Eyeless in Libya -- and a Swiftian border security solution

lack of knowledge about the rebels is like a Rorschach test: outsiders look at them and see what they want to see.

Najla Abdurrahman, a doctoral student in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, takes Admiral Stavridis, who we quoted earlier, to task for his testimony:

The admiral’s comments — and the subsequent headlines they’ve engendered — represent a new level of irresponsibility, constructing false connections, through use of highly obscure and equivocal language, between al Qaeda and Libyan pro-democracy forces backed by the Transitional National Council. The latter is itself led by a group of well-known and respected Libyan professionals and technocrats. Even more far-fetched is the admiral’s mention of a Hezbollah connection, or “flicker” as he put it (Najla Abdurrahman, “Getting Libya’s Rebels Wrong: Don’t buy Qaddafi’s line: The rebels aren’t al Qaeda [Foreign Policy, 31 March 2011]).

Paul Wolfowitz, another supporter of the military intervention on behalf of the rebels, also waxes poetically about their democratic credentials (“The Case for Backing Libya’s Rebels” (Wall Street Journal., 11 March 2011).

On the other side, we read this in Debka (31 march 2011):

Senior Libyan rebel “officers” sold Hezbollah and Hamas thousands of chemical shells from the stocks of mustard and nerve gas that fell into rebel hands when they overran Muammar Qaddafi’s military facilities in and around Benghazi, DEBKAfile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources report.

Word of the capture touched off a scramble in Tehran and among the terrorist groups it sponsors to get hold of their first unconventional weapons.

According to our sources, the rebels offloaded at least 2,000 artillery shells carrying mustard gas and 1,200 nerve gas shells for cash payment amounting to several million dollars.

Debkais a small, right-wing leaning, and exceedingly alarmist Israeli newsletter on military and foreign policy matters (if the New York Times’s motto is “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” Debka’s surely should be “The Sky is Falling!”), so everything published in it should be taken with about half a ton of salt. Still, the point is that the lack of information about the rebels allow different people to see different things in them.

3. Modest proposal for securing the U.S.-Mexico border

DHS secretary Janet Napolitano and her critics have been engaged in an increasingly vitriolic debate about how secure, or insecure, the U.S.-Mexico border is. This led us to the following thought.

In his Modest Proposal (1729) Jonathan Swift