The alleged tilt to Iran

Col. Derek Harvey (Ret.), appearing recently on the PBS NewsHour, voiced some criticisms of U.S. policy in the Middle East:

Well, what I see happening in Iraq in particular — let’s take a look at that — the Abadi regime there, along with Iranian support, has given free rein to Shia militias who are conducting atrocities almost on a daily basis. And they openly proclaim the U.S. is supporting their operations, which feeds into Sunni Arab paranoia and supports the ISIS narrative about a divide and that the U.S. is aligned against Sunni Arabs in the region. So that hurts us in many ways. The U.S. has a choice here. We could declare no-fly zones, no-go zones in Syria. We could have put more capability on the ground and shown some leadership and commitment, which is what Sunni Arabs are looking for in the region, be they in the Gulf or in Ankara, in Turkey. But we have yet to really show real commitment.

The urge to have done something more in Syria is understandable, but the idea that "we could have put more capability on the ground" seems a non-starter given Obama's (also understandable) determination not to involve the U.S. in any substantial way in another ground war in the region, a determination reflected, albeit perhaps too vaguely, in the language of the proposed authorization for the use of military force just submitted to Congress.  Also, if ISIS is so concerned about appealing to Sunnis and playing up the narrative of the Sunni-Shia divide, their murder of the Jordanian pilot, who was (I assume) a Sunni Muslim, does not seem designed to further that goal, to put it mildly. 

Col. Harvey also said this:

Well, Sunni Arabs, be they in the Gulf, in Jordan, you know, in countries of Syria and Iraq, the Sunni Arab communities, Turkey, they want to see an effort directed at the Assad regime and a check on Shia militia and Iranian influence in Iraq and Syria. Unfortunately, from my perspective, the U.S. administration is focused on rapprochement with Iran, and acknowledging Tehran’s regional hegemony in the process, and that alienates Sunni Arabs, Ankara, and as well impacts Tel Aviv in Israel. So, that creates real problems for us in mobilizing support, keeping people online, and having unity of effort.

First, the U.S. is not "acknowledging Tehran's regional hegemony"; the U.S. does not have diplomatic relations with Iran and Iran remains on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. Trying to reach a nuclear deal does not equal recognizing Iran's regional hegemony.  

Second, the idea that the U.S.'s supposed focus on "rapprochement" with Iran "alienates" Sunni Arabs is overbroad: no doubt anything less than implacable hostility to the Iranian regime would displease some Sunni Arabs, but one need not be an expert on the region to find ridiculous the implication that all Sunnis feel this way.  "Sunni Arabs" are not a monolithic bloc, and although pan-Arabism is more or less defunct as a political movement, it only makes sense to assume that there are some political actors in the Arab world who still would rather work at overcoming their divisions than exacerbating them.  Who those actors are I'll leave to the regional experts, but I assume they exist, and for an analyst to go on TV and speak of "Sunni Arabs" as a bloc seems a disservice to American viewers.

As for all this "impact[ing] Tel Aviv": If the Israeli government had made any real progress on the Palestinian issue or shown itself open to genuine negotiations, it would have done more to reduce support for Iranian policies (and Hezbollah, and of course Hamas) in the region than anything else it could have done. Netanyahu's endless blustering about the (supposed) Iranian threat has accomplished nothing, except to confirm that the Israeli government is effectively clueless about its own long-term interests and how best to advance them. The main underlying problem for Israel's long-term security is Israeli policy w/r/t the Palestinian issue, not a supposed recognition by the U.S. of Iranian regional hegemony or the prospect of a nuclear Iran, which Netanyahu wrongly paints as some kind of apocalypse.

Lastly, and as already suggested, reducing everything analytically to the Shia-Sunni divide ignores that there are divisions within the 'camps,' and also other divisions.  As the Wash. Post noted in an editorial last month ("Headed Toward Chaos," Jan.13, 2015, p.A14), the conflict in Libya is mainly between "secular Sunnis [and] Islamists," a division that also "dominates the politics of Egypt, Tunisia, the Palestinian territories, and much of the rest of the Maghreb...."

