There is no doubt that the Western, or all the NATO, powers have been intensely surprised by the turn of events in the Middle East and North Africa. The swift resolution of the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, however, gave them some quick relief and even cause for self-congratulation. For the outcome was seen as in part due to the long-standing institutionalized relationships between the militaries in those countries and the NATO powers. In the case of Egypt, there was no need for the United States in particular to go beyond NATO national action and consultation with the Egyptians, pre-empting the necessity to proceed to the United Nations Security Council if things had got worse. The United States had long prided itself on its close relationship with Egypt’s longstanding President Mubarak, and recent information has demonstrated the close, even familial, relationships that have existed between senior French political officials and the then Tunisian leadership.
But these same NATO powers, faced with the even more surprising popular uprising in Libya found themselves initially paralysed by their inability to influence Colonel Gaddafi in any way, even though in the last decade or so they have amassed an extended presence in Libya mainly through investments in its oil sector. The Colonel, operating a different form of institutionalised relationship within his own country, based on family and tribal connections, has maintained a quite closed political system not susceptible to external influences as in the case of many Middle Eastern states. Colonel Gaddafi, once perceived in the West as representing principles of Arab nationalism once associated with Colonel, and then President Nasser, has been, until the last decade, seen as representing a radicalism which the Western world has abhorred.
This initial distancing from Gaddafi was reinforced not only by what were perceived as his quirky ways (residing in or working from a tent, reminiscent of the behaviour of General Idi Amin who reined in Uganda for a while, but more specifically by President Reagan’s bombing of Gaddafi’s residence in 1986, and then by the Colonel’s isolation after the Lockerbie incident in 1988, in which the Colonel was thought to have authorized the bombing of a Pan American passenger plane over Scotland. The release, in 2009, of the only individual convicted of the crime by the Scottish authorities, an act seen as receiving the approbation of the British government at least, was an early indication of a desire by the Western powers to come to terms with the Libyan government. In fact, as indicated by the behaviour of other European authorities, in particular Italy (a former imperial ruler of Libya) and France, the search for oil was the driver of the new attitude of, as it were, political friendship and alliances without sentiment, already applied to the new China and other states emerging in the single global system arising from the combined influences of globalization and the ending of the superpower confrontation.
So even as, last week, the Colonel took the tack of resistance rather than conciliation with citizens pressing for greater space in the Libyan political system, the United States and European Union powers were unable to even strongly intervene in Libya diplomatically to seek to effect change. The United States for one, was without extensive diplomatic intervention space in the country since the Reagan bombing that, it is said, kept the Colonel somewhat meeker than before. And President Obama considered that it has had its hands sufficiently filled with its interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is argued that diplomacy, subsequent to the bombing, had induced Colonel Gaddafi (unlike the then other US nemesis, North Korea), to give up his focus on acquiring nuclear weapons. And the strategy of concession that led to the release of the Lockerbie bomber, had opened Libya and the Colonel and his kith and kin, in a way which allowed the Western powers to “do business” with him. Recall too, the NATO powers recognition of the fact that Gaddafi had declared himself opposed to philosophies and practices of al Qaeda.
The surprise of the uprising in Libya has therefore led to a wait-and-see attitude on the part of the West – a West a little less confident of its ability to exert control over the Security Council in this era of One World. For in this period the West has had to compete with China in its attempts at securing major investments, particularly in the mineral sector, in the once-called Third World countries.
The NATO powers have therefore, in the present Libyan crisis, sought the approach of gradualism, as evidenced in the UN Security Council resolution of the weekend in which they have taken measures – a variety of sanctions short of military intervention. This approach has a legitimacy in recent Western practices, based on their experiences with the resort to massacres by political leaderships in both the developing countries and countries emerging out of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. So while there had been a limited intervention in the ex-Yugoslavia political space after the massacres of Srebrenica, there has been a strong reluctance to undertake any intervention in the case of the massacres in Darfur, Sri Lanka, Rwanda or the Congo over the last two decades.
Instead, the major powers have adopted a philosophy of intervention, distinct from the knee-jerk interventions of the Cold War period, that has been based on the notion that there is a tipping-point in civil uprisings and political authority interventions which needs to be reached before a direct military intervention becomes necessary. This philosophy, described as ‘the Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P), accepted by the United Nations, prescribes the limits of interventions as defined by a series of stages in the behaviour of political leaders. It also clothes the International Criminal Court with the authority to prosecute political and military leaders as war criminals, even if they have for a time got away with their adventures against their citizens. So the possibility of punishment is administered to the leader who authorizes massacres, as against the whole state and its citizens.
The burden of proof for a single state or regional institution’s authority to intervene is removed from the national level to the international – that is, United Nations level. As can be seen it allows states, particularly those initially opposed to intervention, to graduate their responses to domestic political killings. Such is the case of the UN Security Council Resolution of the weekend which, approving a number of measures against Gaddafi, did not, up to then, advocate the creation of “no-fly zones” over the country to inhibit the Colonel’s use of air bombings.
In practice, of course, the acceptance of this line of action by major states is also a function of their own estimation of the practicable possibilities and limitations of unilateral or collective intervention. And indeed that is where the situation in Libya lies, as while exerting economic pressure against the Colonel, the powers wait to see the extent to which his strength weakens in various critical areas of the country during the course of this week as the deciding factor of any military intervention. And clearly one of the practical matters is whether any intervention can be undertaken in the face of more radical actions by Gaddafi, bearing in mind the necessity not to create a situation of extensive physical liquidation of economic assets owned by corporate citizens of the powers.
