Machiavelli would be so proud
- By Sumantra Maitra
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 14, 2015
But in a move that defies all realist logic, the United States – backed by Britain and France – decided to intervene in Libya against Gaddafi when the civil war started. In their narrow ideological approach, they never calculated how fragmented Libya was originally. On the pretext of humanitarian intervention in a controversial UN Security Council vote where Russia, China and India abstained, the United States decided to take a side in what was essentially a tribal backlash against another tribe.
Libya is comprised of over 140 tribes, and the civil war was about control of resources and a backlash against the wealthy Kaddafa tribe, the one from which Gaddafi rose to power himself. Therein lies the biggest irony of the Middle East. It is now clearly evident that the Arab Spring was never about democracy but about raw geopolitical power struggles between sectarian and tribal factions.
Blinded by idealistic oversimplifications and clouded judgments and glossing over essential considerations as narrow strategic national interests, the half-hearted and shoddy Western intervention toppled the Gaddafi regime, ending in the brutal public lynching of Gaddafi. This intervention eroded Libya, which was one of the last bastions of order in the Middle East.
It didn't end there: Libya is still mired in fratricidal sectarian bloodlust, and it has no centralized authority. Naturally, with no central order, it is a hotbed for terrorism, attracting groups like al-Qaida and al-Nusra. Finally, ISIS recently declared that it is indeed in Libya and is planning to act from there, using the northern Libyan coastline as a platform for waging war against mainland Europe.
The renewed talks of intervention are dragging out another old dog, which takes the form of an oft-repeated statement by realists and voices of sanity worldwide. Here's the hard truth. Western intervention will not help Libya, and it won't help the Middle East. Only Middle Eastern strongmen, some of whom have questionable human rights records, can eventually stabilize the Middle East and get rid of the jihadist menace. It's a war, and no war is ever humane. Middle Eastern Arabs deserve peace and prosperity, but not at the cost of increasing Western human and material costs. They have to fight and earn peace themselves.
First of all, it is unclear whether ISIS has the strategic and technical superiority to accomplish its much-vaunted intention of capturing Rome. ISIS is bogged down on three fronts, battling Assad's army, Iranian backed militias and the Iraqi army, and the Kurds in the north of Syria and Iraq. The aura of invincibility that ISIS momentarily acquired after its blitz last year has been diminishing by the day as the group loses on multiple fronts. It is essentially a defensive force now, displaying tactics that are existential and militarily haphazard. There are also reports of low internal discipline and factional rivalry between Arab and foreign jihadis. ISIS is losing the war, slowly but surely, and it is losing it to Middle Eastern regimes, allowing them no rhetorical grandstanding.
An Italian plan of Western intervention now will only give ISIS the necessary rhetoric of crusaders in Islamic lands that will allow the group to start a renewed recruiting process. Not to mention the increase to the heavy tax burden on the war-weary Western populace that military intervention would necessitate.
The most prudent policy advice would be to form a naval blockade along the coast of Libya to stop the refugee influx immediately. The massive, overwhelming refugee crisis in Europe is a demographic tsunami of uncharted proportions that risks raising the ire of the local populace, and the inevitable public backlash to it will risk the eventual disintegration of Europe. A wartime naval blockade will stop any boats from crossing the Mediterranean toward mainland Europe.
The second part of the optimal strategy would be to supply food, training and arms to these refugees, half of whom are able-bodied men, so that they can go back and fight ISIS under the guidance of Egypt, Iran and other local powers and forces battling Islamists.
The third prong of the strategy would be to renew the push for separate statehood for the secular Kurds. Europe cannot solve the problem in the Middle East militarily, and it would be folly to try and fail over and over again. But what Europe can do is secure its own borders, look inward and actively spend more money on intelligence gathering and monitoring. Pursuing any other policy would be a juvenile and shameful mistake by the country that birthed Machiavelli.
The writer is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/SumantraMaitra.htm
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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