loyalists" in this year's six-month war; we shall soon, no doubt, have to swap these preposterous labels – when those who support the pro-Western Transitional National Council will have to be called loyalists, and pro-Gaddafi rebels turn into the "terrorists" who may attack our new Western-friendly Libyan administration. Either way, Sirte, whose inhabitants are now supposedly negotiating with Gaddafi's enemies, may soon be among the most interesting cities in Libya.

So what is Gaddafi thinking now? Desperate, we believe him to be. But really? We have chosen many adjectives for him in the past: irascible, demented, deranged, magnetic, tireless, obdurate, bizarre, statesmanlike (Jack Straw's description), cryptic, exotic, bizarre, mad, idiosyncratic and – most recently – tyrannical, murderous and savage. But in his skewed, shrewd view of the Libyan world, Gaddafi would do better to survive and live – to continue a civil-tribal conflict and thus consume the West's new Libyan friends in the swamp of guerrilla warfare – and slowly sap the credibility of the new "transitional" power.

But the unpredictable nature of the Libyan war means that words rarely outlive their writing. Maybe Gaddafi hides in a basement tunnel beneath the Rixos Hotel – or lounges in one of Robert Mugabe's villas. I doubt it. Just so long as no one tries to fight the war before this one.

People are renegotiating their socio-political arrangements in many parts of the ME and North Africa. It’s a periodic necessity in all societies, like Spring cleaning, because all authorities have an innate tendency towards corruption which at a certain point becomes intolerable to the oppressed. More often than not the outcome is a similar system, marginally more attentive and with the worst excesses curtailed. The process is similar to something once described to me by Tom Murton, an Arkansas prison governor, as ‘a spiral of reform’ which soars up out of oppression before insensibly slipping back towards where it started, but not all the way back. Its achievement being the measure between where it started and where it finally settles.

The present concurrence in these areas arises partly because their regimes were established at more or less the same time and their corruption has evolved over a similar time span; then add Al Jazeera feeding fuel to the fires. The most significant external outcome is likely to affect Israel since the peoples of the nations now in transition are markedly less tolerant of the Jewish state than their erstwhile rulers, and their voices will need to be given attention if only to avoid them becoming a focus for further political unrest. It is possible that, post Mubarak, we are seeing, in Egypt, both the emergence of a broadly similar basic political system plus hitherto largely contained anti-Israel sentiments. Therein, I think, lies the greatest danger given Israel’s grotesque military arsenal and the Glen Beck-like mindset of its leaders. I would go for the Professor’s number 4 which would not entirely solve the Israel problem, because Arab affection for the Palestinians is way below Arab dislike of Israel, but it would surely take some heat off it. Those settlements, if you think about it, are exactly like the human shields Israelis accuse the Palestinians of employing against the IDF and the humanitarian implications of their use as such could easily throw the US into an appalling dilemma.

I just paid $22.87 for an iPad2-64GB and my girlfriend loves her Panasonic Lumix GF 1 Camera that we got for $38.76 there arriving tomorrow by UPS. I will never pay such expensive retail prices in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LED TV to my boss for $675 which only cost me $62.81 to buy. Here is the website we use to get it all from, BidsGet.com

Libya is important for South European Countries for its oil , one third of Italian imports, and control over migration flux from subsaharian Africa.

The perspective of succesfull State building and control of the territory with the Gheddafi's at large is at least uneasy. The weaponry found in Gheddafi's arsenal can sustain terrorist activities and insurgency in the area for the next future.

We all know about the different tribal and ethnic fracture lines in the country. Libya is capable of turning into a real mess, source of unstability for the entire region.

Anyway, I agree that from Harvard it must look like an irrelevant sandbowl.

Read the above article; note the smug disdain with which this almost breathtakingly arrogant man dismisses the hopes and aspirations of a mere 6.5 million people living under tyranny.

We should all thank God that Steven Walt writes things like this, again reminding us how truly lucky we are that he is at Harvard, where his Herculean ego can be tended by worshipful undergrads while remaining utterly irrelevant to actual policy.

There are simply not words strong enough to capture the almost perfect self-adoration of Steven Walt. It is at once fascinating and horrifying. Has he no friend who can take him aside, sit him down, and explain the intellectual mechanics of basic human decency?

His fully internalized racism toward the Arab world is that most pure distillation that only really exists in the consequence-free air of liberal academia - yet to call him elitist is to remark on the excellent masonry of the steps of a cathedral. His elitism is a temple to scholarly disdain, where the Self is God, where the cynic is priest, where all ye who have abandoned that silliness of hope may enter.

