Thomas Hobbes

FROM DAVID BROOKS’S COLUMN ON HILARY CLINTON, APRIL 28^TH:  Maybe once upon a time there was an environment in which ruthless Machiavellians had room to work their dark arts, but we don’t live in Renaissance Italy.  We live in a world of universal media attention. . . .   You can’t intimidate people by chopping your enemies to bits in the town square.  Even the presidency isn’t a powerful enough office to allow a leader to rule by fear. . . .   Modern politics, like private morality, is about building trust and enduring personal relationships.  You have to build coalitions by appealing to people’ self-interest and by luring them voluntarily to your side.

NEWS ARTICLE ON SMUGGLING OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS FROM THE TIMES, APRIL 28^TH.. . . The boys had joined the unceasing flow of Arab and African immigrants who are churned through the lawlessness of a post-Qaddafi Libya and spewed out into the Mediterranean – more than 170,000 last year and a least that many expected this year.

It is a journey through a failed state in which border security is all but nonexistent, corruption is rampant, the coast guard rarely leaves port, and the proliferating human smuggling operations are growing even more callous and brazen. . . .

Since the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011, warring militias have become the only law in much of Libya.  Smugglers have “nothing to be afraid of,” as one put it, because security along the coast has disappeared.