Tunesia, Egyt and now Yemen: a domino effect in the Middle East?

So it seems, except for Qatar.
Meanwhile, Yemen is falling apart. Any quick summary of what is happening there would be appreciated.
Thanks.

They can back-track all they want; they should not have asked the UN for permission to create a no-fly zone in Libya. You can't approve to have surgery for something, then tell the doctors they must stop, because you changed your mind.

If that is allowed, UN approval means nothing in the future.

Yes you can, and yes they have backtracked.

That seems to me to be the obvious and self-evident conclusion from all that we have observed of the UN over the past decades.

Yes, they are both unreliable for anything; I'm sure they will not be taken seriously in the future by many UN members and others. They made the value of talk cheaper still, and I'm not so sure many countries will come to assist them in the future - even when they cry "wolf," and close to total destruction.

Actually, according to this article, they only wanted a no-fly zone but no bombs.


source

Which means, it seems, that we backtracked by going further than they had agreed to. And we used their agreement as a key component of our rhetoric. In every speech I saw. It baffled me from the start. The Iranians must be jumping with joy.

"The riot squad are restless, they need someplace to go". I imagine that it would consistent in the character of those who successfully climb the greasy pole of politics to seek to command in a war. After all, putting 4p on a pint and giving the single mums an extra £2 a week must be a bit trivial to those who got to the top of the pole by kicking opponents off it and then found themselves **** scared of bankers and scientific advice.

Is any leader, of whatever stamp, not going to resist his country falling apart if able to do so?

This is contemptable and it would be a serious mistake to allow it to go unchallenged. Egypt has ample military forces, just across the border from Bengazi, and is more able to provide the "protection of civilians" it hypocritically claims to desire than are the French, UK and US forces trying to stop the Libyan government from killing its own civilians in a campaign which its leader has already declared will be pursued mercilessly.

The western powers should publicly rebuke the Egyptian general and invite him to provide an example of the protections he proclaims are required. The same goes for the rest of the basically authoritarian governments in the Arab world. The truth is they are all afraid the contagion will strike them as well.

Another example of the fact that the notion of an "international community" interested in justice and willing to lift a finger to aid those in need of it is a great illusion - one we accept at our peril. Neither the UN nor this international community has any moral or lergal authority and we make a great mistake in furthering the fiction that it has either.

But George---one cannot blame a fledgling world government for the recalcitrance of the material. The idea of world government arose from the destructive nature of modern weapons and the economic interdependence of countries. If you are prepared to go back to spears and bows and arrows and warming ourselves at peat fires you can make a case against the UN.

It's as if you expect a quarter-back to throw a touchdown pass everytime. At this stage of the proceedings the UN's task is almost impossible and the last thing the human race needs is for them to throw up their hands in despair at the prospect. It has 192 member states. That's some baby to wrestle with.

And those who don't support it, and its resolutions, can only bomb an another on its own account. Where is the legitimacy for these attacks without a UN resolution? And why was so much high level diplomacy used to get 1973 passed?

Your objections to the UN have no foundation outside of isolationism in its crudest form. It's passe George. Naive. But I know it sounds good after a few snifters. I can do it myself. Turn it on and off like a tap.

Try defending the UN for a year, simply as an intellectual exercise. Surprise all your buddies at the Yacht Club. You simply wait for one of them, a captain of a 40 footer, say, to say something derogatory about the UN and you say "Now wait a minute there old boy, it's not quite so simple as your simple mind thinks it is." And away you go. If you can get the vein in his temple throbbing you are getting somewhere. The UN website will probably have all the best arguments ready for you to use at just a click away. Sitting in your cane chairs all agreeing that the UN is a herd of free-loading dumb-asses for ever and ever can cause the brain to sieze up in some zones. It wouldn't be so bad if it siezed-up in every zone but alas that's quite rare.

I presumed he would be red in the face to start with. Yachts are serious indignation services. It is evolution's indignation feature to teach us what not to do. Or it might be better to say what not to do if possible.

