http://af.reuters.com/article/egyptNews/idAFTOE71O04K20110225 UPDATE 1-S.Korea leaflets tell North of Egypt, but change unlikely Fri Feb 25, 2011 8:44am GMT Print | Single Page [-] Text [+] (Adds unification minister, analyst) By Jack Kim SEOUL Feb 25 (Reuters) - South Korea's military has been dropping leaflets into North Korea about democracy protests in Egypt, a legislator said on Friday, but doubts lingered it would trigger calls for change in the tightly controlled country. As part of a psychological campaign, the South Korean military also sent food, medicines and radios for residents in a bid to encourage North Koreans to think about change, a conservative South Korean parliament member, Song Young-sun, said. While Seoul's move could cause alarm in the North's leadership, Pyongyang's rigid refusal to respond to demands for change means its people will unlikely rise up to the type of protests against their leaders as in Egypt and Libya, analysts and officials said. South Korea's defence ministry declined to confirm the move. "Compared to some of these Arab societies, they have done a much more effective job in maintaining control over the public," said Cho Min of the Korea Institute for National Unification. "You're never going to be able to predict a collapse until the day it happens, but even then, this is a much more perfectly closed society with control over information and travel."
The problem is that Gaddafi's forces are still very well armed even if much of them are mercenaries. In Egypt it appeared that pro-Mubarak forces were not that well armed. They were thugs and trouble makers but not military armed with heavy weapons. Except the No Fly Zones were sustained for almost 12 years. I am not advocating an all out invasion of Libya and am certainly not advocating US unilateral action or even NATO but an international effort that will prevent a blood bath, a much worse blood bath, and descent into chaos for Libya.
My concern is that history has a list a mile long of popular revolutions being co-opted by dictators, usually from the military. Somehow, these guys get in on the backs of the people and then the people either don't want to get rid of them or are unable to. The French Revolution yielded a dictator; same in Mexico, in China, and plenty of other places. I'm worried more for Libya than I am for Tunisia and Egypt that that's what is going to happen here. And the way I see things shaping up in Libya now, it doesn't look like it will genuinely be the people's revolution. Because Gaddafi's going to fight, they'll have to fight. And, their best chance of winning is to put power in the hands of military men, not guys like El Baradei or Wael Ghonim.
We’ll see. That will be an issue in the not too distant future, but what the citizens of these countries have established through these revolutions provides a foundation to build on. In Egypt they stood shoulder to shoulder in that square. They watched each others’ backs when they prayed and went to church. They shed blood together and they died together fighting for a common cause, and they were victorious together. Are they going to sacrifice all of that and give away the revolution? Or are they going to resolve their differences and make the compromises that allow the country to move forward? There’s going to be a tremendous amount of pressure on them to work it out.
True. Violent revolutions and/or civil wars often lead to great problems. I think the prospects for immediate good change are greater if the dictatorial regime is overthrown quickly. If the armed struggle goes on long enough the revolutionaries have to become damn near as brutal as the dictator by the time they achieve power. Under this theory the best thing to do is for the US and the West to go all out to end the Gadaffi regime. Sadly once it has gone this far it has to continue to the end. A dictator like Gadaffi or the dictators the US backed in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua respond violently to any sort of peaceful protest and continue to jail and prosecute the entire famiies of those who partipated even after the demonstrations are over. Eventually the response to those who participated and their families has to be: flee the country, armed revolution or be killed individually after being tortured in prison.
True, and I'm with you in your concerns. What to do and when to do it is a difficult question to work out.
Valid concerns. No matter what happens the army is going to be there in the end, or at least a good chunk of it. It will likely turn out that some generals have sided with Gaddafi while others have sided with the people. Assuming that Gaddafi and those loyal to him will eventually be defeated, what conditions would cause the remaining military to favour and support a future democratic government? The power of the people, as demonstrated in Egypt and now in Libya, would be one thing. Economic considerations would be another. This is where an embargo might help. The power of the people is a big one, however. If the French had brought over many thousands of soldiers and defeated the British singlehandedly, and then handed power over to the Americans, how would that have affected the development of the US? Would there have been enough of a common identify and common history established to keep he states together? Look at how important are the founding fathers and what they believed to Americans even today. How would that be different today if the French had essentially won the war for the Americans?
Or they could just go like Somalia and Afghanistan and fall into factional fighting. I agree in principle that this has to be an internally led revolution but there is a place for the international community to help ease the transition.
In those two countries there was a large scale foreign intervention before any kind of wide spread popular uprising, and it didn’t work in either case. I think the people weren’t invested enough, because it wasn’t really their revolution. I think there is unquestionably a role for the international community after a dictator is removed, and I think there is a role before as well. The French did help the Americans in the American Revolution, but their involvement wasn’t significant enough to diminish the empowerment of the Americans. Where the line is between the two I don’t know. In this case it probably depends a lot on how Libyans would perceive a foreign intervention.
I would say the uprising in Libya is both widespread and popular. Anyway while you cite Somalia Libya has a lot more things going for it than Somalia. Also consider interventions like East Timor, Bosnia and Haiti where foreign intervention either stopped blood baths or prevented them outright. I am not saying foreign powers fight the battle for the Libyans but that they impose things like no-fly zones, apply diplomatic pressure to convince Gadaffi to leave.
Neither has been perfect but the main point is that blood baths were averted. I am not talking about nation building but am talking about preventing, or stopping, a blood bath and concurrent humanitarian crisis.
Irrelevant. The bloodshed "stopped" was originally caused, endorsed and enabled by the "foreign intervention" you subsequently praised for those two examples (and many others). EDIT: Even Wikipedia (which tends to shy away from some of these sorts of details) highlights the US involvement in Indonesia's mass-killings in East Timor. Haiti is arguably an even longer and more sordid story.
You're arguing two different things. Yes the US has meddled in tons of things and caused a lot of problems. That said, UN intervention in East Timor at the time was the right thing to do even if the US is the root cause. Obviously if the US and others werent messing around in the region things might have turned out differently but in a vacuum if you look at what was going on during the peak of the East Timor crisis, the UN had to step in. Also as for Haiti, I'm understand the problems with the UN mission and Haiti as well as previous foreign intervention but again the Haiti mission has been a long term UN mission and generally speaking the longer any foreign power (or UN mission) stays somewhere, the more there is to criticize. But I dont see how that negates the value of quick short term action to stop imminent civilian violence and possible genocide. I think deploying something like a No-Fly-Zone is the right thing to do right now. The popularity of foreign intervention is obviously at an all time low with our fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan but there are examples of success and this can be one provided no one overreaches and does something stupid like putting troops in Libya.
Probably a fair accusation. I'm just making sure that Judoka is honest - no doubt the UN has done many good things, but it (or it's members, more accurately) are also complicit in a great deal of the disturbances to begin with. Simply stating "The UN has helped X,Y, and Z" leaves out half the story. I did not intend to argue that Judoka was wrong - just incomplete (apologies if I was not clear). Ergo, I think they're bad examples.
Perhaps I should've been more precise to mean that I was talking specifically the 1998 intervention in East Timor and the 1994 intervention in Haiti.
On ABC News tonight they had interviews with both Moammar Gadaffi and Charlie Sheen. Its hard to tell which one is crazier.
If this continues, people are going to want democracy here in the United States, and they will want to overthrow our own government.
Lol if it gets rid of the parasitic special interest and lobbying groups, reforms our tax code, and makes an education/infrastructure-heavy budget , I'm all for it.
