There is a close contest under way to choose the most embarrassing aspect of our Libyan misadventure: Is it the utter fecklessness of American and NATO power in the field, the murkiness of the result being sought, or the wider incoherence of the Obama administration’s perspective on the “Arab Spring,” one day declaring that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is “not a dictator,” demanding his ouster the next, and then going on to declare hands-off in Syria because its bloodthirsty ruler, Bashar Assad, is a “reformer”?
The Obama administration can at least claim that a certain amount of opacity or ambiguity is necessary in dealing with a region of such immense instability and political immaturity. The intellectual class that had come to regard Qaddafi as a more or less normal ruler with potentially reasonable or liberal inclinations has no such excuse, and their self-deception has had the consequence of enabling the policy incoherence of our political leaders.
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It is one thing to accept the existence of tyrants as a practical matter, but it is debilitating to take the next step and whitewash their characters. Qaddafi has been among the worst of the worst since his rise to power in the late 1960s — calling Libya under Qaddafi a rogue state is an insult to rogues everywhere. This is the man who in the 1970s wanted to use a borrowed Egyptian submarine to sink the Queen Elizabeth II ocean liner and who routinely sent assassination squads abroad to kill Libyan exiles. “It is the duty of the Libyan people constantly to liquidate their opponents . . . at home and abroad, everywhere,” Qaddafi declared. He once ordered the assassination of an American ambassador to Egypt; only a stern warning from Washington, tipped to the plot, dissuaded him. At one point in the 1980s, Qaddafi was supplying arms to guerrilla insurgencies in 45 countries, arming the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland and providing $300 million in weaponry for the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. About a third of African nations, many of them fellow despotisms, refused to have diplomatic relations with Libya. Qaddafi crushed several coup attempts against him the old-fashioned way: with mass executions of opponents.
But when Qaddafi, under mounting diplomatic and economic pressure, renounced his nuclear-weapons program in 2003 and agreed at last to compensate the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing, it was all the opening the experts needed to rehabilitate the Libyan loon. Ray Takeyh, senior fellow in Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, pronounced in the Washington Post that “Qaddafi’s recent rhetoric and behavior hint at a genuine ideological conversion. The collapse of the Soviet Union, a growing interest in Africa and an emerging disdain for Arab politics led him to offer a new vision for his restive nation,” one that supposedly included liberalizing markets and encouraging more foreign investment. (Notably absent was any offer to make restitution for the foreign assets he seized back in the 1970s, but never mind.) British sociologist Anthony Giddens visited Qaddafi in his tent in 2006 and wrote afterward that “Qaddafi’s ‘conversion’ may have been driven partly by the wish to escape sanctions, but I get the strong sense that it is authentic and that there is a lot of motive power behind it.” Dartmouth professor Dirk Vandewalle explained on NPR recently that Qaddafi’s bizarre squad of all-female “Amazon” bodyguards was not evidence of the usual tyrant’s indulgence in kinkiness, but arose from his “attempt to improve the situation of Libyan women.”
But the gold standard for moral blindness to Qaddafi’s character and regime belongs to Rutgers University political scientist Benjamin Barber (“the internationally renowned political theorist,” as he describes himself in his latest press release), who until mid-February was a board member of the Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, the outfit Qaddafi’s son Saif operated as a forum for “complaints about torture, arbitrary detention, and disappearances.” Who needs Amnesty International when you’ve got Saif Qaddafi on the job? Barber was the ideal Libyan lackey, having written in the Washington Post in 2007: “Qaddafi is a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat. Unlike almost any other Arab ruler, he has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country’s role in a changed and changing world . . . . Surprisingly flexible and pragmatic, Qaddafi was once an ardent socialist who now acknowledges private property and capital as sometimes appropriate elements in developing societies. Once an opponent of representative central government, he is wrestling with the need to delegate substantial authority to competent public officials if Libya is to join the global system.”
Fine article. And one you'd never read nor hear about in the MSM (the intellectuals' useful idiots).
"Our political science is haunted by the belief that ‘value judgments’ are inadmissible in scientific considerations, and to call a regime ‘tyrannical’ clearly amounts to pronouncing a ‘value judgment'".
Sounds like all those "values clarification" classes finally sank in.
"Our political science is haunted by the belief that ‘value judgments’ are inadmissible in scientific considerations"
The real problem here is that political "science" is not science at all. It is a study of human interaction. Humans are complex beings, heavily influenced by hormone driven emotions barely under control of the intellect, prone to self-deception, and with only a tenuous grip on reality. Von Mises discussed this, human interactions are too complex to be measureable, predictable, or testable, which are fundamental requirements of science. Political "scientists" are fools and frauds by definition
Others have pointed out the same academic standard that prevents negative value judgements should also preclude positive observations. For example, if I can't point out that Cuba jails gays and people who want to read foreign newspapers or went from mechanized agriculture to animal-powered subsistance farming under communism, I shouldn't be able to sing the praises of their literacy rate or free healthcare either.