In sum, the U.S. is not recognizing Iranian regional hegemony, and to put some kind of apocalyptic construction on U.S. efforts to relate to Iran in some way other than through unremitting hostility seems highly dubious.  Of course there must be ongoing concerns about the Iranian government's internal polices; it is hardly the model of a democratic, pluralist regime, and cases such as those of the Wash. Post reporter held for a long time in an Iranian jail deservedly garner attention.  Everyone remembers the Iranian regime's crackdown on demonstrations surrounding the 2009 election and the famous image of the young woman demonstrator beaten by regime-allied thugs and left to die in the streets.  However, the U.S. maintains relations with lots of governments that are human-rights abusers.  Anyway, Harvey's objections had nothing to do with Iran's domestic policies, so this whole line of discussion is of limited relevance to the interview.         

The alignments in the M. East

On Friday the NewsHour had a segment with Hisham Melhem and Steven Simon talking about the somewhat tangled alliance patterns in the Middle East: starts at about 14:00 here.

ETA: The segment referred briefly to this June post at ThinkProgress, which featured a chart of the "tangled web" of alignments in Syria.

Is it about the video?

Are the recent protests and assaults on U.S. facilities in the Muslim world about that anti-Muslim video made by some shady person in California? Yes, in the sense that the video was the proximate cause; but protests of this sort obviously don't happen unless there is a reservoir of anti-U.S. sentiment just waiting for a spark to give it expression. A WaPo piece largely on the situation in Egypt, highlighting the role of the Salafists and their political party, contains a few revealing quotes from people on the street.

“What happened in Egypt was the minimum response to the movie,” said Abdelrahman Said Kamel, 30, who was selling brightly colored women’s clothing at a street kiosk Saturday and said he had protested at the U.S. Embassy several times this week. “I can’t understand how America is trying to help us economically but insulting our prophet.”

Note the metonymic phrasing: America is insulting the prophet; the actions of an isolated crank are taken as representative of the whole country. Later in the same article another Egyptian is quoted as saying that the U.S. never helped Egypt; rather it helped the Mubarak regime keep Egyptians oppressed and unemployed. These views are widespread enough to make a spark like the video an effective catalyst of protest.

Dan Nexon notes that the video acted as a trigger because it fit "a particular pre-existing script concerning identity relations: 'Americans/Westerners hate/disrespect Islam/Muslims.'" I would only add that this script has existed for a long time and has proved very durable: statements by U.S. presidents and officials repeatedly distinguishing between Islam on the one hand and extremist violence on the other have not apparently had much effect in diminishing the script's force. Scripts about identity relations presumably can take on lives of their own and become almost impervious to alteration, but the remarkable durability of this script must lie in, among other things, deep-rooted historical and ideological sources, which are kept fresh, so to speak, by some aspects of U.S. foreign policy. (I am leaving this deliberately vague; people can fill in the blanks in their own ways.)

A final note on U.S. embassies: The attack on the compound in Benghazi may have led some people to think that U.S. embassies (as opposed to consulates, etc.) are not well protected. My impression is that this is not true. U.S. embassies in many parts of the world, I suspect, resemble rather forbidding fortresses (certainly that was the case in Bangladesh when I was there a number of years ago) and routinely have armed guards. That doesn't mean they can't be stormed by determined protestors, but people whose image of an embassy is a nice little townhouse in a leafy portion of northwest Washington, D.C. should know that U.S. embassies in many parts of the world are not like that at all.

Update: Fouad Ajami has a WaPo op-ed on this. I'm not a big fan of his but at least parts of this piece are ok. He downplays the role of U.S. policy, however.

Break briefly interrupted

Commenting on Gaddafi's demise etc., David Brooks on the NewsHour tonight said Obama deserved credit for U.S. policy vis-a-vis Libya -- a judgment with which I basically agree, though I think there could and should have been more consultation of Congress. (This is the same Brooks, btw, who wrote last January that Obama was Nero fiddling while Rome burns [I'd probably write that post a little differently if I were writing it today, but never mind]).

Then Brooks went on to say that he thought foreign policy might have an impact on the 2012 election; it won't all be the economy, he said. But this really depends to a substantial extent on what happens to be leading the news cycle a year from now, which is of course impossible to predict.

