We Don't Know. I mean, think about it. How many times have you heard a politician answer a question bluntly and honestly with an admission of ignorance? Maybe with a tagged on "it's a risk, but we believe the potential rewards merit the response" or something equally erudite. Alas, politicians deal in ridiculously ignorant certitudes that they can't back up at all.
What am I talking about? Libya, of course.
Fareed Zakaria, usually fairly even-tempered, wrote a soaring and triumphalist tract about how the most amateurish military operation in NATO's history should actually be the template for Western military interventions. Before you accuse me of dismissing him out of hand, he does make some excellent points. The fact that the operation is indisputably Libyan, and that all the hard and glorious deeds of liberation belong to the population itself, truly is a wise move on NATO's part. Unfortunately, Mr. Zakaria doesn't quite understand why we so like to have "anonymous advisers in sunglasses and body armour" (I wish I could remember who used that phrase) is because we need to know who we're supporting. We quite literally handed NATO's combined air power to the first group of people who could rally enough fighters to challenge Qaddafi's ground forces. They could be lizard-worshipping cultists, for all we know. These rebels have the best deal in history- they spout enough democratic platitudes on facebook and twitter, and 3 major military powers quite kindly chip in with several hundred billion dollars' worth of advanced hardware.
I exaggerate, of course. We know they aren't lizard-worshipping cultists. My point, however, stands. There is not a single military man from NATO on the ground alongside the rebels. How do they treat their prisoners? We don't know. What are the concrete policies of their shadow government? No clue. Why did their leading general get assassinated? We think it might be because he pissed off some jihadis. Well, that's certainly comforting.
I'm not saying bombing Qaddafi's air forces into the dust was a bad idea. I am saying that supporting completely unknown groups is not a good idea. How do we know that the Afghan National Police are corrupt and ineffective? Hundreds, if not thousands, of eye-witness reports from ground forces (usually mentoring teams). The simple fact of the matter is that while journalists have been taking impressive risks to try to report on the insurrection, any arab militant group who isn't able to fool a journalist at least some of the time is probably a couple of minutes away from being annihilated by a Secret Police raid.
Could Libya become another fragile but hopeful democracy in the Arab world? Sure. But I'll save my triumphalist declarations of a new era in policy until I see the first elections.
What am I talking about? Libya, of course.
Fareed Zakaria, usually fairly even-tempered, wrote a soaring and triumphalist tract about how the most amateurish military operation in NATO's history should actually be the template for Western military interventions. Before you accuse me of dismissing him out of hand, he does make some excellent points. The fact that the operation is indisputably Libyan, and that all the hard and glorious deeds of liberation belong to the population itself, truly is a wise move on NATO's part. Unfortunately, Mr. Zakaria doesn't quite understand why we so like to have "anonymous advisers in sunglasses and body armour" (I wish I could remember who used that phrase) is because we need to know who we're supporting. We quite literally handed NATO's combined air power to the first group of people who could rally enough fighters to challenge Qaddafi's ground forces. They could be lizard-worshipping cultists, for all we know. These rebels have the best deal in history- they spout enough democratic platitudes on facebook and twitter, and 3 major military powers quite kindly chip in with several hundred billion dollars' worth of advanced hardware.
I exaggerate, of course. We know they aren't lizard-worshipping cultists. My point, however, stands. There is not a single military man from NATO on the ground alongside the rebels. How do they treat their prisoners? We don't know. What are the concrete policies of their shadow government? No clue. Why did their leading general get assassinated? We think it might be because he pissed off some jihadis. Well, that's certainly comforting.
I'm not saying bombing Qaddafi's air forces into the dust was a bad idea. I am saying that supporting completely unknown groups is not a good idea. How do we know that the Afghan National Police are corrupt and ineffective? Hundreds, if not thousands, of eye-witness reports from ground forces (usually mentoring teams). The simple fact of the matter is that while journalists have been taking impressive risks to try to report on the insurrection, any arab militant group who isn't able to fool a journalist at least some of the time is probably a couple of minutes away from being annihilated by a Secret Police raid.
Could Libya become another fragile but hopeful democracy in the Arab world? Sure. But I'll save my triumphalist declarations of a new era in policy until I see the first elections.
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