Monthly Archives: February 2011

Monday Morning Quarterbacking on the Oscars

Time for a brief break from reporting on the Middle Eastern uprisings to discuss the Academy Awards. No, this is not a joke–by which I mean the break will be brief. But for now, I’ll just post the basic results (minus a few categories such as shorts in which I happen to have less personal interest), plus a few thoughts below.

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The Academy Awards 2011 (Abridged Results)

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Best Picture

Black Swan

The Fighter

Inception

The Kids are All Fight

The King’s Speech

127 Hours

The Social Network

Toy Story 3

True Grit

Winter’s Bone

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Best Director

Black Swan: Darren Aronofsky

The Fighter: David O. Russell

The King’s Speech: Tom Hooper

The Social Network: David Fincher

True Grit: Joel and Ethan Coen

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Best Actor

Javier Bardem, Biutiful

Jeff Bridges, True Grit

Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network

Colin Firth, The King’s Speech

James Franco, 127 Hours

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Best Actress

Annette Benning, The Kids are All Right

Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole

Jennifer Lawrence, Winter’s Bone

Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine

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Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale, The Fighter

John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone

Jeremy Renner, The Town

Mark Ruffalo, The Kids are All Right

Geoffrey Rush, The King’s Speech

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Best Supporting Actress

Amy Adams, The Fighter

Helena Bonham Carter, The King’s Speech

Melissa Leo, The Fighter

Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom

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Best Adapted Screenplay

127 Hours, Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufroy

The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin

Toy Story 3, Michael Arndt. Story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich

True Grit, Joel & Ethan Coen

Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini

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Best Original Screenplay

Another Year, Mike Leigh

The Fighter, Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson. Story by Keith Dorrington & Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson

Inception, Christopher Nolan

The Kids are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg

The King’s Speech, David Seidler

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Best Editing

Black Swan, Andrew Wiesblum

The Fighter, Pamela Martin

The King’s Speech, Tariq Anwar

127 Hours, Jon Harris

The Social Network, Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter

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Art Direction

Alice in Wonderland, Robert Stromberg (Production Design); Karen O’Hara (Set Decoration)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, Stuart Craig (Production Design); Stephenie McMillan (Set Decoration)

Inception, Guy Hendrix Dyas (Production Design); Larry Dias and Doug Mowat (Set Decoration)

The King’s Speech, Eve Stewart (Production Design); Judy Farr (Set Decoration)

True Grit, Jess Gonchor (Production Design); Nancy Haigh (Set Decoration)

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Cinematography

Black Swan (Matthew Libatique)

Inception (Wally Pfister)

The King’s Speech (Danny Cohen)

The Social Network (Jeff Cronenweth)

True Grit (Roger Deakins)

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Costume Design

Alice in Wonderland (Colleen Atwood)

I Am Love (Antonella Cannarozzi)

The King’s Speech (Jenny Beavan)

The Tempest (Sandy Powell)

True Grit (Mary Zophres)

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Best Original Score

How to Train Your Dragon, John Powell

Inception, Hans Zimmer

The King’s Speech, Alexandre Desplat

127 Hours, A.R. Rahman

The Social Network, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

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Best Sound Editing

Inception, Richard King

Toy Story 3, Tom Myers and Michael Silvers

Tron: Legacy, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle and Addison Teague

True Grit, Skip Lievsay and Craig Berkey

Unstoppable, Mark P. Stoeckinger

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Best Sound Mixing

Inception, Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick

The King’s Speech, Paul Hamblin, Martin Jensen and John Midgley

Salt, Jeffrey J. Haboush, Greg P. Russell, Scott Millan and William Sarokin

The Social Network, Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten

True Grit, Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter F. Kurland

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Best Visual Effects

Alice in Wonderland, Ken Ralston, David Schaub, Carey Villegas and Sean Phillips

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, Tim Burke, John Richardson, Christian Manz and Nicolas Aithadi

Hereafter, Michael Owens, Bryan Grill, Stephan Trojansky and Joe Farrell

Inception, Paul Franklin, Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley and Peter Bebb

Iron Man 2, Janek Sirrs, Ben Snow, Ged Wright and Daniel Sudick

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Best Animated Feature Film

How to Train Your Dragon, Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois

The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet

Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich

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Best Foreign Language Film

Biutiful (Mexico)

Dogtooth (Greece)

In a Better World (Denmark)

Incendies (Canada)

Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi) (Algeria)

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Best Feature Documentary

Exit Through the Gift Shop, “Banksy” and Jaimie D’Cruz

Gasland, Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic

Inside Job, Charles Ferguson and Audrey Marrs

Restrepo, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger

Waste Land, Lucy Walker and Angus Aynsley

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I agree with the Academy in giving the win for Best Original Score to The Social Network (though I’m surprised Tron: Legacy wasn’t nominated for its excellent score by Daft Punk, which led even the film’s fans to say it probably would have been just as good presented like the current cut of Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis, silent aside from its breezy industrial rock). Inception has a marvelous, epic main theme by Hans Zimmer, but The Social Network has a great film score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that with visible ingenuity evokes a variety of dark moods. The Liberal Ironist is a big fan of the distinct electronic tones, the rigorous execution, and the ironic pessimistic philosophy Trent Reznor put into Nine Inch Nails, and is glad to see that if popular music has clearly lost one of its brightest (if also darkest) stars, at least another part of our popular culture can clearly be said to have gained talent. For similar reasons, I’d edge Best Director to Fincher over Nolan (with all due respect to Tom Hooper) even though I personally enjoyed Inception better.

If Inception’s writer-director was robbed this year (and point-of-fact, he surely was), it was for Best Original Screenplay. As one of my friends put it during the cermony, it’s weird to think that Inception cleaned up with awards for execution (Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Visual Effects) while failing to win acclaim for the concept those effects brought to life. On this same note of integration in execution, I think a lot of Zimmer’s theme’s power to inspire in Inception comes from its balance with action, especially when you consider that the last several scenes are widely-separated in time, space, the sorts of characters present and even the states of consciousness involved–and yet they are essentially accompanied by that resolute theme right up to the end–hence its wins for Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.

