Translated from Von Marx Lernen
Gaddafi should go
Obama and Rasmussen, the Secretary General of NATO, begin bombing Libya and take control of its air space. Meanwhile, Gaddafi also uses violence – what else? – to prevail against his opponents. The U.S. and the EU have obtained a UN Security Council resolution outlawing the Gaddafi regime: the means of power should be struck from the hands of this still not yet banished “tyrant” and his followers (bank accounts are frozen, sanctions imposed) – diplomatic respect is revoked and prosecution before the International Court of Justice is prepared. “All options are on the table,” U. S. Secretary of State Clinton announces and the EU powers debate various intervention possibilities. Thus the west openly positions itself as a party in a still unfinished power struggle inside Libya and declares its cause to be the overthrow of Gaddafi and the complete victory of the rebels. The only open question is, if Gaddafi does not give in, the timing and method of the assault, as well as the extent of diplomatic support that can be obtained from the rest of the world (UN, Arab League, African Union).
Justifications and reasons
The official reason for this explicit taking sides against Gaddafi, in which all the important countries of the West are united, is that this man bombed his own people and has thus lost all right to govern his country. That the Libyan chief of state is not willing to voluntarily give up the reins of power and beat it into exile and instead, as is usual in such cases, proceeds with all force against the rebels in his country is the final accusation held against him. The reasoning is dishonest. This is not heard when a head of state has his “own people” shot, so it is ultimately not a universal maxim taken to heart by the West; think only of Algeria next door, where the Islamists who came to power through democratic elections were massacred to the loud applause and full support of the western governments. If Gaddafi were to use his considerable weapons against anti-western elements of the people, this would be found perhaps regrettable, but unavoidable and helpful. Vice versa, the just as unsquemish use of force by the rebels against Gaddafi supporters (or people from other countries believed to be his “mercenaries”) is also fully morally in order.
What is disturbing to them about Gaddafi's violence against the rebels, who on their side are in no way peaceful, is the will to self-assertion of a ruler who does not recognize the “signs of the times” which the western states read into the upheavals in North Africa and try to make them in practice. As little as they anticipated or even authorized these rebellions, they see in them by now auxilliary agents of their own interest in stable regimes with pro-Western orientations; they are betting that democratic reforms in the power structures of these countries install more reliability into these political systems, neutralizing the autocrats' arbitrary use of power (even if they have to do a lot so that the revolts have exactly that result). Gaddafi's real crime is that he puts himself in the way of this renewal process which the West intends by instrumentalizing the “freedom fighters.” Instead of seeing the necessity for reform and accepting his own resignation, he announces – after seeming to be severely shaken in the first days of the conflict – a relentless fight to his own death, and then gradually with increasing success frustrates the apparently certain victory of the rebels. The impertinence of this “dictator” once again confirms for the supervisory powers of the West what has always bothered them about him and his regime: a national program that has anything in mind but subordinating itself under Western needs and demands; a nationalism that puts up some resistance. Ever since the uprising, all the reservations that were once or even in recent years made against Gaddafi's regime add up to a clear vote against him and the determination to also carry it out by all measures necessary. In this respect, the civil war in Libya, which has come about without western intervention, is considered – and treated! – as a “window of opportunity” to bring about regime change.
In the Western assessment of the situation, what is good or bad for the people is just as irrelevant as the question as to what they really want. As major powers which project their political, economic and military-strategic interests in every corner of this earth, they simply reserve any dispute between above and below anywhere in the world to relate to themselves and their claims and take up the party corresponding to it. Because they have the power and therefore the right to do it, they do that and protest depending on how it suits them, the power holders or their opponents as their party. Or sometimes they act indifferent, no matter what's going on in orgies of violence.
