Month: September 2013

They aren’t even asking for an estimate

by digby

I haven’t heard much concern about the cost of this Syrian operation which is kind of surprising since the last four years has been a non-stop barrage of rhetoric about the need to cut government spending — from members of both parties. We’ve had epic unemployment (much of it driven by government cutbacks), proposals from a democratic president to cut social security benefits, credit downgrades, and a brutal sequestration process that is resulting in painful cuts all over the country. But the only person I’ve seen even question the cost of a new military operation is Congressman Alan Grayson. Note the cavalier way Secretary Hagel dismisses the concern:

Grayson: “Secretary Hagel, will the military action in Syria, if it does take place, require a supplemental appropriation and, if you think not, then will you commit to that not?”

Hagel: Well, it depends on the option that the president would select. I have said that we will work with the Congress on whatever the cost of that is.”

I’m going to guess that it won’t be a problem getting supplemental money for this should it be necessary.

Meanwhile:

On Wednesday, the Department of Agriculture released a 2012 survey showing that nearly 49 million Americans were living in “food insecure” households — meaning, in the bureaucratic language of the agency, that some family members lacked “consistent access throughout the year to adequate food.” In short, many Americans went hungry. The agency found the figures essentially unchanged since the economic downturn began in 2008, but substantially higher than during the previous decade.

And:

About half the births in the United States are paid for by Medicaid — a figure higher than previous estimates – and the numbers could increase as the state-federal health insurance program expands under the Affordable Care Act, according to a study released Tuesday.

All pregnant women with incomes below 133 percent of the federal poverty level, just below $15,300 for an individual, are eligible for Medicaid, and many states provide coverage to women earning well above that amount.

While previous research has estimated about 40 percent of the nearly 4 million annual births in the United States were paid for by Medicaid, the latest study by researchers at George Washington University and the March of Dimes looked at individual state data and estimated that in 2010 48 percent of births were covered by Medicaid.

48% of newborn Americans are considered to be in or near poverty. We’re cutting food stamps. But when it comes to the cost of yet another misbegotten military operation halfway around the world, which even the proponents acknowledge is nothing more than a symbolic gesture, we don’t even ask for an estimate.

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Is it a dumb war?

by digby

The CW from First Read:

In its lobbying effort to get support for military intervention in Syria, the Obama administration now has one clear target: the left. Yesterday, per the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, White House officials held a conference call with House progressives. Today, Secretary of State John Kerry chats with liberal bloggers, and he also sits down for an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.

Here’s the logic behind the effort: Locking down House Democratic — and liberal — votes allows the White House to go back to House Speaker John Boehner to get the remainder of available Republican votes. But the White House will have to deliver a large share of Democratic votes. And consequently, we can report that momentum is growing for President Obama to address the nation in a primetime speech. If Democrats — many of whom were elected in the aftermath of Iraq — are going to have to cast a tough vote for military intervention, they’re going to need cover from Obama.

Yes, in fact I think it’s obvious that this bipartisan vote will in all likelihood have to be majority Democratic — the party that won the 2006 and 2008 elections largely on an anti-war platform. Awesome. But I suppose that’s not surprising since the initiative is being led by a president who won his first election on the basis of not having been in national office at the time of the Iraq War vote and a speech he made in 2002.

As we go further into this debate on Syria, I can’t help but be reminded of that speech:

Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don’t oppose all wars.

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don’t oppose all wars.

After Sept. 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again. I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear — I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president today. You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s finish the fight with bin Laden and al-Qaida, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings. You want a fight, President Bush?

Let’s fight to make sure that the U.N. inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe. You want a fight, President Bush?

Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells. You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair. The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not — we will not — travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

It’s 11 years later. And the circumstances are different, to be sure. Iraq is not Syria. But I think the question all the Democrats should ask themselves is whether or not, by the president’s own criteria, this is a “dumb war.” I think it is. But that’s just me.

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Increased polarization on reproductive rights by geography

by David Atkins

This last week saw some interesting findings on abortion and reproductive rights from Pew. It turns out that the commonly perceived slide in public support for choice isn’t so: support is actually increasing on the coasts, but decreasing in the South and Midwest.

