Now in his third White House try, Paul is given little chance by political analysts of emerging as President Barack Obama’s 2012 challenger. Yet in Iowa, where the Feb. 6 caucuses start the nomination process, he has a committed and well-funded network that some say may be capable of an upset at the Aug. 13 Iowa Straw Poll, a party fundraising event meant to test the popularity and organizational ability of presidential candidates.

“They are far more organized and are running a formidable campaign,” said Craig Robinson, editor of the Iowa Republican website and a former state party political director. “They are easily a spoiler for someone. I think the question is whether Ron Paul finishes first or second.” ~Bloomberg

If Ron Paul won the Ames straw poll, it would obviously be a significant boost for his campaign, and it would also be a real blow to all of the other candidates competing at the event. Is that the way it would be covered and perceived? Of course, the candidates lagging at the back of the pack would spin a Paul victory as proof that the straw poll is in some sense “meaningless,” but then the straw poll has always been largely meaningless as far as selecting the candidate who will go on to become the nominee. It will hardly do to dismiss a good showing in this straw poll by saying that the Paul campaign has a history of winning straw polls. Isn’t that just a backhanded way of acknowledging that the campaign is organized and has enthusiastic activists? In any case, Paul appears poised to show substantial improvement from 2007.

Earlier this week, the Washington Times reported that Georgian officials had identified the culprit behind a bomb blast near the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi as Russian. The report was treated with a lot of skepticism, including from this blog, because it relied only on Georgian sources which, to put it mildly, tend to blame Russia first and ask questions later.

But now the Times has taken another crack at the story and reports that a U.S. intelligence report on the event corroborates the Georgian one. ~Joshua Kucera

The new story is here. Like Kucera, I was extremely skeptical of the initial report because of its reliance on Georgian government sources, and because it accepted the government’s claim about the very questionable photographers’ espionage case without question. It appears that Lake’s earlier reporting on the embassy bombing was accurate, and my skepticism was misplaced. My doubts about the photographers’ case remain, and they have only grown in light of the abrupt conclusion to that case. This is the problem inherent in Saakashvili’s obsession with seeing Russian agents everywhere: for every real case of Russian agents operating in Georgia, there are several that seem to be fabricated or politically-motivated.

Kucera goes on to ask some important questions:

So, assuming it’s trustworthy, there are a lot of questions that the Times report on the intelligence report doesn’t answer: at what level was this approved? Was this a rogue agent? Or a rogue agency? (One could imagine that the intelligence agencies would have a vested interest in harming the improving Washington-Moscow relations.) Or did this come from the Kremlin?

Update: Giorgi Lomsadze reports on the aftermath of the photographers’ case.

Second Update: Joshua Foust reminds us that the embassy bombing did not, in fact, involve the bombing of the embassy:

Being skeptical of a Georgian official is not the same as being in love with Vladimir Putin, especially given the political battle in DC between Georgian and Russian interests. But unless major details about the bomb blast have changed, the embassy itself wasn’t bombed, but “a cemetery about 100 meters from the embassy” is what got damaged. That still isn’t good, and if a Russian is indeed responsible that’s pretty damned stupid of them.

But turning that into “RUSSIA BOMBS AMERICAN EMBASSY” is just irresponsible. As is treating this accusation like it’s brand new and never before seen, when Georgia has been pushing it since December.

The regime controls around 20 per cent more territory than it did in the immediate aftermath of the uprising on 17 February. ~The Independent

Despite the claims that “all trends favor the rebels,” the rebels in Libya remain as far from their goal as ever. It is absurd to continue refusing a cease-fire in the vain hope that there will be a breakthrough, which the onset of Ramadan makes even less likely. In the meantime, the civilian population suffers from the prolonged conflict:

The problem is that the Libyan people — the same people NATO is trying to protect — suffer too. There are food shortages in Tripoli, and long lines for fuel.

The CIA estimates that before the current crisis, a third of the Libyan population was living at the poverty level. Cordesman says the past few months have made things even worse.

“Nobody has enough momentum to stop this from becoming what it already is: an agonizing, drawn-out process doing immense economic damage to the Libyan people, in which no one can be certain of the outcome,” he says.

In other words, the NATO operation meant to prevent one kind of humanitarian crisis may be contributing to another.

I would point out that the Libyans that NATO has been trying to protect are primarily anti-regime Libyans. Libyans that are on the other side of the civil war would theoretically receive the same protection, but in practice NATO’s mission is to facilitate the rebel advance, which means facilitating reprisals against pro-regime Libyans. While war supporters may console themselves with the idea that regime change is ultimately better for the civilian population, a mission to protect the civilian population in this case is not compatible with pursuing regime change.

