GERARD POWERS (University of Notre Dame): Thanks for having me, Kim. I think there are three broad questions. One is, were we morally justified in going in in the first place? The second is are the means that we are using morally justified, or are we proving through the means we are using that humanitarian invention, as some allede, is really just an oxymoron? And three, I think we have to think about what an ethics of exit means in Libya.

[KIM] LAWTON: Well, let’s unpack all of that. Were we justified in going in? The president said it was to protect civilians.

POWERS: I think humanitarian intervention in extraordinary cases to protect the civilian population is justified, and not only that, there’s a duty in some cases to do that. My concern is that that objective seems to be subsumed by other objectives.

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NATO’s leaders are scrambling to find tactics that might force Kadafi to give up: military escalation, aid to the rebels, Russian mediation. They’re contemplating outcomes in which Kadafi might not have to leave Libya or stand trial before the International Criminal Court. “All options are open,” Sarkozy said last month. “We are not saying that Kadafi needs to be exiled. He must leave power, and the quicker he does it, the greater his choice.”

But Kadafi shows little interest in a graceful exit, and NATO may soon face a tough decision. British newspapers have already reported that former British soldiers are on the ground spotting targets for NATO airstrikes, reportedly under contract to an unnamed Arab regime. If the air war stalls, Britain and France will have to consider sending in ground forces as the quickest way to finish the job. Hague has already acknowledged that Britain will probably send peacekeeping troops if and when the conflict ends.

In a contest of wills between NATO and Kadafi, NATO still appears likely to win in the long run.

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The UN nuclear watchdog is to report Syria to the Security Council over its alleged covert nuclear programme.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voted to rebuke Syria on claims of an undeclared nuclear reactor.

The structure, which Syria has maintained was a non-nuclear military site, was destroyed by Israel in 2007.

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Faced with a decision on how quickly to draw down troops, President Obama spoke by videoconference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday as his nominee for ambassador to Afghanistan cautioned against walking away from its 10-year-old war.

The U.S. must “ensure that the country doesn’t degenerate into a safe haven for al-Qaeda,” Ryan Crocker told skeptical lawmakers at his Senate confirmation hearing.

The White House, meanwhile, challenged the findings of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee probe of U.S. aid in Afghanistan. The panel’s Democrats issued a report saying that nearly $19 billion in aid over a decade has generated waste and corruption and been of limited success.

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President Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Afghanistan offered an unvarnished assessment on Wednesday of the nearly decade-old war, but he told a skeptical Senate committee that the United States could not afford to walk away anytime soon.

In his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ryan C. Crocker, the nominee, said that the United States had abandoned Afghanistan once before, after its war with the Soviet Union in 1989, with “disastrous consequences” ”” the rise of the Taliban. “We cannot afford to do so again,” Mr. Crocker said.

Mr. Crocker nonetheless acknowledged a panoply of problems facing Afghanistan, including government corruption that he said would become “a second insurgency” if left unchecked. He said the United States’s goal in Afghanistan was merely to help the Afghans create a “good-enough government,” not necessarily a model democracy. While progress has been hard, he said, the situation was not hopeless.

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The hugely expensive U.S. attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan has had only limited success and may not survive an American withdrawal, according to the findings of a two-year congressional investigation to be released Wednesday.

The report calls on the administration to rethink urgently its assistance programs as President Obama prepares to begin drawing down the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan this summer.

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Diane Sawyer asks Gen. Petraeus and Sec. Gates if the U.S. is winning the war.

Watch it carefully, it is a great illustration of the huge personal toll on a Secretary of Defense that goes with the job–KSH.

…this is not about technology alone. As Russian historian Leon Aron has noted, the Arab uprisings closely resemble the Russian democratic revolution of 1991 in one key respect: they were both not so much about freedom or food as about ”dignity”. They each grew out of a deep desire by people to run their own lives and to be treated as ”citizens” – with both obligations and rights that the state cannot just give and take by whim.

