Send in the Fighter Jets!

[M]ilitias are out of control and holding thousands of people in secret detention centres… More than 8,000…are being held by militia groups, amid reports of torture, UN officials said… Four died in clashes…on Monday. Where is this happening? Libya. Responsibility to protect whom?

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Can Liberals Count When It Comes to War?

In the last 24 hours alone I’ve seen two liberal sources – Bill Maher and the New York Times - note that we are paying for two expensive wars right now in the midst of our domestic economic woes.  At least in Maher’s case, the upshot is that this is bad for the United States and [...]

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The Future of the Qaddafis

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Costs of War II – Libya Edition – Hell no, our dollars shouldn’t go

An update on the price of the Libyan conflict.  From CNN Money: With the tab already running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, the U.S. military intervention in Libya has sparked a debate over funding. To date, the United States has spent some $225 million firing Tomahawk missiles, according to CNN estimates based on [...]

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Feminist International Relations Theory and Libya

For those of you that lived through the feminist challenge to traditional IR theory in the 1990′s, David Gergen reports on a relevant observation in his CNN piece today: One irony, as a female friend put it, is that for years many of us believed that if only more women could gain power, the world [...]

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Benjamin Barber, Qaddafi Apologist

Many politicians and intellectuals have egg on their faces over the Libyan dictatorship’s brutal, bloody turn in the past few weeks, but arguably none more so than political scientist Benjamin Barber, who helped found the Monitor Group, which received millions of dollars from Muammar Qaddafi to help burnish his image abroad. Barber sometimes failed to [...]

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What If Libyans Had Remained Nonviolent?

I caught a little bit of flak around the Internet for my piece, “Why Isn’t Violence the Answer?,” during the early days of the Egypt protests. I was galled by official demands from the U.S. government and other places that Egyptian protestors remain nonviolent, no matter what. Thankfully, significant violence wasn’t required to get rid [...]

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