March 27, 2011
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History Repeating Itself?
The recent unrest in North Africa, especially Libya, has led to the controversial U.S. involvment in attempts to overthrow Gadhafi and save the people of Libya from a bloodbath. The revolutionary movement seems to be unstructured and without either leadership or coherent purpose - except his overthrow. Here is a situation where there is great temptation for the U.S. to step up once again and impose our notion of acceptable government on the region - ignoring the age-old culture of the region as if it were that of uneducated savages.
They aren't and we shouldn't.
Comments (19)
Dear Dick,
Frankly, I'm ashamed at Obama. The "people of Libya", like the "people of Iraq" do NOT want us going in and acting as policeman (again and again and again.) Ever since Teddy Roosevelt started swinging that "big stick" of his around, every U.S. President seems to want to spread our fighting forces thin, and kill our young people, in places where we never should be involved in the first place. But of course they won't let the populace at large know about why they're doing this.(Can you say ,"petroleum") It's a "humanitarian" gesture.
Michael F. Nyiri, poet, philosopher, fool
(I shouldn't say 'every president." Carter and Clinton promoted peace.)
I call it the "Peace Through War Doctrine". I'm a Democrat and a Clinton fan but he actually bombed four countries during his administration, including Czechoslovokia by mistake (ooops!). The others were Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. I feel like I just don't even want to bother voting any more.
@nurseynursey - but, you must not give up on the system. Just be open to consider the choices and hold the elected leaders to account by every means possible.
What I find interesting here is that President Obama refuses to admit getting rid of Gaddafi is the point of the operation. He insists that we are only trying to protect civilians.
Ciao, Dick!
over here:
http://radiciitaliane.blogspot.com/2011/03/ce-guerra-e-guerra.html
i wrote a post about those fact. Unfortunately in italian!
I wonder if google would give a readable translation...
to BoldMike: Most of people in Lybia (all but the few ones still supporting the dictator) just want to get rid of Gheddafi. I guess what they don't want is him to be substituted by an evenly undemocratic power just for us to control their oil.
In my opinion the westernian world should start to begin to think to work for having democracy atleast in a undetermined future, instead of just having the dominance of all the wealth, which, usually, means a lot of people suffering for it.
Of course Gaddafi, Kadhafi, Qadaffi, or however you wish to spell it, is a thorn in the world's side, but I think Obama and his advisors are quite right to claim that he is not a target. Those statements are obviously for consumption by the Arab-Islamic world who would otherwise portray him as some kind of martyr.
Obama is rightfully reluctant to involve us in another war, but is not adverse to throwing a lit match into the destabilizing ferment going on right now in the Arab world. He seems to me to be specifically avoiding the "Bush Doctrine" advocating setting up a nice protestant democracy in North Africa.
Uhm... if G/K/Q is not the target, then who or what is?
I mean, for the media, the people and democracy, which is the target, being that there must be an excuse to throw bombs somewhere...?
But that is not, in my opinion, the really important question. Because we know why it is so important to have a role in Lybia, and in general in the middle east!
I don't know if in America this has been a big issue: Italy had been protecting Gheddafi in all his 40 years of bloody dictature, we had a lot of advantage in terms of gas and oil, moreover most part of G's investiments were in Italian economy-finance... banks and stuff... pretty much what happened in the US with respect to Saudi Arabia (in a relatively smaller scale). Only less than one year ago Berlusconi invited Gheddafi and signed a strict alliance with him, receiving him with all the honors reserved to the most magnificent kings. It is really impressive that from one day to another we passed from the great respect to the military attack without any change of Gheddafi's behavior (and without any change of Italian government itself!!!). Just because Lybic people asked for some freedom neglected in these 40 years.
Thanks for the different viewpoint Dario. We Americans tend to see things in our own light and too seldom try to get other viewpoints. I think most of the world is anti-Gaddhafi and would be glad to see him go - because he is so unpredictable and capricious, if for no other reasons. The main problem is that he is a shrewd and ruthless leader who has gone to considerable trouble to protect himself while the rebels do not seem to have much of an organization - not even enough to mount a guerilla action against him. western forces knocked out some of his army units but it hasn't taken long for him to reorganize and mount successful attacks with smaller units much less susceptible to air strikes. The rebels will have to get their acts together if they want to prevail - and Obama knows it. Obama's challenge now is support the rebels without seeming to become too involved. If he could use this somehow to also lessen or end our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, that would be nice.
Dick,
Maybe in my comment it looks like i am defending Gheddafi. My thoughts are exactly the opposite.
What i believe is that Gheddafi must be eliminated. To tell the truth, i am still firmly contrary to death penalty or any other way to get rid of a human life to solve any social or political problem, so i would like Gheddafi was eliminated only politically. That he was put in a prison or in any way made harmless to other people.
But,
First of all i notice that no diplomacy was used to obtain this goal, and nowadays there is no other act, except war, that is tried to solve the Lybic question without a lot of innocent blood uselessly spread.