I think it will eventually answer the question: Is interventionism justified?

The answer won't be so apparent either and you will have people arguing back and forth. As the case with Tunisia and Egypt though, there is simply not enough discussions around the progress of these nations in the aftermath of revolutions. For a revolution to be "successful" you have to compare the lives of the people there before and after. In other words, overthrowing a brutal dictator isn't exactly good news, replacing the said brutal dictator with a better government is. Unfortunately the western media typically focuses only on the revolution itself and rarely re-evaluate the actual affects/costs of the revolution.

How Israel takes its revenge on boys who throw stones
Video seen by Catrina Stewart reveals the brutal interrogation of young Palestinians

The boy, small and frail, is struggling to stay awake. His head lolls to the side, at one point slumping on to his chest. "Lift up your head! Lift it up!" shouts one of his interrogators, slapping him. But the boy by now is past caring, for he has been awake for at least 12 hours since he was separated at gunpoint from his parents at two that morning. "I wish you'd let me go," the boy whimpers, "just so I can get some sleep."

During the nearly six-hour video, 14-year-old Palestinian Islam Tamimi, exhausted and scared, is steadily broken to the point where he starts to incriminate men from his village and weave fantastic tales that he believes his tormentors want to hear.

This rarely seen footage seen by The Independent offers a glimpse into an Israeli interrogation, almost a rite of passage that hundreds of Palestinian children accused of throwing stones undergo every year.

Israel has robustly defended its record, arguing that the treatment of minors has vastly improved with the creation of a military juvenile court two years ago. But the children who have faced the rough justice of the occupation tell a very different story.

"The problems start long before the child is brought to court, it starts with their arrest," says Naomi Lalo, an activist with No Legal Frontiers, an Israeli group that monitors the military courts. It is during their interrogation where their "fate is doomed", she says.

Sameer Shilu, 12, was asleep when the soldiers smashed in the front door of his house one night. He and his older brother emerged bleary-eyed from their bedroom to find six masked soldiers in their living room.

Checking the boy's name on his father's identity card, the officer looked "shocked" when he saw he had to arrest a boy, says Sameer's father, Saher. "I said, 'He's too young; why do you want him?' 'I don't know,' he said". Blindfolded, and his hands tied painfully behind his back with plastic cords, Sameer was bundled into a Jeep, his father calling out to him not to be afraid. "We cried, all of us," his father says. "I know my sons; they don't throw stones."

In the hours before his interrogation, Sameer was kept blindfolded and handcuffed, and prevented from sleeping. Eventually taken for interrogation without a lawyer or parent present, a man accused him of being in a demonstration, and showed him footage of a boy throwing stones, claiming it was him.

"He said, 'This is you', and I said it wasn't me. Then he asked me, 'Who are they?' And I said that I didn't know," Sameer says. "At one point, the man started shouting at me, and grabbed me by the collar, and said, 'I'll throw you out of the window and beat you with a stick if you don't confess'."

Sameer, who protested his innocence, was fortunate; he was released a few hours later. But most children are frightened into signing a confession, cowed by threats of physical violence, or threats against their families, such as the withdrawal of work permits.

When a confession is signed, lawyers usually advise children to accept a plea bargain and serve a fixed jail sentence even if not guilty. Pleading innocent is to invite lengthy court proceedings, during which the child is almost always remanded in prison. Acquittals are rare. "In a military court, you have to know that you're not looking for justice," says Gabi Lasky, an Israeli lawyer who has represented many children.

There are many Palestinian children in the West Bank villages in the shadow of Israel's separation wall and Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands. Where largely non-violent protests have sprung up as a form of resistance, there are children who throw stones, and raids by Israel are common. But lawyers and human rights groups have decried Israel's arrest policy of targeting children in villages that resist the occupation.

In most cases, children as young as 12 are hauled from their beds at night, handcuffed and blindfolded, deprived of sleep and food, subjected to lengthy interrogations, then forced to sign a confession in Hebrew, a language few of them read.

Israeli rights group B'Tselem concluded that, "the rights of minors are severely violated, that the law almost completely fails to protect their rights, and that the few rights granted by the law are not implemented".

Israel claims to treat Palestinian minors in the spirit of its own law for juveniles but, in practice, it is rarely the case. For instance, children should not be arrested at night, lawyers and parents should be present during interrogations, and the children must be read their rights. But these are treated as guidelines, rather than a legal requirement, and are frequently flouted. And Israel regards Israeli youngsters as children until 18, while Palestinians are viewed as adults from 16.