Looking over their latest survey data on abortion, the Pew fact-mongers headline a growing “north-south divide,” with New Englanders becoming more pro-choice and Southerners from Kentucky to Texas becoming more pro-life. But that’s not the whole story. – See more at: http://marksilk.religionnews.com/2013/09/03/abortion-and-the-red-suspender/#sthash.VEfiBW2d.dpuf

It’s true that since the mid-90s, New England has become even more pro-choice than the country’s most pro-choice region used to be. Specifically, the gap between New Englanders who think all or most abortions should be legal and those who think all or most should be illegal increased by 11 points. That, I’d say, is the result of the diminution of Catholicism in the region, thanks in no small measure to the sexual abuse scandal of 2002-03.

It’s the Midwest that has shifted rightward on this issue more than any other.

But that’s just another symptom of increased polarization in the country overall. Different parts of America are trending farther apart on a whole host of issues, and this is just one among many where geography tends to dictate public opinion.

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Who the f— knows what it will cost?”

by digby

It’s interesting how they can always find the money for this stuff, isn’t it?

A limited United States intervention in Syria would not require a supplemental appropriations bill from Congress, an Obama administration official told The Huffington Post on Wednesday.

The official’s assessment that a narrowly tailored operation could be paid for with “existing Department of Defense resources” was seconded by two high-ranking aides on Capitol Hill.

However, another Hill staffer argued that without a greater understanding of the operation, it would be impossible to settle on an exact price tag or means of payment.

“Who the f— knows what it will cost? It depends entirely on what happens,” said the staffer.

Meanwhile:

Head Start programs cut staff members and students. Meals on Wheels, a federal program that delivers meals to the homebound elderly, scaled back in some communities. Federal public defenders, already strapped for funding, cut an additional 11 percent out of their budgets and are preparing for more cuts this fall.

It’s been six months since the federal government imposed $85 billion worth of mandatory budget cuts, and among those who have felt the impact most acutely have been the poorest Americans.

“Did the sequester disproportionately hurt the poor?” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks. “You bet it did.”

Among the cuts Ohio social-service agencies have faced:

• The Ohio Department of Health saw reductions to programs including WIC food and newborn-hearing programs. The department has absorbed the impact for those cuts and many others to date.

• Federal unemployment benefits in Ohio have been reduced by 16 percent, an average of about $50 per week.

• According to the Department of Health and Human Services, an estimated 2,782 Ohio preschoolers have been cut from Head Start, a portion of the 57,265 expected to be cut nationwide.

Shared sacrifice, dontcha know?

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How Nativists and Criminals Concocted an Issue that Haunts the Immigration Debate

by digby

There are some important issues close to home that still need tending. This is one:

For Immediate Release:                                         Contact:  Katy Green
September 4, 2013                                                                    650-464-1545

****Google+ Hangout****
TOMORROWSeptember 5th at 1:00 PM EDT
RSVP HERE

The Border Security Scam: How Nativists and Criminals Concocted an Issue that Haunts the Immigration Debate 

Washington, DC – As Congress returns to Washington, the House is expected to consider several pieces of legislation dealing with immigration.  Among those are bills relating to border security – an issue that has been at the forefront of the immigration debate for several years. In June, the Senate passed an immigration bill that included a path to citizenship for undocumented Americans along with a $40 billion “border surge” that would double the size of the border patrol to 40,000 troops.  This fall, the House is set to consider a raft of immigration measures including the “SAFE Act” (or Safe to Harass Act), which would make Arizona’s SB 1070 the law of the land. 

Most Americans support a balanced approach to immigration policy and reform.  So where did the relentless focus on more and more aggressive enforcement originate?  During the last decade, border security groups like the Minutemen pushed this issue into the forefront. Their extreme messaging was adopted by the media, members of Congress and other officials including the notorious, anti-immigrant Sherriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona. But, increasingly the leaders of that movement are being exposed for their shady pasts and suspect motivations. 

Tomorrow

David Neiwert, author of “And Hell Followed With Her:  Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border” will tell the history of border security extremists, including the tale of Shawna Forde, one of its leading figures, who is currently on death row in Arizona.  Juanita Molina from the Border Action Network in Tucson, Arizona, will discuss how these groups and personalities shaped the debate over immigration reform in her state. Julieta Garibay from United We DREAM will explain how that discussion led to an growing push to militarize the border. Frank Sharry from America’s Voice will moderate. 