I've arrived at the state where I can go from one year end to another without the slightest sense of indignation. Even in selling a house and buying another, which has fewer indignation services, I have been unpeturbed at events which I know would drive most of the people I know into slamming doors hard enough for the slates to slide off the roof. It is a sort of theatre of the absurd. Where one wonders what the characters would be doing if they weren't doing this. That this might be the best way of dealing with them and it is one's turn to take one for the team. Something more honoured in the breach than the observance of course.

Depends on your concept of legitimacy and its sources. I do detect a certain strange preoccupation with the superficial forms it as I occasionally tune into the UK hearings investigating the actions of Blair's government. Then that same concern for legitimacy appeared to be absent in the evaluation of appeals by a terrorist murderer for clemency release from imprisionment when a jucy contract was held up by a petty tyrant as an inducement.

Legitimate is as legitimate does. We are known by the price at which we will sell these things.

Come, come George. Your red mist is unbecoming in a man of your experience and status.

What makes you think that abolishing the UN wouldn't put future generations in peril? More peril than from not abolishing it even. What evidence can you offer that it won't? I'm quite willing to consider it.

The assertion that continuing with the UN puts us all in peril is grossly insufficient as an argument for abolishing it. So gross that it isn't an argument at all. Assuming you're not Solomon. Or God. Solid arguments are required.

George--I have already told you that Mr al-Megrahri is a convicted terrorist murderer. Only this week I heard a government minister in the House of Commons use the word "convicted". There is an important difference in English law. Many of the families of the victims are convinced of his innocence in this case as are many eminent members of the legal profession here. The main spokesmen for the victim's families is one of them.

Far less becoming are your awkward attempts at taunts and now at putting words in my mouth. Reread my posts - I wrote exactly what I believe with respect to the UN and the good offices of the "international community". The rest of your post is merely your own extrapolations in search of something you believe you can successfully fault. That's all your affair - not mine.

I don't see much that is solid in your vague criticisms - certainly not any self-consistent path for dealing effectively with the real challenges out there. But then you demand explanations: you don't provide them.

What is a "red mist"?

Are you suggesting that Megrahi's release was merely an expedient way of correcting an injustice? None of the surrounding facts or supporting communications suggests that was a consideration in the actual event. Again our worth is reflected in the price we demand for our integrity.

Not only in English law - under "Roman law" it is the very same.

The UN can obviously do nothing to stop Nazi [and their little functionaries, guys like you, Gob] type incursions into sovereign countries.

What is the point you two are trying to make? I can see none.

The British Government, if it truly believed an injustice was done could have pardoned him or reversed the conviction. They did neither. Instead they released him on "humanitarian grounds" associated with a phoney terminal illness, and did so in a cloud of vague communications suggesting key economic interests of the UK with respect to Libya. The current reality gives the lie to the pretense that was used to justify this act.

If the UK was so convinced of the sagacity, justice and legitimacy of Ghadaffi's government, then why is it bombing him now?

Don't blame Gob, there just aren't that many educational opportunities for pond scum.

I was merely pointing out George that the expression you used is illegal under our law without the word "convicted" or "alleged" preceeding it.

As far as the Libyan agent is concerned, and I don't for a minute think he's an innocent man in every respect, I suggested nothing. I did not say he was innocent of the Lockerbie bombing. How on earth would I know? I said others think he is innocent and they have no self-interest in taking such a view that I can see. We will have to wait for the secret files to be released. Until then he is a convicted terrorist murderer. Officially at least.

Oh--I forgot.. A "red mist" is a gentleman's club version of getting your knickers in a twist.

None of this is relevant to the discussion. However, I will be glad to revise my earlier post by noting the strangensss attending the "humanitarian release" of a convicted murderor and terrorist due to a falsely described terminal disease under circumstances that suggested economic bribery at the hands of a regime a subsequent British government is now attempting to destroy.

The UK could have pardoned him, noting questions about the adequacy of the verdict - but it did not do that, and we have no basis now on which to suppose that was the real motive. Indeed it is obviously a distraction deliberately used to cloud the unpleasant reality.

It's not the worst thing in the world, and most governments (mine included) have done as bad or worse. However trying now to put lipstick on this pig is both futile and unseemly.

God damn but you're vacuous, Gob.

Here you are, like an Al Capone, pointing fingers and wildly gesticulating that there are other evil gangsters about.