When Despots Fall - Libya Edition

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We appear to have reached the endgame in Libya.  With Tripoli cut off, much of the loyalist forces have stopped fighting, allowing the residents of Tripoli to take to the streets, supported by clandestine weapons shipments and reinforcements from the rebels outside the city.  It's really only a matter of time, and blood, before the fight is over and we can begin to see the shape the new Libyan government will take.

I readily confess that I take a certain pleasure in watching the end of the Gadhafi regime.  He was one of the great megalomaniacal autocrats of the twentieth century, a thorn in the side of the West going back beyond Reagan, a leader who took the seat of power at the point of a gun, and will only relinquish it the same way.  From the bombing of the La Belle in Berlin and the resultant US air strikes to that icon of tragedy, to the crumpled cockpit of PanAm 103 lying broken in the verdant fields of Lockerbie, he has always been dangerously willing to translate rhetoric and oil wealth into action in a long, incoherent asymmetric war with the US and her allies.  And despite the bombings, the sanctions and the decisive losses in occasional air battles over the Gulf of Sirte, he relentlessly demanded a position on the world stage all out of proportion to his actual status - and more often than not he received it.  But ultimately, the actions taken by the leader of a single-party police state to suppress dissent and hold onto power erode his support among the people, creating a cycle of increasingly brutal suppression and a more radicalized population.  The ultimate result is very often rebellion or civil war.

Of course, we cannot know at this point how this will all play out.  Libya is another one of those artificial constructs, a nation with borders drawn by arrogant colonialists without regard to Tribal realities.  It remains to be seen whether the competing demands of Tribal politics, ethnic antipathy and religious intolerance can be set aside to allow the establishment of some sort of national identity without the coercive control of a traditional "strongman".  But one fact is, even now, hard to overlook.  For perhaps the first time, the international community came together to provide the appropriate level of military intervention to prevent a wholesale slaughter of innocents and level the playing field just enough for the people to have a fighting chance to win their freedom.  This was done with extremely limited military force, with no ground troops, no occupation and no coalition casualties.  The fact that the world can now have confidence that it can honestly, fairly and decisively intervene to prevent a humanitarian disaster should give pause to any despot considering massacres as a method to hold onto power.

Well, why not Syria, you ask.  How can this formula apply to Gadhafi and not Bashar al Assad?  The answer is simple - sadly so.  International intervention can be compared to a medical procedure, and "First do no harm" is a critical guiding principle.  If intervention has the likelihood of starting a regional war, a scenario where it would create far more suffering than it might alleviate, that is a situation in which it cannot be used.  One of the necessary keys to international military intervention, then, is it can really only be used against the more isolated of regimes - those with powerful or local allies (or both) are mostly inoculated against the world community acting against them.

But we should remember Rwanda, and Srebrenica, and we should point to Libya and resolve that we never need let it happen again...
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