Funny how it never seems to work out that way in academia, isn't it?
Such a standard would also seem to preclude me speaking negatively about Nazi Germany. But to speak positively or even neutrally about such a thing is beyond preposterous.
I don't care what you say, Streisand singing "Something Wonderful" is well, something wonderful. Can we seduce the tyrant with a wonderful lyric? Yes, we can!
Q is a tyrant and a gangster, nothing untrue here, but he has long stopped his trouble-making with America and reformed his past stance in this regard even if he did that from survival instinct i.e. making such compensatory and reconciliatory moves reluctantly and half-heartedly under fear of possible regime change wrought by Western military attack.
Both Q and the West have understood this and acknowledged it mutually and tacitly. Now suddenly the West attacked Q with sheer military superiority simply because he suppressed internal rebellion with however brute force he possesses as a dictator. Plainly speaking, it's betrayal and perfidy on the part of West and it would certainly if not having already pushed Q utterly to the camp of Russia and China who know far better than the hubristically stupid and incurably self-righteous West to care first and foremost about their own real and strategic national interests. The West would suffer direly in a long run for such foolish and severe misjudgment based on an incorrigible snobbish sanctimony instead of cool and rational thinking. Again, Q never challenged West openly to merit such retribution out of blue, and punishing and resultantly and thoroughly antagonizing him served no core interest of America and could only bring profound and manifold damages and complications.
If the West is really so sincere and steadfast in caring about the so-called human rights of those distant lands so dearly, why has it only picked on Q and likes but failed dismally and abjectly to uphold and maintain sanctions with the ultimately vicious and disingenuous communist and neo-imperialist China after 1989 massacre of its own young students but have instead competing with each other to pay homage to and curry favor with it slavishly and feverishly with awards of all kinds of business dealings, investment and technology transfers which have only hugely fattened, empowered and emboldened the former to carry out its military expansion and aggressive world domination agenda more effectively and potently with its inherent and peerless ruthlessness and duplicity with the West itself as a whole being put on the anvil eventually while also exponentially trashing and undermining the interest of the common working people of the West’s own? Because China is less evil and/or it has too large and luring a market for those transnational profit-crazed treasonous bigwigs and their political lackeys to ignore or displease, even by expending their own working compatriots and bankrupting and wrecking their own nations?
Maybe that's the price to pay from the just and perspicacious Providence for the stupendous stupidity, greed, cowardice and stark hypocrisy of the West, both the abysmally selfish, spineless and myopic rulers and the pathetically listless and languid, ignorant and nonchalant masses who elected them. It’s time to wake up or go perdition!
Don't non-"intellectuals" and non-"elites" also fall for tyrants and dictators?
Lots of people fall for tyrants and dictators. Some of them are powerless or uneducated; others have power or are highly educated. I'm not sure why there should be a dividing line between one class and the other that would cause us to ask the question about a Ph.D or a CEO but not about a street sweeper or someone who never learned to read.
Perhaps the better question is: Why do some people fall for tyrants and dictators?
Ah yes, Professor Benjamin Barber. The only issue when one considers Professor Barber is whether one emphasizes the "useful" or the "idot" in describing him. As Barack Obama might say, this is a false choice. Clearly he's both.
Billy Li - tell china we're coming for them. It'll just be a while. Obama has made China our bankers for a few generations, and we'll be depending on their good will and intelligence.
In the meantime we'll have Hillary Clinton begging the Chinese to keep buying our debt, sort of like Madeleine Albright chasing Arafat around the White House Porch, begging him to accept 95% instead of 100% of his demands...
"I'm not sure why there should be a dividing line between one class and the other that would cause us to ask the question about a Ph.D or a CEO but not about a street sweeper or someone who never learned to read."
I put forth that it's because the intellectuals aren't merely following the tyrant but actively aiding him, providing him moral cover, helping persuade the street sweeper and illiterate to follow him.
In fact, because ideas are the major determinant of culture and history in the long term, it's they that enable him to rise to power and maintain it.
Jeff Perren, I would also point out that bloody revolutions, takeovers, and the tyrrany that follows are led by intellectuals. Lenin certainly did not consider himself a street sweeper, nor did Ernie Guevarra. Usually, a bunch of disaffected elitists fed up that not enough of the masses recognize their brilliance and ability to organize their lives better than they can.
Thank God we don't have anybody like that around here with access to the levers of power!
