http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_
Air patrols and cruise missile strikes alone won't force a well-financed sociopathic dictator to step down, especially when he knows no foreign troops will come. The opposition has to topple him and seal the deal. If the international community acted 2 weeks ago, when the rebels had all the momentum and were at the outskirts of Tripoli, then maybe we could have had a relatively clean conclusion to this tough situation and a cessation of violence now. But as we dithered, Qaddafi's better armed and trained forces beat back the rebels, and we only started to attack this weekend when the tables had turned, and Qaddafi was about to deliver his death blow to the resistance at Benghazi. We lost the initiative, and now it's starting to look intractable like our police action in Korea in the 1950s.
I know it's hard to get the UN and NATO to act quickly on anything, and the Japan quake was another major concern to address. But that's why our fumbling in Iraq and Afghanistan is so costly and will hurt us for years more; no-drama Obama is so paranoid of getting embroiled in another Middle East quagmire that he is being too timid when America would have been justified to act weeks ago. If this uprising occurred in 1995, I think Clinton would have swiftly intervened. No one wants Qaddafi around. Unfortunately neither does Al Qaeda, so maybe in his power vacuum some Islamic forces would gain some power, but it's doubtful if they would be able to control the entire country. Qaddafi has survived for 40 years partly by beating down any traces of Islamic movements, like his neighbor Mubarak.
But we don't want another quagmire that ends up biting us in the ass, right? When we toppled Saddam, it was a big boon to Iran and Al Qaeda. We messed up there because we were following a foolish strategy of remaking the region into a "kinder, gentler" Middle East that would be safe for globalization and Israel. Many Iraqis hated Saddam, but his grip on power was strong and he was basically an integral part of the Iraqi society he built around himself and the Ba'ath party. The Saddam opposition movement was comprised of a handful of corrupt, decadent, unknown exiled chumps like Ahmed Chalabi. All that was a recipe for disaster, but Bush and the neocons had blinders on. In the Libyan case, a good portion of the country has already rejected him. We won't have to install any government like with Iraq, we can let the Libyans run the show. The rebels are organized and motivated and not radical Muslims like the Mujahadeen vs. the USSR. Libya is sparsely populated with only a few coastal urban centers, it does a lot of commerce with Europe, and maintains diplomatic relations with the outside world. It is a relatively easier case for post-dictatorship nation building. We could still horribly mess up with Libya, but it's a much easier challenge than Iraq or Afghanistan.
So what are our options now? Air-drop supplies and other assistance to the rebels? Freeze Qaddafi's assets, increase sanctions, and hope we stave him out? But that hurts the innocent population too, and as we've seen with Iran, we can't effectively embargo a country the size of Texas. The rebels will run out of steam before Qaddafi's side does, he's a survivor. Maybe at best we can hope for some sort of bargained truce where Qaddafi stays in power and the rebels get a section of the country, like with Sudan. But there are plenty of problems associated with that scenario too, it will take years to implement, and who says Qaddafi won't crush the other side in a surprise attack down the road when we're no longer concerned with Libya?
Here's an opposing view arguing that liberal interventionists are basically behaving like neocons in calling for Obama to intervene in the Libya situation that we have no business meddling in:
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment