PROCÈS-VERBAL

Well. I hate love to say I told you so, but yes, this is what I predicted over a month ago.

Today, Colum Lynch reports on the UN Security Council’s attitude toward Syria, and they aren’t in the mood to listen to the interventionist bloc at the moment:

The current dispute over Syria “is the hang over from Libya,” one council diplomat told Turtle Bay. “China and Russia feel a bit betrayed because the coalition went further than what was in the resolution. It diminished the possibility of replicating the Libya model in Yemen and Syria,” where Russia and China have blocked action.

(Emphasis mine)

Not that I’m calling for another bombing campaign, I’m most definitely not, but this is real fallout for overreaching in Libya. The mission approved by the Security Council was civilian protection, as established by international norm. Regime change was unilateral.
Read the rest of this entry »

Pardon my alliterative mood. It may be an off day for me, but the world still continues to spin, burn, fold, spindle and mutilate itself, and yours truly is here to report.
Read the rest of this entry »

“The only thing we learn from history is that people learn nothing from history”
— Georg Wilhelm Hegel

Inspired by post on Foreign Policy Magazine’s Passport blog.

It began in an unassuming way: the American commanding general in theater sent a memo to Washington informing his superiors that an important enemy target had been tentatively located, but that it was over the border in a neighboring country whose status in all conflicts was neutral and that the territory in question was for all intents and purposes, though inhabited, ungoverned and ungovernable by the central government.

Read the rest of this entry »