As I have been arguing for several months, a cease-fire leading to a negotiated settlement is the best way out of this. At the very least, a cease-fire would permit the civilian population in Gaddafi-controlled areas to receive vital food and medical supplies. Jonathan Steele lays out how this might happen:

No wonder western governments are having to review their strategy. The parameters of a settlement have been clear for some time. There must be a mutually agreed ceasefire, on the ground and for Nato’s bombs and missiles. This would allow internationally supervised access for humanitarian supplies to Tripoli and other government-held areas as well as rebel areas. Talks need to accelerate, either through the UN mediator or between government and TNC negotiators, towards forming a power-sharing administration that can find a path to a new constitution and elections. Gaddafi has indicated he does not want to be part of the talks. He will probably have to make clear he will not be part of the next government either. Whether, after 42 years of power, any such promises would be delivered will be a thorny issue. The rebels already snort at it.

All now depends on the sequencing of the elements of a settlement. For the rebels to insist Gaddafi stands down before talks start dooms everything. Ideally, the first step is a ceasefire. This would be by far the best way to protect civilians. The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, called for an immediate ceasefire earlier this month. If Ban were a stronger figure, his call would have carried more weight instead of being ignored by western leaders as well as most of the media. Nato hawks fear it would look defeatist so they prefer to parrot the line that that Gaddafi cannot be trusted, and therefore a ceasefire would be worthless.

Now that Britain and France have started publicly entertaining the “internal exile” option for Gaddafi as a way to end the Libyan war, the idea is coming under harsh criticism from all sides. Simon Tisdall writes this for The Guardian:

Although some rebel spokesmen have expressed dismay at the perceived softening of Britain’s position, they do not speak with once voice on Gaddafi (or much else). Mustafa Abdel Jalil, leader of the Benghazi-based government-in-waiting, said recently that Gaddafi could remain if he accepted the rebels’ conditions, including the ceding of all military and political power. But others in the rebel camp strongly disagree, arguing that he will not do so and that his continued presence in Libya would be both disruptive and untenable.

This latter argument is wholly persuasive – for the bottom line, as Hague surely understands, is that if Gaddafi is to remain in Libya, he will never wholly surrender the military and other powers that protect him and his family from the retribution, judicial and extra-judicial, that Libyans would certainly pursue. To do so would be political if not actual suicide. Any deal allowing him to remain but supposedly stripping him of power will therefore lack credibility from the start. It will be either a sham or a capitulation.

It has taken just a few months for the leading NATO governments to move from unreasonable maximalism (i.e., Gaddafi must leave power as a precondition for a cease-fire) to rather desperate compromise position (Gaddafi must renounce power, but doesn’t have to “go” anywhere). So the ill-conceived, unnecessary Libyan war slowly wends its way to an embarrassing conclusion. Tisdall is right that Gaddafi’s continued presence in Libya at this point would be a source of instability for years to come, but this is an outcome that the U.S. and its allies virtually guaranteed by the manner in which they chose to fight the war. They (especially the U.S. and Britain) were forced to impose limits on how they fought the war because there was little or no political support at home for yet another war. The Libyan war has been a model in the kind of war that the Powell Doctrine was designed to avoid: it has been an exercise in using insufficient force for a cause that does not have broad popular support, and which serves no discernible security interest. The failings of the Libyan war are a reminder of why the Powell Doctrine’s requirements should be followed when deciding whether to take military action.

After the administration has gone to such absurd lengths to pretend that the U.S. not at war, it seems unlikely that Obama would agree to greater U.S. participation in the war as Britain and France start looking for the exits. What is scandalous about the Anglo-French shift on Gaddafi’s fate is that they could have accepted one of a number of cease-fire proposals put forward by Turkey and the African Union that would have had more or less the same result, but which could have halted the fighting months ago. The result might have been just as embarrassing, but it would have allowed for aid to reach the civilian population much earlier.

Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin concurs:

Although France and Britain may say this “scenario” would create a new government in which Qaddafi would not rule, this is nonsense. Even if these terms were accepted, it is more likely than not that Qaddafi would retain enormous influence. But more to the point is now that such generous terms are on the table, he knows he can hang tough and get far more. Indeed, with his ongoing presence in Libya guaranteed by his foes, there is no reason for him to do anything but keep fighting until his hold on power is assured.