This will be a live and interactive event and speakers will be taking questions from Twitter using the hash tag #borderscam.   

If you’d like to RSVP for tomorrow’s Google+ hangout, click here. 

WHAT:            Advocates discuss the border security scam

WHEN:            THURSDAY, September 5th at 1:00 PM EDT

WHO:              David Neiwert, author of “And Hell Followed With Her”
                         Juanita Molina, Executive Director, Border Action Network
                         Julieta Garibay, United We DREAM
                         Frank Sharry, Executive Director, America’s Voice

 Follow Frank Sharry and America’s Voice on Twitter: @FrankSharry and @AmericasVoice

America’s Voice — Harnessing the power of American voices and American values to win common sense immigration reform 

Update: Here’s Neiwert’s op-ed on the “border security” sham. It is shameful.

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Huckleberry’s History Lesson

by digby

What a silly man:

“Well, this is about the most mismanaged situation I’ve ever seen since World War II when they were trying to to control the Nazis.”

Hey,let’s be fair. Those wacky Nazis were known for being incorrigible. Nobody could control them.

I don’t mind historical analogies. It’s how humans contextualize current events. But to go all the way back to WWII just seems so unnecessary when there have been so many despots and tyrants since then that “they” have “mismanaged.” But then Huck wouldn’t want to admit that, I suppose, because so many of them were friends of the American right wing — until they weren’t. It’s kind of embarrassing.

Meanwhile, James Fallows offers up another piece about Syria from veteran diplomat Robert Pastor whose analysis of the regime presents the forgotten option: diplomacy. (Huckleberry would call this “appeasement” but he’s an idiot.) The analysis concludes with this advice:

If the United States changed the way it looked at diplomacy, from trying to get under the skin of its adversaries to getting into their shoes, the framework of the deal could emerge. The United States should go to Russia, drop its demand that Assad must leave as a precondition for a Geneva conference, and focus instead on the political process. I believe it can persuade Russia that a more inclusive political-participation process in Syria is in Russia’s best interests, and that the question is how to stabilize the environment so that can occur. Then the United States should ask Russia to join in assembling a robust and assertive peacemaking mission in Syria to assure the security of a free election. Also, the United States should ask Russia’s help in finding a place at the negotiating table for Iran, which has already accepted a Geneva conference without preconditions and favors a power-sharing agreement that would protect all groups.

All three nations – Iran, Russia, and the United States — would then have a stake in both negotiations and the outcome. There is no better person to orchestrate and mediate such an agreement than Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special envoy to Syria and the person who negotiated the Taif agreement in Lebanon. All he needs is the support of the United States and the Security Council. Up until now, we have consistently undermined his efforts.

None of this would be easy, and it would be even harder to negotiate a free election and a peacekeeping force, but if you compare it to the alternatives for each of the regional and global powers, especially the United States, this diplomatic option seems the best. But it will require a great deal of political courage by the president since there are few people in Congress who would like to open up to Iran or to look as if we are making any concession to Russia. Nonetheless, this diplomatic option would pack a more effective punch than cruise missiles.

With McCain, Graham and Kerry making bellicose speeches worthy of Nikita Kruschev, it’s going to be a little tough. But it’s far preferable to violent intervention.

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Kabuki authorization

by digby

Greg Sargent lays out the White House strategy to get Democrats on board with the Syrian strikes:

If Congress does get to Yes on Syria, it won’t be hard to see why. What’s happening here is that Congress is being given a way to rein in the White House on Syria without saying No to authorizing the punitive strikes the Obama administration wants to launch.

Today, the President and the White House will very likely weigh in on the latest turn in the debate, providing more clues to where it’s headed.

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress have introduced new versions of the Syria resolution that contain far stricter limits on Obama’s authority than the previous resolution offered by the White House. The version introduced by House Dems is here; the one introduced by a bipartisan group of Senators is here. Both stipulate no ground troops will be deployed and both limit force to 60 days (the Senate version allows one 30-day extension). The House version explicitly limits strikes to retaliation against use of chemical weapons, as opposed to broader efforts to degrade the Syrian military. The two versions probably won’t be hard to mesh.

You can probably expect Obama and/or the White House to say generally positive things about these resolutions today, thus signaling a willingness to limit the mission in keeping with what Congress wants.

