mixed messages

Here are a couple of items from the BBC feed concerning Libya:

1955: Danya B Mohammed tweets: “@barackobama thanks, we know #Gaddafi isn’t legitimate, please stop reminding us and do something to remove him. #LIBYA”

2107: Arab envoys meeting in Madrid have told Spanish Foreign Minister Trinidad Jimenez that they reject any idea of outside military intervention in Libya, Spanish news agency Efe reports.

Granted, we’re dealing with different people, each of them with different opinions. But there’s also a sense in which critique of the West can too easily look like an automatically serious political position no matter what the West does. It can be critiqued either way. If Obama simply makes statements, he’s “doing nothing” (and I didn’t think he did enough in the case of Egypt). If he orders airstrikes, he’s an imperialist on a quest for oil. I suppose some middle ground could be finessed, but this is the problem with critique: it always has the appearance of winning, while often dodging any concrete suggestions at all and thereby risking nothing of its own.

Unfortunately, this tendency can sometimes also be found in a book such as Said’s Orientalism, which I just went back through again in November and December while writing my recent article. For example, Said makes fun of Westerners who know nothing about the Middle East, and then one page later makes fun of Westerners who devote their lives to understanding the complexities and the languages of the Middle East as best they can. It’s “heads I win, tails you lose,” and that’s never fair play, and I wish he hadn’t done it that way.

But to return to the present situation, my concrete suggestion would be as follows. Qaddafi can’t be allowed to prevail at this point. The Libyans should be left to handle it alone for now. But what if the Libyans ask for more? That’s the really thorny problem. The “more” can’t be done under the neutral-looking UN Security Council umbrella, because Russia seems prepared to block it. What does that leave? It really leaves the unpleasant fact that, to respond to any urgent demand from the Libyans if things start to go really badly, NATO and/or “the Anglo-Saxons” will be left roughly with a choice between intervening pretty severely, arming the Libyan rebels, or doing nothing (I would favor #2, though every one of these has problems: welcome to politics). And then onlookers will be faced with a choice between agreeing that the outside powers had no alternative but to give the demanded assistance, or stating that the avoidance of a whiff of imperialism is so important that it’s better to let Qaddafi prevail, with all the repercussions that would bring. And one could always take that stance. But just imagine how that would feel: watching Benghazi get swept up bloodily by Qaddafi’s henchmen.