The Cool Cat Versus The Mad Dog

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After a lot of dithering, President Obama acted at the last minute to prevent Qaddafi from eradicating the last pockets of a rebellion, reversing a revolution that had spread across most of the country and was poised to eliminate the dictator. 

While the Libyan opposition and most of the world press had already written off Qaddafi, the President knew otherwise from U.S. Intelligence assessments.  With Obama’s deliberate caution buttressed by a war-weary Defense Secretary and a skeptical Secretary of State, it looked like the superpower would sit this one out, until the last minute.

Something happened, and while the Arab League’s call for a No Fly Zone seemed to change the diplomatic landscape, reports that it was Susan Rice at the U.N. and Samantha Powers on the N.S.C. weighing in on Hillary that changed the day, don’t measure up.  True it was unusual to have the French leading the charge.  However cynics suggest Sarkozy was driven to repair his tattered image of palling around with dictators.  But there has to be more to this.

Since the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs just admitted the end game is uncertain and that a stalemate is possible, it seems clear the U.S. military was reluctant to join the war party.  And no sooner had the shooting started; the Arab League began to have second thoughts about civilian casualties although the League’s head Amr Moussa has since retracted his remarks in the absence of credible evidence.  

Now the Congress is weighing in with a coalition of critics from opposite sides expressing concern over the lack of strategic clarity and diplomatic purpose.  Clearly there is none, aside from protecting civilians from further slaughter by a demented despot. 

But that has not been a priority in recent world affairs and it has never been applied universally.  Sure it is not a good idea to give the Syrians a green light to slaughter their restive population, not that they care what we think, or to give Ahmadinejad permission to take the gloves off against his opposition. 

Apparently the Russians and the Chinese felt sufficiently shamed by international approbation to abstain from vetoing the intervention and why Germany and Brazil joined them is worth further explanation.  But this latest war remains short of answers except for the possibility that it is in fact about stopping the slaughter of civilians. 

And since there is such a sorry record of international indifference to slaughters protected by sovereignty, have we become too jaded to accept it a face value?  Of course there is the oil factor and Europe needs Libya’s oil, but we are not intervening in the oil-rich Gulf.

Since Bush junior’s wrecking crew gave intervention a bad name, we have been bogged down in the wrong wars while sitting on the sidelines uncertain about what to do about the right rebellions. 

But this is a slippery slope with a whole lineup of righteous interventions waiting as the world’s dictators cling to power with a callous determination to kill as many of their own people it takes.  Syria could be next, and Saudi Arabia; from the strategically important all the way down to murderous regimes that do not affect our vital interests like in the Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe. 

Along with a belief that if the good guys don’t act, then Al Qaeda will fill the void, my suspicion is that, in spite of the official denials, there is an understanding that the only way the military intervention in Libya makes sense is to remove the Qaddafi family. 

A divided Libyan would be the worst outcome, with the oil fields stuck between the eastern and the western halves.  And it is likely that even Qaddafi’s inner circle has little loyalty to the greedy family of spoiled brats who have plundered the country.  

Perhaps there will be a coup inside the regime, but if the head of the snake is cut off, it is very likely that the regime will collapse and the opposition and most of the tribes will come together without the great slaughter of score-settling that is predicted.  

If killing the Qaddafis is the unspoken plan, then it does pose some troubling questions about how to deal with criminal regimes in an era of global transparency.  With an International Criminal Court able to indict criminal heads of srate, but incapable of bringing them to trial, short of sending in foreign armies to exact street justice, what kind of new world order is that?