The King’s Speech, I think is more of a “Best Picture”-type film than either The Social Network or Inception, but this is the award I’d more-readily grant Inception because I think its power is more in the relationship of its concepts to the effects than in its direction. Then again, a lot of people felt that Nolan was cheated out of a win for The Dark Knight at the 2009 Academy Awards–and they were right.

The Best Actor win for Colin Firth in The King’s Speech and the Best Actress win for Natalie Portman in Black Swan were widely-anticipated; they were also spot-on. Interestingly, both leading wins went to portrayals of characters who lived a straightjacketed existence, trying to perfect a rarefied form of performance art they have been carefully-groomed for, but at the cost of their capacity to express themselves freely. The King’s Speech is the more-understated (and its protagonist certainly the more-mature) of the 2, but many of this year’s good wide-release movies features protagonists contending with one or another kind of splendid desolation. In Firth’s Prince Albert we see a man worthy to be king but blocked by deep-seated inhibitions because of cruelties confronted in childhood; Natalie Portman’s Nina is unable to be childlike without also being childish, maintaining a devotion to ballet that is so innocent that she cannot even see how harsh and unsustainable her artistic ambition is because it is so simple and pure.

There is something oddly-fitting about the much-deserving Hailee Steinfeld being passed over for Best Supporting Actress for her (lead?) role as Mattie Ross in the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of True Grit. The young nominee greatly exceeded the much-older winner in elegance, sense of fair play, and for those who caught the Oscars ceremony last night, circumspection.

Regarding the Best Documentary win, I only saw 2 of these documentaries, Gasland and Restrepo. Gasland is a disturbing account of the horrifying deterioration of groundwater quality in the wake of natural gas drilling in the American interior (notably in rural Pennsylvania). It is a troubling account of the often almost-invisible rural poor and the ravages of an energy industry that comes dangerously close to writing its own regulations. Speaking of writing one’s own regulations, Charles Ferguson apparently sought in Inside Job to expose what he interprets willfully-criminal behavior of the banking and hedge fund executives. To my mind, however, the 2008 Financial Crash isn’t really the result of a crime, but rather good old-fashioned hubris–as I discussed months ago in my review of Scott Patterson’s book The Quants.

The only other of the 5 documentary nominees I’ve seen yet (and the one I would have preferred to win) was Restrepo, a strangely-funny, occasionally jarring, always riveting account of about a year’s tour of duty at a hastily-constructed combat outpost in one of the most-dangerous postings of our military’s mission in Afghanistan. The documentary is less than 90 minutes but somehow feels much longer in a good way, giving an account of every sort of experience to be had in the Taliban-contested valley, from the pervasive locker room-type antics inside the fortified combat outpost, to calls from Afghan villagers whose loyalties are simply opaque, to mission briefings, to phone calls home, to a battle with casualties, seen from headcam perspective. It’s unpretentious yet outstanding.

Inception, The King’s Speech, and The Social Network happen to be my favorite of 14 wide-release films that I saw in 2010 that I thought were very good or great. You might have noticed that they are all about people trying to shape humanity through the mastery of a powerful new medium: This year, film rose to the occasion of portraying the inner lives of those shaping forces greater than it. It was a great year for movies.

The Sin of Omission: Leaving Libya to Its Fate

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I’ve been converted to the theory that one of our most basic forms of bias is that against doing harm. Allowing terrible things to happen right in front of us–even when we have the means to do something to stop it–provokes no comparable concern.

I imagine this predisposition explains why first Secretary of State Clinton, then President Obama insisted that the rolling massacres to which Libya has descended are “unacceptable.” The moment I heard the Secretary of State say so, a thought occurred to me that has driven me almost to distraction: If we countenance this slaughter and have the means to mitigate, contain, or even decide it through intervention and don’t do so, then it must be “acceptable” by definition.

I wasn’t the only person who had some version of this thought. Tom Scocca, blogging in Slate, thinks a President’s use of the term “unacceptable” an outright absurdity if not an outright inversion of what the word normally means:

“Unacceptable to whom? What does ‘acceptance’ mean, here? Did Qaddafi submit the bloodshed to the Oval Office for approval, but Obama refused to sign for it? Did someone give the Libyan protesters an opt-out box to click if they declined to be shot, or if they preferred to be shot later?

“Come statement-making time, the American presidency sounds like Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer in reverse: the things the president can’t change get deemed ‘unacceptable.'”

For Scocca the point of interest was precisely this uncanny consistency with which Presidents use this word for those outrageous states of affairs that…won’t be changed. I’m interested in the current use of the word, because when an unhinged dictator like Colonel Muammar Gaddafi loudly announces that he will “cleanse Libya house by house” and draws upon foreign fighters–and according to one disturbing account taken by al-Jazeera even deluded migrant workers–to bring his threat to any plausible source of opposition, a state has perpetrated such a loss of legitimacy that even absolute monarchist Thomas Hobbes would have to embrace revolution.

Of course, President Obama and his Secretary of State are hardly alone in taking strong language but no action. Last Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called Colonel Gaddafi and told him the violence he was deliberately sowing “must stop immediately.” Then there is this first paragraph of a report from today by the CNN wire staff:

“As clashes in the Libyan capital continued Friday between government security forces and anti-regime protesters, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters unequivocally: ‘The violence must stop.'”

Well, Ban is on the right side of the Libyan Civil War, and he’s saying the right things…and I can’t fault him for consistency either. We can’t fairly fault the Secretary General when the constituent states of the UN fail to act. It’s ironic, but leading the UN sounds like a lonely job. The article further related that Ban estimated the death toll in the Libyan uprising since February 17th at over 1,000 and called on other governments “to do everything possible” to prevent violence against civilians.

