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COMMENTARY
April 2, 2011
Libyan fiasco
The question, "What in God's name are we doing in Libya?" has yet to be asked on the campaign trail, except perhaps sotto voce.Goaded by France, Britain, and Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration suddenly went to war there. Like nice running dogs, the Harper government immediately dispatched six planes, while looking for anything else available. Suddenly one of our three-star generals was put in charge of the whole allied operation; though only nominally, I'm sure. We might think of him as a constitutional monarch, in Bedlam. We are rather in the position of a bystander who, noticing a few friends hurling rocks at a bogeyman, decide to wing a few ourselves before asking any questions. I really hate to find myself looking back nostalgically on Jean Chrétien's government, but that prime minister had at least some practical sense of what was and wasn't doable, abroad. It was he who sized up the Bush administration's intentions towards Afghanistan and Iraq, and sensibly triangulated from three big facts: 1. We are America's ally, and that can't change. 2. The people who support my party are given to cheap anti-American gestures. 3. We anyway don't have much in the way of an army. He therefore decided: We pass ostentatiously on Iraq, but will try to do Afghanistan with a bit of style. I despised Chrétien, but at least I could understand him. And understand that he understood the basic facts of geopolitical life. It helped that he grew up during the Cold War. But there's no rocket science here: we, as a nation, have allies, have enemies, and have domestic political realities. A prime minister weighs this all, and decides what we must do. Notice that my list did not include vague moral crusades. Chrétien did commit to one of those, over Serbia, along with the rest of NATO. Safety in numbers was his reasoning there. But the idea that we should commit tanks, ships, or airplanes, as if we were Amnesty International's avenging angel, remains intrinsically weak-in-the-head. For there can be no end to such endeavours. The whole Arab world is in convulsion, and in the case of Libya, we do not even know who our friends are supposed to be. The opponents of Gadhafi will obviously include our own most lethal enemies -al-Qaeda and company of that ilk -yet we have no reliable information on how large a part they play in the insurrectionist ragbag. And the French are now creating a demented precedent, by promising to arm "whoever they are." By aiding the Libyan ragbag in any way, we are abetting the ragbag in every other Arab country. In most of those, the opposition looks a lot uglier than the autocrats in power. Egypt was a splendid example, of where the choice comes down finally to the generals, or the Muslim Brotherhood -with "democrats" and "open society" bloggers, and the economic liberalizers Mubarak was patronizing, already squeezed out of the play. Yet in two countries where the regime is our unambiguous enemy, and the enemy of that enemy consists of more-or-less friends, we don't dream of acting. What about the humanitarian crises in Iran and Syria? Since the United States alone can provide the muscle to change regimes, or at least seriously scare them, the U.S. has traditionally had the last word on which fights to start. Compounding the ludicrous mess in Libya, we now have the world's biggest dog being waved by its tail. The U.S. is letting France and Britain make the decisions. The Obama administration has purposely -for the first time in American history -put U.S. military forces attacking Libya under nominally foreign command. This, to my mind, was the clinching signal for a Canadian prime minister to stay out of it. Barack Obama does not know what he is doing; or rather, he thinks he knows, which comes to the same thing. He thinks he is ushering in a new world in which wars are fought by international consensus; in which war crimes tribunals trump armed might; in which his country withdraws its claim to exceptionalism and becomes a team player at the UN. Our southern neighbours are already rolling their eyeballs at this, but he remains president through the next 22 months. Worse, having set this revolutionary policy in motion, it will take time for the next administration to reverse it. For the terrible consequences, when naive idealism is pursued as state policy, see the whole history of the world. This is what a Texas friend calls a "Hully Gully War." Lord knows there have been a few of those, started while statesmen were sleeping. But to enter into the chaos of Libya, wide-awake -without a plan, or rational articulation of our interests -begins to hint at insanity. Would someone please ask Harper what he thinks we are doing there? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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