While the U.S. has and still does support autocratic regimes in the Middle East, the action against Gaddafi appears hypocritical. There are civilians to be protected elsewhere but one place of non-action is the most disturbing: Palestine.
The case for action in Libya is a weak one. It will only protect civilians if the threat of the U.N. is enough to halt the internal hostilities between the competing tribes. However, that will not happen. Instead, the U.S./U.N. intervention (led by autocratic regimes from the Middle East), even a verbal one, will enable the tribes in Banghazi and elsewhere to recover and strike back. Other than the fact that the tribes have been hostile to each other for generations, nothing is known about who they are and what they want. It is not even known how extensive a discontent in Libya is. This intervention enables an outright civil war. Many more civilian lives will be lost. If the West thinks that there is some kind of a drive toward democracy, they may simply misunderstand the scope of possible interpretations for their sacred societal organization. 97% of Libyans are Muslims. This is similar throughout the Middle East. What kind of a democracy do the Americans think they want to install in their countries?
This U.S./U.N. intervention is nothing other than an apologetic propaganda war that will go into history as a decision driven by cost, not by lives, and a disgrace to humankind’s rationality. The U.N. has finally something to show for that it supported the revolutions in the Middle East. These actions—including those since the beginning of the year—expose foreign policies of the U.S. of the last decades as misguided, failed, ignorant, and amateurish. They are based on guesswork and spontaneous reactions to unfolding events rather than on solid knowledge and rational actions. Beer-politics could not score worse. These are policies that have cost millions of lives and have not brought about change that significantly improved the lives of the civilians that are subjected to them. Instead, anti-Americanism continues to be at the top of Muslim’s minds. This is because we neither understand the underlying social economics nor that we put in an effort to acquire the necessary knowledge beyond the bias of western societies.
The intervention also exposes an ever widening distrust that has formed amongst the international political class since wikileaks has brought the pretentious relations to light. Before, it was common sense that politicians SHOULD NOT trust or be trusted. Now, it is clear that they MUST NOT trust or be trusted. Best friends will turn around to stab when opportunity strikes. It is turncoat politics at its best that goes beyond an international spread.
After the U.N. had come to a resolution against Gaddafi, he declared a seize fire. The news that now arrives from Libya seems one sided and only talks about bullets that leave Gaddafi’s barrels. It seems that all the bullets are Gaddafi’s and they are magnified ad infinitum by those that want to see a military intervention that speaks the only universally understood language: bombs.
For the Americans at home, it is the final blow to any hope for real CHANGE. Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel are still being funded. Now, America meddles with a third war and may soon find itself in another standoff with Iran. I can but wonder what might happen if the 15 million unemployed and underemployed in America start protesting that nothing is being done for them and demand that the U.S. is setting its priorities straight. Their situation is probably worse than what the Libyans experience. There, a Muslim culture of mutual support may at least help them cope. Poor and underemployed Americans are mere social outcasts, instead. They need their lives protected and rebuilt.
I understand that the United States cannot and should not intervene everywhere. In fact, it should be an imperative to build friendships without guns and to altogether shun those—economically and spiritually—that oppress their people. However, the stance with Libya is in stark contrast with the Palestinian question: The Israelis can pull the world on their nose for decades and starve the Palestinians out without any intervention, not even a U.N. resolution. If anything needs to be done to please the Muslim world, it is to slap the Israeli leadership on their hands and have them pull back their aggressions instead of meddling with Libya. This, and only this centre of conflict is the potential trigger for a much greater clash of civilizations with hundreds of millions of lives at stake. It is the hinge on which the Irianian threat rests. America and the U.N. needs to solve Israel, not Libya—and then get out of the Muslims’ affairs. It is their puzzle to solve.
A.J. Deus
Author of The Great Leap-Fraud
Social Economics of Religious Terrorism