300, 1,000, 2,000…In truth we have no idea how many people Gaddafi has sacrificed this week to his delusional bid to remain in power because we have little capacity to observe what he is doing. Libya seethes under multiple apparitions of chaos. There is chaos as some army units and pilots slaughter protesters and some defect to their cause. There is chaos as mercenaries from Chad, Niger and Sudan fly into Libya with a broad mandate to stop the rebellion in the streets–some apparently shooting any civilian who goes outside. There is protesters as mercenaries drag the bodies of the dead away in an attempt to hide the full death toll. There is chaos as protesters become a fighting force, overrunning arsenals both with and without the assistance of army mutineers. As a consequence of the preceding, there is chaos in the cities of Libya’s Mediterranean coast over which the protesters gain, then sometimes lose, then gain control again.

The apparent chaos actually follows multiple logics–the city of Benghazi’s longstanding grievances towards Tripoli, tribal loyalties, individual incentives to avoid eventual punishment by the protesters or to pursue the newly-available but rapidly-dwindling resources made available by the Gaddafi regime, the material prize of a greater share of Libya’s oil wealth, and varying levels of fear among all parties. What is remarkable is how quickly Libya has passed through the stages of a civil war–at least so far and to appearances.

It isn’t coming fast-enough, however. This brings us back to my point about our deep-seated bias against doing harm. Some have argued that any sort of UN or NATO military intervention in Libya, from imposition of a no-fly zone to the establishment of beachhead safe zones or incursions into certain Libyan coastal towns (even just to deliver needed supplies like food to civilians) would expose the protesters to charges of foreign-backed subversion. I think this political concern was plausible until Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was deposed. Even if the revolution in Egypt hadn’t breathed such life into Middle Eastern pro-democracy protests generally, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s objection to Gaddafi’s brutality frames the argument for an intervention on humanitarian grounds.

It’s true that we cannot know whether other Middle Eastern anti-regime protests will suddenly escalate from violent to very violent in contexts where military intervention wouldn’t be feasible. Some skeptics of intervention would say we would take blame for any ensuing politicide, thus incurring hostility from that country’s masses. I say such warnings are a little strained, and miss the point: Libya is bleeding profusely right now. If we just take some kind of military action whether to strike at loyalist positions, protect the protesters or to feed Libyans, we can save lives, issue a warning to other dictators in the region considering escalating their repression, and show participants in these movements in our deeds what the President implied with his January 28th speech on Egypt–that the US is with them on this one.

Time for the President to Get Ahead of This Curve

Libya’s Mad Dog Dictator Bears His Fangs: Now is the Time for the United States to Get Involved

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Say what you will about Libya’s Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi (and don’t be surprised if you can’t find anything nice to say), but he doesn’t resort to petty euphemism or dissemble about his intentions. No, he speaks with astonishing candor about the brutality to come. In Tunisia, Zine el-Abindine Ben Ali tried to save himself by declaring that he would institute economic reforms, investigate police brutality against demonstrators, and step down at the end of his current term. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak made an ill-received attempt to defend his rule by embracing the protesters as warmly in rhetoric as he had struck them callously in action, assuring his people that he had appointed a vice president and, yes, that he would step down at the end of his term. In Libya yesterday, Ghaddafi delivered a 73-minute speech in which he declared that those rebelling against his regime were under the influence of foreigners (and drugs), and that he would “cleanse Libya house by house” if the protests don’t end now.

One might be inclined to sermonize that a dictator is a dictator, that 1 strongman who would sacrifice an open-ended number of lives to maintain absolute power over his country is as much of a monster as any. But one would be wrong. There are dictators, and there are mad dog dictators. President Reagan once called Ghaddafi “the mad dog of the Middle East,” and if his extensive past support of terrorism weren’t enough of an indication, his utter callousness towards the fate of his own people at the apparent end of his reign dispels all of his past moral pretenses.

Don’t let the fact that he hasn’t had occasion to murder his countrymen on the scale of Saddam Hussein’s 300,000-400,000 fool you; Colonel Ghaddafi has more in common with the late despot of Iraq, that man who modeled himself on Josef Stalin, than with the corrupt party-monopolists Ben Ali or Mubarak. Whether he just feels comfortable in the well-worn political-ideational space he has eked out for himself or he is simply insane, the Liberal Ironist believes Muammar Ghaddafi has revealed his character through his actions in his desperate hours–and he is an impossible monster.

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi some time after seizing power in 1969 as a 27-year-old army captain. Associated Press photo.

Captain Muammar Ghaddafi took power in Libya in a bloodless military coup against the king in 1969. He was 27 years old. Modeling himself on Egypt’s Arabist dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser and Latin American Communist revolutionary Che Guevara, Ghaddafi promoted himself to Colonel (still his rank in the Libyan Army), expelled all Italians living in Libya in 1970, published his “Green Book” between 1975 and 1979 in imitation of China’s Mao Zedong, sponsored terrorism in various countries (including not only the PLO and the IRA but direct involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103), tried to develop nuclear weapons (which he abandoned in 2004 between Western negotiations and mounting political pressure), and habitually traveled with an all-female bodyguard team and slept in a tent when abroad. In a typical act of callous and counterproductive revolutionary commitment, Ghaddafi expelled 30,000 Palestinian refugees living in Libya to protest the PLO’s signing of the Oslo Accords with Israel.

Now, after just 1 week of anti-regime protests, most estimates put the number of dead civilians in Libya as more than those killed in all other current Arab democracy movements put together. The Libyan Air Force has carried out air strikes on protesters in the capital, Tripoli.

Colonel Gaddafi during his 73-minute televised tirade yesterday, during which he claimed anti-regime protesters were being controlled by foreign agents with hallucinogens. He also warned that if the protests did not stop, he would "cleanse Libya house by house." Photo courtesy Agence France Presse/Libyan TV.

This brings us to the matter of Secretary of State Clinton’s statement on the violence and chaos in Libya. Here I’ve included most of the first paragraph:

“…The United States continues to watch the situation in Libya with alarm. Our thoughts and prayers are with those whose lives have been lost and their loved ones, and we join the international community in strongly condemning the violence, as we’ve received reports of hundreds killed and many more injured. This bloodshed is completely unacceptable. It is the responsibility of the Government of Libya to respect the universal rights of their own people, including their right to free expression and assembly…”

At current I must express skepticism towards the Secretary of State’s use of the word “unacceptable.” If our government doesn’t intend to do anything about the rolling massacres perpetrated by the remaining armed forces and mercenaries of the “Mad Dog of the Middle East,” then this bloodshed is acceptable by definition. This is a good time, and these are good grounds, for the United States to take action.

