in the movie joint the hotel rooms see a movie that's the gateway to the grand imperial truly the torch was the close coromandel. close mission which will see don't need to go and. read this and the kindle was fictional as treat. you with the live from moscow our headlines produced in england who spoke out against an internationally wanted criminal is being questioned by police off the t.v. broadcast the story. is accused of inciting religious hatred and prophet scribing as a terrorist even though the chechen warlord is behind the moscow metro airport bombings . as the u.k. thrusts itself to the forefront for protecting and libya's citizens lawmakers in

london are furious the country sold millions of dollars of weapons to colonel gadhafi before the rest libya as well as egypt and arms from britain and later sold violent uprising. and moscow hands over a new files to warsaw into the plane crash that killed poland's president and ninety five others in western russia last april the investigation into the tragedy that strained relations between the two countries is still under. my colleague of build on it will be here half an hour's time but next to him and his crosstalk guests argue whether barack obama is able to follow his line on foreign policy or whether he's stuck on the course george w. bush you without.

we'll. remove you the latest in science and technology from around the world. we've got the future covered. kick. start. following welcome to cross talk i'm people of all feel bamma doctrine is there such a thing over the past few months we've seen the u.s. waffle as change rages across the arab middle east and some western bakit pages remain firmly in power while the same time forced regime change is happening in libya all when is this a new doctrine or just muddling through. can. discuss whether there's an obama doctrine i'm joined by phyllis bennis in washington she is project director at the institute for policy studies in paris we

have on this album art he's a libyan political analyst and another member of our cross talk e-mail on the hunger right phyllis i'd like to go to you first you know we're both americans and we're used to having presidents having doctrines when it comes to foreign policy and we had harry truman he had a universal policy on your universal doctrine that is if you support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation ok john f. kennedy pay any price bear any burden to assure the survival and success of liberty we all remember that one then we should it's a good saying george w. bush had his own to the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world now mr obama a few days ago had the following to say let's discuss it this is his doctrine. americans should not be expected to police the world particularly when we have so many pressing concerns here at home is that a doctrine should it be a doctrine should it be in braced and is it being acted out through us well i don't

think that's a doctrine i think it's a statement of lowering expectations i also think that one of the problems with all of these doctrines is that it bases the whole of u.s. foreign policy on the military so if we say should we intervene should we help it's assumed to mean should we send troops in my analysis that's almost never the case we should intervene with a whole range of other things but not with military force and that question of how are we defining intervention is an ongoing challenge in the particular for president obama i think what he faces right now given that the arab spring has turned upside down all of the longstanding assumptions of what u.s. policy in the middle east needs to be i don't think they're anywhere close to having a real doctrine yet ok we're going to you in paris meet do you agree with the military intervention into libya. well you know why why i mean given what

freeway phyllis just said ok i mean i and i and all tend to agree with her you know we always think of sending tanks and planes and troops in boots and bombs and sure like in effect political change change is going to be ten to haunt everybody in the long run but you support it already here. well i think i think we need to have a bigger picture and we take a longer view were three happening because i don't particularly pursue the truth or mention as a whole interest what i think you have this is that we take a longer view but last thirty forty years and fifty years since the nationals of time a nation movements which laws are shaped and drew lines around the deserts of the middle east and you fall in that both of those lines were drawn support was given and it wasn't in the economic sense it was given in the sense i mean we were actually. not only given vocal support but we were actually on a sports around the middle east and i think that's why we have a moral obligation to disarm them i personally don't think. is it morally right is

it morally right to arm rebels at the same time i mean the argument is if you're just going in more and more arms into a very very volatile dangerous situation ok and we also have the problem of mission creep ok we heard only a few days ago you know you know we're not going to commit more to put boots on the ground apparently cia sneakers are already there they beat me down after the fact i mean mission creep is involved here. can you have a one off and you're saying we should have a one off right. lola think you should be a one off and let me go to the first point you're making innocence if we if we talk about. military intervention as a as an only solution and that was working about clandestine from the ceiling. look at the c.e.o.'s involvement in panama and places that really really show the you know the old intentions of the i'm trying to sort of the. times is behind however

