If you’re looking for a way to follow the fast-moving events in Libya, CNN’s liveblog has been excellent.

Watching Gaddafi’s forces disintegrate before the onslaught of a people’s uprising—organized by disparate groups with differing interests with one uniting goal, ending their repression—has been awe-inspiring and worrying all at the same time.

Gaddafi’s rule has ended, but the future could be a greater struggle for the Libyan people than the last few months. Once Gaddafi is completely defeated, the National Transition Council will sit down to—and I say this without exaggeration—build a nation from nothing, all the while attempting to keep the society’s different factions engaged and focused on the same goal. That’s a monumental task, and I wish them all the best in doing so.

They will have their freedom soon. The task before them is to keep it.

Bizarre:

Only minutes into Biden’s remarks, Chinese officials had begun to direct reporters toward the exits. Most reporters and the vice president’s staff objected, saying it was important to cover the entirety of Biden’s opening statement, as had been the agreement between officials beforehand.

A Chinese press aide said Biden was going on far too long for their liking. But in fact, including the consecutive translation of his comments from English to Chinese, Biden spoke only two or three minutes longer than Xi had.

Soon the stern shooing turned into forceful shoving. As reporters tried to stand their ground, Chinese officials locked arms and pushed forward in a show of overwhelming force. Soon enough Biden did finish, but reporters had difficulty hearing the entire thing because of the fisticuffs.

Michael Pettis argues China’s miracle growth won’t last much longer:

Can China rebalance away from investment and toward domestic consumption as the main engine of growth? Yes, but with great difficulty. Chinese households consume only about 35% of gross domestic product (GDP), far less than any other country. Such a large domestic imbalance has no historical precedent.

Some in Beijing understand how lopsided their development has been. So over the next 10 years, policy makers have said they will try to raise consumption to 50% of GDP. Even that is a low number; it would put China at the bottom of the group of low-consuming East Asian countries.

But achieving this goal is problematic, since it requires that household consumption grow four percentage points faster than GDP. In the past decade, Chinese household consumption has grown by 7% to 8% annually, while GDP has grown at 10% to 11%. If one expects Chinese GDP to grow by 6% to 7%, Chinese household consumption would have to surge by 10% to 11%.

Basically, China’s growth over the last two decades has been due overwhelmingly to state-directed investment in infrastructure development, and they’re reaching the end of the road for economic growth from investment. China needs to readjust their economy to be a more consumer-based economy to succeed in the coming decades.

The PRC is trying, of course. But as Pettis points out, households only hold 35 percent of GDP. Getting that percentage up to a safer level will require significant adjustment and slower overall economic growth.

China’s path to world economic domination is not an easy one.

U.S. planes are participating in air strikes in Libya:

“U.S. aircraft continue to fly support [ISR and refueling] missions, as well as strike sorties under NATO tasking,” AFRICOM spokeswoman Nicole Dalrymple said in an emailed statement. “As of today, and since 31 March, the U.S. has flown a total of 3,475 sorties in support of OUP. Of those, 801 were strike sorties, 132 of which actually dropped ordnance.”

So, not only are we providing surveillance and refueling for NATO, and striking Libyan forces with unmanned drones, but we’re also conducting traditional air strikes as well.

Remember, according to the administration, this doesn’t amount to “hostilities.” Is that the place we’re in now, where the government believes dropping 500-2000 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles doesn’t amount to hostilities?

President Obama will announce today the withdrawal of 30,000 troops from Afghanistan, nearly one-third of our current military deployment. This will effectively end the “surge” Obama ordered in 2009.

The military is furious, apparently, because they believe they need the full number of combat troops available to maintain advances made against the Taliban last winter.

This effectively is capitulating the Afghan war. Obama’s policy on Afghanistan is, to put it nicely, puzzling. After 3 months of thinking in 2009, Obama increased our forces in Afghanistan by 30,000—a middle-ground between administration and military officials. That measure was already half-hearted, but rather than see it through, he’s apparently given up on it.

The Afghan war was always going to be almost impossible to win, so it’s easy to say he’s making the right decision now. But if that’s true, and it’s a hard truth that he’s recognized, why did he order the half-surge in 2009 to begin with? If it’s because it’s a truth he only recognizes now, after two years of war, why not announce a full withdrawal? If the reason is because we’re in the middle of negotiations with the Taliban and announcing a withdrawal would undermine our position, doesn’t announcing the withdrawal of nearly one-third of our troops do exactly that?

The only answer that makes any sense is that he’s given up on the war and he thinks announcing the withdrawal of troops will help in the 2012 election. Even then, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; withdrawing one-third of our troops will feel like a half-hearted political measure to independents who want to see our troops come home, and for those independents who want to see us win the Afghan war, it will just anger them even more.

I don’t see any other answer, though. The best end-game in Afghanistan now is a negotiated settlement with the Taliban that allows them into the government but limits the extent to which they can re-implement Shariah law and militants are allowed to train and organize. That’s a terrible outcome, but even that requires us to negotiate from a strong position, and beginning to withdraw our forces while we’re negotiating almost assuredly undercuts our chance.

The Pakistanis, the Afghans and the Taliban all know that we have no will to stay and are leaving. This announcement will confirm it. Our best end game now—and what Obama’s seeking, I’m sure—is saving a little face when the Taliban march through and re-claim Afghanistan. It’s unfair to blame Obama, or any president, for “losing” a war in a region that cannot be tamed, but it’s certainly valid to criticize him for undermining our position for negotiation.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is providing 24 high school graduates with $100,000 each to work on their own projects for two years. He selected them based on their project’s potential to save the world.

The condition for taking the grant is that they cannot go to college. Thiel believes they can learn and contribute more by working on their own things rather than sit in class:

“Turning people into debt slaves when they’re college students is really not how we end up building a better society,” Thiel says.

In conversation and as a philanthropist, Thiel pushes his strong belief that innovation has stagnated in the U.S. and that radical solutions are needed to push civilization forward.

The “20 Under 20″ fellowship is one such effort. Thiel believes that the best young minds can contribute more to society by skipping college and bringing their ideas straight to the real world.

College, as a concept, has a tremendous amount of potential for fostering innovation; there’s smart people all around you, the ability to easily learn about different kinds of things you’re unlikely to learn about on your own, resources to research, and time (if you’re willing to make it) to work on things.

That’s incredibly beneficial, but schools tend to find ways to mess it up. Universities like to describe themselves as institutions that take in children and output adult, life-long learners who are prepared to do anything. For most schools, though, that’s bullshit; what they’re really doing is forcing students to take courses they have no interest in and learn how they can get through courses with as little effort as possible, while receiving the grade they desire. School, for most students, isn’t about learning—it’s about receiving a degree.

So, until schools evolve, programs like Thiel’s are a great idea. Some disagree, however:

:

Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at Duke University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and a writer for TechCrunch and Bloomberg Businessweek, has assailed Thiel’s program for sending what he sees as the message that anyone can be Mark Zuckerberg.
“Silicon Valley lives in its own bubble. It sees the world through its own prism. It’s got a distorted view,” Wadhwa says.
“All the people who are making a fuss are highly educated. They’re rich themselves. They’ve achieved success because of their education. There’s no way in hell we would have heard about Peter Thiel if he hadn’t graduated from Stanford,” he says.

Oh, really? Yet we’ve heard about all kinds of people in technology that didn’t graduate from Stanford, or graduate from any other college, for that matter. We’ve only heard of them because they created something incredible.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both dropped out of college. Somehow I doubt they, and the world, would have been better off by completing their degrees. The reason is because people in technology care less about what degrees someone has and more about what they’ve built. That’s a good thing.

This, of course, isn’t for everyone. It’s for the kind of person who’s self-motivated, who’s dead-set on creating something worth creating, on doing something worth doing—not someone who goes to college so they can get a degree and work for the same company their entire lives and enjoy a stable salary, and has very little interest in expending themselves into something.