No, I am not talking about boots on the ground in Libya. The only question about such a prospect is whether our people or Libya’s would find such a prospect more-unappetizing. But an Army deployment isn’t the only thing our government could do to save lives in Libya. The US Air Force could enforce a no-fly zone in Libya–and it would be well worth the cost.

There are reasons why we haven’t yet taken this action unilaterally–or for that matter why the UN Security Council has issued a statement of condemnation regarding Libya but no resolution. The New York Times article on the disapproving yet curiously non-committal stance of our government identified the concern staying its hand–and it is a good one: There are still US diplomatic staff and citizens inside Libya. It isn’t currently in Ghaddafi’s interest to initiate violence against Americans in Libya, because that would likely catalyze US reprisals; by the same token, US aggressive action against Ghaddafi’s redoubt in the northwest of his country would probably incite revenge violence against Americans there. Secretary of State Clinton insisted that “the safety and well-being of Americans has to be our highest priority.”

A government has to see to the safety of its own citizens first; that is the principled reason for its existence. The Liberal Ironist recognizes and respects this primary obligation of the state. But today a corrolary arises: The Ghaddafi regime has now explicitly betrayed this responsibility, declaring large numbers of Libyan civilians to be enemies for assembling and speaking out–and subsequently defending themselves. The New York Times reports that many governments are currently scrambling to withdraw their nationals from the mounting violence in Libya. Once the United States and other Western governments manage to withdraw their citizens from Libya, it’s time to get cracking to rectify this situation. Muammar Ghaddafi has relinquished his rights to his country’s airspace. It’s high time we stop Ghaddafi’s airstrikes on demonstrators.

The Italian government has just stated that it considers current rough estimates that 1,000 people have been killed in regime repression credible. For ours and foreign governments to withdraw their citizens and diplomatic staff should be the end of the hold-up, because this situation is truly getting out of control. We may already be 1,000 dead towards another Hama Massacre. We know Ghaddafi is willing to do that; both his bark and his bite are dreadful.

UPDATE March 21, 2011: For anyone interested in some thoughts on what Egypt’s passage of its constitutional reform referendum means for that country’s revolution, click here.

UPDATE March 25, 2011: For a recent entry on President Obama’s push last week for a no-fly zone over Libya and a case that his failure to justify the operation to the public has drawn more criticism than a headline-grabbing defense would have, click here.

UPDATE April 5, 2011: For a discussion of Bashar al-Assad’s political situation in Syria and the Assad regime’s little-known history of brutality, click here.

UPDATE May 2, 2011: For thoughts on the significance of the killing of Osama bin Laden, click here.

UPDATE May 8, 2011: For thoughts on how Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu’s lack of regard for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process brought the Fatah and Hamas factions together, click here.

UPDATE May 21, 2011: For a discussion of the reason for our strategy of maintaining a good working relationship with Pakistan in spite of ISI support for terrorist groups, click here.

For a take on the novelty of President Obama’s support for a Palestinian state along Israel’s 1967 borders, click here.

UPDATE May 23, 2011: For a shorter discussion of the timeliness of President Obama’s AIPAC address on Sunday, May 22, click here.

UPDATE July 22, 2011: For a discussion of the apparent stalemate of the Libyan Civil War–and a call to maintain the no-fly zone and grant the Rebels state-building support–click here.

UPDATE September 6, 2011: For a discussion of the detention of hundreds of alleged black African mercenaries in Tripoli and elsewhere by victorious but still largely-disorganized Rebels, click here.

Colonel Gaddafi during his first address before the UN General Assembly after Libya emerged from decades of rogue state status, back in September 2009. During his unwelcome 100-minute rant, the sponsor of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people accused the United Nations of being a terroristic body. Photograph: Ray Stubblebine/Reuters.

So Much for the 3rd Longest-Serving Head-of-State in the World

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42 Years of Absolute Rule, 6 Days of Mounting Revolution

There’s something happening in Libya. Pro-democracy demonstrators in Benghazi, a city of about 500,000 in the east of the country, suffered regime-led violence that took the lives of at least 233 (Human Rights Watch) or as many as over 300 (eye-witness reports, not cross-checked) demonstrators over the weekend. Following a massacre of attendants of a funeral procession for 84 dissidents killed in the previous day’s clashes, a military unit sent to Benghazi to quell the uprisings in the east defected and joined the demonstrators on Sunday. This probably came as a great relief to a city under siege; it was correspondingly really, really bad news for Libya’s iron-fisted ruler, Colonel Muammar Ghadafi.

It was also bad news for Ghadafi when a chief of the Warfalla tribe (a powerful personage in Libya, a non-consolidated state marked by tribal divisions which Ghadafi has episodically exploited) declared that he had defected to the demonstrators, and urging his counterpart tribal chieftans to band together to do the same. Worse was the announcement of the al-Zuwayya tribal chieftan that he intended to cut off the Ghadafi regime’s access to Libya’s oil fields, demanding Ghadafi’s resignation. Less strategically-crucial, perhaps, but also indicative of crumbling confidence at the top of the political structure, has been the resignation of 9 Libyan diplomats, including its representative to the Arab League, its ambassador to India, and Libya’s deputy representative to the United Nations.

Ghadafi Has Deployed His Military–and May Have Overplayed His Hand

Military units have in fact fired on protesters in several parts of the country. According to the New York Times, helicopter strikes on protesters have occurred in the capital Tripoli and along the road from rebel-held Misruata to Tripoli. But this isn’t the worst-case development that could occur in Libya.