Why Gaddafi never really got rid of the hostility of the West
Gaddafi enacted a bit of a political about-face in his state system some time ago. He distanced himself from the transgressions of earlier years (especially the Lockerbie bombing), counteracted his long-standing outlaw status as a “terrorist” and the Western blockade policy and subsequently met the interests and demands of Western countries on important points. Since Gaddafi ostentatiously scaled back his former anti-imperialist ambitions (supporting anti-Western movements in Africa, fighting for an anti-Western and anti-Israel pan-Arab union, direct terrorist attacks in Europe) under the pressure of Western sanctions and even threatened or real military strikes and gave up his quest for nuclear arms for his military, he was removed from the black list of “terrorist states.” Diplomatic contacts by the U.S. and EU were a bit more “normalized”; and these took place in state visits where the colonel was received with full – rather too much for the media's taste – diplomatic honors (Paris, for example, is now ashamed not only of its contacts with the Tunisian ruler, but especially the pompous appearance of Gaddafi with his entourage on the Seine). Oil deliveries from Libya (which also indeed never stopped even in the days of sanctions) were of course picked up just like the repatriation of petrodollars (Libyan investment in the capital of European corporations and banks) or growing business opportunities on Libyan territory (highway construction, plans for building a nuclear power plant, etc.) And not only was there economic cooperation. Gaddafi scored points in other areas, such as his intelligence cooperating with the CIA to fight terrorism (Al-Qaeda in North Africa) or cooperating with the EU in forcefully containing immigrants fleeing African misery by closing escape routes across the Mediterranean. And the EU reported on their website some success in the attempt to align Gaddafi's and their interests by a cooperation agreement of the bilateral kind which exchanged their “know how” in matters of the rule of law, privatization of the economy and the fight against AIDS for compliance.
Nevertheless, all this is obviously not enough for the claims of the west. All these very useful functions of his state for the west never spared Gaddafi the suspicion, even after his “conversion,” of not really being or wanting to be a reliable partner of the West. This is not just because imperialist states have a good memory and can be very unforgiving. It is because of the level of the claims of imperialist powers, their comprehensive interest in directly supervising and controlling state systems which sit on “their,” i.e. claimed by them, sources of raw materials. And the Libyan dictator would not scale down his national goals to the extent that seems appropriate to the western powers for a country like his – despite all the concessions he agreed to under pressure. The obstreperousness of his type of exercise of power was showed by various indicators: Gaddafi rejected the Mediterranean Union, with which the EU wants to turn the North African states economically and politically into their functional backyard, as an unfair urge to dominate. He wanted to drive up the price of assistance in fighting the flight of refugees and threatened consequences if they were not paid. Also demonstrative diplomatic appearances before the UN, sympathizing with the “rogues” of western world politics like Chavez, gave pause. And even little things like insisting on certain rituals like setting up a Bedouin tent in Europe's metropolitan areas instead of using a hotel suite – rated by the press in part as folkloric gimmicks and the mere vanity of the desert ruler – demonstrate for the Western politicians a not really acceptable will to high handedness; the good man does not want to take off the makeup. He couldn't shake the suspicion that all the concessions he made to the West were done only under pressure and out of calculation and not conviction.
Gaddafi must go – the only question is how
The West has always done everything possible to hedge in and domesticate Gaddafi's unmanageability (and permanent political danger). Now the not at all ordered uprising of the Libyan people is the welcome opportunity to uproot the problem and get rid of him once and for all. The rebels against Gaddafi's rule become registered, without having had to be asked, executors of the western desire for a coup. It is expected of them that they – also without the west's orders – will play the intended role, overpower the “dictator” and build a new state power that exists to do nothing other than better serve Western interests and demands. In this case, the fact that they send sixteen year olds, who are clueless about this and enthusiastically want to risk their lives in comabt, into a bloody war for this, is not taken as a scandal, but as evidence of the viciousness of the tyrant against whom everyone must simply line up.
To the extent that the insurgents already do not properly manage the first part of the mission intended for them and Gaddafi's forces even win back terrain, the west becomes uneasy and sees itself challenged as a power to decide the situation in their own sense. Of course, war is the last decisive means to produce the peace which is desired. It would indeed have been nice for the west if the uprising succeeded without military actions by the USA or NATO, supported only by the sanctions applied by the security council and other pre-military attacks on Gaddafis power, maybe supplemented by arms supplies. But world supervisory powers cannot really be deterred by all the risks and costs that such an assignment brings with it – the present debates in the USA and Europe show how free they are to calculate.
When a military assault is deemed appropriate and then all doubts which are still tossed back and forth in public are pushed aside, the supervisory nations will settle among themselves. In any case, the appropriate moral background music, that it is necessary for humanitarian reasons to “save the Libyan people” from their crazy butcher, is already intoned on all channels.