Walzer, Mill, Libya, and the value of state boundaries

In a blog post written last March (which I linked at the time but did not comment on at any length), Michael Walzer rehearsed J.S. Mill's argument about non-intervention, an argument Walzer had also summarized in his Just and Unjust Wars (Basic Books, 1977), pp. 87-91. With the debate about the Libyan intervention, sovereignty, and R2P continuing to simmer (in the IR blogosphere and elsewhere), and with Gaddafi still at large and one or two cities in Libya still resisting the rebels (or revolutionaries, or anti-Gaddafi forces, whichever label you like), it may be worth going back to Walzer's post. The question whether the U.S. and/or NATO should intervene in Libya is now of course moot, but the broader issues will likely recur (and have already recurred in a way in the case, e.g., of Syria).

Mill's position was basically that oppressed peoples had to struggle for their own freedom without outside help; if they failed to secure freedom that proved they didn't deserve it, weren't "fit" enough for it. In his blog post of last March, Walzer wrote that if the Libyan rebels were on the verge of defeat he would not be willing to go all the way with Mill, i.e. to declare the rebels "unfit" for liberty and leave them to their fate after a Gaddafi victory. But Walzer said that when intervention became necessary -- and he wasn't sure exactly when that point of "necessity" would occur -- it should be done by neighbors, by the Egyptian and Tunisian armies, rather than by the U.S. and NATO.

Even though he was not willing to go all the way with Mill in the Libyan case, Walzer clearly has a lot of sympathy for the view that oppressed peoples should do their own struggling, with outsiders intervening only in cases of real "necessity" (however defined). In Just and Unjust Wars [JUW] (pp. 90-91), he wrote: "We need to establish a kind of a priori respect for state boundaries; they are, as I have argued before, the only boundaries communities ever have. And that is why intervention is always justified as if it were an exception to a general rule, made necessary by the urgency or extremity of a particular case."

It is perhaps unfair to focus on something Walzer wrote 30-plus years ago, ignoring his more recent writing on these issues; still, the sentence just quoted shows a weakness, in my view, of his approach in JUW, namely the attachment of too much moral value to state boundaries. He recognized the (in some cases) "arbitrary and accidental character of state boundaries... [and] the ambiguous relation of the political community or communities within those boundaries to the government that defends them" (JUW, p. 89), but his basic position was that boundaries enclose communities which should be left to work out their political fates for themselves. There is definitely something to be said for this view but it is also necessary to acknowledge that the ways in which state boundaries are routinely penetrated or breached by outsiders, whether they be governments, corporations or NGOs, make the issue somewhat more complicated [note: some, e.g. Robert Jackson, would deny this]. Moreover, it is not the case that state boundaries are "the only boundaries communities ever have." Students of international relations have spilled much ink writing about all sorts of boundaries (ethnic, zonal, tribal, etc.). State boundaries retain a special place in international law and practice, but they are not the only boundaries communities have.

So where does this leave matters? Intervention should still be an exception to a general rule, and R2P, at least as I understand it, does not alter that. But in a world that some see as being full of cross-boundary 'networks' and transnational communities, the principle of non-intervention, assuming one wants to keep it, perhaps needs an updated justification, one that does not rely quite so heavily on a picture of self-enclosed national communities, each working out its own political destiny in isolation from the world outside. I'm not sure exactly what that updated justification of non-intervention might look like; perhaps political theorists and IR types have already produced one and with a little research I could find it. But laziness being the blogger's prerogative, I'm not going to bother searching, at least not now.

Does the 'sovereignty debate' matter?

Update: I've now read Slaughter's latest entry in the debate, and at least on a theoretical level I tend to agree with the "walk and chew gum" formula: sovereignty as it's coming to be understood implies both a state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its borders (at least in the normal run of things) and a duty to act in non-exterminatory ways toward its citizens. As Slaughter herself appears to acknowledge, this hardly resolves all the practical problems, but as a general formula it seems unobjectionable.
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I would be lying if I'd said I have read with extremely close attention the recent blog posts by A.-M. Slaughter (here), J. Foust (here), D.P. Trombly (here), and others about the implications of the Libya intervention for the notion of state sovereignty. But the gist is that Slaughter wrote a post at The Atlantic saying that R2P and its application in Libya means that the "nature of sovereignty has fundamentally changed," Foust and Trombly took exception, and they were off.

