Who Is IOZ?: You Want a NATO? I Can Get You a NATO?

Thursday, March 31, 2011

You Want a NATO? I Can Get You a NATO?

I like where this is headed. If either side in the Libyan civil war fails to discriminate between civilians and combattants, NATO is going to bomb them. But NATO can't seem to determine who is a civilian and who is a combattant; indeed, the presence of so many irregulars makes it almost impossible to tell. So an organization that has no idea who is whom is going to bomb people for not distinguishing who is whom. With any luck, NATO will find itself in violation of its own principles and bomb itself. Isn't NATO headquarters in Belgium? THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE A FUNCTIONING GOVERNMENT! What if Islamists talk over the capital? From Mogadishu to Brussels! YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST, brah!

47 comments:

Mr.Fundamental said...: is that a real poncho...i mean
Is that a mexican poncho
Or is that a sears poncho?
Hmmm...no foolin ...; 2:11 PM
Apologia: the MobiuStrip of Meaning said...: if i were a smug twit (smit?) and delirious fanboi id suggest this post wins the last three days of threads

"the coalition has told the rebels that the fog of war will not shield them from possible bombardment by NATO"

... and the argument with cruise missile liberals for ever; 2:14 PM
PR said...: I would think that Belgium is the poster country for Anarcho/Libertarian Socialist policy. I mean, in the sense that it still has no central government formed yet is functioning in a peaceful and efficient manner.; 2:19 PM
mextremist said...: baal forbid NATO bombing itself! who would save teh West™ from the soviets?; 2:21 PM
John said...: I was thinking the same thing. Nice way to show off the latest in military fashion. Some of these guys are really snappy dressers. The twinkies here at home will pay top dollar for Libyan Khaki by Gap.; 2:22 PM
El Serracho! said...: BOMBARDMENT!

http://download.lardlad.com/sounds/season17/laddy1.mp3; 2:27 PM
NutellaonToast said...: Man, we were too selective with our bombs. Maybe the civilians are getting bombed because they can't distinguish themselves from the fighters, and so we have to start bombing them on purpose? Seriously, is there anyone we SHOULDN'T bomb?; 2:28 PM
Paul Alexander said...: You see, those in power possess a clarity of mind that we lack, which is why we work in our shitty jobs instead of making Real Decisions. I for one am glad that they know the answer to this delicious little riddle you've posed, otherwise I'd be worried.; 2:29 PM
Paul Alexander said...: I see a red door and I want to blow it up.; 2:32 PM
John said...: Belgium? Peaceful? When did that happen? I read that they're a bunch of brutes. They got a piece of Africa in their closet also. If they're peaceful, it's because they hired out..; 2:38 PM
NutellaonToast said...: Use bombs wisely.; 2:40 PM
D-one said...: NATO memo: "We are the arbiters of killing; there is in fact a right way and a wrong way to kill. Do it the wrong way and we kill you. Run along now and kill nicely, we'll be watching."; 3:07 PM
Professor Coldheart said...: From the article:

"The warnings, and intense consultations within the NATO-led coalition over its rules for attacking anyone who endangers innocent civilians, come at a time when the civil war in Libya is becoming ever more chaotic, and the battle lines ever less distinct. They raise a fundamental question that the military is now grappling with: Who in Libya is a civilian?"

Three weeks into the bombing campaign and the question just now comes up. Some junior aide raises his hand at an Arlington briefing. Someone coughs; someone fidgets.; 3:27 PM
Happy Jack said...: Charlie Davis said it best:

When all you have are bombs, everything starts to look like a target.; 4:11 PM
John said...: When all you have is a dick, everything starts to look like a pussy. If it moves, fuck it..; 4:47 PM
Paul Alexander said...: When I see an old lady trying to cross the street, I don't take her hand and lead her to the other side. I just drop a bomb on her. But if a homeless person asks me for change I'm not going to waste a perfectly good bomb on them. Go get a job and buy your own munitions!; 5:44 PM
Soj said...: I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a Javelin!; 10:54 PM
John said...: Mmmm, I hope Ghreyba or Bureek is on tomorrow's menu.. Make mine with spinach, ok?; 12:10 AM
Anonymous said...: What did you folks do to that Absolute Zero feller?; 12:25 AM
Anonymous said...: Quiet you!; 12:32 AM
Synthetic Nero said...: Cannetnost thou see?: we make the best decision possible after the wisest and most complex balancing of teh long term factors of suffering and justice.

Bother me not of cost! What might hast happend might has have been deemed worst that what ist-- by me!

Behold! Technocracy!; 3:57 AM
Anonymous said...: If all you've got is snark, everything is POTUS.

