Stability is a key strategic interests pursued by the United States in the Middle East since it became the region’s sole superpower.Thus stable regimes have pumped the petroleum to the world market, keeping the price per barrel relatively low and allowing the US Navy to police the tanker lanes. For 40 years, with an occasional dissent, stable Arab regimes have acquiesced in Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Stable Arab regimes enlisted in the US-led war on terrorism and repress the less militant Islamist movements that have long raised the most credible specter of disruption to the preferred order.
Whilst non-religious popular uprisings have given flesh to the threat of disorder and instability it is still the commitment to stability that guides the White House and European nations. So why did Europe intervene? After all the Arab street represents the specter of disruption to the preferred order.
In their Of Principle and Peril the editors of the Middle East Research and Information Project say that the European intervention into Libya was based on fears that oil flows might be interrupted, but that more importantly because migrant flows might spike as Libya morphed into a “failed state.” The say:
In France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, immigration from Africa is a white-hot potato, not only because (as in the US) native-born Europeans resent competition from low-wage labor, but also because white Europeans fear their liberal laws and post-Christian culture will be overrun by unruly, yet doctrinaire Muslims. The EU has spent billions of euros to assuage this fear, both on tightened border security and on the “Euro-Med” family of socio-economic development programs, which are intended to lessen the poverty and despair propelling migrants northward. In the 2000s, the concern with stanching the North African migrant flow was augmented by worries about transmigration -- the movement of black Africans across the Sahel and Sahara, through North Africa and then into Europe. Qaddafi’s Libya, along with Morocco, Algeria and Ben Ali’s Tunisia, became an increasingly watchful sentinel along the byways of transmigration, as the local press stoked anxiety about black Africans, unable to reach the promised land, settling in the Arab-Berber spaces en route. A scantly governed Libya, wracked by revolt and starved of revenue by external sanctions, would be unable to block transmigration, even as it produced its own stream of refugees. The southern-tier EU states cannot abide a “Somalia.”
They add that a post Qaddafi Libya would look nothing like the democratic state of liberal interventionist dreams, and quite a bit like post-Saddam Iraq.
The UN intervention into Libya comes under the Responsibility to Protect; namely that the international community has a responsibility to intervene in crisis situations if the State is failing its responsibility to protect its population
The UN's concept of responsibility to protect is a norm or set of principles based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege, but a responsibility developed in response to the genocide in Rwanda and the deliberate targeting of civilians in Kosovo and Srebrenica. Since these crises, a series of governmental and non-governmental initiatives have focused on reconciling traditional notions of state sovereignty with the moral imperative to act -- with force if necessary -- in the face of genocide and crimes against humanity. The Responsibility to Protect concept is a valuable framework for building international consensus around the legitimate use of force to halt large-scale attacks on civilians.
The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) focuses on preventing and halting four crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. The responsibility to protect can be thought of as having three parts.
(1) A State has a responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing (mass atrocities).
(2) If the State is unable to protect its population on its own, the international community has a responsibility to assist the state by building its capacity. This can mean building early-warning capabilities, mediating conflicts between political parties, strengthening the security sector, mobilizing standby forces, and many other actions.
(3) If a State is manifestly failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene at first diplomatically, then more coercively, and as a last resort, with military force.
According to its advocates the concept of Responsibility to Protect captures a simple and powerful idea. The primary responsibility for protecting its own people from mass atrocity crimes lies with the state itself. State sovereignty implies responsibility, not a license to kill. But when a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert such crimes, the wider international community then has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary.
R2P emphasizes preventive action above all. That includes assistance for states struggling to contain potential crises and for effective rebuilding after a crisis or conflict to tackle its underlying causes. R2P's primary tools are persuasion and support, not military or other coercion. But sometimes it is right to fight: faced with another Rwanda, the world cannot just stand by.
In a debate on the concept in 2009 Noam Chomsky observed:
The general principles of R2P that don't seem to me controversial...The question that is controversial is how the right of forceful intervention is interpreted, and, as I mentioned, that is controversial, there's difference of opinion, and also, in general, how it's going to be implemented. So will there be, in fact, an implementation of R2P right now that takes account of protected populations - a specific responsibility of the United Nations - who are being subjected to gross violations of fundamental human rights? Will it be applied to protect the children of the world in particular the children of southern Africa alone, who are dying daily at the rate of Rwanda, not for a hundred days but every day, and its getting worse because of [the] refusal of Western countries to do anything. So will the R2P apply to that? In fact, it's always the selectivity and the implementation that is at issue.
Richard Falk argues that Responsibility to Protect is subject to the political will of the powerful sovereign states, the powerful members of the United Nations, especially the U.S., and it just reinforces the understanding that geopolitics is primary and takes precedence over international law in those cases where the interests of the most significant members of the UN are engaged.
This invites the criticism of the UN as being subject to this geopolitical discipline, and [being] appropriately accused of double standards, of applying international law to the weak but excepting the strong consistent with the impunity that the leaders of powerful countries have while weaker leaders are prosecuted for their criminal conduct.
This overview of the nuclear emergency at Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeastern Japan is from Professor Gary Was, from the department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at Michigan University. Recall that at the level of philosophy of science, all the greatest excesses of western science are embodied in nuclear physics: true representations of nature, an ignorant and/or irrational public that must be disciplined; in short, epistemology where "just the facts" must first be known, then people can form a rational opinion about the topic.
The situation at Fukushima Daiichi is that there not being enough power to run the cooling systems to keep the reactor cool because the tsunami took them out. However, the situation is under control because the company, Tokyo Electric Power, is able to pump water into several reactors to keep them cool and the containment vessel is still intact. So things are fine.