The worst thing that could happen in Libya would be air strikes and a tank invasion of Benghazi, the 2nd-largest city in the country, on the coast of the eastern Cyrenaica region. This city of about 500,000 was liberated by protesters after the defection of the army unit deployed to crush those protests. It isn’t clear the Ghadafi regime still has the means to suppress the rebellion in Benghazi, but with enough control over the air force, he could try to make an example of this restive city like the 1982 atrocity by Syria’s Assad regime in Hama.

In other news, as of this writing we can apparently dismiss early speculation, by United Kingdom Foreign Minister William Hague among others, that Colonel Ghadafi had already fled to Venezuela. Colonel Ghadafi has just appeared on Libyan state television, helpfully clarifying that he has in fact not fled to Venezuela. He also called independent media reporting on the demonstrations “stray dogs,” a gesture of maximum disrespect. The statements of defiance issued by Ghadafi and his son, Saif al-Islam, were intended to suggest that he won’t resign as did Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia or Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, come what may. “We will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet,” Saif al-Islam said on Libyan state television last night.

Inaction on Libya May Be a Costly Strategy

A www.BBC.co.uk article assessing the importance of tribal loyalties in Libya was perceptive in not overestimating the uniqueness of the Libyan revolution–and prudent in issuing a warning that the simple stagnation of the regime’s current near-hopeless state could ultimately be a worse outcome even than a yet-larger massacre in Benghazi:

“So, what significance ought to be attached to Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s warning of war between Libya’s tribes in the event of the regime falling, or to the heads of Libyan tribes reportedly declaring support for the anti-regime protesters, as the head of the Warfalla tribe appears to have done?

“And how seriously should we take the eastern Al-Zuwayya tribe’s threat to cut off oil exports, as has been reported?

“The short answer is that the prospect of civil war will become real only if the regime chooses to fight to the end and continues to remain indifferent to civilian casualties, as it has been doing over the past few days.”

For now, prospects for a civil war in Libya still seem distant–though as of this writing the country’s territory is in fact split between territory still under government control and territory liberated by demonstrators and military forces or tribes which have defected to them. The Liberal Ironist thinks his would be a good time for President Obama to say something beyond his consistently-cautious line since Mubarak employed vigilantes against his ultimately-successful opposition. Morally-commendable but in effect so indirect as to be off-point, the President’s position to-date has simply been that violence is bad. With successful expulsions of decades-ruling, foreign-supported autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt in a matter of weeks, protests not only in Libya but Bahrain, Yemen, Djibouti and Algeria have become serious. Not all of these revolts are necessarily fated to succeed, and the moment for pro-democracy protests in Sudan, Syria and Iran already seems to have come and gone. But prudence is not synonymous with passivity, and awareness of the costs and risks of taking any stand may not constitute profound thinking when the means the President has to change the political and strategic balance of protests such as Libya’s are considered. This will be the subject of my next post.

Tunisia and Egypt: What We Thought We Knew Did Hurt Us

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1 month ago, Eric Goldstein wrote a fine retrospective on Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution on ForeignPolicy.com. It hadn’t been 1 week since kleptocrat Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia after just under 1 month of mounting riots in what had probably been the quietest Arab state since 1960. Ben Ali’s regime had been a poster-child for “durable autocracy,” the broad theory that an autocratic government could employ certain combinations of mobilizing ideology, redistribution of benefits and spectacles of repression to stave-off popular sovereignty essentially forever. Ben Ali’s regime wasn’t ideological, but it had been keen to advertise Tunisia’s supposedly exemplary economic development. Indeed, of all Arab states Tunisia is probably the most-middle class. (While several oil-drilling “petrostates” on the Persian Gulf have higher overall levels of wealth, several political scientists and economists such as Paul Collier and Michael Ross have convincingly argued that oil-dependence profoundly stunts economic and social–and thus political–development.) And Ben Ali’s police force had mastered repressive spectacle, sometimes making arbitrary gestures of their impunity just to warn people not to stand out too much.

Then, apparently without giving any indication of discontent beforehand, Tunisia’s government collapsed completely over the course of 1 month. This revolution was largely the work of 20-somethings who’d had no prior opportunity to develop political experience. Crucially, when Ben Ali asked the Tunisian Army to fire on protesters in the capital, they abandoned him in disgust. That was probably not a response most outside observers, inclined by historical anecdote to conceive of the armed forces as an aggregate, pro-incumbency actor, would ever have expected. Tunisia’s reigning kleptocrat had to flee the country that day.

What I particularly like about Goldstein’s article, aside from some insightful (though admittedly retrospective) observations about Tunisia’s tinderbox status, is his foregrounding of the fact that we were all blindsided by the speed and thoroughness with which the Ben Ali regime fell apart–including the continuation of protests until most of his old cabinet appointees resigned from the interim government. Following the end of Ben Ali’s 23 years of rule in Tunisia in about 28 days of protests and the much more-dramatic demise Hosni Mubarak‘s 30-year “presidency” in Egypt after just 18 days of peaceful (but violently-attacked) protest, demonstrations have emerged in Algeria, Syria, Jordan, Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Bahrain, and even comparatively-democratic Iraq in response to poor service provision and apparently serious corruption by the Governor of Basra. The violent repression of demonstrators in Bahrain and Libya follows the same old playbook of post-colonial dictators–but so far those demonstrations just keep spreading…and growing.

Whatever happens as these other bids for revolution metastasize, what has already happened in the Middle East should give us pause. Twice in the past 2 months, selfish and callous despots who created an outward impression of a normalized society for over a generation were overthrown with little to no anticipation in a series of demonstrations that took less than a month apiece. It has turned out, as dramatically at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union and the democratization of Eastern Europe, that we didn’t know what we thought we knew at all. Not only for those of us in academic fields such as political science, political theory or sociology, but for laypersons interested in this busy World as well, the events unfolding in the Middle East should fill us not just with humility but with gratitude. What we have seen is not all that is, and while the disappointments of the past will never cease to influence the present, they don’t determine what’s possible in the future. We owe this powerful reminder of both our capacity for agency and the brilliant appeal of Liberalism to the various Arab peoples–a series of nations about whom we have generally thought very uncharitable thoughts over the past decade when we have thought of them at all. Now we can smirk at our naiveté, and wish that the Arab democrats find the wind at their backs.