If you want to know what brings about revolutions, it is not GDP rising or falling, says Aron, ”it is the quest for dignity”. We always exaggerate people’s quest for GDP and undervalue their quest for ideals. ”Dignity before bread” was the slogan of the Tunisian revolution. ”The spark that lights the fuse is always the quest for dignity,” said Aron. ”Today’s technology just makes the fire much more difficult to put out.”

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With some 47,000 US troops slated to leave the country by then, the attack could provide a new impetus for the Pentagon to push for an extension of the US military presence in the country.

US military officials have made it clear that while security on the ground in Iraq has improved in recent years, “there is still much work to be done and still plenty of extremists aided by states and organizations who are bent on pulling Iraq back into violence,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said during a visit to Iraq in April.

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China’s official Communist Party newspaper issued a caustic response on Monday to Google’s charge that Chinese hackers had taken aim at influential users of its Gmail service, calling the accusations “political gaming” aimed at fomenting new discord between the Beijing and Washington governments.

The newspaper, People’s Daily, published a front-page editorial in Monday’s international editions that also suggested that Google’s actions could cost it credibility in the business world.

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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton defended her new ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom on Thursday (June 2), calling the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook a bridge-builder who is right for the job.

Speaking at Cook’s ceremonial swearing-in, Clinton cited Cook’s firsts as an African-American Baptist minister and New York police chaplain, as well as her involvement in international activities.

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After venting out their ire against Sony PlayStation Network and Sony Pictures, hackers have pointed their guns at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The group LulzSec has hacked an FBI-affiliated website called InfraGard and siphoned off with the details of around 180 users. The attack was on their Atlanta chapter.

InfraGard is a government and private sector alliance which provides actionable intelligence to protect critical national information infrastructure. The website defines its role as: “InfraGard is an association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States.”

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Google Inc. is blaming computer hackers in China for a high-tech ruse that broke into the personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists.

The breach announced Wednesday marks the second time in 17 months that Google has publicly identified China as the home base for a scheme aimed at hijacking information stored on Google’s vast network of computers.

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Moammar Gadhafi insists he will not leave his country, South Africa’s president said Tuesday after he met the embattled Libyan ruler.

South Africa President Jacob Zuma’s office said he had pressed Gadhafi to agree to an African Union proposal for a cease-fire and dialogue to settle the Libya conflict and that the Libyan leader agreed.
“Col. Gadhafi called for an end to the bombings to enable a Libyan dialogue,” it said. “He emphasized that he was not prepared to leave his country, despite the difficulties.”

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The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.

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For a small cadre of CIA veterans, the death of Osama bin Laden was more than just a national moment of relief and closure. It was also a measure of payback, a settling of a score for a pair of deaths, the details of which have remained a secret for 13 years.

Tom Shah and Molly Huckaby Hardy were among the 44 U.S. Embassy employees killed when a truck bomb exploded outside the embassy compound in Kenya in 1998.

Though it has never been publicly acknowledged, the two were working undercover for the CIA. In al-Qaida’s war on the United States, they are believed to be the first CIA casualties.

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In early 2008, Libya’s sovereign-wealth fund controlled by Col. Moammar Gadhafi gave $1.3 billion to Goldman Sachs Group to sink into a currency bet and other complicated trades. The investments lost 98% of their value, internal Goldman documents show.

What happened next may be one of the most peculiar footnotes to the global financial crisis. In an effort to make up for the losses, Goldman offered Libya the chance to become one of its biggest shareholders, according to documents and people familiar with the matter.

Negotiations between Goldman and the Libyan Investment Authority stretched on for months during the summer of 2009. Eventually, the talks fell apart, and nothing more was done about the lost money.

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Leading Chinese author Xiaolu Guo has revealed that China still views America as its biggest enemy and competitor.