The problem is, that kind of job is disappearing. We don’t need reliable, boring and stable middle managers with no ambitions besides getting home in time for primetime TV anymore. They’re not contributing much of anything. We need people who see the world a little differently, who see connections between things no one else sees, and thus can create great leaps forward.

Those are the people who are going to be in demand now, and those are the kinds of people Thiel is looking for. Good for him. Universities aren’t fulfilling their role and I’m glad to see someone is trying to.

A Senate bill would give the Department of Justice the power to seek a court order to effectively make web sites they deem as intellectual property violators inaccessible on the web:

The U.S. Department of Justice would receive the power to seek a court order against an allegedly infringing Web site, and then serve that order on search engines, certain Domain Name System providers, and Internet advertising firms–which would in turn be required to “expeditiously” make the target Web site invisible.

…

Leahy said in a statement that his proposal permits law enforcement to “crack down on rogue Web sites dedicated to the sale of infringing or counterfeit goods.” The actual bill text, however, doesn’t require that the piratical Web site sell anything–meaning, for example, if WikiLeaks were accused of primarily distributing copyrighted internal bank documents, access from the United States could be curbed.

No trial, just a court order, and a web site is gone. That’s a rather convenient power to have when most communication works through the web.

I don’t have much sympathy for pirated content repositories, but this is a terrible precedent to allow happen. It’s a small jump to go from allowing this for sites that infringe on intellectual property to sites that the government finds threatening.

Apple just launched the iPad 2 in China and Thailand, and MacStories has collected photos from both launches.

This amount of people do not show up for a normal product release. The iPad is something special.

Some have taken to arguing that bin Laden was somehow victorious.

Ross Douthat explains why this isn’t so:

Keep in mind that for Bin Laden, increased American military involvement in the Muslim world wasn’t an end unto itself. Rather, it was a means to a larger goal: The spread of global jihad, the empowerment of a particular strain of Salafi Islam at the expense of more moderate alternatives, and ultimately the restoration of a pan-Islamic caliphate. Are those goals any closer to fruition today than they were on September 10, 2001? I don’t think they are.

He’s absolutely right. Bin Laden’s goal with September 11th was to embroil the U.S. in an intractable war in the Middle East, in order to (1) cause the collapse of Arab regimes across the Middle East and (2) to both inspire Muslims with an attack on the U.S. and to infuriate them with the U.S.’s invasion, so they would rise up and support his cause.

That plan failed. Miserably. People across the Middle East turned against al Qaeda after September 11th and is now an after-thought in people’s minds. The people are not supporting Islamist causes; indeed, Arabs have risen up against their regimes not on Islamist grounds, but rather on secular grounds—because they have been repressed.

He absolutely failed. He had his opportunity—our bungling of the Iraq war, and the ensuing chaos from the sectarian war that resulted, provided an opening to take over one of the region’s most strategically important countries, but bin Laden and Zarqawi failed. Their strategy of turning the Shiites and Sunnis against each other to create chaos initially worked, but then they turned against fellow Sunnis, too. This broke them from the greater Sunni insurgency and the Sunni community, and the U.S. was able to gather the support of Sunnis and Sunni insurgents against al Qaeda in Iraq.

If they had succeeded in Iraq, and took over the country, things may very well have turned out quite different. Iraq would have been an ideal base to begin building the caliphate; it is rich in Islamic history, has oil supplies and sits between Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran. But they failed.

Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are certainly still a threat, but they are not the threat they were before and immediately after September 11th. They can still do significant damage, but that’s all we should fear. We should no longer be afraid of anything more than that. They failed.

That doesn’t mean that we should withdraw from Afghanistan immediately, however. The situation there is almost identical to when the Soviets began withdrawing from Afghanistan in the 1980s, and our failure to deal with it then allowed the Taliban to take over and the militant movement to grow in Afghanistan and Pakistan, giving birth to al Qaeda. If we fail to deal with it now, we may be facing the same threat in the future.

