A great article by Roger Cohen about Libya crisis:
Be Ruthless or Stay Out
Roger Cohen
LONDON — For years I watched a “no-fly zone” in Bosnia. I watched Bosnian Muslims being slaughtered as NATO patrolled the skies. The no-fly zone was created by the United Nations Security Council in October 1992. The Srebrenica massacre took place in July 1995. Enough said.
The Bosnian no-fly zone was an attempt to assuage Western consciences after the Serb killing spree against Muslims in the first six month of the war. It was not about saving lives: Lifting the grotesque arms embargo on Bosnia might have achieved that. It was about allowing politicians in Washington and Paris to feel they’d done something, however feeble, about genocide.
Having witnessed hypocrisy most foul in Bosnia — the West, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, became “accomplice to a massacre” — I refuse to will similar hypocrisy on the brave resistance fighters of Benghazi who face Muammar el-Qaddafi’s superior tanks, now moving relentlessly eastward. No-fly zones are for the birds.
The real question must be put up-front if the West’s Bosnian shame, its smokescreen of useless agitation, is not to get a Libyan re-run: Should President Barack Obama lead a coordinated, Arab League-backed Western military intervention in Libya to stop Qaddafi?
That’s a tough question. I would have found it easy right after Bosnia, when — like Leon Wieseltier of the The New Republic, but unlike him now — I was a passionate interventionist. I don’t today.
Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward, as Kierkegaard noted. He might have added: “And if not, you’re in trouble.” Iraq and Afghanistan have provided powerful lessons in the cost of facile planning (or none), the ease of going in, the agony of getting out, and the limits of Western firepower.
But there’s another historical lesson. Rwanda paid the price for the botched U.S. intervention in Somalia. The 1994 Rwandan genocide took place as America did nothing in part because the fiasco of Somalia disinclined the United States to intervene. Can we then allow the fiasco of Iraq to prevent a Western intervention in Libya as the Qaddafi clan delivers “rivers of blood”?
It’s a prosaic exercise, but let’s set forth arguments for and against a Western military intervention:
Against:
1) The riveting moral power of the Arab Spring comes from its homegrown quality. This is about Arabs overcoming fear to become agents of their own transformation and liberation. Nothing would more quickly poison this movement at its wellspring than Western colonialism in new form (that’s how Qaddafi will portray it, and he will have an audience.)
2) U.S. intervention in Libya will reinforce the old argument that America only gets involved in the Middle East to secure its oil interests. It will end up hardening regional anti-Americanism.
3) The United States cannot afford a third war in a Muslim country. The very talk of Western intervention betrays a profound misunderstanding of the West’s declining power. When the Bosnian war broke out, major Western nations accounted for about 70 percent of the global economy. Now that figure is just over 50 percent — and falling. The “white man’s burden” is not history; it is ancient history.
4) Intervention will turn into a long military stalemate that will distract the West from what must be its core strategic objective: A decent democratic outcome in Egypt that, with more than 13 times the population of Libya, is the pivot of the Arab awakening.
5) The legality of any intervention may be dubious.
For:
1) Obama and other Western leaders cannot declare the objective of removing Qaddafi and then sit idly by as people rising to oust him get massacred. That’s as criminal as encouraging the Shiites of Iraq to resistance in 1991 and then watching them be slaughtered by Saddam.
2) Obama’s repeated pledges that he stands for universal human rights will be shredded if Qaddafi prevails. Just as the bombarded people of Sarajevo deserved American-backed firepower — which finally proved decisive in 1995 — so do the people of Benghazi.
3) Qaddafi, like Milosevic, is a weak bully. He’s fighting along a narrow strip of coastline. His support is shallow. Crater coast roads from warships in the Mediterranean, jam his communications, provide weapons and money and training to the ragtag resistance, and he will quickly crumble.
4) The Arab Spring across North Africa will be undercut at a critical juncture if Qaddafi is allowed to recover. Wounded, a cornered beast, he may then do his worst.
5) Qaddafi is a mass murderer who brought down Pan Am 103 (270 people aboard) and UTA 772 (170 aboard), crimes now reconfirmed by his justice minister. He has slaughtered thousands of his own people over decades. There could scarcely be a more powerful moral case for the elimination of a leader.
What’s clear to me is that there is no halfway house. Spurn conscience-salving gestures. The case against going in prevails unless the West, backed and joined by the Arab League, decides it will, ruthlessly, stop, defeat, remove and, if necessary, kill Qaddafi in short order. I’m skeptical, even after a vote from the United Nations authorizing "all necessary measures," that this determination can be forged. Only if it can be does intervention make sense.