we do know that the c.e.o. . as we call him from the transitional council in libya is actually being as transparent as possible because it's something that we've not had in libya and we've never had a transparent and accountable government there with. the training and it's not something that's kind of you know. as a mystery or something that's coming out a and it's coming from the city because that opened it was. ok for those who were jumping ahead and that's can i just ask you i want to ask and ask you raise the issue of looking back further and i think that is very very crucial i think part of the problem with our discussions about libya has been that we've all focused on that one day when allegedly and i'm not convinced it was either imminent or inevitable that there was going to be the kind of massive slaughter that has really used as the reason that there was no alternative let me

just finish and that is i was given that would you reason that when i was in state it is because if you want to finish what i'm saying is let's go back let's go back two days before that when the libyan opposition had managed to drive those government tanks out of out of out of benghazi with their own power without military force i'm not convinced that they could have done it again i'm not sure but my point is if we started with that they were handed in if we're looking back and we are now i think we need to look back three weeks earlier the first day there was a government assault on unarmed protesters. the first day when they were still unarmed that was the moment for the u.s. to quote intervene by saying you know what the colonel gadhafi we have allowed you since two thousand and two to be on our good side no more no more arms no more contracts no more military support you're going back probably just terrorism says i was on the hearing this will stop exactly as they should have the others what this

is these are that's what i think roy would do if world however long grayness from germany just speaks in the conflict it looks in the conflict i mean what we're saying is sort of yourselves you know you own your own problems and we know that one side is on the other side is not on a minute i personally don't want any arms and i'm not asking for in a situation where no one is on a person that we've made a massive massive i understand them going off of someone and looking at have also brought them out of the cold in two thousand and three or two thousand and two as you know to call it but i personally think a huge but i do want to go about the situation here and also for the other thing is we can talk about the e-mails because no the base can really focus on but it has it right and there was an imminent threat and i can you can accuse obama of procrastinating during that period of time isn't it because it is like elation when the moment was imminent but i wouldn't risk that personally because that my people and i personally know that they do themselves realize that. america has

a better track record on the fulfilling of the mission do there's a. record there are some commentary that what has family there are so many years that i don't have them are saying it's great all right fellas jump in and go ahead . there are people in libya who also recognize that there are cia people are among the libyan opposition the guy who came back from northern virginia for twenty years who is now one of the commanders of the military is somebody who clearly was involved with u.s. intelligence during that period there's a mixed bag of the libyan opposition in terms of what people have asked for what they want the other thing that i think is makes this all very problematic is that in the context of the of the arab spring where in each of these situations they began whether it was egypt whether it was tunisia whether it's been yemen path train all of them have faced massive military assault at the beginning only in libya was the decision made to take up arms i'm not going to second guess that this is not in the same sense that there are two hundred one says that you are. right

and that's why as we well you see what. additional you saw them in search of the notion of that's. my job. why is it over because phyllis brought up a very good point why is it different because it used now with these different i didn't already think of. but i personally think that it's a numbers game of i think in terms of victims being a numbers game i don't want to say that there were more people here more people there but equally we realize that it was on the radio program i mean if you look at i want to use iraq as a good example as to what things are wrong and things are right personally when bush and blair came out saying there was a forty five minute threat and it was imminent and they try to for the rest of the world and we went along with it but there was no substance to the argument give birth he was openly on the radio or on the radio waves of libya and forcing people to. come and cleanse you know if you think that's an imminent threat i don't know ok but i personally wouldn't want that on my conscious and secondly you have to

realize that if we're talking of the greater picture here of obama he looks like someone that obviously his intervention in this was lackluster he didn't do anything and came in late and egypt can be saying the roughly the same thing however in libya i think we can accuse them of the notion but i look back at his legal background and i say to myself someone that looks at legal background and as a liberal and a different you know kind of a fish to the neo conservative background i would say that he's thinking a legal perspective and try to go through we have a new and track the developments as they come however when the thought was imminent it would have been and it would have been the case with the situation we were talking about anyway i personally want to be talking about another one in libya another holiday charged names and countries and and you know the whole charge to be with you about let me answer right is not so i would point to. nobody does headphones nobody does and i think i have i have a different view in rwanda i supported intervention a lot and i blame the united states and france for not only not intervening but

affirmatively preventing the united nations from intervening so i'm not somebody who says there should never be any intervention the question is under what circumstances and by cohn one of the key things that president obama did was to recognize that there's a difference between legality and legitimacy he knew he could force his way. into a u.n. resolution in the security council the u.s. has a long history of that by bribing threatening to get votes it happened here it will happen again it's happened before but he also knew that without clarity from the arab league and the african union that wasn't going to be possible so early on if you recall he was the national interest and was already miles away in question here a great i'm talking about the question that was asked and he recognized you know let me just say the question for me is partly international legitimacy and having both the arab league and the african union would have been important what we found was that the african union was not prepared to sign on to even

a no fly zone let alone all necessary measures and as soon as they made that clear the obama administration stopped talking about the need for african union or you know major jumping in to really. break in after that short break we'll continue our discussion on obama's foreign policy you can libyan state.