If you have a few minutes, a wise friend of mine who specializes in Arab politics was actually in Cairo during some of the grim early days of the revolution, and has blogged much more-eloquently about this, contrasting the banality of official corruption to the unexpected courage and enthusiasm of Egypt’s protesters. He wrote this entry on February 9th, 2 days before Mubarak’s departure and 2 days before he could let himself believe that all this enthusiasm could prevail. If you can spare a few minutes, his reflections on the eve of the Egyptian revolution’s success are the fitting last word; he has seen first-hand what the Arab lay revolutionaries are up against.

The Prospect of a Government Shutdown is Now Very Real

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It’s coming. What the Tea Partiers in the Republican Caucus in the House had made likely, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) has now made…well, really hard to avoid. I previously reported on the Tea Partiers’ revolt over the attempt by House Republican leaders to moderate their calls for spending cuts to work-out a budget deal with the President; while the House Republican leadership had called for about $40 billion in cuts to non-Defense discretionary spending on Wednesday of last week, they are now proposing at least $61 billion in cuts to such spending.

The New York Times reported that such deep spending cuts haven’t merely raised real concerns about the stability of our economic recovery (undermining Federal stimulus, requiring layoffs from Federal jobs, and canceling or curtailing Federal contracts to private companies), but some Republican Representatives have even admitted such cuts may be politically self-defeating. Ultimately, though, it isn’t the House leadership’s seats that will be on the line, but the Republican freshmen–a great many of whom are the Tea Party activists insisting on the budget cuts. So, in order to retain their positions in a restive and skeptical Republican Caucus, House leaders have to consent to letting freshmen members endanger their own seats by pushing for cuts to programs from which their constituents in sometimes-marginal districts benefit. The debate in the House over these spending cuts opened last Tuesday, as House Speaker John Boehner took the step–not seen from either party’s leadership since Newt Gingrich’s “Class of 1994” Republicans took over 16 years ago–of allowing Representatives from both parties to commend budget cuts–or increases. Of course, with 242 members and a dominant Conservative wing, the Republicans have carried most of the budget amendments (as you can see from this nifty New York Times chart), though in some instances Federal programs have been restored by a majority vote. One interesting bit of news is the cancellation, by a vote of 233-198, of the expensive 2nd engine for the F-35 Joint-Strike Fighter jet, a pork spending item that both Presidents W. Bush and Obama had tried to defund. Maintaining this funding had been an interest for Speaker Boehner, whose west Ohio Congressional District receives many jobs from the construction of this engine. The elimination of this second engine alone is projected to save $3 billion (!) over coming years.

Senate Appropriations Chair Inouye has done his corresponding part to close the bargaining space for a budget agreement, scheduling the Senate vote on its version of the budget for the first week of March. The continuing resolution temporarily funding the Federal Government while its budget is passed runs out on March 4th. Speaker Boehner, still acting in response to prodding by the upstart Conservatives in his freshman class, has said it’s make-or-break time–House Republicans won’t support another continuing resolution to take more time to resolve his party’s budget differences with the Democrats unless that temporary suspension contains substantial spending cuts.

While the intervening 2+ weeks could otherwise be spent negotiating a reconciled budget, the back-loading of the Senate’s budget vote makes a shutdown of an unfunded Federal Government very difficult to avoid. True, the depth of the program cuts proposed by House Republicans right now is intolerable for Congressional Democrats and President Obama, but if Senator Inouye had allowed an earlier vote this would still have given Senate Democrats (and the President) time to pressure the House–and House leadership political cover to show their Conservative rank-and-file that they don’t really have the means to prevail if President Obama takes his message about the value of targeted programs to the public. If such a strategy seems implausible after the last election, bear in mind that President Clinton won such a confrontation just over 15 years ago, when the Federal Government shut down after he and Congressional Republicans failed to pass a budget–just over 1 year after his party lost control of Congress in a wave election.

For now, the House soldiers on with its open invite to propose budget cuts; a vote is expected either in the very wee hours of this morning or some time Friday–though it would not be unheard-of for such a contested and sensitive vote for it to drag on into the weekend. In the meantime, House Republicans debate the priorities of their base: The Washington Post reports that the House is either debating or has likely passed 1 or 2 amendments banning funds from implementing the President’s 2010 Health Care Reform, and the New York Times reports that House Republicans are currently debating eliminating all Title X funding for Planned Parenthood, claiming that family planning assistance for the poor makes abortions more-affordable. The anti-Health Care Reform amendments, of course, are a tactical measure aimed at a central 2010 Republican campaign commitment; the proposal to eliminate $317 million in family planning assistance, the Liberal Ironist suspects, is part of a strained Republican effort to appease both the Christian Right and Libertarian factions of the Republican Party, which likely share only 1 sentiment about abortion–that the Federal Government shouldn’t spend money to fund or even facilitate it in any way.

To President Obama and Congressional Democrats, however, those amendments epitomize a budget-cutting process aimed at society’s most-vulnerable. Were it not for all the rest, those amendments alone would have to be removed for the Senate–let-alone the President–to pass the budget. Of course, at this rate the Senate won’t have time to discuss removing the amendments anyway…

The National Review Lacks Its Moral Compass Without Buckley

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Andrew Sullivan, blogging on The Daily Dish, has raised the subject of the National Review’s frequent recourse to the low road in recent years. He closes this column with the same thought the Liberal Ironist had while reading it–indeed, the same thought I’ve had for years when I would turn to the National Review:

“This is what’s become of The House That Buckley Built.”

William F. Buckley Jr.: Horrible sitting posture, good moral posture.

True, Sullivan was mostly directing his criticism at various contributors to the National Review’s online content, but that doesn’t mitigate the point: William F. Buckley Jr., as much as anyone set the agenda for modern American Conservatism, but his magazine managed to invite a wide variety of strains of Conservatism into the political movement while also turning his hand up against uncouth radicals and resentful bigots alike. He wouldn’t ingratiate himself to his audience and he drew a line against bigotry, whether intellectual, religious or racial, and he would sometimes acknowledge he had been wrong about some progressive causes, such as the Civil Rights movement.