Speaking on a panel simply entitled, ”˜China’, at the Hay Festival, the author of ”˜A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary’, said: “For the last 20 years China thinks America as a model but is also the enemy.”

Talking about her experience of education in Beijing, Chinese-born Guo who now lives in London, revealed that anti-Americanism was still very strong and people were told to intensively study American work and texts, such as J.D Salinger’s Catcher in Rye, in order to know everything about the “enemy”.

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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Pakistan on Friday in what officials described as an effort to measure Pakistan’s commitment to fighting Islamic extremism after the killing of Osama bin Laden badly strained relations with the United States. It did not appear to go well.

The atmosphere of her initial meetings ”” visibly frosty ”” underscored the tensions between the two countries, which have threatened to lurch into open confrontation since Navy Seals found and killed Bin Laden on May 2 in a military garrison town only 35 miles from here. Mrs. Clinton, the highest ranking American official to visit Pakistan, was joined by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who arrived separately as part of a carefully orchestrated diplomatic encounter.

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As NATO’s military campaign against Moammar Gadhafi’s Libyan regime continued last week, the 60-day deadline for U.S. participation expired, based on the 1973 War Powers Resolution. So it’s debatable whether President Obama has the legal authority for continued use of U.S. forces in the Libyan campaign.

The “witching hour” has arrived.

So far, the president hasn’t made a persuasive case for ignoring the deadline. He owes the American people an explanation.

Polls show declining public support for this intervention, despite the president’s repeated upbeat assessments of its progress….

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If it wasn’t already clear, India’s announcement of $5 billion in development deals in Africa should certainly put to rest any question of whether India is dedicated to doing business on the African continent over the long haul.

The pledge of development aid to African countries ”“ essentially a fund to help African countries to meet their development goals ”“ stands in stark contrast to Africa’s largest single trading partner, China.

While China trades large infrastructure projects (built mostly by Chinese labor) for access to African raw materials, India spends money on training Africans to develop their own countries. And while Indian countries certainly have come into Africa as investors, Indian diplomats are quick to stress that the relationship between India and African countries is more one of equal partners.

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Here, the students witnessed the establishment of a German-Polish-Russian forum designed to encourage a rapprochement among three countries with fundamentally different historical narratives of World War II.

Any such process would ultimately mean Russia confronting its past, particularly Stalinist crimes and the gulags, and reassessing its role as victim and victor during and after World War II. It would also mean Russia embracing the European idea of dealing with memory and the past, now so much a part of the European identity.

“Being European is about being aware of what we did,” said Ivan Krastev, historian and chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia.

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Security forces loyal to Yemen’s president Ali Abdullah Saleh were locked in fierce gun battles on Tuesday in the capital Sana’a with guards from the country’s most powerful tribal federation whose leader is backing protesters’ demands for an end to the premier’s 33-year rule.

At least 24 soldiers and 14 tribesmen were killed and 24 injured in the skirmishes, dimming the prospects for a negotiated solution to Yemen’s political impasse.

The shootout, which pitted Saleh’s central security forces against guards of Sadiq al-Ahmar, head of the Hashid tribal federation from which Saleh also hails, took place in sandbagged streets surrounding Ahmar’s fortified compound, near several government ministries and the ruling party’s headquarters.

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It is understood that the president’s remarks may have been made to head off a symbolic recognition of pre-1967-borders Palestine at the U.N. General Assembly and to restart negotiations between the parties. This is indeed commendable, but not at the expense of securing an agreement that is just and workable for both Israel and the Palestinian people. It would be tragic if the emergence of a Palestinian state consigned the Palestinians to Salafi-Wahabi servitude rather than leading to a true freedom for Christians as well as Muslims, women as well as men.

Finally, from a Judeo-Christian point of view, I would have welcomed an acknowledgment from the president of the Biblical basis of the idea, expressed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, that women and men are endowed with certain inalienable rights by their Creator. This is the true basis for any struggle to have human equality affirmed and respected.