but first let's see what russians think about the libyan intervention. obama doctrine is a doctrine or an interventionist strategy in his speech at the national defense university barack obama articulated the grounds for the intervention in libya and now many say it through beal's the beginnings of which we know regarding the use of u.s. military support as the russian public opinion research center all citizens support the international military operation in libya sixty four percent said they do not and the other twenty percent of the respondents expressed their support still the bomb of doctoring has yet to be declared but presidential talk trains have an

impact on american policy and as a result on the entire world back to peter ok and if i'd like to go back to you and paris here a lot of people will say and i want to talk about george w. bush in this part of the program obama had a sudden attack of stupid idealism. do you think that's a fair thing to say because again if we look at interventions in the past a lot of people can say you know what panama was success successful you can go to paramount a lot of people will say it wasn't ok so i guess it depends on how we define success here but very idealistic or is obama just trying to muddle through on this one too because you can say well it's an international effort now many can walk away from it but it's not being very idealistic. obama was elected to have a third war in the muslim world bank good for him and. in a post in the post the rock world i think. in terms of real politic everyone knows

that it's political suicide to recruit through in iraq and too strong from all the way through that one again so i mean i personally think that it would but he's done that in afghanistan or trying to do as capital as possible you know i think he has us through this situation about as though no one knows that he's a thousand more troops so i don't really think that this is a but and this is a yes i think this really is the crux of the reason i ask you is that you support this intervention ok you're a libyan ok if your country fine but i mean this is. what is there but isn't this well i mean even i'm willing to admit that people can have a personal attachment to an issue ok that's fair enough ok but at the same time isn't this just bush lite this is another intervention and this or this there is a difference too is that the american people and the world were lied to for months on end preparing for the war to go into iraq and this was just done over the weekend i mean you know it was no debate in the united states you said new security

you said it was going to you say did you say there were some transparency and there's transparency in benghazi but going into this conflict or war if we did this war there wasn't much transparency ok so and if you can finish your parents here in washington ok well that look a that's what's most important because nobody else is going to do i think that all right go ahead phyllis go ahead but i think i think that the key question of transparency is important and what's not true in washington but i also think that we should be clear this was not a sudden decision that was made at a moment of urgency this was a decision that was several weeks in the making as we know that come about first when the french and the brits said we want a resolution that will call for a no fly zone the u.s. position was no we don't think a no fly zone is going to work but instead of saying and therefore we're going to vote no. they said let us take the resolution we will rewrite it and we'll come back with a better resolution which of course said not only a no fly zone but all necessary means to protect civilians but with the world's

discriminators going over what is tactics could be. it's one of the questions that needs to be asked it's not the only question i really question or highly personal his word nationals which is decide the libyans why the libyans also why the libyans also for a no fly zone why the asking for international that's one important position they weren't that's a very important question it wasn't the only western it's not the only question of course of the it was i think in the middle threats and that's a reality game and that's a reality and for the first and that those are the only messages nationally but pushback from sort of up from which is the stronghold of gadhafi push back over a period of a week which backed militia leaving only be able to do should be exactly ok have because the capacity because using european norms no i really want to the point i really want to make here is that whether or not we want to debate whether there's an imminent threat on the other think we would like to i think we're working on very morally dubious ground zero if we were to say that it doesn't matter if it's a threat or it was you know it was heated i mean he was going to say man so you

know wasn't a man of the area no i'm not saying that what i'm saying in all this really nice thing about them is because there's not a question a lot more of them can be threatened i'm saying no i'm not saying i can't do it or suzanne what i can do is really could not you say what you want to say right now british jumping ahead i'm not convinced that the united states i am convinced that the united states government decision not my own personal view that the united states government decision was not a sudden one based on what the people of benghazi wanted they made a strategic decision that it's cold it's calculated it takes into account the moral issue only as a political factor in terms of how it will be assessed what their decision is ok and i want to ask you what you know you know it's not very much of your assertion that there's little they will. last point greg i want to challenge you on that point however because i don't think that humanitarian aid is and sort of the principle of a voice has always been the family factor and foreign policy in america in the west