I really stopped paying attention to the National Review around 2004, when one of its contributors wasted an entire column with irrelevant and hyperbolic slurs about his life in (Democratic, and thus somehow abominable) New York. The truth is the National Review increasingly played to the lowest common denominator over the past decade, reflecting a shameful lack of mission integrity in the face of the mean-spirited and vacuous but marketable bluster of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

William F. Buckley Jr. left the editor position in 1990, and for whatever reason Rich Lowry simply doesn’t have his sense of fair play (or, apparently, Buckley’s concern with political relevance). Buckley probably did more than any other intellectual to breathe life into American Conservatism after founding the National Review in 1955. He was undeniably a Conservative (and your faithful Ironist frankly thinks our country would be better off without the political movement he cobbled together out of a fusion of market economics, Christian traditionalism, and anti-Communism), but he pushed the magazine (and by example exhorted the Republican Party generally) to take the high road, publishing Whittaker Chambers’ attack of the ideological bigotry of Atlas Shrugged back in the 1950s and keeping anti-Semites out of the magazine, attacking the John Birch Society in 1962 as a dangerous influence, admitting he was wrong about the Civil Rights movement after passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and opposing George Wallace’s Presidential bid in 1968 on those grounds, and stating before the New York Bar Association in 1995 that the “War on Drugs” was un-winnable and harmful to millions of Americans and thereafter moving the Review’s editorial position that way. Buckley was brilliant and early in his skepticism of the Iraq War; too central to the Conservative movement to condemn but no longer a necessary or active leader of it, his criticisms of the President’s decision to go to war made not a ripple, hidden in plain sight. Maybe it marks a significant transition that Buckley retired as editor-in-chief at the National Review in 1990 and Newt Gingrich emerged as the first Republican Speaker of the House since 1954 just 4 years later, similarly articulating Conservative principles in an intellectual cast but dissimilarly interpreting his electoral mandate as an invitation to carry on a spiteful and ultimately self-defeating vendetta against President Clinton.

The Republican Party’s recent historic political successes aside, the Conservative movement wants for someone to credibly assume the role of both its intellectual guide and conscience. That we may give “To bigotry no sanction,” as George Washington put it in his letter to the Providence synagogue, for the sake of civility in politics, and for the soul of the Conservative movement itself if not the very interest of its long-term political viability, this movement needs a Buckley of this generation, one with a catholic approach to the movement’s many perspectives who nonetheless disavows its darker impulses and focus on building a political tradition rather than simply destroying it in a storm of political know-nothingism. He would criticize those who’d say “the President is a Muslim” simply because of partisanship, and wouldn’t care any more for the Birthers than Buckley did for the Birchers. Like former Republican Mike Bloomberg, he would defend religious liberty in Lower Manhattan, refusing to make expedient compromise between fundamental principles and emotive misinformation. I have no idea what his reflections on the revolution in Egypt would be, but he wouldn’t criticize the President’s middling tack without laying a compelling alternative course. And whatever his proclivities on this issue, he wouldn’t pretend to defend the American heritage by assuming we could round-up undocumented immigrants in the largest mass-expulsion since Stalin.

William F. Buckley, Jr. may have slowly and serenely faded away before his death, but now the interacting consequences of his political vision and his personal absence are all around us. The Liberal Ironist misses the Catholic Conservative.

While we could have done without his Conservatism, we suffer badly for want of his dignity, his morality and his sense of fair play.

Just a Point of Perspective About 2012 for All You Political Junkies Out There…

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The Gallup Organization polled President Obama’s overall approval rating at 49% on February 10th. That may not sound great, but it actually puts the President on good footing to be re-elected. Gallup also offers a comparison with past Gallup Polls of Presidential approval ratings for the February following their first midterm election. George W. Bush, just over a month from starting the war that would ultimately consume his Presidency, had a 59% approval rating, but something interesting comes to light in comparisons with the preceding Presidents.

Bill Clinton’s February 1995 approval rating was 46%, and he won re-election easily and ultimately became immensely popular. The 1-termer George H. W. Bush had a February 1991 approval rating of 83%. Ronald Reagan had a 40% approval rating in February 1983 and was re-elected in a landslide in 1984; Jimmy Carter also had a 40% approval rating back in February 1979 but famously lost his re-election bid in a landslide.

Richard Nixon had a 49% approval rating in February 1971, and won re-election in what is probably the biggest Democratic Presidential campaign embarrassment of the past century.

There are different ways to look at these comparisons. First, one could say that Presidential approval ratings aren’t indicative of anything; I don’t buy that. Second, one could say the dynamics of Presidential politics depend heavily on heavily on contingencies, and so a President’s re-election prospects can’t be forecast the moment he faces his 2nd Congress; in broad strokes this must be true, but I still say it profits us political junkies to try to understand what sorts of factors upset a presidency. Only 3 sitting Presidents since World War II have failed to win re-election if they sought it–Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush Sr. All 3 confronted abysmal economic conditions and failed to deal with them.

That’s one way of looking at it–and while it’s unoriginal to the point of banality, maybe the question is why we political junkies seem to shy away from the economic indicators. Our country’s economic fundamentals are strong; if President Obama can bring unemployment down (or if it simply falls, for whatever reason), and housing prices pick up after the stagnation of 2007, collapse of 2008-09, and stagnation thereafter, he will likely be impervious to attack. But if we fail to find a solution for the lagging economic variables–especially unemployment–then we find ourselves in Jimmy Carter/George Bush Sr. political territory. You can be a moral exemplar for your people and you can win a major war with remarkable speed and ease, but Americans will not abide pervasive high unemployment. Our economists were by and large unpleasantly-surprised by the Financial Crash; now that they have given portents of a jobless recovery it is the President’s full-time job to see that they are pleasantly-surprised.

Sire! The Conservatives Are Revolting!

