Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and author of books including The Muslim Brotherhood: The Organization and Policies of a Global Islamist Movement, took some questions from me this afternoon on the death of Muammar Qaddafi.
LOPEZ: What is Muammar Qaddafi’s legacy?
RUBIN: A horrible dictator who combined repression at home with terrorist sponsorship and subversion abroad. Qaddafi’s weakness was that he never had a secure superpower patron, which, combined with Libya’s small size, made him the most vulnerable Middle East dictator. Nevertheless, the West almost always let him get away with his aggressive behavior against it. Even the Lockerbie story, which began with a “tough” demand to turn over those responsible, ended with the scapegoat intelligence official (so Qaddafi could pretend it was a rogue operation) released by the British (with American approval) in exchange for oil agreements. Message: The West is weak, stupid, and corrupt.
LOPEZ: Is this a huge victory for the Obama administration? Who deserves credit, assuming this is a good thing?
RUBIN: Obviously the NATO forces — Europe, and especially Italy — pushed for this and the Obama administration enthusiastically went along, bypassing Congress and the War Powers Act. Since Qaddafi was unpopular, of course, the administration got away with ignoring U.S. law and procedures. But credit will depend on what comes next.
LOPEZ: Is it a good thing?
RUBIN: Well, it is good to see a ferocious and murderous dictator overthrown, but what comes next? I see a bunch of politicians in nice suits who know how to talk to the West and win its support and a bunch of guys with guns who don’t care what the West thinks, have no gratitude for the NATO help, and a lot of whom are Islamists or aspiring future dictators. Moreover, the energy wealth of Libya makes it a tempting target for political looting, and whoever has it doesn’t have to worry about what the West thinks. Not to mention the real problems of regionalism, hatred of black Africans, and potential Arab-Berber conflict.
LOPEZ: Is this a warning to Assad?
RUBIN: Yeah, a warning that he better be willing to kill people without end or face the end for himself.
LOPEZ: Is this important for the myth or reality of an “Arab Spring?”
RUBIN: Simple answer: governments only get overthrown by Western intervention (Iraq, Libya) or their own armed forces (Egypt, Tunisia). Everything else is mythology or failed revolts put down with bloodshed.
I want to be real careful with this one. I do not have any moral problem with Qaddafi assuming room temperature. He has the blood of thousands of innocents on his hands, including Americans, and if there is a Hell he should be approaching well-done about now.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCertainly, we have seen other dictators get the same treatment, whether in Rumania as the Iron Curtain was falling or in Italy at the end of WWII, and both of those examples ended well.
That having been said, it was probably not a good thing to see the people we have been backing shoot a prisoner of war in the face as he was begging for his life. As much satisfaction as it undoubtedly provided, and as richly as Qaddafi deserved to be shot, killing a POW after he has surrendered violates just about every international law under the sun. An arrest followed by a quick trial and a rapid execution would have sent a much better signal.
It's one thing if it's an aberration but it's quite another if it indicates what is coming. At the time we intervened, Qaddafi had been in a cage for several years. He had given up his WMD programs, jailed most of his country's radical Islamists and had even been providing us intel on al Qaeda. None of that exempts him from prior acts, but it did mean he presented no immediate threat to American national security.
Now, those Islamist prisoners have been freed from jails, thousands of shoulder-fired missles have disappeared and the country is just as if not more likely to end up being another radicalized Islamist state than anything resembling what westerners would regard as a democracy. We are certainly seeing the worst-case scenario unfold in Egypt and there is no reason to think the same thing will not happen in Libya. The Obama administration might want to keep the corks in the champagne bottles, because this may not look like much of a victory in a few months.
Reed, nothing gets better in the Middle East unless the dictatorships go and any dictatorship that held power for a generation or more isn't going to leave anything but chaos and strife in their wake.
Simply, the status quo is horrible and the aftermath will be ugly.
The US opted to prop up a lot of dictatorships during the Cold War but that's gone and that choice was costly.
We can't say that we lead the free world if we won't lead toward freedom in the world.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat is there about the oppositon we were backing that gives you any confidence it will be moving Libya toward freedom? We know for a fact that it included al Qaeda and other jihadists that had been shooting at our soldiers in Iraq. We already have video, aired on Fox, that shows members of the Iranian Revolutionary guard carting away shoulder-fired missiles, and you can be virtually certain that some of those weapons will fall into the hands of the jihadists that have already been released from Libyan jails.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAgain, you can call Qaddafi anything you want to and I will agree and double down, but this could quite easily be a case of being better off with the devil we knew than something even worse. As far as our history of propping up dictators in the Middle East, we never propped up Qaddafi. The Russians did that, just as they propped up the Nasser regime in Egypt. We dealt with the governments that were in power because that was the reality on the ground.
Say what you will about Mubarek, but he kept the peace with Israel and provided material assistance to the U.S. after 9-11. If the Moslem Brotherhood continues consolidating power in Egypt, as it appears to be doing, then you will almost certainly end up with a far more brutal and totalitarian regime than Mubarek ever contemplated, and it will be hostile to the U.S. and allied with our enemies as well. Tell me that either the world or the Iranian people are better off under the Mullahs than they were under the Shah, whose many crimes in the eyes of the revolutionaries was insisting on women's rights and a civil society kept arms' length from Islam.
We have been down this road of making the world safe for democracy before. It led to chaos and economic turmoil and ended with Hitler and Mussolini. If there is one thing I have learned over a few decades on this earth, it is that change is nearly always change for the worse, and that applies ten-fold in the middle east. And that is why I simply said we might want to put any celebration about Libya on hold.
I'm nor confident that Libya will be moving to freedom any more than I'm confident that iraq has moved to freedom.
But I do think that in Libya, in contrast to iIraq, we were asked to help get rid of Gaddafi by the Arab League and the UN and we led NATO into the air above Libya.
We handed the Libyans a chance at freedom and we were seen to hand them a chance.
As I said earlier, I expect that there's not going to be an instant transformation in any place where there's been nothing but authoritarianism.
Russia hasn't become a place where everyone is better off and neither has Iran. ( I do suspect that when the Iranian theocracy gets the boot in the near future the Iranian people have a pretty good shot at a decent life.)
In any case, it's not better to embrace the devils that we know. It's better, particularly t a time when we have unrivaled military power, to live with the uncertainty and push away the demons of our fear.
We managed to chance living without the comfort and security provided by King George, we'll manage without Gaddafi and Mubarak and the Shah of Iran.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe world might be a better place now if we had moved away form the Shah 60 years ago....
Just a note that the comment immediately below was in reply to fuster. For some reason the reply button didn't work.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"A horrible dictator who combined repression at home with terrorist sponsorship..."
Don't forget the cold-blooded murder of Yvonne Fletcher, in London:
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