Guess what? None of them is completely right. (You knew I was going to say that.) I think Slaughter is probably exaggerating when she implies that the notion of sovereignty as it is traditionally understood by international lawyers is dead -- to the extent she has implied that -- and Foust and Trombly are wrong to suggest that the 19th and 20th-century (note: their periodization) concept of sovereignty is as much about preventing civil war as it is about preventing external intervention in a state's 'internal affairs'. The modern idea of state sovereignty as enshrined for instance in Art. 2(7) of the UN Charter has more to do with the prerogatives of governments (states) than anything else. R2P has widened and formalized a traditional exception rather than completely upended the received notion of sovereignty, or so I would be inclined to argue.

Anyway, does the whole debate matter? I'm not sure it does. It gives IR types another subject to argue about, but whether it has any real importance beyond that is questionable. Governments will continue to make decisions about intervention for a variety of reasons, but whether any policy-makers will first sit down and reach a position on whether sovereignty has 'fundamentally changed' is, I think, doubtful. But this is, admittedly, pure speculation.

Added on 9/5: See also J. Ulfelder here.

Too clever by half (?)

A list of recent columns by Slate's William Saletan (whom I never read, mainly because I don't read Slate very often) includes one about the Obama admin's position on congressional authorization for the Libya operation.

The column is called "Koh is my God pilot." That would be Harold Koh, chief legal advisor in the State Dept. (And just in case your brain has retired for the evening, the title is a riff on those bumper stickers one used to see now and then announcing "God is my co-pilot." Personally I prefer the bumper stickers that say "My airedale [or fill in other desired breed of dog] is smarter than your honors student." But I digress.)

If you find any of this offensive, don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

P.s. Haven't actually read the column yet.

'Demonstrative compellence' is a bust (again)

Back in Jan. '09 I blogged about an article that discussed the notion of 'demonstrative compellence' (as the author termed it) in connection with the G.W. Bush policy toward Iraq. The argument in a nutshell was that the invasion of Iraq was meant to signal to Iran and N. Korea that if they didn't straighten up and fly right they might be next. The strategy was, in essence, a complete failure, at least with respect to its intended targets. Iran continued its less-than-transparent nuclear program and N. Korea showed, on occasion, some apparent willingness to negotiate but basically continued on its path toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

Why bring this up now? Because some might think, not unreasonably, that one motive for the NATO intervention in Libya was to send a signal to possible emulators of Gaddafi that they had better not contemplate atrocities. The trouble is that the signal, if one was intended, has had little effect: the Assad regime in Syria has killed lots of protesters (though recent events in Syria, with some soldiers perhaps having mutinied and killed other members of the security forces -- it's still not entirely clear what happened -- point to the possibility of a split in the armed forces); the Saleh regime in Yemen killed lots of civilians before Saleh's departure; and the Bahraini regime used violence against protesters before (and after) calling in Saudi troops to shore itself up.

The case for the NATO intervention in Libya thus has to be made mostly on humanitarian grounds and in terms of Libya alone, it would seem, since from the standpoint of demonstrative compellence it's been a washout.

'Arab spring' update

Many critics of U.S. foreign policy have long decried the close ties between the U.S. and the House of Saud. It's no secret that the Saudis have been uneasy about the U.S. role in helping nudge its long-time ally Mubarak offstage, and as David Ignatius mentioned in his Wash. Post column of April 27, Pres. Obama's national security adviser met with Saudi King Abdullah this month and gave the king a reassuring letter from Obama. 

It has been plausibly suggested that the Saudis supported the initial proposal for a no-fly zone in Libya because they thought it would distract attention from what has been happening in Bahrain and elsewhere in the region. If that was their motivation, it doesn't seem to have worked. The Libyan intervention turned into a broader effort to protect civilians (and, in effect, indirectly aid the rebels), but it has not distracted attention from the ongoing violent crackdowns on protesters in Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. The simultaneous repressive actions by different governments, and the variation in international response, underscores something that should have been clear all along: humanitarian interventions are always a product of more than one motive and 'consistency' is not necessarily the main criterion by which they should be judged. That said, one hopes that real pressure is being brought to bear on the Yemeni and Bahraini regimes, with both of which the U.S. and Europeans have leverage, to modify what they are doing now.

Will drones save the day in Libya?

Hard not to have at least a couple of qualms about this, given their track record in the Pakistani border areas. Admittedly the environment is different.