About this particular point of view i guess Italy is the main one to blame, being that we have/had privileged channels connecting Gheddafi to our government, finance and economy. I think that any war, if any way justifiable, should be only the extrema ratio, after one tries all the other solutions. And in this case it had not be done.
And secondly, i believe that this attack to Gheddafi's troups, although we could admit (and i don't, really) it has the good side effect of supporting the rebels, helping them to build their freedom, in reality it is done for having the control of those areas, still rich of oil. Although Gheddafi dies, somebody over there would eventually take control of that resource. It would be useful for everybody to be friend of that somebody.
Finally i would underline again (if not already clear) the hypocrisy of all of this.
Suppose there is a country of poor people, that has the wealth of a big resource, but people is still poor because the resource is militarily controled by some dictator. That dictature stands on its legs just because the dictator has the support of other nations' governments. The agreement is: i give you money, i give you weapons, i give you my support on international relationship, i give you protection towards other countries, i give you a privileged seat in world economy, and you give me oil which i am so thirsty of. If there was not this barater the dictator would never preserve his power on that country so long.
This is exatcly what happend in the past 40 (FORTY!) years in Lybia.
Gheddafi was supported by Italy, Europe and America because of his oil, because it was convenient for us. Although everybody of us knew since the beginning that it was a tyrannic dictature, that people over there dies of hunger while him and his family swim in the gold. That there is no freedom, and any opposer happens to die soon. We knew that, but we were happy to accept it, in change of his oil.
Now, all of the sudden, we feel the conscious need to support those poor people and bomb Lybia to build some democracy there?
Uhm.... i don't know how to say... that really really sound me a tad hypocritical.
What Obama should do about it?
Frankly i don't know. I could tell you what he should have done before and he did not for convenience (same accuse to Berlusconi, obviously!). And now i keep my doubt that bombing is the solution.
Dario, I certainly never doubted your distaste for Gadhaffi. There is no doubt that he has been tolerated because he supplied oil without major fuss - even made a public spectacle of dropping any idea of nuclear arming to prove how peaceful he was. We tend to have short memories and forget exploding airliners, bombed bistros, rape and murder, etc.
The point seems to be that his own people finally were emboldened by nearby successful revolutions and decided to revolt. Apparently the U.S. has been quick to act - sending in the afghanistan-experienced CIA and doing a little bombing to get his attention.The assault has apparently been more carefully thought out than we first realized. The rebels are apparently a sort of sideshow and Gadhafi's group seems to be splintering. Obama seems to have decided to let the Europeans try their hand at managing the unwashed for a change. Personally I think we're in for an extended fascinating spectacle of the Europeans trying to extricate themselves from the mid-east tar pit.
Never doubt that Obama is acting in what he sees to be the U.S. best interests - that's what he was hired to do. His next steps will be to sell the American people on this new "popular" movement.
I suppose I sound critical of Obama - actually I'm not. I admire his ability and I think in the end the world will be a better place for having him around.
i wonder if one day the governments of the world would ever act for the good of the human beings.
@italian_culture - Dario, you are a pessimist. Most democratic governments do act for the good of their citizens - as those citizens see it. We seem, in fact to be Verrrry slowly moving toward a world where more and more governments and their citizens are in agreement about what's good for all the world's peoples. It probably won't happen in our lifetime - but we are moving in the right direction, IMHO.
@tychecat -
Define it better.
Dick, you didn't look to me a religious edonistic fatalist like that till now! The good of the world's people? What's that?
Do you think that eating enough food and drinking enough water to survive is part of the good of the world people? So, why the governments are not planning to think to look to find any possibility to reach the goal of stop starvation in the world?
I firmly believe that the good of the third world (which is what i am more concerned with, when i think about the good of the world, being the third world the one that is suffering much more - so it need much more just to reach our level) would make worse conditions for us rich people. So, what is the good of human life? That we won't be able to put gasoline in our cars or that they won't be able to feed their children?
One choice must be done at first. If we all want to survive with some dignity of consciousness i believe that we should change our system in a way that we renounce to a big part of our wellness in favor of a more even distributio of wealth. Otherwise we could decide to be divided in nations, each one try to get more and more with any kind of weapons, keeping the world uneven as it is (actually it looks to me that the history is driving in the opposite direction of what you say. It looks to me that the disparity between rich people and poor people is much bigger that it was in the past.
The fact that any single state or nation decide to divide evenly the produced (or should i say "conquired" better?) wealth has nothing to do with a even distribution of wealth in the world. And anyway, also from this point of view i believe that the diversity between rich and poor people within a single country is much bigger today than in the past (i am thinking of Italy and USA, but i believe this is valid for the main part of western countries).
I believe that both of these problems are the direct effect of a system that privilege the enlargement of production and consumism, as it happens in the capitalist systems. In these systems economy is the engine that pulls the wealth, and the one that distributes the produced wealth among people. Obviously this is true only if there is disparity. Why should an company invest the money it makes (giving work to people and producing goods) if not for providing few people more wealth? Or, in other words, enlarging disparities?
