A lesson for the ages has unfolded in Libya. Moammar Qaddaffi, erstwhile terrorist and dictator, observed the activity of the United States in Iraq post 2003 and decided the time had come for him to be rehabilitated. He came in from the “Mad Dog” cold by agreeing with George Bush’s doctrine that nuclear arms in his hands would constitute grounds for his destruction. Accordingly, he gave them over, in the process obtaining commitments of a new opportunity to become a legitimate member of the “international community.” The deal worked for him in numerous ways, including extensive financial and economic opportunities for his country and for himself and up and including obtaining, on the strength of his new credentials, the prison release of the Lockerbie bomber, Megrahi.
Warning: the United States will change its mind quickly
Qaddafi also paid dearly for his new world credibility, including nearly a billion dollars in payments to the families of the individual slain in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. But nothing he paid will ever equal the price now collected from him. For it is his disarmament alone that has permitted the United States and its Arab Gulf States and NATO allies to destroy his country and overturn his rule, leaving him hunted and harassed like a feral beast. A Qaddafi with even a rudimentary nuclear program would have proved unapproachable by the methods employed to defeat him in the armed revolt that has unfolded in Libya since last March.
Here is a lesson for world dictators to learn. The promises of a United States president are only good until the next election! That is a sad and dangerous lesson for President Obama to have taught the world. For not only will it greatly and permanently reduce United States leverage in international negotiations; but inasmuch as the national security of the United States has depended ever since the administration of George Washington on prominent insistence upon justice in all its dealings with the world (even if sometimes with inconsistent performance), the prevalent understanding now must be that the United States may act as mercurially as any of the world’s famous dictators. In that context, the only safe line of conduct for other states is to seek every advantage, licit or illicit, from the United States in every opportunity that presents, and never to rely upon its good faith.
That is much to have sacrificed in a will–the-wisp pursuit of the “responsibility to protect.” For such a concept or doctrine is meaningless unless it is partnered with a “responsibility to preserve.” But even the manner in which we have undertaken this Kosovo-style intervention reveals that the United States acknowledges no responsibility to preserve a decent civil order in Libya. We neither know who will rule in Libya, nor toward what ends. We do not know how the civilian population will fare, most of whom were nowise implicated in the armed revolt. Thus, the pretense that we protected them from “genocide” was but an empty pretext to justify the military intervention. The coming assaults in Libya, now that the rebels hold the upper hand, will illustrate exactly how far the United States is willing to go to protect civilians – which will be exactly no where at all. The fact that a son of Qaddaffi spoke of a “blood bath” in Benghazi to defend the established order can in no wise be distinguished from rebel annunciations of a resolve to annihilate the retreat of Sirte. Yet, there was no more evidence of a threat to civilians than this.
One might be inclined to think all of this inspired statecraft, despite the fact that it is a tongue-in-cheek and sneaky way of doing what George Bush did in Iraq, without being accompanied by Bush’s open and frank expression of high-minded ambitions. But one can never forget that none of it either would have been undertaken or could have been successful without the predicates of Bush’s Iraq intervention. Consequently, we must entertain the nagging question of whether the manner of proceeding in Libya has not done in fact done more to undermine whatever little was gained in iraq than anything at all to advance the interests of the United States.
Since the general disorder in the Middle East continues to augur doubtful expectations from the outcomes of these “street revolutions,” it would be reasonable now to begin to take stock of just how much may have been lost. Bear in mind, that no revolution such as these we now see unfolding has ever been successful. It was no little wonder that George Washington kept his distance from the anti-clerical revolution of 1789 in France. He doubted that it could accomplish any worthy work in republican virtue. I suspect that he would have been gloomier still about what we now see unfolding. All of which ought to lead us to inquire exactly what it is our President is up to?
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