Desperation in Misurata; residents angry at NATO

Leila Fadel's first-hand report in the Wash. Post portrays a battered city under siege whose residents are angry at NATO for failing to protect them. She writes: "There are few signs in Misurata of NATO's military campaign to protect civilians. The fighting is all urban warfare, making accurate strikes from the air difficult." No doubt; but her report indicates that Gaddafi's snipers are using particular buildings, which NATO could probably target if it wanted -- although to be honest, I really have no idea. (Nor am I going to debate the intricacies of who counts as a civilian.)

On the question Who are the rebels? that has been much asked, again I really don't know. But Fadel's report suggests that at least a few of them are idealistic young men who may or may not have known what they were getting into:

"We tried to blow up the buildings, but we don't know how," said Alaa el Deen Khesham, 30, a rebel fighter who until two months ago worked in public relations for the government. "We threw homemade bombs in there, but it didn't do anything." ...
Khesham was born in Germany and spent part of his childhood in Boise, Idaho. He has two homes in Tripoli and a sports car. But he gave it all up to fight with the rebels in Misurata.

Given what appears to be happening based on this story, I'd say there's a fair chance he'll never see that sports car again.

Update: The city council in Misurata has now formally requested foreign troops on the ground, according to Fadel.

Context is everything

It must be difficult to be an op-ed columnist. You have to come up with a certain number of words twice a week or so, and the words have to make enough sense to an editor to avoid provoking a "what are you talking about?" reaction. Sometimes one wonders how a particular column has managed to clear this hurdle. Take Maureen Dowd's "Fight of the Valkyries". As L. Sjoberg pointed out at Duck of Minerva, Dowd misunderstands feminist IR theory. But toward the end of the column, there is also this:

As compelling as the gender split is, it’s even more interesting to look at the parallels between Obama and W. Candidate Obama said about a possible strike on Iran, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Obama's quoted statement referred to a possible decision to launch a unilateral U.S. strike on Iran, and the considerations in such a case are different from those involved in a multilateral, UN-authorized intervention. Still, it's possible that Obama meant that a president needs congressional approval for any use of U.S. forces that does not respond to "an actual or imminent threat" (or, like the 'Afghan surge,' relate directly to an ongoing conflict). If so, he would not be the first president to have said one thing about the scope of presidential power during a campaign and then to have discovered, once in the Oval Office, that he found a somewhat more expansive notion of executive power to be congenial.

Presidential systems, as opposed to parliamentary ones, seem designed to encourage a certain amount of gridlock stemming from the almost constant tug-of-war between president and legislature, especially in periods of divided or semi-divided party control (as is the case now, with the Republicans in control of the House). And congressional action can frustrate what should be properly be executive branch decisions, as in the case of where to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators on trial.

But to come back to the quote on Iran, I'm inclined to think that Obama said it in the context of that particular issue and probably meant it to be less sweeping than the actual words themselves would suggest.

Orford on Libya

Anne Orford of Univ. of Melbourne, author of a recent book on R2P, had a post at the London Review of Books blog (link to it here); see my brief (and admittedly rather too flippant) comment on it here.

R2P and Libya: application or misapplication?

This post at the blog connected with the journal The American Interest [hat tip: DPT] argues that 'the responsibility to protect' (R2P) is a "nebulous norm". One way norms get less nebulous, however, is by being invoked and debated, as Badescu and Weiss suggest in a piece in last November's International Studies Perspectives (abstract here).

According to them, R2P should not be seen as synonymous with humanitarian intervention by military means (too narrow), nor as synonymous with human security generally (too broad). Rather, R2P is "about taking timely preventive action, about identifying situations that are capable of deteriorating into mass atrocities and bringing to bear diplomatic, legal, economic, and military pressure" (p. 367). Given the speed with which the Libyan situation unfolded, an argument can be made that there was not time to do these things in sequence -- i.e., first the diplomatic and economic, then the military measures -- but that, rather, an effective response required a deployment of these different means pretty much all at once. That, at any rate, seems to me to be the most plausible argument that the military intervention and accompanying actions (e.g., freezing of assets) do represent a legitimate application of R2P rather than a misapplication. It will be interesting to see how Pres. Obama frames the issue in his address tonight.

P.s. After listening to the speech, I realized that my reference (above) to the measures being taken "pretty much all at once" is a bit of an overstatement; the asset freeze etc. did precede the military action -- but not by a prolonged period. As Obama noted, the entire sequence of events from the start of the Libyan protests to the intervention took only 31 days.

