Declan Harmon
In the superb documentary The Fog of War, the former US Defence Secretary, the late Robert McNamara, outlined his eleven lessons of war. The first lesson is ‘empathise with your enemy’. McNamara describes how the former US ambassador to Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson possibly saved the world from nuclear war because he knew that Khrushchev could save face in backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis by saying he had saved Cuba from US attack. Later in the film, McNamara explains how ignoring this lesson prolonged the Vietnam war – the North Vietnamese saw themselves in a Civil War and fighting for independence from enemies like China and the US as colonialists attempting domination, whereas the Americans saw only the Cold War.
Watching the beginning of the air strikes on Libya, I have been thinking about McNamara’s lesson. How can one empathize with someone like Colonel Gaddafi, someone who has been quite willing to murder his fellow Libyans in order to stay in power? The reality is that much of the west has been trying to empathize with him for the last number of years, particularly since 9/11. Indeed by the middle part of the last decade Libya had, as George W. Bush put it, ‘resumed normal relations with the world’ (quote from Bush’s autobiography, p. 437).
Those days are over now and the prevailing view of Gadaffi has switched again from a rogue with whom the west could do business to simply a murderous psychopath. While it appears extremely unlikely that we will see American boots on the ground in Libya, it is difficult to see any way that the current situation can be resolved that does not involve one or more of the following: a) Libya being partitioned, b) a massive civil war or c) Gaddafi leaving power. Any of those scenarios will involve a long-term commitment by the coalition of western forces now in place.
While none of what is happening in Libya is in any way light-hearted, I have been amused by the difficulty the self-proclaimed ‘anti-war’ lobby in Ireland have had in reacting to the situation. They don’t like Gaddafi and having called for the international community to act through the UN, they now find themselves conflicted between supporting the UN action that they promoted and condemning their usual US and British bogeymen. In particular, I note the silence from Sinn Féin on the issue.
Of course, the attitudes of groups like the Peace and Neutrality Alliance belie a wider hypocrisy amongst many Irish people towards military intervention in world affairs. This, I believe, dates back all the way to the Second World War, when Ireland was quite content to hide behind our bigger neighbour in order to posture politically. Such posturing still goes on today. We secretly want the Americans and their allies to be the world’s policemen but we don’t want to actually put our own young people in the firing line. We also want to reserve the right to take the moral high ground should the US make a military error. However, the same people who call the US ‘imperialists’ and claim that US intervention in any part of the Arab world is simply a grab for oil would be begging the Americans and British to intervene were the oil to stop flowing.
While the situation in Libya is, in itself, intriguing from a foreign policy point of view, what will be of greater longer term interest and importance is whether the action that has been taken there sets a precedent for future action in the Arab world. With unrest in Syria and Bahrain and, maybe, Saudi Arabia, one wonders if a memo is being prepared in the White House along the lines of the one Jason O’Mahony imagines on his blog here: http://jasonomahony.ie/?p=8708