Of course, once it became clear that Gaddafi was fighting to preserve his hold on power and to avoid being hauled before the ICC, he never had any reason to give up. He assumed that his determination to remain in power and stay in Libya was far greater than the intervening governments’ resolve to see him gone. The stakes could not have been higher for him, and they could scarcely be much lower for NATO. The Libyan war’s goal of “pressuring” the regime enough until Gaddafi finally did give up, which is another way of saying that the U.S. and its allies had no realistic plan for removing Gaddafi from power.

Bruce Crumley cuts Britain and France some slack:

To be fair to Western allies, there aren’t too many other realistic options to accepting Gaddafi remaining hunkered down somewhere in Libya’s future if they ever want to extricate themselves from the military operation they bounded into four months ago. Despite that, their pragmatism won’t protect them from accusations on all sides that their war costs lots of money, many lives, and much credibility in return for what in the end may not be a whole lot.

Crumley is right that there aren’t many alternatives to what Britain and France are now proposing, and his assessment of the costs is fair. Tobin’s is wildly exaggerated:

But the consequences of this astonishing turn of events will be felt beyond the borders of that unhappy North African country. While those who supported the Arab Spring revolts may have thought intervention in Libya put other dictators on notice their time was coming to an end, Qaddafi’s apparent victory sends the opposite signal.

Anyone who claimed that “intervention in Libya put other dictators on notice their time was coming to an end” was kidding himself or trying to sell the war to a skeptical audience. Attacking Libya was not going to have a deterrent effect on other authoritarian governments, and it has not had that effect. That would have been true regardless of the outcome in Libya. Wars should not be fought to send “signals.” The intended recipients rarely interpret the signals in the way we wish they would, and the war may send other messages that we did not intend to broadcast. In the case of Libya, the U.S. and our allies paid the price that no authoritarian regime will want to make deals with our governments that expose them to future attack.

Iran specialists are baffled by the vocal backing the MEK enjoys among some heavy-hitters in Washington. Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University in New York, said: “Their [the MEK’s] support inside Iran is very, very limited.”

“The fact that they’re against the government in Iran doesn’t make them good,” he added in a recent telephone interview. “The only thing that I can think of that would be worse than the present government of Iran is a government of the MEK.” ~The National

The story also details the poor conditions in the MEK’s Camp Ashraf in Iraq:

Massoud Khodabandeh, a former senior high-ranking MEK member, said: “People aren’t allowed to get married. Some there haven’t heard or seen a child for 25 years. There are no phones, no internet, no postal services, nothing..”

Mr Khodabandeh runs an organisation helping those trying to quit the MEK, and believes many at Camp Ashraf want to leave but are effectively held hostage by the Rajavis.

“Those caught trying to run away get severely punished,” he said in a telephone interview from Leeds, England, on Sunday.

One of the most detailed studies of the MEK was conducted in 2005 by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the US-based watchdog.

Outlandish practices ordered by the Rajavis included “divorce by decree of married couples, regular writings of self-criticism reports, renunciation of sexuality, and absolute mental and physical dedication to the leadership,” HRW said.

Its report focused on cases of would-be defectors being tortured at Camp Ashraf, including two who died under interrogation.

Camp Ashraf was was the target of an Iraqi government raid earlier this year that resulted in 34 deaths, which has prompted some of the MEK’s sympathizers here in the U.S. to conflate Iraq’s mistreatment of the inhabitants of the camp with the question of de-listing the MEK. Perversely, this has allowed pro-MEK Americans to portray themselves as human rights advocates. In fact, they are lending public support to a terrorist group that subscribes to a violent ideology and engages in human rights abuses against its own members.

The Secretary of State will announce the decision on whether or not the MEK will be removed from the foreign terrorist organization list next month.

Simply said, sanctions must impose sufficient pain on the regime to force it to change lest it be overthrown by popular domestic protests and upheaval. ~Hossein Askari

Put another way, sanctions must have magical powers to achieve something that has never been done. The most-sanctioned states around the world also tend to be the ones with the weakest forces of opposition to the regime. If they do face opposition at home, the more heavily-sanctioned such regimes crush internal resistance with impunity. Having fewer connections to the outside world makes it easier, not harder, for the regime to use repressive tactics. What Askari fails to address here is that any sanctions regime that could cause the regime “sufficient pain” would inflict even more pain on the population. Contrary to what Askari assumes, this does not cause political upheaval, but instead reinforces political stagnation. Domestic opposition forces in Iran already have enough difficulties, and sanctions would place more burdens on them. If the middle class is often the vehicle for political change, sanctions will help delay that change by depriving them of whatever economic prosperity they might be able to have. Impoverishing the middle class with a punishing sanctions regime makes them and the entire population more dependent on the state. Sanctions are a crude instrument at the best of times when they are aimed at stopping a certain kind of regime behavior. As a means to cause the radical transformation and/or toppling of a regime, they are essentially useless.

