Intervening in Libya now will set a poor precedent on when the use of force is justified.
Richard Falk
Al-Jazeera
"Long ago, Gaddafi forfeited the legitimacy of his rule, creating the political conditions for an appropriate revolutionary challenge.
Recently he has confirmed this assessment, referring to his own people as "rats and dogs" or "cockroaches", and employing the bloodthirsty and vengeful language of a demented tyrant.
Such a tragic imposition of political abuse on the Libyan experience is a painful reality that exists beyond any reasonable doubt, but does it validate a UN authorised military intervention carried out by a revived partnership of those old colonial partners – France and Britain – and their post-colonial American imperial overseer? I think not....
A difference in resistance
In Libya the opposition forces were relying almost from the outset on heavy weapons, while elsewhere in the region the people were in the streets in massive numbers, and mostly with no weapons, and in a few instances, with very primitive ones (stones, simple guns) that were used in retaliation for regime violence.
It may have been the case that the Libyan governmental response was predictably brutal and militarist, and that the rebel opposition felt that it had no choice.
But it should have been clear from the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan that military intervention against a hated and brutal regime is not the end of the story, and before the ending is reached violence cascades to heights far beyond what would have likely resulted had there been no intervention producing heavy civilian casualties and massive displacements among the population.
In effect, overall historical trends vindicate trust in the dynamics of self-determination, even if short-term disasters may and do occur, and similarly underscores the problematic character of intervention, even given the purest of motivations, which rarely, if ever, exists in world politics....
But such a claim was patently misleading and disingenuous as the obvious goals, as manifest from the scale and character of military actions taken, were minimally to protect the armed rebels from being defeated, and possibly destroyed, and maximally, to achieve a regime change resulting in a new governing leadership that was friendly to the West, including buying fully into its liberal economic geopolitical policy compass...."
Richard Falk
Al-Jazeera
"Long ago, Gaddafi forfeited the legitimacy of his rule, creating the political conditions for an appropriate revolutionary challenge.
Recently he has confirmed this assessment, referring to his own people as "rats and dogs" or "cockroaches", and employing the bloodthirsty and vengeful language of a demented tyrant.
Such a tragic imposition of political abuse on the Libyan experience is a painful reality that exists beyond any reasonable doubt, but does it validate a UN authorised military intervention carried out by a revived partnership of those old colonial partners – France and Britain – and their post-colonial American imperial overseer? I think not....
A difference in resistance
In Libya the opposition forces were relying almost from the outset on heavy weapons, while elsewhere in the region the people were in the streets in massive numbers, and mostly with no weapons, and in a few instances, with very primitive ones (stones, simple guns) that were used in retaliation for regime violence.
It may have been the case that the Libyan governmental response was predictably brutal and militarist, and that the rebel opposition felt that it had no choice.
But it should have been clear from the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan that military intervention against a hated and brutal regime is not the end of the story, and before the ending is reached violence cascades to heights far beyond what would have likely resulted had there been no intervention producing heavy civilian casualties and massive displacements among the population.
In effect, overall historical trends vindicate trust in the dynamics of self-determination, even if short-term disasters may and do occur, and similarly underscores the problematic character of intervention, even given the purest of motivations, which rarely, if ever, exists in world politics....
But such a claim was patently misleading and disingenuous as the obvious goals, as manifest from the scale and character of military actions taken, were minimally to protect the armed rebels from being defeated, and possibly destroyed, and maximally, to achieve a regime change resulting in a new governing leadership that was friendly to the West, including buying fully into its liberal economic geopolitical policy compass...."
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