Lawyers and activists say more than 200 Palestinian children are in Israeli jails. "You want to arrest these kids, you want to try them," Ms Lalo says. "Fine, but do it according to Israeli law. Give them their rights."

In the case of Islam, the boy in the video, his lawyer, Ms Lasky, believes the video provides the first hard proof of serious irregularities in interrogation.

In particular, the interrogator failed to inform Islam of his right to remain silent, even as his lawyer begged to no avail to see him. Instead, the interrogator urged Islam to tell him and his colleagues everything, hinting that if he did so, he would be released. One interrogator suggestively smacked a balled fist into the palm of his hand.

By the end of the interrogation Islam, breaking down in sobs, has succumbed to his interrogators, appearing to give them what they want to hear. Shown a page of photographs, his hand moves dully over it, identifying men from his village, all of whom will be arrested for protesting.

Ms Lasky hopes this footage will change the way children are treated in the occupied territories, in particular, getting them to incriminate others, which lawyers claim is the primary aim of interrogations. The video helped gain Islam's release from jail into house arrest, and may even lead to a full acquittal of charges of throwing stones. But right now, a hunched and silent Islam doesn't feel lucky. Yards from his house in Nabi Saleh is the home of his cousin, whose husband is in jail awaiting trial along with a dozen others on the strength of Islam's confession.

The cousin is magnanimous. "He is a victim, he is just a child," says Nariman Tamimi, 35, whose husband, Bassem, 45, is in jail. "We shouldn't blame him for what happened. He was under enormous pressure."

Israel's policy has been successful in one sense, sowing fear among children and deterring them from future demonstrations. But the children are left traumatised, prone to nightmares and bed-wetting. Most have to miss a year of school, or even drop out.

Israel's critics say its policy is creating a generation of new activists with hearts filled with hatred against Israel. Others say it is staining the country's character. "Israel has no business arresting these children, trying them, oppressing them," Ms Lalo says, her eyes glistening. "They're not our children. My country is doing so many wrongs and justifying them. We should be an example, but we have become an oppressive state."

Child detention figures

700,000 The estimated number of Palestinian children detained and prosecuted in Israeli military courts since 2000, shows a report by Defence for Children International Palestine (DCIP).

87 The percentage of children subjected to some form of physical violence while in custody. About 91 per cent are also believed to be blindfolded at some point during their detention.

12 The minimum age of criminal responsibility, as stipulated in the Military Order 1651.

62 The percentage of children arrested between 12am and 5am.

indepedent.co.uk

Stephen, it's all very scary. The fact that revolution could hit Libya shows that it is possible for revolution to hit any of the countries in this region, not just ones that don’t have the money to maintain their promises. In Egypt, there appears to be a possibility of an orderly transition to a new government, but this seems far less certain in Libya.

Libya’s oil exports amounted to about 1.5 million barrels a day in 2009, based on EIA data. The same source indicates that OPEC is to hold a special session in case of oil price soaring, and furthermore, that Saudi Arabia will make up for the shortfall in Libya’s exports (when and if).

One of the big lessons that may come out of this is that we really can’t count on OPEC as much as we had hoped. First, there is the problem of oil supply from individual countries, like Libya, being reduced, because of political problems. Second, OPEC’s ability to actually deal with disruptions may be less than advertised.

With the discovery of oil in 1959, the focus of U.S. interests changed as officials began to see Libya mostly as an inexpensive petrol pump. I guess, Libyan oil and gas reserves are of direct interest to the United States because they ease production pressures on its traditional suppliers.

Furthermore, I guess what we want are new investment opportunities to exist in areas like tourism and infrastructure development, but the current political and legal systems in place make it difficult for most U.S. companies, outside the energy sector, to pursue them.

All that being said, the USA is not the world police like so many are yammering about. We want control of the oil in the Arab countries, because we don't have any alternatives yet. We don't want China to take over and we don't want to be on the short end of the stick in terms of the coming oil/gas shortage.

So you can see that I agree and yet disagree with your conclusions. Let's take a Cruise? http://feelnfly-feelnfly.blogspot.com/

Muammar Gaddafi vanishes after promising to fight to the death. Isn't that just what Saddam Hussein did? And of course, when Saddam disappeared homeprojects and US troops suffered the very first losses from the Iraqi insurgency in 2003, we were told – by the US proconsul Paul Bremer, the generals, diplomats and the decaying television "experts" – that the gunmen of the resistance were "die-hard", "dead-endears" who didn't realize that the war was over.