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COMMENTARY
February 26, 2011
Permissions
That Moammar Gadhafi is a monster has been known for some time -- even better to his own people than to those out of harm's way. But there was never much doubt, in any foreign office, that his regime was behind various terrorist enterprises, or that his own unpredictability made the world less stable far beyond Libya's shores. His current domestic "reign of terror" is only an extension of his way of governing for the last 42 years. The puzzle to me was why he was humoured, until last week. The answer appeared to be, oil. The soaring price of that substance helps to remind us.The temptation to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by some well-placed bombing, end them, has returned with reports that the Libyan regime is itself using things like its air force to scatter protesting crowds. Yet we know little about what is happening in that country. The reports are confusing, and often contradictory, and after decades of tyranny, there are no reliable sources. This should be stressed before every journalistic assertion. Even so, it would seem that "thousands dead" is a plausible inference. Hence the call for humanitarian intervention. Roméo Dallaire and Hugh Segal have argued, in these pages, that talk is cheap, and coordinated action might be preferable. They refer to much paper that is now in place, through the United Nations and its agencies, to enable collective action against "genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity." I have no confidence whatever in the UN, but rather, contempt for an institution that was happy to seat Libya on its Human Rights Council. Nor have I ever been impressed by the quality of its "peacekeeping" operations. Serious intervention means changing a regime, and therefore, necessarily, replacing it with another. The U.S.-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq showed, if nothing else, what this entails. In both cases regimes were changed more murderous than Libya's. Consider Iraq. To the relative indifference of world media -- which kept asking, "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" -- U.S. and allied forces uncovered mass graves, containing the bodies corresponding to several hundred thousand souls. By the glib, the Iraq invasion is now presented as "illegal." Behind that allegation is a moot point: that the invasion did not enjoy the UN's official imprimatur. But as I insist, the UN's moral authority is zero, and in the command of military force, it is dysfunctional. Under the Reagan administration, the U.S. regularly challenged Libyan ships and aircraft patrolling international waters to which Gadhafi had laid claim. After proof was established that he was behind the bombing of a discotheque in West Berlin, Reagan ordered an air strike on Tripoli. This very nearly removed Gadhafi, not only from power but from the planet. The dictator in his turn waited for Reagan to be leaving office before replying with the Lockerbie bombing -- confident that he would again be dealing with gutless wonders. But in the meantime he behaved as if he had been chastened. Likewise, the sight of an hirsute Saddam Hussein, emerging from a hidey hole in Iraq, persuaded Gadhafi not only to abandon his nuclear weapons program, but to invite international inspections. He remained reasonably co-operative with the West -- for the duration of George W. Bush's presidency. These cases are instructive. Like criminals on the pettiest scale, criminals on the biggest operate on "permissions." They do not act irrationally, but instead quite rationally, in calculating what they can get away with. Sometimes, as in the case of Saddam, or Mullah Omar of Afghanistan, they miscalculate. A very large part in the art of keeping the peace consists of helping any potential criminal avoid miscalculation. It consists of making crystal clear, "If you do this, we do that." And then doing it, when necessary, to maintain the credibility of the threat. This may sound like "simplisme" to my more sophisticated readers. Yet many who demand action on Libya today have not merely opposed but demonized western governments who took action in the past, in circumstances of equal or greater moral clarity. (This criticism does not apply to Dallaire and Segal.) I prefer simplisme to comprehensive hypocrisy. Having supported American and allied action in Iraq and Afghanistan, I could easily extend the arguments to Libya (and Syria and Iran). But the moral clarity that emerged in the days after 9-11 is now entirely occluded. If we tried to act on Libya, we wouldn't have a clue what we were doing. We would be even less prepared for the consequences of our action than were the U.S. authorities after the fall of Saddam. And I am generally opposed to using military force, when we don't know what we're doing. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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