Oh wait, that can't be right.; 4:14 AM
Anonymous said...: I love these threads so much.; 6:53 AM
anne said...: , .. . so you want to write a fugue .. . , biscuits .. ,april .. .; 8:30 AM
George Jones said...: biscuits are the cruelest month; 11:03 AM
Ima Civilian said...: Nice waves, anne.; 11:06 AM
Heiractic Hero said...: It all comes down to an empirical question: is any given intervention actually going to reduce or increase human suffering in the long term? How can we best measure human suffering? And how can we know the future? The answer is that we must get our best experts together, and use our best judgment, with the best information at hand.

Strict non-interventionists would argue that military intervention always increases human suffering, regardless of motive. There is something to this, but not enough. I can imagine at least a few hypothetical scenarios in which it is not true. For example, what if our best experts had known that the Holocaust was about to happen in 1939? Then I would argue that we could have reduced human suffering by joining WWII then. Indeed, the scenario is even more stark that that: for if we had just predicted the Holocaust in 1930, we could have intervened directly in Germany to prevent the Nazis from taking power, thus saving not only the Jews but also stopping WWII from breaking out altogether.; 11:49 AM
Paul Alexander said...: HAHAHA!!! It's unfortunate that our current government doesn't have access to a wayback machine so the current policymakers that have learned so much from their predecessors mistakes, could take their current knowledge and apply it to the past. They would know how to bomb people so much better than they did in the past. Unfortunately there's that whole issue of messing with the past messing with the future so they might wipe themselves out in the process, but seeing how self sacrificing they are as evidenced in their handling of Libya, I doubt they'd have an issue with it.; 12:37 PM
Anonymous said...: Great, thanks for the mindfuck HH. Humorous parody or has the bot effortlessly nameshifted? WE'LL NEVER KNOW FOR SURE.; 12:41 PM
Charles F. Oxtrot said...: I really want to change my name to Wicking Fabric Giro.

Once upon a time humanity beat each other over the head with rocks, with rocks fastened to sticks as hatchets, with sticks alone, with skulls of other dead humans, with femur and humerus of other dead humans. Because of this we learned that violence is efficient when wrestling for something another has, but we desire. We can avoid the wrestling altogether by getting a surgical anticipatory death strike! How efficient.

Efficiency is one of mankind's great discoveries and clearly its driving motor. At its best, humanity is efficiently operating like an eagle, soaring on high-altitude thermals. At its worst, it avoids efficiency. These times tend to be those when a Republican is in charge.

Under Democrats, we see a renewed focus on efficiency. Hence, Obama-->Gates-->Petraeus-->sorry you're not our pal anymore Muammar. A truly efficient way to have an excuse to invade a country whose oil you wish to steal is this: create a puppet whom you alternately praise and demean, occasionally bomb, but also to whom you regularly sell weaponry, technology, and ...other things. This efficiently boosts profits in the desirable sectors.

Because there are actual human beings living in Libya, you may appeal to the protection of those unfortunates, and ignore the fact that their existential threat has been one enabled and greased by your country for decades previously. This matters not one whit now, you are focused on the present, moving forward, with efficiency! Kinetic!

...thank you, thank you, you are all too kind. I am but a Synthetic Zero.; 12:44 PM
John said...: Why didn't Adam intervene and stop Eve from killing the innocent apple? Oh the humanity!; 1:30 PM
Fantastic Pharoah said...: We committed genocide against our native Americans and of course our "Manifest Destiny" propaganda was nothing if not bald-faced imperialism.

There's a quite non-trivial difference between American and, say, Japanese imperialism which would have been evident. The occupation of Japan was, by any measure, infinitely more humane than the Japanese occupations of their territories. This is not to in any way efface the genocidal actions of the United States against the indigenous population, nor the various massacres and other crimes we committed (quite notably in the Philippines, for example) --- I'm not trying to elide over our many crimes, as I've often said. But we simply aren't equivalent in any reasonable sense to every other empire, in my view. We are unique, and exceptional. We physically removed the former owners from our conquered territories; other empires weren't smart enough to do that. It is only when we stopped doing this that we came to regret our imperialism.

Furthermore, with the exception of our initial expansion across the continent, the United States never amassed an empire along the lines of most of the European nations. The Philippines was by far the most populous overseas territory we controlled, and we controlled it for a comparatively brief time.

