[Cross-posted from zenpundit.com]
[NEW! Incoming link from Outside the Beltway – see addendum below]
There has been much ado about Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s enunciation of “Responsibility to Protect” as a justification for the Obama administration’s unusually executed intervention (or assistance to primarily British and French intervention) in Libya in support of rebels seeking to oust their lunatic dictator, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi. In “R2P” the Obama administration, intentionally or not, has 
found its own Bush Doctrine, and unsurprisingly, the magnitude of such claims – essentially a declaration of jihad against what is left of the Westphalian state system by progressive elite intellectuals – are beginning to draw fire for implications that stretch far beyond Libya.
People in the strategic studies, IR and national security communities have a parlor game of wistfully reminiscing about the moral clarity of Containment and the wisdom of George Kennan. They have been issuing tendentiously self-important “Mr. Z” papers for so long that they failed to notice that if anyone has really written the 21st Century’s answer to Kennan’s X article, it was Anne-Marie Slaughter’s battle cry in the pages of The Atlantic.
by Felice Benuzzi. (Dirt cheap copies at the link.) This is a very good book. It is set in 1943. Benuzzi is an Italian POW in a British prison camp in Kenya, way the Hell out at the butt end of nowhere. He is bored to the edge of psychosis by prison life. In his pre-POW life he had been a mountain climber in the Alps. Off in the distance, he can see the glacier-girt pinnacle of Mount Kenya. Benuzzi falls in love with the mountain. He is overcome with a desire to conquer it, to possess it, to make it his own. He enlists two fellow POWs to assault the mountain. They makes a bunch of mountaineering equipment under the very noses of the askari guards. The three men escape, climb the mountain — or at least one of its peaks — and return to the prison camp. Of course they are punished for this escapade. But, to their credit, the British take a sporting attitude toward it all, and even send a team up to confirm the prisoners’ claim. I am leaving out a lot of important and engrossing details, of course. Benuzzi’s descriptions of the ascent and its hardships, the cold and hunger, the flora and fauna, and POW life, are all very well done. You have to love these Italians. The war was a distraction, an absurdity they were stuck with. They had no interest in it. The flag they plant on the mountain is the monarchy’s flag, not the fascist flag. They are Italian patriots who despise their own stupid, fascist government and the stupid, losing war it had gotten them mixed up in. A very sane attitude, actually. 