Ultimately what this will do is give those members of Congress who appear inclined to support the general need for action against Assad a way to argue to constituents that they have placed substantial limits on the White House’s authority to wage war. Members of Congress were shocked by the broadness of the White House’s initial request for authority, but — whether by mistake or by design — it has given Congress a way to appear to be taking action to place tight limits on Obama’s warmaking authority.

He points out that this will widely be seen as kabuki (and acknowledges that it pretty much is.) I’m not sure of that — I think the press will present this exactly as the White House and the leadership wants them to and most citizens will accept it at face value.

But I’m on the record about this already.

I’m going to guess that the Democrats … will pretty easily be persuaded to authorize strikes once they’ve been able to pretend that they are watering down the president’s proposal. (I’m fairly sure that was worked out in advance.) I would love to think I’m wrong about this but recent experience shows that the president’s party almost always backs the president on these things and depending on the political climate, a fairly substantial faction of the opposition balks. Both parties are extremely hypocritical in these matters.

Still, this has been less predictable than usual. I was certainly surprised by the British vote and the president pulling the plug n the strikes to go to congress was a surprise. So, who knows?

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QOTD:  sensitive plutocrats

by digby

“[Mayoral candidate Bill DeBlasio’s proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy so that all children can attend pre-school] shows lack of sensitivity to the city’s biggest revenue providers and job creators,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a network of 200 chief executive officers, including co-Chairman Laurence Fink of BlackRock Inc., the world’s biggest money manager.

Greedy plutocrats have feelings too! Sheesh. Paying more in taxes hurts their feelings. These people are working as hard as they can to create lots of jobs by buying expensive jewelry, real estate, yachts and art. What more do these parasites…er, little people expect from them? Blood????

There’s more:

“Almost anyone with a self-perceived degree of affluence will be uncomfortable with de Blasio’s tax ideas,” said Michael Steinhardt, chairman of New York-based asset manager WisdomTree Investments Inc. While growing inequality is troubling, Steinhardt said, “perhaps even more so is the thought that more government spending is the way out of our problems.”[…]

E.E. “Buzzy” Geduld, who runs the hedge fund Cougar Capital LLC in the city and is a trustee of Manhattan’s Dalton School, where annual tuition tops $40,000, said de Blasio’s plan “is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard” and “not a smart thing to do.”[…]

The city should be cutting spending and taxes, said Peter Solomon, chairman of New York-based investment bank Peter J. Solomon Co. and a former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. vice chairman.

FYI:

De Blasio, elected in 2009 to the watchdog post of public advocate, says he’s concerned that the number of middle-income city residents is shrinking. The richest 1 percent took home 39 percent of all earnings in 2012, up from 12 percent in 1980, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group in New York.

Because they’re woooooorth it.

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Are we prepared to barter social security for war?

by digby

Yeah, I’m fairly sure this is the GOPs political calculation:

I don’t suppose anyone will dare make the point that the Republicans will be agreeing to launch yet another war in exchange for cutting even more vital services for Americans at home. (Well, besides Alan Grayson…) But that’s what this will be if the GOP is successful in using their “leverage” on Syria to get the cuts they (and plenty of Democrats also) want on the budget.  American poor, sick, old and young will be paying for yet another military debacle out of the already meager stipends they get from the government.

Oxymoron ‘o the day: Humanitarian War

by digby

“I would argue that when I see 400 children subjected to gas, over 1,400 innocent civilians dying senselessly . . . the moral thing to do is not to stand by and do nothing.” — President Obama earlier today

That’s very compelling. This article in Jacobin Magazine by Greg Shupak explains why humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms:

Liberal interventionists thought they had this one. Their doctrine had seemingly triumphed in Libya. Not only were the usual suspects, the Christopher Hitchenses, the Bernard-Henri Levys, peddling the notion that NATO could be a global constabulary for the enforcement of human rights, but more careful commentators like Juan Cole and Gilbert Achcar had also backed Western intervention. If NATO’s war in Libya has now lost some of its initial luster, it is primarily because the murder of US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans brought worldwide attention to the nature of the forces the war unleashed and to the chaotic state in which Libyans now find themselves.

