A week of hibernating in the woods without newspapers or TV can alter your perception of time and space. So imagine my shock and awe when I crawled back into reality yesterday to discover it was 2003.
It certainly felt like it with the press images of battleships launching Tomahawk missiles in the dead of night to news another Arab dictator was surrounding himself with human shields and promising to wage the mother of all battles against the west.
Only the news wasn’t about Iraq and Saddam Hussein, but Libya and Muammar Gaddafi. Madness.
This version of western hegemony is a little different than George Bush’s solo mission against Hussein post-911. The U.S. is not alone on this one. A United Nations-backed coalition has joined in the bombing raids against Gaddafi and Libyan targets.
But that doesn’t make this latest U.S.-led foray in the name of peace and democracy in the Middle East any more acceptable. Have we learned anything from our past military mistakes in the region? Obviously not.
There may be compelling humanitarian reasons for western intervention in Libya. But saving rebels from Gaddafi’s warplanes is not one of them. The perils of that logic are many.
For example, what responsibility does the west have to respond militarily in the event ongoing democracy protests in Yemen and Syria turn violent, then?
If the UN is serious about protecting civilians caught in the crossfire between troops loyal to Gaddafi and the rebels in Benghazi, then perhaps a truly international force, led by Arab nations, should be deployed on the ground to begin the process of brokering some kind of peace deal or partition of the country, if necessary.
The days of the west rendering judgment from on-high at the UN in New York and with jet fighters in the sky every time some tin pot dictator begins sabre rattling, is a strategy that has backfired before and will do nothing to improve the west’s image in the Middle East.
Perhaps the west has judged rightly, this time, that the appetite for democratic reforms in the region is such that the UN’s intervention is welcome. But that’s assuming a lot. Already, the Arab League’s secretary general has condemned the airstrikes as outside UN jurisdiction.
If the pro-democracy demonstrations sweeping north Africa and the Middle East, and that have already toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt prove anything, it’s that Arab self-determination is stronger than it has ever been. And that it should be up to Arabs to decide their own future.