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Thursday’s New York Times revealed the limits of Congressional Republicans’ capacity for legislative organization. So far, House Republicans have passed 2 major bills and lost 2 major bills: The Health Care Reform repeal that predictably went nowhere in the Senate was passed on January 19th, and a bill eliminating public financing of Presidential campaigns was passed on January 26th; then last Tuesday, February 8th, the Republicans lost a vote to temporarily extend expiring provisions of the massive and controversial USA PATRIOT Act without a floor debate by failing to win a supermajority, and last Wednesday, the 9th, a bill to demand repayment of just over $179 million that House Republicans deemed the US Government overpaid to the United Nations in 2009 also failed to win a supermajority. So, to date the House of Representatives of the 112th Congress has ended Federal matching funds for Presidential elections and effectively called for greater scrutiny of the PATRIOT Act. The latter attempt at a quick renewal failed by a margin of 6 votes, with 26 mostly-Conservative Republicans defecting.

Though the 112th Congress just met, this is not a portentious start considering all the measures the House Republican leadership proposed in their 2010 “Pledge to America.” The Federal budget is where this might really come to a head. Reflecting its usual penchant for the conceptual scoop, the Times article focused on what its author saw as the profound increase in the opposition’s difficulties: “The fraying of party unity, if not of a scale or intensity that imperils Mr. Boehner’s ability to advance the main elements of his agenda, nonetheless stood in sharp contrast to the record of Republicans in remaining remarkably united against President Obama and the Democrats over the past two years.” It’s early yet, and Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Republican Conference Chair Jeb Hensarling (who was deeply-involved in the House Republicans’ 2010 midterm campaign strategy) and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Paul Ryan may yet succeed in disciplining this majority. The article also mentioned that the House GOP leadership tried to expedite some bills for passage even though it required a supermajority because they believed those votes would be non-controversial. For now, the Speaker has been letting a thousand flowers bloom among the ranks; these upsets may compel him to change his managerial style.

But regarding the Federal budget vote, right now, there’s no stopping the Conservatives. On Friday the House leadership relented to Conservatives who objected to a Republican budget that prorated the budget cuts to the 5 1/2 months of the current fiscal year that will have lapsed by early March, as well as allowed cuts to the Pentagon budget to make up some of the difference. Among cuts outlined in the Washington Post report are over $1 billion cut from certain items intended to implement the President’s Health Care Reform, about 30% of the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget, and yes, the complete elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

There is a real risk that, if left to their own devices the House Conservatives could really screw themselves over with their insistence on $100 billion in domestic discretionary spending cuts, now. True, the “Pledge to America” promised budget cuts of that size to the annual Federal budget. The fiscal year started on October 1st, and usually Congress would pass a budget that would last through next September 30th…What actually transpired last year, however, was that the Republicans during the lame-duck session approved a budget for the rest of this fiscal year that would keep spending at current levels, which was what the President’s preference. Then Tea Party activists started calling the Republicans hypocrites for supporting current Federal spending levels, and the Republicans reneged, blocking passage of the budget in the Senate! Congressional Republicans agreed to a continuing resolution for funding the Federal Government only through March. So, some time before March 4th, a majority of Representatives, 60 Senators and President Obama have to agree on a budget to fund the Federal Government through September 30th. To properly pro-rate the budget cuts the Republicans were proposing, the House Republican leadership called for about $50 billion in budget cuts, and even subtracted the President’s roughly-$16 billion in Defense Department cuts into that, thus bringing the amount they were cutting from Federal programs for this year to under $40 billion. Then the Tea Partiers in the House (and the larger conservative Republican Study Committee) revolted and refused to pass that budget. They are calling for $100 billion in Federal budget cuts now. They’re upholding the number on paper against the scale of budget cuts the number is actually intended to mean in the House Republican leaders’ “Pledge.” So now House Speaker John Boehner is confronted with an ugly choice: Either try to pass a budget with most of the Democrats and try to weather a challenge by conservatives, or give in to Republican demands for a budget that faces an uphill battle in the Senate, let-alone on President Obama’s desk, and of being stuck with either a Democratic-passed budget (in the context of a huge Republican House majority) or a government shutdown. There is no reason to expect a government shutdown today to go down differently than it did in spring 1995: The President has the means to speak out on behalf of (hypothetically-suspended) Federal programs and the House Republicans trying to force budget cuts have no real medium or message to justify the government shutdown. House Republicans would probably be forced to relent, their reputation damaged both with their base and independents; Democrats would be energized by the threatening spectacle.

John Boehner commands 242 Republican seats in the 435-seat House of Representatives. He won this majority in a historic 63-seat swing to the Republicans, having produced his “Pledge to America” as a promise to set Federal budgetary and regulatory policy from the right. What he wants (and what House Speakers can almost always count on) is for near-all of his fellow-partisans to vote with him, whatever the Democrats decide to do about it. If he can’t manage that, it’s an embarrassment. The Republican Party, to be frank, is the party of common-cause posturing–until the Tea Party revolt it was the party of Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment: “Never insult a fellow Republican.” It is more of a problem for them if they can’t pull together. We Democrats are a permanent coalition of contentious but not lost causes; we’re practically expected to quarrel amongst ourselves. If Speaker Boehner turns to the Democrats to pass a budget, it inevitably makes him look weak–to the President with whom he must contend over legislation, and definitely to the House Republican Caucus who made him Speaker.

So far, the party leadership can’t explain to the relative political neophytes of the freshman class why not all their budget cuts have to be passed this year, or why they needn’t be found in popular programs. That’s what we’re looking at. There is no master plan behind this, and it wasn’t to Republicans’ advantage to delay setting a budget like this. The Liberal Ironist thinks John Boehner has been underestimated up to now, but no amount of cleverness will overcome a legion of righteous activists intoxicated by recent (and unrepresentative) victories.

Today the President will introduce substantial program cuts in his own budget; this will give us maximum and minimum parameters for the scope of the Federal Government. Once this document is out, the ball will be back in the House Republicans’ court, if they can do anything with it.