For a short time - when Gadaffi was about to take Banghazi - I was in favor of some sort of intervention. I hoped that foreign pressure to stop Gadaffi from taking Benghazi would open the road to negotiations that would lead to an interim government. Most likely Gadaffi would resign and someone else from Sirte would take his place while the regime would become more inclusive towards the other parts of the country. And the possibility of revenge and punishment for those who had taken part in the insurrection would be avoided. Gadaffi had shown enough preparedness to negotiate during the previous months that I assumed that he would agree to such a thing - provided we gave him some peaceful retirement and didn't send him to the ICC.
I may well have been right about Gadaffi, but I was definitely wrong about the Western countries. Instead of applying just enough pressure to get Gadaffi to negotiate they went for an all-out war against him. As a child could foretell this proved to be very dead and destructive. A war-by-proxy - as the West waged in Libya - is much more deadly than the tradition strategy of overwhelming force as Bush applied in Iraq. And both result in a lot of destruction and a near-anarchic state afterwards.
Now the West is repeating its mistakes in Syria. The senselessness of these policies - we don't have any interests in Syria and our policies are only dictated by Wahabi and Israeli interest groups - makes me believe that we may rather soon see the West loose its dominance in world affairs.
No comments:
Post a Comment