Salon: U.K. Parliament report details how NATO’s 2011 war in Libya was based on lies

“Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options,” an investigation by the House of Commons’ bipartisan Foreign Affairs Committee, strongly condemns the U.K.’s role in the war, which toppled the government of Libya’s leader Muammar Qaddafi and plunged the North African country into chaos.

“We have seen no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya,” the report states. “UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.”

The Foreign Affairs Committee concludes that the British government “failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element.” [...]

This flies in the face of what political figures claimed in the lead-up to the NATO bombing. After violent protests erupted in Libya in February, and Benghazi — Libya’s second-largest city — was taken over by rebels, exiled opposition figures like Soliman Bouchuiguir, president of the Europe-based Libyan League for Human Rights, claimed that, if Qaddafi retook the city, “There will be a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda.”

The British Parliament’s report, however, notes that the Libyan government had retaken towns from rebels in early February 2011, before NATO launched its air strike campaign, and Qaddafi’s forces had not attacked civilians. [...]

The report explains “the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change.” This view has been challenged, however, by Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Zenko used NATO’s own materials to show that “the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start.” [...]

The report also notes that the primary reasons France pushed for military intervention in Libya were Qaddafi’s “nearly bottomless financial resources,” the Libyan leader’s plans to create an alternative currency to the French franc in Africa, “Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa” and the desire to “Increase French influence in North Africa.”

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The Washington Post: Putin will make Russia’s elections this Sunday the most tightly controlled in 16 years. Here’s why.

Most observers see Putin as someone who, in New Yorker editor David Remnick’s words, seeks “power for power’s sake.” It’s not so. Putin is a potentially insecure leader who reacts defensively to domestic threats, not a hungry autocrat who lusts for ever more power. Since he became Russia’s president in 2000, as I show in a forthcoming article, most of Putin’s anti-democratic policies, reforms and actions have been put in place defensively, as reactions to real and perceived threats to his political security and survival. [...]

Putin feels threatened by individuals and organizations that have, first, the ability and resources to undermine his political control of Russia, and, second, the intent and motive to do so. And Putin sees those threats in many places. That’s why he has steadily moved to defend his power from the media, oligarchs, regional governors, the upper and lower houses of parliament, opposition political parties, foreign and domestic NGOs, and eventually the citizens themselves. [...]

But in December 2011, widespread reports of fraud sparked mass protests in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities. Here’s how we know that Putin and his ruling circle were genuinely caught off guard by the election and its aftermath: Their party, United Russia, pulled in only 49 percent of the popular vote. That was still a plurality — but the 15-point drop startled observers and embarrassed the regime.

Why didn’t Putin’s sophisticated electoral engineers deliver a stronger result for the regime? Here’s the problem: Rigging results to hit a comfortable target requires knowing how much you have to add to the real vote. That requires a good estimate of how many legitimate votes you’re likely to get. In coming up short of 50 percent, Putin and his United Russia allies revealed that they had lost touch with Russian society and misjudged their true level of public support.

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Quartz: If dolphins do have language, it’d probably be just as alien to us as, well, aliens

When animals signal to each other (or we give auditory, visual, or tactile cues) they’re usually conveying information about the situation at hand, Jaakkola says. On the other hand, “with real language, we actually don’t typically talk about the things that are going on around us,” she says. “It would be really odd if you and I were sitting together and I started naming things on the desk.”

But that is something animals like dolphins seem to do. Which is why, Jaakkola says, if we were trying to decipher if dolphins had “language,” we would probably start by thinking like an animal—looking to see if any sound units corresponded to an object at hand or an activity we could see happening simultaneous to the making those sounds. [...]

Plus, even if animals do have language, there’s no guarantee that we’d recognize it when we saw (or heard) it. “One of the pitfalls I think we have in a lot of studies, whether it’s in animals or aliens, is that we only have one example of languages,” Kershenbaum says. In other words, we have no way of knowing what we can’t understand.

Some researchers postulate that dolphins actually do speak a language through their echolocation, and that they speak through pictures generated by sound vibrations. This is a relatively new concept not yet widely accepted—but if it was true, it would go a ways in bolstering Kershenbaum’s point: the pictorial-vibration-based communiques would be so far from what we know as “language” that we don’t have anywhere near the ability to see, hear, or understand it in a meaningful way.

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