Megan McArdle can’t celebrate bin Laden’s death:

I was, however, filled with a terrible rage. I wanted Zacarias Moussaoui to get the electric chair, even though I’m against the death penalty.  I wanted vengeance, justice, and an end to terrorism.  I think I wanted them in that order.  I would have been exulted if Osama Bin Laden had been shot by American troops.

Ten years later, I feel none of the righteous joy that I expected.  It mostly just fills me with grief for all the deaths between then and now that should never have happened.  I’m glad we’ve taken a terrorist out of circulation, of course.  But maybe because I’m older, and mortality seems all too depressingly real, I find it hard to celebrate anyone’s death–no, not even Bin Laden’s.

I sympathize with what she’s saying, and she’s absolutely right; ultimately, killing or capturing bin Laden doesn’t mean we’re going to get back any of the people who died on September 11th, 2001, or have died since.

But while celebrating in the streets may be over the top, I think it’s something we should be glad for. Bin Laden was one of the most evil people the world’s seen in a long while, and being happy when an evil person is captured or killed is no vice. Moreover, it’s a bit like feeling some closure after a murderer is brought to justice. It doesn’t change that an innocent person lost their life, but it does mean someone who doesn’t deserve to walk the earth as a free person no longer will, and that’s a good thing.

This isn’t a complex moral issue. Bin Laden was an unrepentant mass murderer who used murder to try to make his controlling and backward political ideology a reality. His death is unquestionably a good thing.

Osama bin Laden was killed in a firefight by U.S. special forces in Pakistan. Good riddance to a truly evil man.

After being accused of quartering a supporter of al Qaeda, American citizen Syed Fahad Hashmi was extradited from Britain and placed in solitary confinement:

The federal government established SAMs in 1996 for gang leaders and other crime bosses with demonstrated reach in cases of “substantial risk that an inmate’s communication or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons.” After September 11, the Justice Department began using SAMs pretrial, with wide latitude to wall off terrorism suspects before they had been convicted of anything.

Fahad was allowed no contact with anyone outside his lawyer and, in very limited fashion, his parents—no calls, letters, or talking through the walls, because his cell was electronically monitored. He had to shower and relieve himself within view of the camera. He was allowed to write only one letter a week to a single member of his family, using no more than three pieces of paper. One parent was allowed to visit every two weeks, but often would be turned away at the door for bureaucratic reasons. Fahad was forbidden any contact—directly or through his lawyers—with the news media. He could read only portions of newspapers approved by his jailers—and not until 30 days after publication. Allowed only one hour out of his cell a day, he had no access to fresh air but was forced to exercise in a solitary cage.

The government cited Hashmi’s “proclivity for violence” as the reason for such harsh measures—even though he had no criminal record and was not charged with committing an actual act of violence or having any demonstrated reach outside of prison. Given the number of people convicted of a violent crime behind bars in the United States, “proclivity for violence” seemed an implausible justification for the harsh measures.

After nearly three years of solitary confinement, he plead guilty to providing material support to terrorism in April 2010. He was never allowed to review evidence held against him, because it was deemed classified.

The federal government alleged that he provided support to al Qaeda by allowing an acquaintance to stay at his apartment in London with luggage filled with “military gear”—raincoats, ponchos, and water-proof socks, apparently—that later delivered it to al Qaeda in Pakistan. This acquaintance, by the way, testified against him in court.

He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He is now being held at Colorado’s Supermax prison, in solitary confinement.

Perhaps, as the government argued, Hashmi was radicalized and was attempting to support terrorism. It’s certainly possible; while pursuing his degree in political science in New York, he advocated Muslim religious law as a “utopian” society and called the U.S. the world’s largest terrorist. I don’t deny that he may very well have been a threat, and imprisoning him based on these rather flimsy charges may have prevented greater crimes.

