69 lines
4.5 KiB
Plaintext
69 lines
4.5 KiB
Plaintext
Lessons of Libya
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<p>Muammar Qaddaffi, Libya’s dictator and long-time terrorist<br />
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sugar-daddy, has agreed to dismantle his WMD programs and allow<br />
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international inspections. The NYT’s December 20th article <a href='http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/20/opinion/20SAT1.html'>Lessons<br />
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of Libya</a>, covering this development, is unintentionally<br />
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hilarious.</p>
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<p>An honest account would probably have read something like this:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>When Qaddafi saw the Hussein capture pictures they must have scared<br />
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him silly. Realizing that the U.S. is no longer in the mood to take<br />
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shit from tin-pot tyrants in khaffiyehs, and that the U.S. military<br />
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could blow its way into Tripoli and give him a free dental exam in<br />
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less time than it would take for an utterly impotent U.N. to pass the<br />
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resolution condemning American action, he crawled to the Brits<br />
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whimpering “Don’t let your big brother hurt me,<br />
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<em>pleeeassseee…</em>”</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Instead, we’re treated to a bunch of waffle: “To an extent<br />
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that cannot be precisely measured” and “yesterday’s<br />
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announcement also demonstrates the value of diplomacy and United<br />
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Nations sanctions”. I suspect the NYT will deny as long as it<br />
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can the real lesson of Libya, which is the same as the lessons of Iraq<br />
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and Afghanistan and, for that matter, Yugoslavia. And that is this:<br />
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the disarmament of rogue states has never once been accomplished by<br />
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the U.N. or by diplomacy or ‘international opinion’, but<br />
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is now being driven simply and solely by the fear of American military<br />
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power and the will to use it.</p>
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<p>We are in what Karl Marx would have called a world-historical<br />
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moment — the first time that American hyperpuissance has<br />
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defanged a dictator <em>without actual war</em>. All the rules will<br />
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be different from now on, and Qaddafi (wily survivor that he is) has<br />
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figured them out well ahead of the Western chattering classes. The<br />
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most important rule is this: <em>do not make the U.S. fear what<br />
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you might become, or it will break you.</em></p>
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<p>Indeed, it seems very likely to me that future historians will date<br />
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the beginning of the 21st-century Pax Americana from Qaddafi’s<br />
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crawfishing. The U.S. is not merely maintaining its lead in economic<br />
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vigor and military heft over any conceivable opposing coalition, that<br />
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lead is actually increasing. Demographic trends (notably the fact that<br />
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Europeans and Japanese are not breeding at replacement levels) suggest<br />
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that U.S.’s relative power, in both ‘hard’ and<br />
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‘soft’ terms, will continue to increase through at least<br />
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2050.</p>
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<p>The most visible indicator of this change, aside from the collapse<br />
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of awful governments in any number of Third-World pestholes, will be<br />
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the marginalization of the U.N. That organization, which has never<br />
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had hard power, will now lose its soft power as well. It might have<br />
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been different — but France and the other nations who aimed to<br />
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set the U.N. up as a geopolitical counterforce to the U.S. overplayed<br />
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their hand in the run-up to the liberation of Iraq. For that effort,<br />
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the capture of Saddam and Qaddafi’s surrender in the face of an<br />
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American-led New World Order are fatal blows. The U.N. may survive as<br />
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an umbrella for international aid agencies and a few technical<br />
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standards groups, but in the future it will constrain American<br />
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behavior less, not more.</p>
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<p>The ripple effects on Middle Eastern, European, and U.S. domestic<br />
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politics will be significant. Even <cite>Arab News</cite> is<br />
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beginning to come around to the realization that the U.S. did the Arab<br />
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world a favor by deposing Saddam Hussein, and his capture<br />
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significantly betters the odds that the reconstruction of Iraq will<br />
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succeed. Since U.S. power has actually accomplished the peaceful<br />
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disarmament of a rogue state, making political hay in Europe from a<br />
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case against U.S. unilateralism is going to become steadily more<br />
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difficult. And in the U.S., the antiwar opposition is increasingly<br />
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marginal and demoralized as the war goes well and George Bush’s<br />
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re-election now looks like a near certainty.</p>
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<p>To borrow Churchill’s phrase, this is not the end of the War on Terror.<br />
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But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.</p>
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