{"id":140,"date":"2003-12-21T03:30:16","date_gmt":"2003-12-21T08:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=140"},"modified":"2003-12-21T03:30:16","modified_gmt":"2003-12-21T08:30:16","slug":"lessons-of-libya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=140","title":{"rendered":"Lessons of Libya"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Muammar Qaddaffi, Libya&#8217;s dictator and long-time terrorist<br \/>\nsugar-daddy, has agreed to dismantle his WMD programs and allow<br \/>\ninternational inspections.  The NYT&#8217;s December 20th article <a href='http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2003\/12\/20\/opinion\/20SAT1.html'>Lessons<br \/>\nof Libya<\/a>, covering this development, is unintentionally<br \/>\nhilarious.<\/p>\n<p>An honest account would probably have read something like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>When Qaddafi saw the Hussein capture pictures they must have scared<br \/>\nhim silly.  Realizing that the U.S. is no longer in the mood to take<br \/>\nshit from tin-pot tyrants in khaffiyehs, and that the U.S. military<br \/>\ncould blow its way into Tripoli and give him a free dental exam in<br \/>\nless time than it would take for an utterly impotent U.N. to pass the<br \/>\nresolution condemning American action, he crawled to the Brits<br \/>\nwhimpering &ldquo;Don&#8217;t let your big brother hurt me,<br \/>\n<em>pleeeassseee&#8230;<\/em>&rdquo;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Instead, we&#8217;re treated to a bunch of waffle: &#8220;To an extent<br \/>\nthat cannot be precisely measured&#8221; and &#8220;yesterday&#8217;s<br \/>\nannouncement also demonstrates the value of diplomacy and United<br \/>\nNations sanctions&#8221;. I suspect the NYT will deny as long as it<br \/>\ncan the real lesson of Libya, which is the same as the lessons of Iraq<br \/>\nand Afghanistan and, for that matter, Yugoslavia.  And that is this:<br \/>\nthe disarmament of rogue states has never once been accomplished by<br \/>\nthe U.N. or by diplomacy or &lsquo;international opinion&rsquo;, but<br \/>\nis now being driven simply and solely by the fear of American military<br \/>\npower and the will to use it.<\/p>\n<p>We are in what Karl Marx would have called a world-historical<br \/>\nmoment &mdash; the first time that American hyperpuissance has<br \/>\ndefanged a dictator <em>without actual war<\/em>.  All the rules will<br \/>\nbe different from now on, and Qaddafi (wily survivor that he is) has<br \/>\nfigured them out well ahead of the Western chattering classes.  The<br \/>\nmost important rule is this: <em>do not make the U.S. fear what<br \/>\nyou might become, or it will break you.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Indeed, it seems very likely to me that future historians will date<br \/>\nthe beginning of the 21st-century Pax Americana from Qaddafi&#8217;s<br \/>\ncrawfishing. The U.S. is not merely maintaining its lead in economic<br \/>\nvigor and military heft over any conceivable opposing coalition, that<br \/>\nlead is actually increasing. Demographic trends (notably the fact that<br \/>\nEuropeans and Japanese are not breeding at replacement levels) suggest<br \/>\nthat U.S.&#8217;s relative power, in both &lsquo;hard&rsquo; and<br \/>\n&lsquo;soft&rsquo; terms, will continue to increase through at least<br \/>\n2050.<\/p>\n<p>The most visible indicator of this change, aside from the collapse<br \/>\nof awful governments in any number of Third-World pestholes, will be<br \/>\nthe marginalization of the U.N.  That organization, which has never<br \/>\nhad hard power, will now lose its soft power as well.  It might have<br \/>\nbeen different &mdash; but France and the other nations who aimed to<br \/>\nset the U.N. up as a geopolitical counterforce to the U.S. overplayed<br \/>\ntheir hand in the run-up to the liberation of Iraq.  For that effort,<br \/>\nthe capture of Saddam and Qaddafi&#8217;s surrender in the face of an<br \/>\nAmerican-led New World Order are fatal blows. The U.N. may survive as<br \/>\nan umbrella for international aid agencies and a few technical<br \/>\nstandards groups, but in the future it will constrain American<br \/>\nbehavior less, not more.<\/p>\n<p>The ripple effects on Middle Eastern, European, and U.S. domestic<br \/>\npolitics will be significant.  Even <cite>Arab News<\/cite> is<br \/>\nbeginning to come around to the realization that the U.S. did the Arab<br \/>\nworld a favor by deposing Saddam Hussein, and his capture<br \/>\nsignificantly betters the odds that the reconstruction of Iraq will<br \/>\nsucceed.  Since U.S. power has actually accomplished the peaceful<br \/>\ndisarmament of a rogue state, making political hay in Europe from a<br \/>\ncase against U.S. unilateralism is going to become steadily more<br \/>\ndifficult.  And in the U.S., the antiwar opposition is increasingly<br \/>\nmarginal and demoralized as the war goes well and George Bush&#8217;s<br \/>\nre-election now looks like a near certainty.<\/p>\n<p>To borrow Churchill&#8217;s phrase, this is not the end of the War on Terror.<br \/>\nBut it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Muammar Qaddaffi, Libya&#8217;s dictator and long-time terrorist sugar-daddy, has agreed to dismantle his WMD programs and allow international inspections. The NYT&#8217;s December 20th article Lessons of Libya, covering this development, is unintentionally hilarious. An honest account would probably have read something like this: When Qaddafi saw the Hussein capture pictures they must have scared him&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=140\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Lessons of Libya<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}