A good piece. Take an action after thinking it through. Otherwise, you create a mess for yourself & others. But, who will heed this warning? No one. For elections purposes, military actions will always be taken way before anyone will ever even think of starting a dialogue among opposing parties to resolve the situation.
On top of not thinking before acting (which is the lesson we adults teach to our children & then not follow them ourselves) & creating a mess for everyone else & ourselves in the Western countries, the military actions also killed & destroyed the lives of thousands of people in those lands & displaced millions. Who is going to be held accountable for that?
In corporate world, from CEO down to a lowly clerk, anyone who takes one wrong step with dire consequences (even though, that mistake might not of such a huge consequence as killing thousands or displacing millions) is severely reprimanded right away, either in the form of a demotion or being fired. But, in the politics of the West, nothing happens. Elections are won as usual & billions more are spent, as usual, on military hardware.
After all, who cares if a few Libyans, Iraqis, Yemenis, Afghanis, Syrians, Egyptians etc. are being killed or losing their families, homes, & livelihoods. It's not happening to me. Right?
(Just in case, if you didn't get it, it was sarcasm & a rhetoric question).
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President Obama, already musing on failures during his second term, has said he regrets that the U.S. joined a coalition to intervene in Libya in 2011, ousting President Muammar Gaddafi, without an adequate plan for the post-Gaddafi society. “I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this.”
It’s curious that Obama & his allies had not ordered a plan for the new Libya: They had the example of the Iraq invasion in 2003. The war was won quickly but the post-war haunts us still, in part because the war effort was not paralleled with a vigorous peace effort.
President George W. Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 – “the United States & its allies have prevailed” – was echoed by then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s chuckle to a reporter when hearing of Gaddafi’s death, “We came, we saw, he died.” Both thought the loosening of Western military force on dictators had settled the matter: Both lived to know otherwise.
... The vacuum created by the fall of the tyrant yielded not democrats (or not enough), but old feuds, hatreds, divisions -- &, above all, the militants of jihadism resurgent, al Qaeda, Islamic State & others.
As in Iraq, Libya has known no stability since the toppling of its tyrant, Gaddafi. The first elected prime minister, Mustafa Abu Shagour, was out in a month: In 4 years, the country has had 7 prime ministers. Armed Islamist groups are allowed to flourish -- there is no reliable army to keep them down -- & now control slices of the state. A jihadist government chased the elected administration out of the capital, Tripoli, & rules there: The internationally recognized government huddles in the eastern port city of Tobruk -- which older Europeans remember as the site of one of the great battles of World War Two, the first sign that the fortunes of war might turn against the Nazis.
An estimated 10,000 are reckoned, conservatively, to have died in the chaos of Gaddafi’s fall. One of these was the US Ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, killed in an attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi in September 2012.
The message has hit home: Better the dictator you can condemn than the insurgents you cannot control (& may hate you more).
Shorn of any military option, the only hope is to bring the opposing parties to some kind of talks. ... Yet so full of hate & bitterness against each other are the warring groups, so convinced of their own virtue & the others’ vices, that any agreement would seem elusive -- &, if reached, fragile.
An Arab capital is now under jihadist control; it is also in the country closest to the borders of the EU. For two decades, we have been warned that “failed states” are a large threat to Western security: It is vividly clear that the warning was right.
On top of not thinking before acting (which is the lesson we adults teach to our children & then not follow them ourselves) & creating a mess for everyone else & ourselves in the Western countries, the military actions also killed & destroyed the lives of thousands of people in those lands & displaced millions. Who is going to be held accountable for that?
In corporate world, from CEO down to a lowly clerk, anyone who takes one wrong step with dire consequences (even though, that mistake might not of such a huge consequence as killing thousands or displacing millions) is severely reprimanded right away, either in the form of a demotion or being fired. But, in the politics of the West, nothing happens. Elections are won as usual & billions more are spent, as usual, on military hardware.
After all, who cares if a few Libyans, Iraqis, Yemenis, Afghanis, Syrians, Egyptians etc. are being killed or losing their families, homes, & livelihoods. It's not happening to me. Right?
(Just in case, if you didn't get it, it was sarcasm & a rhetoric question).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
President Obama, already musing on failures during his second term, has said he regrets that the U.S. joined a coalition to intervene in Libya in 2011, ousting President Muammar Gaddafi, without an adequate plan for the post-Gaddafi society. “I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this.”
It’s curious that Obama & his allies had not ordered a plan for the new Libya: They had the example of the Iraq invasion in 2003. The war was won quickly but the post-war haunts us still, in part because the war effort was not paralleled with a vigorous peace effort.
President George W. Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 – “the United States & its allies have prevailed” – was echoed by then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s chuckle to a reporter when hearing of Gaddafi’s death, “We came, we saw, he died.” Both thought the loosening of Western military force on dictators had settled the matter: Both lived to know otherwise.
... The vacuum created by the fall of the tyrant yielded not democrats (or not enough), but old feuds, hatreds, divisions -- &, above all, the militants of jihadism resurgent, al Qaeda, Islamic State & others.
As in Iraq, Libya has known no stability since the toppling of its tyrant, Gaddafi. The first elected prime minister, Mustafa Abu Shagour, was out in a month: In 4 years, the country has had 7 prime ministers. Armed Islamist groups are allowed to flourish -- there is no reliable army to keep them down -- & now control slices of the state. A jihadist government chased the elected administration out of the capital, Tripoli, & rules there: The internationally recognized government huddles in the eastern port city of Tobruk -- which older Europeans remember as the site of one of the great battles of World War Two, the first sign that the fortunes of war might turn against the Nazis.
An estimated 10,000 are reckoned, conservatively, to have died in the chaos of Gaddafi’s fall. One of these was the US Ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, killed in an attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi in September 2012.
The message has hit home: Better the dictator you can condemn than the insurgents you cannot control (& may hate you more).
Shorn of any military option, the only hope is to bring the opposing parties to some kind of talks. ... Yet so full of hate & bitterness against each other are the warring groups, so convinced of their own virtue & the others’ vices, that any agreement would seem elusive -- &, if reached, fragile.
An Arab capital is now under jihadist control; it is also in the country closest to the borders of the EU. For two decades, we have been warned that “failed states” are a large threat to Western security: It is vividly clear that the warning was right.
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