Andrew Solomon makes a good case for why Gaddafi can’t be given any benefit of the doubt, or any deal to let him stay in power. Solomon has lived in Libya. He knows the place and the leaders better than I do. But I still find his essay to be glib. Look at this:
Will accomplishing Qaddafi’s removal at this stage result in a quickly established democracy on the model of, say, Sweden? No. Chaos looms; the rebellion is coherently against something, and not coherently for anything. Even so, its first objective, removing the man, is a valid objective for them and for us.
People keep saying things like this. “Chaos looms, but let’s go!” It’s a little late now, but there will be another disturbance somewhere in the world some day soon, and we really need to stop taking leaps of faith.
That also includes any leap of faith that Gaddafi will leave power willingly, or that it is more humanitarian to arm-up a civil war than it is to stand by while rebels are defeated.
True, disturbances will always happen elsewhere, but they won’t always be part of a wider region wide movement to overthrow autocrats. Looked at in light of our larger MENA strategy this MIGHT make sense in a way that it wouldn’t if it was an isolated incident.
“To contemplate the idea that there would ever be a correlation between what Qaddafi said and what he did is to miss the central tenet of his rule.”
That’s a pretty ironic statement given that the mere threat of civilian slaughter was one of the justifications for the military action.
“If we don’t drum Qaddafi from power, we allow Al Qaeda’s depiction of the United States as wealthy, self-interested, and corrupt to ring scarily true.”
That’s a real prize of a call for regime change too. The terrorists will win, haven’t heard that one before…
So yeah, some rather tone deaf support from Solomon.
A very significant, yet subtle, shift happened in American thinking on foreign policy between the 1970s and now.
In the 1970s most Americans were still very aware of the primary lesson of Nuremberg — that war inevitably leads to atrocities and therefore it is to be avoided except under extreme circumstances. And of course the lesson of Vietnam had only reinforced that. Nasty stuff happens when the military gets involved — you’d better have an extremely compelling case before starting the war and a very clear strategy for ending it.
Of course, in response to Vietnam, in the 1980s the conservative think tanks, in tandem with the Military War College and the military PR departments, began a campaign to change that way of thinking.
Now most Americans don’t think of the military as the last option — it is the first and only option. It’s hard to remember that as recently as 1991 the Senate barely approved a resolution supporting the first Gulf War. And that was almost a classic case of a “just war”, in that Iraq had invaded and occupied a sovereign country, virtually the entire world was aligned in a UN coalition against them, and tons of propoganda (later proven lies) indicated Nazi-like atrocities being committed in Kuwait. Even then elected Senators stood up and argued against war and were — amazingly — not crucified in the American media for doing so.
To my surprise I’ve seen the pro-war thinking get even stronger since the Iraq debacle. In 2002-3 people were actually still arguing against war on humanitarian grounds with respect to the people of the targeted country. Remember that? How quaint. Now the arguments I see against war on Libya are almost all from the perspective of “what’s in it for us?” People point out the cost — to the US budget. They point out the risks — to US fighters. They point out that there is no guarantee that an attack will have a desirable outcome — for the US.
I guess this makes sense. Once the military and its supporters are able to frame the terms of discussion the arguments will always be self-centered. Remember when we tried to point out that the Iraq War probably cost over a million Iraqi lives, with pain and suffering to many other millions? We could get no traction with that argument. Nope, had to keep pointing out the number of US soldiers dead as if it were the main “cost” of the War. We couldn’t even count all the US military contractors and non-uniformed military. And when Ted Koppel had the audacity to devote an episode of Nightline to those soldiers he was excommunicated from Washington media.
So we are now a country reduced to a war machine. We debate over issues, but it’s on the military’s terms — would this invasion be good for the military or bad? The victims are collateral damage, their humanity worth considering when justifying an invasion (if we don’t attack they’ll suffer) but not when we invade (now that we are attacking they are suffering, but it’s for their own good).
As a country, we are SOOOOO guilty of war crimes under the definition of Nuremberg. But no one gives a crap anymore.
Well get ready for a possible war with Syria, too. Assad is apparently gearing up for a massacre that’ll make Daffy look like an angel.
And Yemen’s president just promised civil war if the people don’t back down:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/23/headlines#5
Let’s remember that Assad’s daddy, in about 1981, destroyed the whole old city of Hama by aerial bombardment on a single night killing thousands (20,000?) because of his perceived threat from Islamic resistance. For Syria such stuff is hardly a novelty. The news made the front page of the NY ‘Firewall!’ Times of course, but then no one did no-fly zones and that sort of stuff.
I was reading yesterday, in the admittedly Likudnik Jersusalem Post, that “A senior member of al Qaida urged Libyan rebels to continue their fight against Muammar Gaddafi and warned of the consequences of defeat, in a videotaped message posted on Jihadi websites, the Qatar-based Gulf News reported on Sunday.”
I do not know if this is true. What i do know is that no one seems to know who these rebels we’re supporting are, what their goals are, and whether they’re our friends.
That’s quite a few leaps of faith if you ask me, and not very wise ones considering the 1980s in Afganistan and the 2000s in Iraq.
This has to be the definitive post on the War on Libya, (h/t Atrios):
http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/humanitarians-of-year.html
And so it is that the United States is fighting to free the Libyan people from the Libyan people by killing the Libyan people. The situation is fairly straightforward, after all – Libya faces a humanitarian crisis, and the only way to address a humanitarian crisis is to bomb it with hundreds of cruise missiles. I’m told that the Red Cross still delivers bottled water and medical supplies by duct-taping them to the nose cone of an outgoing Tomahawk. More importantly, the Libyan people are oppressed by a bloodthirsty dictator – a dictator who kills his own people – and the least we can do is kill those people ourselves. How, I ask, can we stand idly by and allow people to be slaughtered by a ruthless tyrant when we could be slaughtering them instead?
And from the comments:
Do not underestimate the sacrifices Americans are willing to make for humanitarianism. Just the 120 cruise missiles that were fired the first day cost 120 million dollars. But Americans are willing to starve our own children and let our elders freeze to death to pay for those missiles.