Consider the popular uprisings and protests we have seen in the last six months. Were any of them caused by punishing sanctions regimes? Quite the opposite. The countries that have experienced these uprisings have all to one degree or another been opening their markets to the rest of the world. Egypt’s protests were fueled by economic grievances, but those grievances were sharpened because some Egyptians tied to the regime were benefiting disproportionately as economic policy was being liberalized. The greatest challenge to Gaddafi’s rule did not come at the time of his regime’s maximal isolation. It happened after he had been reconciled to the West and had begun doing business with his former enemies. When the regime and the people are both suffering deprivation, that perversely binds the population to the regime, and it blunts the appeal of political opposition. Most will see outside governments as the ones responsible for making their lives miserable, and they are hardly going to do those governments’ regime change work for them. It is when a regime begins to flourish that it begins to encounter stronger internal resistance. The parts of Libya that had traditionally opposed Gaddafi did not benefit from the new wealth that followed the end of Libya’s international isolation, and it was the injustice of that and the examples provided by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that sparked major protests and finally open rebellion.

Sanctioning a country for the purpose of regime change does not encourage domestic dissent and resistance, but instead provides the regime with an ideal foreign threat and a ready-made scapegoat for all of the people’s ills. If the regime can tap into pre-existing anti-American or anti-Western sentiment, the population will be that much more willing to blame foreign governments for their current plight. It is unlikely that the people suffering from the effects of sanctions are going to conclude that the fastest way to alleviate their country’s economic woes is to replace the current government with one that is more to the liking of the governments imposing the punishing sanctions on them. Sanctions represent the clumsiest tool available for those intent on practicing coercive diplomacy. It is not just that it is very difficult to isolate a regime enough to make sanctions “work,” but that even then sanctions don’t “work” as intended.

Libya defines unnecessary conflict. ~Doug Bandow

I agree with just about everything in Bandow’s call for dissolving NATO and his description of the Libyan war, and I have made the same arguments in past. Previously, I have argued that NATO’s main function now is as an enabler of U.S. interventionism, and that’s partly true, but the Libyan war has actually shown how Bandow and I overstate this. NATO didn’t enable the U.S. to intervene in Libya. It provided belated cover for a decision that had already been made. It’s true that most of NATO isn’t involved in the fighting in Libya, and very few NATO members wanted to intervene, but this is why the claim that Libya is a NATO operation is something of a political fiction promoted by war supporters. After the Security Council passed UNSCR 1973, Britain, France, and the U.S. were going to attack Libya no matter what any other NATO governments decided. By abusing the principle of allied solidarity, these three governments dragged the alliance into a war that served no collective security purpose.

Making the war into a NATO mission did allow Italy to provide bases that it would have otherwise withheld, and it permitted the administration to promote the absurd idea that the U.S. was no longer vital to continuing the war. Both of these are significant, but the intervention could have happened anyway. It is easy to imagine the three main intervening governments attacking Libya without being able to use NATO as an umbrella. That might have made things harder for the administration at home when it wanted to claim that the U.S. was not at war, but that is a different question. Such a war might be be having even less success than the one that is currently going on, but I imagine that it would still be happening. While appeals to NATO “credibility” have been an important part of war rhetoric in 1999 and again this year, it is obvious that most members of the alliance don’t really believe them this time (if anyone ever did). It is because they value the alliance for other reasons that the majority has not wished to create a larger rupture over some of the major allies’ abuse of the alliance.

A major reason why so few capable governments (e.g., Germany, Poland, Turkey) are participating directly in the bombing campaign is that they correctly see this as having nothing to do with the alliance’s mission. There’s no question that many of the newer alliance members cannot participate in Libya because they do not have the means, which is confirmation that they had no business being brought into the alliance. Many of the same members that are not involved in the Libyan war were among the first to offer mostly token forces to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but this was not really a sign of their belief in allied solidarity. That was an obsequious gesture of tribute from satellites to their great power patron. After the Iraq debacle and the drain of Afghanistan, there is naturally greater reluctance on the part of European allies to contribute to wars that have nothing to do with them.

