Patrick Cockburn in the Independent says stage one of the intervention is going well, as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we have no more knowledge than we did there of what should follow; he sees little prospect of a successor-regime acceptable to Britain, France, and the U.S. that won’t be instantly de-legitimated in Libya as servile
and corrupt. Cockburn:
David Cameron, Hillary Clinton and Nicolas Sarkozy are coming to believe too much of their own propaganda, particularly over Arab League support for air strikes. Diplomats normally contemptuous of the views of the Arab League suddenly treat its call for a no-fly zone as evidence that the Arab world favours intervention.
This could change very fast. Arab League leaders are mostly people whom the “Arab Awakening” is trying to displace. Military participation in action against the Libyan government is expected from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, members of the Gulf Co-operation Council that clubs together Gulf monarchies. This is the same GCC that has just sent to troops to Bahrain to help the government crush pro-democracy protests by the Shia majority.
The worst verifiable atrocity in the Arab world in the past week was not in Libya but in Yemen, where pro-government gunmen machine-gunned an unarmed demonstration last Friday, killing 52 people.
In terms of the exercise of real authority, Gaddafi is likely to be replaced not by Libyans but by the foreign powers which assist in his overthrow. Going by what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq it will not take much for their actions to be seen across the Middle East as hypocritical and self-serving, and resisted as such.
