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Libya, the West and the Narrative of Democracy
This gives me huge second thoughts over my support for interceding in Libya. I generally support it, but wonder what's the plan now? Where is this supposed to lead? Hell, it is a lot like Iraq, where there are contentious tribes/ethnicities/religions (George makes this point), but at least we fully committed to do Iraq. We have hardly any commitment to doing Libya. And frankly we DO NOT want to do another Iraq. It is their responsibility to overthrown these regimes - we'll help as we can. I just wish we didn't arm the governments against their own people, with heavy weapons and air power.
This gives me huge second thoughts over my support for interceding in Libya. I generally support it, but wonder what's the plan now? Where is this supposed to lead? Hell, it is a lot like Iraq, where there are contentious tribes/ethnicities/religions (George makes this point), but at least we fully committed to do Iraq. We have hardly any commitment to doing Libya. And frankly we DO NOT want to do another Iraq. It is their responsibility to overthrown these regimes - we'll help as we can. I just wish we didn't arm the governments against their own people, with heavy weapons and air power.
Rather, the goal of the intervention is explicitly to stop Gadhafi’s threat to slaughter his enemies, support his enemies but leave the responsibility for the outcome in the hands of the eastern coalition. In other words — and this requires a lot of words to explain — they want to intervene to protect Gadhafi’s enemies, they are prepared to support those enemies (though it is not clear how far they are willing to go in providing that support), but they will not be responsible for the outcome of the civil war.
The Regional Context
To understand this logic, it is essential to begin by considering recent events in North Africa and the Arab world and the manner in which Western governments interpreted them. Beginning with Tunisia, spreading to Egypt and then to the Arabian Peninsula, the last two months have seen widespread unrest in the Arab world. Three assumptions have been made about this unrest. The first was that it represented broad-based popular opposition to existing governments, rather than representing the discontent of fragmented minorities — in other words, that they were popular revolutions. Second, it assumed that these revolutions had as a common goal the creation of a democratic society. Third, it assumed that the kind of democratic society they wanted was similar to European-American democracy, in other words, a constitutional system supporting Western democratic values.
Each of the countries experiencing unrest was very different. For example, in Egypt, while the cameras focused on demonstrators, they spent little time filming the vast majority of the country that did not rise up. Unlike 1979 in Iran, the shopkeepers and workers did not protest en masse. Whether they supported the demonstrators in Tahrir Square is a matter of conjecture. They might have, but the demonstrators were a tiny fraction of Egyptian society, and while they clearly wanted a democracy, it is less than clear that they wanted a liberal democracy. Recall that the Iranian Revolution created an Islamic Republic more democratic than its critics would like to admit, but radically illiberal and oppressive. In Egypt, it is clear that Mubarak was generally loathed but not clear that the regime in general was being rejected. It is not clear from the outcome what will happen now. Egypt may stay as it is, it may become an illiberal democracy or it may become a liberal democracy.
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