So one has to speak of American empire in different terms, it seems to me. Nicer, more euphemistic terms. One can talk about "cultural" or "economic" imperialism, about our "covert operations" which did so much harm, and so on, but I would still argue those were motivated less by a desire for economic domination than by a fear of the USSR.; 1:43 PM
The Mathmos said...: Ross: Once it gets inside, thats when the killin starts.; 2:07 PM
Anonymous said...: We had to destroy the future in order to save the future.; 2:21 PM
John said...: I contend that the camera and instant communications did more to change the face of empire building than anything else. It's the old 'nobody can stomach the sausage making process'. Up until the invention of mass media, the Americans were just as brutal as anybody. But now they outsource the job to the locals in the conquered territories. As long as people submit, they will be allowed to live, and maybe prosper. Resist, and die, slowly. Now the trick is to make the PR campaign work on those who don't care what people think. Right now, the Russian and Asian pirates just shut off the transmitter. But even there, the camera is the best weapon to bludgeon them over the head. I noticed they back down also when confronted.; 3:14 PM
Thomas Daulton said...: IOZ said "brah"?? Are you Hawaiian, dude?; 4:41 PM
Matt said...: IOZ, you gotta read this, penultimate graf esp.:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/obamas-judgment; 8:36 PM
Whats a few million eggs between friends? said...: I contend there are not seven or eight hundred bases all over the world.

I contend Chalmers Johnson never existed.; 8:38 PM
anne said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 11:04 PM
anne said...: , by hyper on food dyes .. .do they mean sauce .. or colbert's sets ..,?; 10:36 AM
anne said...: oh, the possibilities are endless with her fine lines .... ,swim; 10:40 AM
mistah charley, ph.d. said...: OBAMA is to JACQUELINE FUCHS, ENTERTAINMENT LAWYER as JOAN JETT is to JACKIE FOX, RUNAWAYS' BASS PLAYER

Matt points us to Kevin Drum's recent penultimate paragraph, which reads, in part: if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust his judgment, and I still do.

This reminded me of something I read yesterday at HuffPost, which was published in 2008. The author played bass in Joan Jett's first band and also went to Harvard Law School with Obama. She finds them similar in that each aspired to greatness and consciously adopted the mannerisms associated with same. She knew Joan Jett before and after; Obama, when she first met him, had already made this decision. A quote:

One of our classmates once famously noted that you could judge just how pretentious someone's remarks in class were by how high they ranked on the "Obamanometer," a term that lasted far longer than our time at law school. Obama didn't just share in class - he pontificated. He knew better than everyone else in the room, including the teachers. Or maybe even he knew he didn't know, but knew that the leader of the free world had to be able to convince others that he did.

http://tinyurl.com/5gcwhs

As the Who song "Eminence Front" said, "It's a put on."; 10:54 AM
Long Term Balance Of Good and Harm said...: NATO announced on Friday that the first 24 hours of their command over the Libyan War has resulted in 178 sorties and 74 air strikes. NATO warships also stopped two ships in the Mediterranean Sea near Libya, but did not board them.

At least some of the strikes hit a small village called Zawia el Argobe, near Brega. The village doctor said the strike hit a truck carrying ammunition, and the subsequent explosion killed seven civilians and wounded 25 others. Among the dead were children as young as 12.

Though NATO and the US have been shrugging off most reports of civilian killings in their strikes, they have come under renewed scrutiny since a top Catholic official in Tripoli said that his city alone lost 40 civilians in the bombing campaigns.

NATO announced on Friday that the first 24 hours of their command over the Libyan War has resulted in 178 sorties and 74 air strikes. NATO warships also stopped two ships in the Mediterranean Sea near Libya, but did not board them.

At least some of the strikes hit a small village called Zawia el Argobe, near Brega. The village doctor said the strike hit a truck carrying ammunition, and the subsequent explosion killed seven civilians and wounded 25 others. Among the dead were children as young as 12.

Though NATO and the US have been shrugging off most reports of civilian killings in their strikes, they have come under renewed scrutiny since a top Catholic official in Tripoli said that his city alone lost 40 civilians in the bombing campaigns.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-04/02/c_13809664.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12931731

http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=214560; 11:49 AM
Gridlock said...: Blessed are those who only receive; 4:37 PM
Clothing said...: Thank you, very thorough look at comments. One think I could add is that lately I've been seeing randomly generated graphics for users, who don't have gravatar. Do you know what kind of plug-in they are using?; 9:12 PM
RedPhillip said...: Finally! A truly important question:

"Do you know what kind of plug-in they are using?"

Wouldn't you know that all the truly vital points of inquiry are bot-generated?; 9:48 AM
Anonymous said...: Enjoyed the SZ free-4-all, and his attempts to "maybe this time is different". But before the rooster crowed twice the story turned out 2B (once again, rinse, lather repeat) about "our" glorious military saving the skin of "our" CIA assets. CIA assets shockt, SHOCKT! to find themselves in the midst of a "spontaneous popular revolt". "Our" meaning USG's. And "spontaneous popular uprising" meaning "CIA-sponsored rebellion".

I know, I know. Hence my moniker.

Capt'n Obvious; 5:36 PM

Thursday, March 31, 2011

You Want a NATO? I Can Get You a NATO?

47 comments:

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