No, Dick. I believe we are moving in the opposite direction.
@tychecat -
"Pessimist" is my middle name
@italian_culture -
Dario there is a fairly modern social-philosophical idea called Extropy.
Basically and much oversimplified, the idea is that progress is inevitable and that the direction of progress is historically independent - that is, it does not depend on any past actions except those which immediately precede the present. Are you properly confused yet?
In practical terms, the present world living conditions and definitions of what is rich and what is poor depend only on our current view of the situation. What we consider "poor and undeveloped"today would have seemed to be very rich a century ago and the modern poor are only poor in comparison with the modern rich.
This is, of course, in direct opposition to the classical Marxian view of historic dialectic materialism and synthesis, which called for a world where a gradual leveling would take place as excess economic capital was spread more evenly. This is unlikely to ever happen - different nations and world areas move into a so-called take-off point where their economic and social conditions shift their economy into a much faster mode - sometimes called the Drive to Maturity and High Mass Consumption. the first group to take off was England during the late 18th - early 19th century. The U.S. - building on the European model - was the first to achieve Maturity and High Mass Consumption (Take off in the 1830-60 era, Maturity in approximately 1910, and High Mass Consumption in the early 1920s). Japan has been the fastest, the entire process, from take off to HMC occurring in between 1880 and 1960.
I think what we see in the Middle East is a beginning of the "Drive to Maturity"and a demand by those peoples for more High Mass Consumption with the inevitable change in the oligarchic autocratic governments. This has, of course begun to happen in China and India. Their governments have become much more accommodating to capitalistic economic growth. Mao must be revolving in his grave.
Interesting discussion....
@tychecat -
Dick, apart from abstract philosophical theories which (although usually i am very interested on) i don't know, it looks to me that the progress is the effect of the past. Nuclear energy, just to make an example, is the direct effect of the discovery of nuclear power, which is the effect of the run to definitive weapons that were perceived during WWII, which is the effect of the participation of USA in that conflict, which is the effect of.... If there was not that chain of cause-effect, nuclear energy would never been discovered.
I am trying to imagine a parallel world where mmmmh... say... the wheel, the iron..., were never discovered. How would that world develop? Mmmh... too difficult exercise for me now. Anyway, for those Extropians it looks to me a tad too easy to predict in the future what the past caused to the present. Any exercise made on an hypotetical unrealized past is only an exercise, being that, inevitable or not, the only past we had is one: the one that we had.
I didn't want to drive this discussion on abstract philosophical matters, but being here to discuss, i would add just that if the progress drived us over here now in this way it is because our society is composed by individues that thought the way they thought. Progress is the effect of free choices of human beings. Maybe upon a higher point of view those free choices were not free, in the sense that they were deterministic. But unfortunately our point of view is the only one we have.
In other words, if we are a democracy and we believe that the decisions of our nations is due by the choice we make because we are a democracy, we should admit that if our governments make wrong decisions on the world, that is the effect of our choices.
Saying that it is not like that, it means that we are not living in a real democracy (being that the governments don't do what we want them to do) or that we made wrong choices. If we say that independently of our choices and independently of our governments decisions the world would run anyway the same, we should also conclude that not only democracy is something we don't really need, but that also governments is something we don't need.
What i am saying is something really easy. Imagine a bottle of water, and a couple of people very thirsty. If the first one drinks all the bottle, the other one would die of thirst. If the first drinks only a half, the second one doesn't drink but the first would be much less satisfied.
I firmly believe that what happened in the middle east is just the effect of our own need to have all those resources. Not only that, but also our need to make everybody else not having those resources. In other words, our need to win the war of economy. Because in our system the only way to survive is to win. To have the entire bottle. That is what capitalism is.
That, in my opinion is largely immoral. But it is not driven by me. It is driven by who controls economy. In a democracy, if we consider mine a democracy, i have the power to control politics. And that should work if politics has the power to control economy. But does it have? I don't think so.
@italian_culture -
Dario, The Extropian concept does not say that the present does not depend on the past, obviously it does, but that the effect and direction of present events cannot be accurately predicted. For example, those early computer developers at IBM had no idea of the direction computer development would take and would have laughed at predictions of present usage.
it is easy to say that present Mid-Eastern and Islamist movements are the result of European colonization and the greed of Western developed nations, and to an extent this is probably true; but we must not ignore internal politics in these areas. The leaders of these developing nations have themselves demonstrated their ability to ignore the needs and aspirations of their own people. Middle Eastern mineral wealth has been controlled by indigenous governments for generations now - if anything, we are and have been at their economic mercy.
Today, we seem to be approaching a World Economic Union. Many rather large areas have broken down national and trade barriers with resulting standard of living rise throughout the regions. This seems to be the antithesis of the capitalistic ideal you mention. I think the main drive for this has been a general democratic concern for the welfare of all individuals.
Can the US really afford being involved?