This has the sickening quality of a dream we’ve dreamed before. Gaddafi was not merely gibbering about the identity of the soldiers of the East Libya rebellion. Hillary, Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Barack Obama, Nicholas Burns, welcome to your new friends. Tom Wood at Huffpo writes:
Eastern Libya has been described by U.S. diplomats as a breeding ground for Islamist extremism. In diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, the region’s young men were said to have “nothing to lose” by resorting to violence. Sermons in the local mosques are “laced with phraseology urging worshippers to support jihad,” one diplomat reported. U.S. officials declined to discuss the make-up of the anti-Gaddafi forces in eastern Libya, and U.S. intelligence agencies declined to comment publicly.
This is mostly about Saudi Arabia. They have just shoveled $93 billion to their people to demonstrate their worthiness as rulers, but their fear is very great, and has been conveyed to the U.S. With the stirrings all over that region–and already it seems Egypt will not turn out very cheerfully from the U.S. policy standpoint–Obama felt enormous pressure to do something to assert continued control of the oil and to show that the U.S. even now is capable of doing anything it thinks necessary in the region. Gates’s public skepticism gave him a way out but he lacked the courage for that; and he was trapped, besides, by his wishful command that Gaddifi must go. None of the coalition (which he keeps announcing at the top of news hours he isn’t leading) has the faintest idea where this is going or how it will end.
This AM on “This Week” to discuss it Christiane Amanpour had four guests: Jane Harman, Paul Wolfowitz, Robin Wright, and George Will. Only Will opposed the intervention, saying correctly that we don’t know who the rebels are and that there is an incommensurate adaptation of means to end: we say that we’re just enforcing a no-fly zone but plainly we won’t accept a Gaddifi victory, we are intervening militarily in a civil war (indeed we’ve already bombed his tanks), the actual not avowed end is regime change, yet we have no real idea who the “rebels” are whom we say we support and whom we miscall “the people of Libya.” Paul Wolfowitz answered that we should support them but of course try to find more about who they are! Avnery nods, on this; he loves the underdog, and loves a good romantic war:
The doctrine of non-intervention into the internal affairs of other countries when matters of genocide and mass killings are concerned is dead and should be buried, before the corpse starts to stink to high heaven.
At this point in history, it is the duty of all nations to prevent systematic atrocities committed by a criminal government against its own citizens.
From what different beginnings we arrive at the same blindness.