there's a lot of branches however i do want to was whether whether or not we believe that this is not a coincidence of interests and if i can also personally what do you think the motivating factor was in order to go into libya. because i think it was a combination of factors the main one i think the main factor was a lack of clarity about what their posture was going to be in the arab spring in general and they wanted to position themselves in a position of being on the right side of history that corresponded with us also differently with unpopular forces right and but we do have to separate what i might want to happen as an individual person what i want isn't really the point i would have wanted maybe for a revolution at the very very beginning that very first day when they when people in benghazi faced the same kind of attack that the people in yemen faced. i think they did make their own choices. and guess their choice. is was ok don't we can

argue that he wasn't going to say it and there are consequences to that and i want to ask you a question government in yemen. you ask you a question. that we're talking about ok i want to ask you i mean the intervention is started it's going on as we speak there is a stalemate at least as we speak has the intervention that fueled fueled on or created a civil war that could last why don't want a while at the expense of the libyan people civil civil war civil civil war zone civil wars are when you have two conflicting soldier conflicting demands and i think i don't like to call them rebels on though that it's a very small point to make and that's the importance of being made over and over again i guess perino issue for the rest of the litigation and if you want to play because you aren't. people are talking of their own systems are they rebels or talk with armies or the rebels what are they sebelius with arms i mean what your definition of millions i mean these are teachers futures students bakers government

employees policemen i mean they're from every background that you have in libya and i mean i work for a minute or so and so not an artifact is that it's not an army it's a people trying to govern themselves and they're trying to get rid of forty two years that political dysfunction is into i want to call them rebels because i have any political aims all their aim is get rid of gadhafi so we can have a more democratic and and the reflected government so i want to get rid of him so ultimately i think this is a world that we have. to kind of we have an arab spring. it was scheduled none of those really are there is it and i think it is a civil war when people when two sides are fighting to hold territory i think that makes it a civil war i don't think the the opposition side is an art when you're going to run us on this you're to introduce your homeland for no it's not an army it's a it's an armed population i agree with that but there are now two sides will in zone rating which of those is really going to say over here in the house and there but has used the do it well some of them the house is not going to over close on

tape to force people on this job this is the easiest but there's a lot because this is me and i'm saying there are two sides fighting right character and still are stanfield the u.s. and its allies is having shows a stalemate the u.s. and its allies have chosen the side is well in this again making it more and more into the side for a change although you know back in the sixty's you see as you say with your shoes in the throes of the dictators in the boat but it's the same time is that this is what cohen is cheers exactly i will choose the dictators including gadhafi so lonely so feel no jewelry or we have all the treasures want to return to the region so we trust in the moment we can begin washing them one issues you are doing it wrong exactly or using military force in a way that is guaranteed and i said it before they did it and i say that it has come true that the military force has made the military stalemate emerge in libya it is now whatever you want to call it i'm not going to fight over the words but

there are two military forces battling for control of territory there is likely to be a stalemate that's going to go on for a long time compared to more people are going to die under the no fly zone in iraq because really one year alone our hundred forty four people were killed by the no fly zone so this is not something without flaws it was one of the more is a really it was judged on what it was judge it was doing but it's measured look the world of citizens measure it as it is we have an issue of them we have an awful. for the last two weeks i mean i could go out and prove it to you but i mean western journalists on the ground there are people in and they would say well i think they want to support america whether they're clinging on or when the come out and them said the no fly zone has not killed civilians i may not be hard pushed to try and find my yes that's right through the area where i'm most times how it plays ramos the time the killer. is one more question how to break the stalemate here comes up leverage with the left as this is the last answer how can we break the stalemate

with our greater outside intervention and what would be fueling would a lot of people call it a civil war how do you break the stalemate phyllis. ok i personally see a thing or two but it is the question is framed it's not the frame get all this work on the social contract can we can be broken the social contract with these people as rousseau would say is broken the social contract these people he has no legitimacy and so when it is with the people they're choosing to fight against a dictator so we have to negotiate with the people and not with gadhafi he has no terms he has no ground and he has no legitimacy to the question with him and also is the question of the same military system going from entry arming the people themselves even on the before it to use how well i know this is there on this point folks thank you very much for a very heated discussion many thanks to my guest today in washington and in pairs and thanks to our viewers for watching us here on our see you next time and remember. you

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