I find this interpretation optimistic in the light of a containment vessel in a second reactor unit having ruptured; and that is the second vessel to be compromised in two days. It is not clear how serious the possible breach might be, or how low the water is in the pools of water that cover the rods.
This optimism is standard amongst the professional nuclear engineering and research community--in this post at brave new climate one says:
It is expected that enough coolant and power will be found to avoid meltdown. In which case it could be argued that this is a reasonable result for 50 year old Gen I Reactors exposed to the worst earthquake and tsunami for 100+ years!
What I find problematic about some of the nuclear academics --eg., brave new climate run by Prof Barry Book at Adelaide University---is that they stand for the facts and rationality (the enlightenment) versus the fear, ignorance and hysteria (irrationality) of the mass media. In between lies public ignorance. Yet their interpretations of the facts are very optimistic---the situation at Fukushima Daiichi plant is stable and under control.
We do need facts and rationality to have a debate about nuclear power in the context of global warming as this education of the public leads to an informed citizenry, which is crucial to a deliberative democracy. Brook is a defender of nuclear power (fourth generation or integral fast reactor). He says:
For too long Australia been an energy production backwater, satisfied with old-style technology based on burning cheap coal and natural gas. But as societal concerns over pollution, climate change, price of electricity and future energy security rise, nuclear energy – the only proven and most cost-effective baseload low-carbon energy source – is now looking like a really sensible option. And rightly so. If we are really serious about addressing Australia’s future clean energy needs, we need to rationally consider all the alternatives, nuclear and renewable.
Update
Barry Brook's has changed his interpretation of what is happening. He now says:
In sum, this accident is now significantly more severe than Three Mile Island in 1979. It resulted from a unique combination of failures to plant systems caused by the tsunami, and the broad destruction of infrastructure for water and electricity supply which would normally be reestablished within a day or two following a reactor accident. My initial estimates of the extent of the problem, on March 12, did not anticipate the cascading problems that arose from the extended loss of externally sourced AC power to the site, and my prediction that ‘there is no credible risk of a serious accident‘ has been proven quite wrong as a result.
Mark P. Worrell in The Cult of Exchange Value and the Critical Theory of Spectacle Fast Capitalism 5.2 says that what Guy Debord:
conveys with the idea of spectacle is the extent to which the logic of exchange has penetrated into everyday consciousness at precisely the point where the equivalent value form (money) itself dissolves into abstraction; the extent to which exchange value has become literally disembodied or spectral. As money becomes increasingly abstract its fetish power is magnified... Pushed to extremes spectacle is the belief in value disembodied, resistant to stable forms, free from earthy bonds, colonizing the totality of the social universe; every word spoken through us is the voice of commerce and exchange, warped by the distortion field of omnipresent and omnipotent exchange value; every visual or acoustic image we see or hear (the whole signifying chain in which we are submerged) is dictated by the logic of alienation and exchange; there are no longer relations or thoughts not colored by the dictates of value; spectacle society is the absolute realization of not just commodity relations but the deification of value; people now have prices in their eyes, money on their minds, commodities in their dreams, and, in the case of the lucky few, capital in their veins.
Debord was definitely on to something.
In Fibre Cultural Journal it is stated that:
Since 2002, as everyone knows, there have been dramatic changes in publishing—primarily due to digital and networked media. These are now transforming nearly all of publishing in a dramatic and ongoing manner. This in turn has opened up critical research and discussion exponentially, both for traditional research and the new. It’s true that there seem many forces trying to put the genies involved back into their respective bottles. There are many who would like to see open access go away, or prohibitively expensive (if to authors now instead of readers), or highly regulated, or possibly diminished in stature besides that which some still see as “real (commercial, print) publishing”. At worst, open access serves as a bait and switch mechanism in a variety of contexts.
Gerry Hassan's argument in The Neo-Liberal State and its Context at Open Democracy about the neo-liberal nature of the contemporary UK state also applies to the Australian one. The neo-liberal state has emerged out of the welfare state and it is one that is concerned with governance in a seemingly free and self-regulating global market that is constituted as the ideal in relation to which governance should be oriented. The ethos here is one whereby ‘government failure’ is seen as being a greater problem than ‘market failure’.
Hassan says:
The UK state has become a neo-liberal state – one which has changed how it acts in the UK and globally...he neo-liberal state has a transformed political centre; one which at the core and highest echelons of British government now prioritises marketisation, corporatisation and outsourcing, and economic relationships which aid this. The political centre has been captured by entrepreneurs of the state, corporate interests, and the accountancy firms. The old Whitehall mandarins have been caricatured by ‘Yes Minister’ – an account the Thatcherites and Blairites thought accurate in describing them as obstacles to change, stuffy, high bound to tradition and Oxbridge dominated.
The future of Australia is inextricably linked to the future of the neo-liberal state's capacity to govern in accordance with a neoliberal rationality of government:
this governmental rationality can be characterised as one within which governance is reflected on with the aid of a vocabulary that includes ‘competition’, ‘market’, ‘ freedom’,‘ choice’, ‘ customer orientation’,‘ efficiency’ and ‘flexibility as core concepts; ‘the market’ is constituted as the ideal in relation to which governance should be oriented; it is accepted that markets can exist only under specific political, legal and institutional conditions that must be actively established by authorities; individual and/or individualised entities are constituted and acted upon as flexible and manipulable subjects with a rationality derived from arranged forms of entrepreneurial and competitive behaviour; the main responsibility for economic activity is ascribed to private market actors; and interventions in such activity on the part of authorities are, if accepted at all, given a theoretical justification based on ideas of market failure or imperfection.