The Obama Administration has stumbled into a regional war (and potentially a world war) in the Middle East. Libya is not a case of democratic reform. And the casual language of “reform by protest” and so-called “universal values” has served only to disguise a dangerous reality. The forces in play in the Middle East range far beyond Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. It was readily foreseeable already in Tunisia that apparent social movements in the region bore the portent of general state engagement to redesign the strategic balance. The role of the United States in that process was to anticipate the movements of the key state actors. Instead, the U. S. has acted as if each country were a unique case.
What is the consequence? Consider first the reality that nothing is as it has been represented. The case in point is Egypt. Mubarak has not been overthrown. If we think of Mubarak not as the man (who has simply made himself obscure) but a particular regime, that regime not only has not been overthrown but is systematically carrying out the program set forth by Mubarak himself. It is fair to anticipate that it will remain intact after this season of “reform” has been completed but with a difference. It will act on the basis of state imperatives liberated from deference to the United States. That means that it will be open to the influence of other states with a much more immediate influence and the means to pursue that influence. In that region there are only two states in that position, Iran and Turkey. Will they work in concert or as antagonists? That is the question of the day in the Middle East.
The role of the Arab League in fostering Western intervention in Libya serves mainly to outline who are the loosely aggregated forces of resistance to region-wide change. To them the engagement of the West in Libya is a means to commit the West to continued engagement in the conflicts yet to arise, failing which the heads of the established states in the Arab League will prove unable to control the flow of events. Those events herald a growing armed resistance to the present organization of power in all of the weaker states in the Middle East (excluding Israel). While Mr. Obama speaks of protecting civilians, the reality is that these are threats of armed revolt organized around unarmed protest as a wedge to undermine established claims to legitimacy.
It will not be possible to confine these events to the small states presently in ferment. As the crucial responses from Saudia Arabia and Iran to the ferment in Bahrain provide sufficient evidence, there will be no outcome to these events that is not mediated by the major powers in the region. And the efforts of these states cannot avoid implicating Pakistan and India in the ultimate results. One consequence of this likelihood is that major world powers will be unable to avoid engagement as events continue to unfold.
To return to Libya, therefore, it is necessary to question critically the claims that inform the action that has been taken. There is no U. S. interest in creating a partitioned Libya. There is no basis to the claim of preventing a mad leader’s killing his own innocent civilian (where he has faced almost from the beginning an armed rebellion), which claim moreover would no less – and perhaps more — commit us to tackling Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast. Nor does a Kosovo-style killing of civilians satisfactorily express such a resolve. In short, we have moved into Libya on pretexts that are highly questionable, and we seem to have acted with inadequate intelligence (which should have situated the local case in the context of larger threats in the region).
Nevertheless, we are at war. Paeans to the international community and the spurious legality of United Nations’s resolutions to the contrary notwithstanding, it is the United States that has gone to war in Libya and which must bear the consequences of having done so. We have made this country and all of its citizens legitimate targets of reprisal. Accordingly, we have no choice but to win the war, whether prudently undertaken or not. Once in we are all in. We must hold our President accountable for his decision, but we cannot abstract ourselves from the effects of his decision.
In further commentary we may consider the wisdom of preaching democracy by disorder, which presently lays seeds of further instability in the world and in the United States.
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