Libya - a Complex Muddle

The Libyan situation is now being acted out on multiple levels in a maze that should be a dream to conspiracy theorists. Theoretically, the situation in Libya is being dealt with by the UN Security Council through the instrument of an international coalition of governments contributing military resources to a no-fly zone. In reality there are several more levels, and they are not well connected with each other:

1. The bottom level is the struggle between Libyan rebels and the Gaddafi government's forces in which fortunes and loyalties seem forever changing and unpredictable; neither side has helpful international links;
2. The military action level of implementing the UN-mandated no-fly zone and associated airstrikes against Gaddafi forces in Libya – a multinational coalition venture lately led by NATO and consisting of both non-NATO and NATO forces gathered in a multitude of national military contributions, each delivered under specific limiting conditions and all subject to continuous coordinating discussion between the military authorities involved, working through the established machinery of NATO military diplomacy and NATO's consultation apparatus linking it to partners and other non-members;
3. The politico-diplomatic level of coalition government leaders and their officials – as of March 29 organized into a Contact Group of nearly 40 governments – seeking to hold the implementing coalition together from day to day, tackling sceptical parties like Turkey and Germany, and attempting to gain some semblance of coherence as to what their goals (long-term and short) actually are;
4. The global/international political level where Russia, China, India, Iran and others offer sceptical input into the UN Security Council oversight of the implementation of the resolution mandating the no-fly zone.

Interwoven with this multidimensional mess are (a) the domestic political struggles in all of these countries, most intense in the countries participating in the coalition and clearly more intense in the United States than anywhere else; (b) the diplomatic role-playing, mostly in the wings, of the intergovernmental organizations also involved, pushing their separate agendas (the African Union, the Arab League, the European Union, the Islamic Conference, NATO); (c) the international and national media competing in pursuit of their stories or in making them up.

You may think that you grasp an important part of the whole if you are completely informed about what is going on at one level. However, this is not necessarily so, because the connections between the levels are weak – the governments do not directly command the military level although they are supposedly their superiors, and the military cannot control what happens on the ground except indirectly through their use of air power and missiles. Even that use of military means depends on passing through several intermediate levels, since the employment of military force is still the responsibility of the national military units that make up the coalition.

Hence, all of these levels must produce outcomes pulling in the same direction for the totality of efforts to yield a meaningful overall result. What is the chance they will, instead of buckling up this way and that as domestic concerns, interstate rivalries and other pressures enter the picture? Not much, in my view. Even the military input from the outside now appears to have little chance of putting the rebels on top unless a more direct intervention takes place. That would be counter to the essence of the Security Council resolution (# 1973). In short, while the world's forces of goodwill for democracy have mounted an immense effort to save a chance for Libyan freedom, these activities appear to have precious little chance of making a difference where it counts. Inside Libya, Gaddafi cannot be counted out yet. Discussing his destination in exile is merely wishful thinking at this stage.

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CORRECTION (PREVIOUS BLOG):

Gaddafi (whose name is spelled in a multitude of different ways, even in English) has seven sons, not five as I stated in my previous blog. Even worse.

“The Arab Spring”: 1989 all over again? Yes and No.

Yes – these popular uprisings of 2011 are – as they were in 1989 - all going down (or up) in flames at the same time. No nice sequence pacing one after the other, except Tunisia setting it off, and Egypt opening the floodgates next by showing the revolution's maximum dimension and potential, the way the Baltics and East Germany did in 1989. From these initial, hesitant steps into the breach it quickly turned into a free-for-all, in 2011 as in 1989. In North Africa as in Communist Europe, popular sentiment that had been slowly brewing for years came to a state of boiling. A growing awareness of much better living next door stoked the fire in both cases. Whether it was tv, underground cassette tapes and VHF movies in the 1989 case, or mobile phones, Facebook or Twitter in the most recent case, it was enhanced communication reaching (especially) young people that triggered both revolutionary chains.

But: No – the similarities are both indicative and yet superficial. In 2011 there is no common controlling authority being challenged, no superpower tottering, just local dictators. There is no ideology from the top, only the smokesceen of Islam veiling oldfashioned despotism and an unimaginable greed. Unlike Eastern Europe, the Arab world seems to have had few movements living a secret organized life aiming for change. There has been systematic oppression, suffering and still somehow the bare survival of ordinary people. But there was never an overt justification of Muslim misery the way the Marxist-Leninist ideology was used to justify the oppression and low lifestyle of the Communist world.

Then there is the material wealth, above all the oil and gas, available to many of the rebelling peoples in 2011. In Soviet-controlled  Europe there were no riches to be redistributed. In the Middle East and North Africa, the worst crime of despotic leaders has been the theft of national wealth in the face of the abject poverty of their subjects. As the spirit of rebellion awoke, the image of a better future is a strong stimulus that has no comparison in Eastern Europe of 1989. True, the East Europeans also expected a better material future, but the riches they imagined were not as concrete and massive as those of (e.g.) Algerians or Libyans.

An open question is still whether the follow-up in the Middle East and North Africa is likely to be as successful as that in Eastern Europe (which admittedly has its downsides even two decades later). Obviously in 2011 “democracy” of some sort is a goal, however inchoate, but it has no historical reference very close to the experience of North African or Middle Eastern societies. Autocracy is the more familiar model, and (as Hillary Clinton just said), the West does not have all the answers. We may be facing a future of some kind of modified "auto-demo-cracy" emerging, more akin to the various Asian regimes in existence today.

The thought keeps coming back to me that I have no good answer to the charge that a people gets the government it deserves. If a people finds itself living under a despot, that is as good as deciding to do so; it is their choice. Some have called me heartless for that view. Yet the world is cruel, and we can only at our own peril ask others to meddle in our affairs to impose their sense of what is right.

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