But the shine was, from the start, an illusion, as Maximilian Forte proves in his important new book, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa. Forte thoroughly chronicles NATO’s bombing of Libya and the crimes against humanity for which NATO is responsible. The author takes us on a tour of Sirte after it had been subject to intense NATO bombardment by chronicling journalists’ impressions of the city in October 2011. Reporters observed, “Nothing could survive in here for very long,” that the city was “reduced to rubble, a ghost town filled with the stench of death and where bodies litter the streets,” that it was a place “almost without an intact building,” whose infrastructure “simply ceased to exist,” and resembled “Ypres in 1915, or Grozny in 1995,” or postwar “Leningrad, Gaza or Beirut.”

Forte describes numerous NATO operations which, he argues, rose to the level of war crimes. For example, he discusses a NATO strike on a farming compound in the town of Majer on 8 August 2011. A Human Rights Watch investigation concluded that NATO fired on the compound twice, the second time killing 34 civilians who had come to look for survivors —a tactic familiar to those who follow US drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen—and found no evidence that the target had been used for military purposes. In its examination of five sites where NATO caused civilian casualties, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) found that at four of those sites NATO’s characterization of the targets as “‘command and control nodes’ or ‘troop staging areas’ was not reflected in evidence at the scene and witness testimony.” In view of these and other killings of civilians by NATO, Palestinian lawyer Raji Sourani remarks that the Independent Civil Society Mission to Libya of which he was a part has “reason to think that there were some war crimes perpetrated” by NATO. Through this method, Forte shows the fundamental contradiction of humanitarian wars: they kill people to ensure that people are not killed.

If people want to make a moral argument for military intervention they have to reckon with this in some way. And as far as I can tell the only way to do that is to say you hope you don’t kill quite as many people as the “bad guys” would have killed if you didn’t intervene. That’s not good enough.

Moreover, you have to reckon with the obvious fact that these humanitarian wars are almost always underwritten by people with other motives that are not quite so high-minded, something which the president actually gets to when he talks about “credibility” although he ties it into the humanitarian case in a way that isn’t quite honest. The “credibility”on the line is far more about US machismo than it is about the need to enforce norms about chemical weapons. Obviously.

All of this adds up to humanitarian war not being a particularly moral decisions except in a rather preening sense of self-regard and presumed nobility on the part of those who need to believe they alone have both the power and the will to “help”. It’s horrible to feel impotent in the face of violence so it’s a natural impulse to feel that someone must step in and stop it. But modern warfare is so powerfully violent (and our attention span so short) that it is almost inevitable that military force will, at best, end up solving nothing. In fact, it almost always makes thing worse.

“I do have to ask people, well, if in fact you are outraged by the slaughter of innocent people, well, what are you doing about it?” — President Obama earlier today

If we really want to help the Syrian people perhaps we should spend the billions we plan to spend for military action on helping the refugees. After all, whether we bomb Syria or not, it looks as though they aren’t going to be going home any time soon. If we want to “do something” there is definitely something to do besides hurl explosives.

Obviously, I used this analysis of Libya to make a larger point in the context of Syria. But you should read the whole article (and presumably, the book, which I’ve just ordered)for the specific analysis of the Libyan intervention and why our intervention may end up being instrumental in creating a whole new environment for ongoing “interventions” in Africa. It’s the sort of insight that can’t help but make you cynical about the whole operation — after all, military powers need battlefields on which to fight. And they’re always looking for new ones.

Update: Oh, and this from yesterday:

A little under two years ago, Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, urged British businessmen to begin “packing their suitcases” and to fly to Libya to share in the reconstruction of the country and exploit an anticipated boom in natural resources.

Yet now Libya has almost entirely stopped producing oil as the government loses control of much of the country to militia fighters.

Mutinying security men have taken over oil ports on the Mediterranean and are seeking to sell crude oil on the black market. Ali Zeidan, Libya’s Prime Minister, has threatened to “bomb from the air and the sea” any oil tanker trying to pick up the illicit oil from the oil terminal guards, who are mostly former rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and have been on strike over low pay and alleged government corruption since July.

As world attention focused on the coup in Egypt and the poison gas attack in Syria over the past two months, Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Gaddafi two years ago. Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country putting in doubt claims by American, British and French politicians that Nato’s military action in Libya in 2011 was an outstanding example of a successful foreign military intervention which should be repeated in Syria.

Did we really help?

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