But I don’t know. It may also be that an innocent man—a man who advocated a political system I strenuously disagree with and that runs counter to our system, yes, but an innocent man—is now being held in solitary confinement, serving out a 15-year sentence. The only people who know are Hashmi and the federal government officials which have access to the evidence held against him, evidence we have never seen.

The government is asking us to trust them; I am generally inclined to do so on issues related to terrorism, but this isn’t acceptable. Not only is this a slippery slope, but we may have already slid down it: there may very well be an innocent man rotting away in prison. That’s too much power for the federal government to hold. We are not very far away from the situation in China, where the government uses state secrets laws to throw dissenters in jail. The only thing which prevents the federal government from abusing “Special Administrative Measures” (SAMs) and classified evidence rules is their own moral rectitude, and if that is all we have, we are in trouble indeed.

We are at risk of a government with arbitrary power, where the law does not define their power and constrain it, but rather enables them to do as they please.

Palestinians are unhappy with Fatah, and Hamas in particular:

Not everyone has taken kindly to this new authoritarian yoke. Inspired by protests against other despots, Palestinians in both territories have been crying for “revolution until we end the division”. In Gaza and the West Bank protesters champ for an interim government of the young, aligned to no party, to be followed by elections in both bits of Palestine.

If Palestinians rejected Hamas and united behind a movement that believes in peaceful coexistence with Israel and the unification of Gaza and the West Bank under a representative government, and they push for it through peaceful protests, the pressure on Israel would be immense. There would be no possibility but Israel ceding land they’ve gained through settlements and coming to a real agreement.

Adam Garfinkle:

U.S. policy, on its face, suggests the absurd notion that if the Qaddafi regime stops targeting “civilians”, then we are fine with its continued incumbency. Yes, the President has said many times lately that Qaddafi has to go, but he never said that U.S. military forces were to be the proximate agent of that outcome. This is a lawyer’s cleverness bucking up against reality, however, and in this instance at least, the lawyer is bound to convince no one. (It was a lawyer’s way of thinking, too, to have privileged the attainment of multilateral cover above the need to know what the hell one was actually doing.) Clearly, the only way to reliably protect these “civilians” is to change the regime. Having started this foolish war, that is the only way it can end without producing sheer calamity—not that any end state that one can reasonably foresee is risk-free at this point.

(Via Ross Douthat.)

That’s the situation the Obama administration has talked itself into; noting Qaddafi’s proclamation that he will show no mercy for the opposition, Obama said we would protect civilians and that Qaddafi must go, but the administration has also said U.S. ground troops will not be deployed on Libyan soil (special forces, of course, do not count), and the U.S. will not attempt to bring down Qaddafi’s regime.

Those two statements are contradictory. If Qaddafi is willing to use his military to murder protestors—as he has already done—and our mission is to protect civilians, then we have little choice but to attack the regime. A no-fly zone alone will not protect them from tanks. Or pickup truck-mounted machine guns. Or rifle-toting soldiers. Either our mission is to protect civilians, and all that entails, or to enforce a no-fly zone, and that’s it (and if all we are doing is enforcing a no-fly zone, but not seeking to genuinely protect civilians, I’m not sure why we need a no-fly zone at all). There’s no middle ground that Obama is attempting to hold. It is one or the other, and unless he would like his stated policy to amount to little more than empty words, attacking the regime will likely be necessary.

While our official policy is contradictory itself, what’s worse is we don’t seem to even share that policy with our allies. France is the only country to recognize the rebels as the provisional government of Libya, while the British for their part said targeting Qaddafi is justified under U.N. resolution 1973. Those two things suggest they are seeking a little more than merely “protecting” civilians.

So, our intervention not only ties our hands, but our allies seem intent on regime change, too. We could, of course, refuse to uphold our words, leave the conflict to the British and French and extricate ourselves, but besides burning what little credibility we have, that presents even greater risks. Garfinkle explains:

So what happens if the French and British try but do not succeed in a reasonably expeditious way? What happens is about as obvious as it gets: not Suez happens. The Americans come and save the day, as they demurred from doing in October 1956. The French and British know in their heart of hearts that we cannot let them fail miserably at this, or that’s what they suppose. I suppose they’re right.

