Time to fish or cut bait in Libya
Simon Jenkins argues that the West should either
kill Muammar Gadhafi or get out of Libya.
Gaddafi's survival is ostensibly insane. He is the tinpot dictator of a tiny country that Nato could topple in a day. It could bomb his palace, take out his tanks, land paratroops on his airport and ship in reinforcements. Libya is not Iraq or Afghanistan. Nato could set up a client regime, as in Bosnia, secure the oil and give two fingers to the Arab world, as the west always does when its interest so requires.
Instead we have the ludicrous position that Nato can save Benghazi by taking out a tank column and then laying a bombed strip to the west. But all this does is encourage reckless rebels to drive towards Tripoli and die. The maxim is old as the hills. No war can be won from the air. A temporary balance of advantage can be awarded to one side, but pilots can only destroy. Bombs are inherently crude tools of war. They cannot seize and hold land.
At present Nato strategy appears to be to prolong civil war by bolstering the weaker side. It is the equivalent of refereeing a bare-knuckle fight so as to keep the contestants on their feet and still punching. Stalling Gaddafi's advance on Benghazi appears to have prevented its fall. Whether there would have been a genocidal massacre, as interventionists maintain, is not known. There would surely have been bloody retribution against ringleaders, which is what dictators do to those who cross them. But then Gaddafi, Assad of Syria, Mubarak of Egypt and Hussein of Iraq all did ghastly things to their enemies, usually while the west was cosying up to them.
Holding the ring for someone else's civil war is a bizarre justification for intervention. It is a distortion of the UN's peacekeeping role – indeed it might be termed war-keeping – and an abuse of Nato's supposed purpose, to defend the west against attack. Even setting those objections aside, any humanitarian gain is moot. Iraq and Afghanistan were Muslim dictatorships in a state of suppressed civil war when the west intervened. The result was hardly peace, tranquillity or an easing of tribal tension, rather more destruction and bloodshed. Yet these interventions were claimed as "humanitarian".
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Libyan regime change, Muammar Gaddafi, Operation Odyssey Dawn
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
Simon Jenkins argues that the West should either kill Muammar Gadhafi or get out of Libya. 