Bandow is absolutely right that the alliance has no reason to exist, which is why its more aggressive members keep trying to find something for it to do. The alliance’s formal mission is an obsolete holdover from the Cold War, and the alliance is a relic of a time when western Europe feared Soviet power and the danger of a resurgent Germany. The Soviets are no more, and Germany is united and at peace with its neighbors. If anything, many Europeans seem to be worried that Germany has become too averse to using military force abroad. NATO was a massive success whose time has long since passed. It is the alliance’s inherent obsolescence that makes it fit to be dismantled. Perhaps if NATO did not exist, and a few of its members could not use it as political cover for their own wars, it would be slightly more difficult for those governments to take military action, but NATO is ultimately just the vehicle that interventionists have chosen to use rather than the reason why there are interventions. Oddly enough, it is the same governments that cannot or will not indulge in an unnecessary war in Libya that will fight most strenuously to preserve the relic of the alliance.

The Suez Crisis heralded an era of American leadership and action, while Libya has shown that, though powerful, America intends to rely on its allies to carry larger burdens, and take responsibility for their own regions. America once drove and financed western security, but due to fiscal shortfalls and a decade of conflict, it no longer intends to guarantee European security. ~Patrick McKinney

Let’s think about this for a moment. We can agree that the Suez crisis and the U.S. response to it “heralded an era of American leadership” in the Near East, or at least it marked the eclipse of the old imperial powers, but one thing that Suez and Libya have in common is that neither one of them really had much to do with European security. Perhaps Britain and France believed attacking Egypt served their respective interests because they feared Egyptian control of the Canal, but the security of Britain and France was never really at stake. Taking sides in Libya’s civil war certainly had nothing to do with securing Europe, and the limited U.S. role in the Libyan war should not be taken to mean that the U.S. will ignore existing security commitments to Europe. That’s something very different from throwing massive resources into a war of caprice waged by two European governments embarrassed by their prior dealings with unsavory North African regimes.

As McKinney noted, Eisenhower objected to the attack on Egypt in these terms:

We believe these actions to have been taken in error. For we do not accept the use of force as a wise and proper instrument for the settlement of international disputes.

In the Suez crisis, there was at least some agreement between the U.S. and its European allies that Egyptian control over the Canal was the cause of an international dispute that needed to be settled, but the U.S. objected to the means they employed. The Libyan war was the result of an Anglo-French hunt for a justification that would permit them to involve themselves in Libya’s internal affairs. As Eisenhower saw it, the Anglo-French policy was a misguided response to a real international dispute, and their attack undermined international peace and security. The Libyan civil war was not a conflict that jeopardized international peace and security, but it was one that Britain and France, this time with U.S. support, chose to internationalize.

In fact, what we are seeing in the Libyan war is a willingness on the part of the U.S. to enable Anglo-French military adventurism in a part of the world where the U.S. had previously opposed it. If this is evidence of receding U.S. power, it is a very strange one. The curious thing about this is that Britain and France are no longer equipped to indulge in this adventurism without U.S. help, but even at a time of “fiscal shortfalls” and after “a decade of conflict” the U.S. has facilitated and supported their ill-conceived adventure anyway.

Despite U.S. recognition of the Transitional National Council as Libya’s government, frozen Libyan state assets will not be easily transferred to TNC control. The Washington Postreported over the weekend:

One obstacle to releasing the money is that much of it was seized under legally binding sanctions imposed against the Gaddafi government by the U.N. Security Council. Unfreezing such accounts would require a consensus vote of the U.N. sanctions committee, according to one senior European diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity [bold mine-DL].

That presents two risks for the Obama administration: The committee includes countries that are skeptical of NATO’s military campaign in Libya, such as Russia and China.

In addition, said the senior official, “You don’t want to set a precedent that compromises other sanctions regimes,” such as those against Iran.

It seems unlikely that Russia is going to cooperate in unfreezing these assets when it regards American recognition of the TNC as a serious mistake. If recognition was intended to free up these assets for the rebels, it doesn’t do them or anyone else much good if there was no consensus among the governments that would be responsible for making these funds available.

To make things harder, the funds are scattered among many different institutions:

U.S. and Libyan officials say there are a host of other complications in turning over the frozen assets to the rebels. Libya’s financial holdings are widely dispersed among financial institutions, some of which are subject to the laws of foreign governments.

And bankers will probably move cautiously because of the fear of lawsuits.

“All these institutions want assurances that they’ll be protected,” said a second U.S. government official, who also insisted on anonymity to describe internal discussions. “This is something that is going to take some time.”

The U.S. has taken the unusual step of recognizing a government that doesn’t control most of its own country in order to unfreeze state assets that the U.S. and its allies were instrumental in freezing in the first place. Libyan war supporters can argue that this was a necessary step in pursuing the war’s real goal of regime change, and more hawkish supporters will certainly complain that all of this could have been done months ago, but all of that will be moot if recognition does not even translate into unfreezing the assets.