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Barack Obama will pressure David Cameron this week not to begin scaling back British forces’ involvement in Afghanistan later this year.

The American president, who arrives at London Stansted tomorrow to begin a full state visit to Britain, after a quick stop-off in Ireland today, will seek the Prime Minister’s backing for a tougher stance on a range of international and security issues from “AfPak” (Afghanistan-Pakistan) and combating homegrown terrorism to missile defence in the former Soviet Union. Mr Cameron will, in return, seek deeper American commitment for Nato action in Libya, where Britain and France seek help towards an exit strategy from the conflict.

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The persecuted Catholic Church in China needs and deserves the prayers of Catholics throughout the world, Pope Benedict XVI said.

“There, as elsewhere, Christ is living his passion” because of government restrictions and pressures on the church, the pope said May 18 at the end of his weekly general audience.

He asked Catholics everywhere to observe May 24, the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians, as a day of prayer for Catholics in mainland China. Pope Benedict established the annual day of prayer in 2007 when he wrote a letter to Catholics in China outlining ways to promote greater unity between those exercising their faith clandestinely and those participating in communities overseen by the government-backed Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

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Communist China has earned praise in the past few years for a perceived thaw in its strict opposition to religious observance””particularly Christianity. A visitor to China will see Christian churches out in the open; a printing facility in Nanjing is the largest Bible publisher in the world. There is the appearance, at least, of a faith that is free and tolerated.

This helps explain some of the shock over a series of brutal crackdowns that have come as startling departures. Over Easter, Chinese authorities escalated their campaign against a Protestant “house church,” Shouwang, detaining dozens of believers and placing hundreds more under house arrest for the “crime” of worshipping in a public square. And late last month, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its annual report, which flagged several incidents of horrific abuses of Christians in China”‹”””‹including “disappearances,” beatings, the destruction of churches, and forced “re-education through labor.”

But these two trends are not in fact contradictory. The “thaw” in China’s treatment of Christians was nothing more than a savvy and sophisticated new twist on its longstanding assault on religious freedom….

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Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said that the Bushehr power plant is operational, Press TV reported on Wednesday.

“As we have previously announced, Bushehr power plant has reached the criticality stage, meaning it has been successfully launched,” Salehi reportedly said.

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Keeping debt under control, Merkel said in a speech at an event held by her party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union, in the western German town of Meschede, isn’t the only priority. “It is also important that people in countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal are not able to retire earlier than in Germany — that everyone exerts themselves more or less equally. That is important.”

She added: “We can’t have a common currency where some get lots of vacation time and others very little. That won’t work in the long term.”

There are indeed significant differences between retirement ages in the two countries. Greece announced reforms to its pension system in early 2010 aimed at reducing early retirement and raising the average age of retirement to 63. Incentives to keep workers in the labor market beyond 65 have likewise been adopted. Germany voted in 2007 to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67 over the next several years.

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Even if we were justified in using force to kill Osama bin Laden and his death brings a sense of “closure” to the victims of the 9/11 attacks, his death has not broken the cycle of violence. We have already seen that 80 people in Pakistan have been killed as an act of “revenge” for bin Laden’s death. Will someone avenge those 80 deaths, too? And then who will avenge the avengers? Will anyone be marked as Cain so that he may not be killed in revenge?

As has been so often said, the Christian duty to love is not a feeling, but can be understood as an act of fulfilling our responsibilities to God and our neighbor. Augustine believed that taking someone’s life to defend the innocent in order to preserve a “provisional and earthly peace” could be understood as a paradoxical act of love. But he also understood these responsibilities of political authority to be a tragic necessity, borne from the responsibility that comes with trying to preserve a common life in the face of evil.

Those who render this provisional and earthly judgment, Augustine says, do so “with tears,” knowing that the death of one’s fellows can never be something to celebrate. “As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live” (Ezek. 33:11).

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