What this means is that the President may before very long be forced to make the most excruciating decision of his life: to send American soldiers into harm’s way to save the Western alliance—even from an operation that is not explicitly a NATO mission!—in a contingency that has no strategic rationale to begin with; or not, leaving the alliance in ruins and Qaddafi bursting with plans to exact revenge.

I think the President simply cannot allow that latter outcome. So this is no ordinary, run-of-the-mill mission creep we’re about to encounter if our allies cannot turn the trick

At this point, I’m not sure leaving Qaddafi in power is even a choice the U.S. or our allies can even make; it’s more than possible that if Qaddafi survives this tumult, he will turn back to a favorite trick of his—terrorism—and the nations who aided his opposition would be the primary targets. We may simply have gone too far.

That’s not an enviable position to be in, but it’s the path Obama has taken, and that says nothing about the contradiction he’s created between U.S. policy on Egypt and Libya—where the U.S. officially supported regime change in both cases—and Yemen and Bahrain, where the U.S. has made weak statements about “both sides” needing to show restraint¹ and the need for reform. Of course, the situation in Yemen and especially Bahrain is complicated, and could serve as a flash point for a Sunni-Shia battle in the Gulf and an opening for the Iranians, but that only begs the question: when regional and U.S. interests come into conflict with the claims and aspirations of peoples under non-democratic regimes, what is the U.S.’s policy?

That’s not an easy question to answer, but the Obama administration’s actions make it necessary.

1. Jon Stewart had the best line about this—what does it mean for protestors to show restraint against soldiers firing upon them? To not step in front of the bullets? [↩]

The British and French were “completely puzzled” by what the U.S.’s position on Libya is:

Clinton stayed out of the fray, repeating the administration’s position that all options are on the table but not specifically endorsing any particular step. She also did not voice support for stronger action in the near term, such as a no-fly zone or military aid to the rebels, both diplomats said.

“The way the U.S. acted was to let the Germans and the Russians block everything, which announced for us an alignment with the Germans as far as we are concerned,” one of the diplomats told The Cable.

And:

On the same day, Clinton had a short meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in which Sarkozy pressed Clinton to come out more forcefully in favor of action in Libya. She declined Sarkozy’s request, according to a government source familiar with the meeting.

Sarkozy told Clinton that “we need action now” and she responded to him, “there are difficulties,” the source said, explaining that Clinton was referring to China and Russia’s opposition to intervention at the United Nations. Sarkozy replied that the United States should at least try to overcome the difficulties by leading a strong push at the U.N., but Clinton simply repeated, “There are difficulties.”

This happened on Monday. The U.S., of course, decided Tuesday night to support military action in Libya, but let’s remember what happened in the last week. Before this week, the rebels were largely on the offensive; they were gaining ground. But this week, Gaddafi counter-attacked and advanced all the way to the rebel’s makeshift capital in the east, Benghazi. So, our dithering on the issue gave Gaddafi the opportunity not only to shift momentum in his fight, but come to the brink of finishing off the opposition entirely.

While the British and French pushed everyone to support the rebels, our official position was not that we should give them our support and try to convince anyone who opposed action—our position was “there are difficulties.” While the people of Libya rose up against a regime willing to use the full power of its military to murder its people, our position—the United States of America, the first nation to rise up, throw off its oppressors and build a stable, democratic government based entirely on the right to freedom of the people—our position was there are difficulties.

If the Obama administration had decided that enforcing a no-fly zone risked full military intervention on our behalf, and that risk was just too great, I would respect that. I fear that, too. But that wasn’t their position. They had no position, either in supporting action or in staying out of the conflict. For weeks, the administration did nothing at all, apparently arguing amongst themselves about intervention.

That’s unacceptable. While for most issues fully debating it is a positive thing, some issues require a decision to be made quickly. This is one of those cases. And Obama seemed paralyzed with indecision.