Israel Matzav: What's really behind Operation Odyssey Dawn?

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

What's really behind Operation Odyssey Dawn?

What's really behind operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya, writes Salim Mansour, is that the Arab League has suckered the West into doing their dirty work for them (Hat Tip: Tundra Tabloids).

The lives of Arabs and non-Arabs in the region whose countries are members of the league, but lack oil wealth — Yemen, Bahrain, Darfur within Sudan, etc. — are cheap, inconsequential and certainly not worth the expenditure needed to save them from their respective despots.

Similarly, the lives of the poor, beaten and killed by despots — kith and kin of Libya's Gadhafi — in places like Zimbabwe, North Korea and Myanmar, or where democracy movements are openly crushed as in Iran and China, are not worth a dime beyond the merely ritual official regrets announced by western governments. Neither are the lives of people killed by terrorist bombings as in Israel and India.

League members are a collection of authoritarian states where widespread violations of human rights are notoriously routine.

There is no instance in the league's 66-year history when its members were sufficiently moved by evidence before them — even genocide as in the case of Saddam Hussein's repeated massacre of Kurds and Iraqi Shiites — to protect the abused.

The Libyan situation offered the league an opportunity to redeem its dishonourable record.

Arab states possess military resources that they could have deployed as a league operation and, in keeping with the UN principle of "responsibility to protect," placed in effect a no-fly zone over Libyan air space to save civilians and punish Gadhafi.

But the unwillingness of the league to intervene in Libya, or anywhere else in the Arab world — save for its unrelenting hostility towards Israel — is related to the fear of establishing a precedent among its members that nobody wants.

However, a precedent of a sort with unsavoury consequences for the future has been established. The league has talked the UN and western powers into doing its bidding without assuming any responsibility for consequences it finds politically distasteful or unpopular.

Middle Eastern culture of bargains made in bazaars is well known and in such haggles, sellers regularly find happily deluded suckers. The league made a winning bargain over Libya, and suckers of those left to pick up the bill and take the blame.

And why does the Arab League suddenly feel motivated to 'redeem its dishonorable record'? No, it's not because they've suddenly repented. It's because they are using the opportunity to create a precedent for invoking R2P (responsibility to protect), which can later be used against 'that s***ty little country' that takes up less than one tenth of one percent of the land mass that the Arab Muslim dictatorships call home.

Given that motivation, the West may not have fallen into a trap. It's at least as likely that they played along.

Labels: Libyan no-fly zone, Operation Odyssey Dawn, PT Barnum, responsibility to protect