What If Qaddafi Wins?

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Yesterday the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, an unimaginative “securicrat” from oxymoronland (The Defense Intelligence Agency), spoke some accidental truth when he opined that Qaddafi “will prevail” against his own people. 

Already Qaddafi is callously unleashing his Air Force on the freedom fighters, mislabeled as rebels, who are being slaughtered in what is a preview of the carnage to come.  Libya’s freedom fighters, students, engineers, artists, have no military experience and sometimes there is only one rusty Kalashnikov to share among them.  They tend to group around the one guy with military training and that makes them an easy target for the bombs Qaddafi is using on civilian targets with gruesome collateral damage.

A terrible line is being crossed in international indifference to unprecedented depravity, and just like with Rwanda, it looks like too little will be done about it, and too late.  The United Nations will not step up and stop a tyrant from unleashing a modern military killing machine on his own defenseless people. 

Russia and China will veto any Security Council no-fly resolution because they are afraid of losing their sovereign ability to repress Chechens or Tibetans.  But even they do not resort to such naked barbarism, and once this threshold has been crossed, every thug clinging to power will be able to wage modern warfare on defenseless civilians. 

Until now they’ve used secret police first, then internal security forces, or have imposed martial law to intimidate their restive populace.  But sending in the Air Force to bomb your own cities and industries and ordering artillery barrages to soften up suburbs before an assault by tanks and armor, is a new low for even the often feckless World Body to tolerate.

So far Qaddafi’s only friends are Venezuela’s Chavez and Nicaragua’s Ortega, and while that might pry open the eyes of some of their deluded supporters, that is not the company that we and the rest of the world should find ourselves in.  After Qaddafi has murdered 10,000, 20,000 or 50,000 more of his people, will we simply raise the threshold for genocide and say it is not as bad as Rwanda?  How will we get along with the pariah who we condemned but now forgive, because Europe needs his oil?

Clearly Obama is being rolled by his military as they drag their heels with an understandable reluctance to get bogged down in another war in the desert sands.  But he might also be being set up by the Republicans who, in the poisonous partisan climate of the capitol, can’t wait to run against a president who let a tyrannical terrorist escape justice and thumb his nose at the world.

After almost a decade of misrule by an arrogant and ignorant cowboy shooting from the hip, some caution in foreign policy and military action is welcome.  But dawdling in the face of monstrous international criminality, and appeasing a demented despot, might prove more damaging in the long run for a new world order and a second presidential term.