When you cite a social-scientific study, it usually helps if the study is relevant to the issue at hand

...which is a long-winded way of saying that Stephen Walt seems to be a bit offbase here. He cites an unpublished working paper by Alexander Downes which concludes that "foreign-imposed regime change" tends to "ignite" civil wars. That may well be, but it's of limited relevance to Libya because in Libya there already is a civil war. Kindred Winecoff beat me to this point, but I figure it's worth repeating.

Galston on Libya

Here.

Remembering the end of the Sri Lankan civil war

Conor Foley, in a post that I have previously linked to, mentions the situation in Sri Lanka toward the end of the government's war with the Tamil Tigers (LTTE).

Hundreds of thousands of civilians were blockaded into an area the size of New York Central Park, where at least 20,000 were killed over a three month period. The area was shelled incessantly and hospitals and food-distribution points appear to have been deliberately targeted. Many more died from starvation and disease because the government blocked humanitarian access. Others were summarily executed during the final assault.... There was never even the remotest prospect of a ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Sri Lanka and I only include it in the discussion to show that the option of doing nothing also has moral consequences.

What happened in Sri Lanka at the end of its war is certainly worth recalling. Nothing on anything approaching a similar scale has occurred in Libya. The intervention there may be said to have relied on a reasoned prediction ("reasoned" of course not meaning "infallible") about what might occur in the absence of intervention. Seen in this light, the intervention is defensible, though the continuing debate about it is probably a good thing. Interventions of this sort are necessarily controversial and an absence of debate would be surprising.

Kuperman on Libya

In a USAToday column (h/t T. Wilkinson), Alan Kuperman argues that the Libyan rebels started the uprising knowing they could not win on their own and hoping to provoke civilian casualties that would draw in outside intervention. This seems to be based on an analogy with what Kuperman argued happened in Kosovo, where for instance a KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) official admitted that the more civilians killed, the more likely the prospects for outside intervention. But on a quick reading of the USAToday column, I see no direct evidence presented for his assertion that the Libyan rebels were following the same modus operandi. Moreover, didn't the anti-Gaddafi movement start out as peaceful protests and then become an armed uprising once the protesters were violently attacked? Or am I just imagining that?
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Kuperman's 'moral hazard' theory of intervention (i.e., that the possibility of outside intervention gives rebels an incentive to provoke atrocities in order to bring on an intervention) has generated academic debate. See e.g. A. Grigoryan, "Third-Party Intervention and the Escalation of State-Minority Conflicts," Int'l Studies Quarterly 54:4 (December 2010). Abstract.
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P.s. For discussion and other links, follow the Wilkinson link (above) to the CT post and comment thread.
Also - Marc Lynch on Fresh Air this afternoon.

After Gaddafi

On the admittedly optimistic assumption that Gaddafi's days are numbered, despite his vow of a "long war," it may not be too soon to think about what happens (or should happen) after. With the caveat that I know basically nothing about Libya, I suspect that holding elections is probably not one of the first things that should happen. There is ample evidence, as discussed for instance by Roland Paris in a several-years-old article* I was glancing at yesterday, that holding elections first thing in a polity emerging from a civil war, and therefore having weak or damaged institutions, is probably not a great idea.
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*R. Paris, "Bringing the Leviathan Back In: Classical Versus Contemporary Studies of the Liberal Peace," International Studies Review 8:3 (Sept. 2006), pp.425-440. See also his At War's End (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004).

Kristol & co. send a letter

Via Tom Ricks, I see that a letter has been sent to Pres. Obama urging intervention in Libya and signed by a gaggle of neocons and some others. As Ricks says, the signers alone are enough to ensure that the letter will probably have the opposite of its intended effect. A letter on foreign policy signed by Bill Kristol, Martin Peretz, and Joshua Muravchik, among others, carries a huge warning sign on it before the contents are even examined.

In this case such unavoidable prejudice-before-reading might be too bad, since it looks as if Gaddafi's forces are readying an assault on Benghazi and as Dirk Vandewalle said on the NewsHour tonight, the ragtag rebel forces are not going to be a match for Gaddafi's mercenaries and armor. He suggested that what's needed now is a 'no-drive zone'; the point is past at which a no-fly zone could have helped. Depressing, especially when coupled with the horrible events in Japan.

Update: Text of the letter here. A more skeptical view, e.g., here.