Rainblog

In the movie “Three Kings”, Archie Gates (George Clooney) sums up the political situation in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War with the words:

Bush told the people to rise up against Saddam. They thought they’d have our support. They don’t. Now they’re getting slaughtered.

There’s room for debate over whether supporting the Iraqi uprisings would have been a good idea - it would probably have led to sectarian killings and ethnic cleansing on a huge scale, and might well have split the country three ways, so US reluctance to get involved is at least understandable. Still, the rebels did believe that they’d have foreign support, in part because that’s what the international community - particularly the US - let them believe. When they didn’t get it, they and their families died in vast numbers, and Saddam remained in power until the US finally mounted a hugely expensive war to get rid of him.

Fast forward just over twenty years and some more rebels have just learned that they don’t have our support. The international community, in its wisdom, has decided that any kind of decisive intervention in Libya is not warranted and has limited itself to the equivalent of sending a strongly-worded letter. The rebels, militarily weaker than Gaddafi’s oil-funded military, are being pushed back. If you need to be reminded what happens next, think back to 1991.

Gaddafi may look like a figure of fun, with his preposterous dress-up uniforms, his barkingly-insane speeches and grandiose public works projects, his put-away-wet physiognomy and his unwise personal grooming choices. He isn’t. He is a vicious thug. Frankly, I don’t care if he did or did not sign off on the Lockerbie bombing: what he has done to his own people is ample grounds for hanging him by his heels from his palace gate.

I’m not normally hawkish on foreign interventions. Unlike those who actually have the power to command them, I’d never try to pretend that they are easy or uncomplicated. But in the past few weeks, a window of opportunity in which we could have crossed off another villain briefly opened up. Thanks to the inability of the international community to display even the appearance of decisiveness, that window has probably closed. Gaddafi was weak; a show of real resolve could probably have toppled him. When that show never came, he fought back and now he’s getting stronger every day.

We know what comes next because we’ve seen how a dictator consolidates his rule after a rebellion. Tens of thousands will flee, creating a refugee problem that the international community, in its goodness, will also fail to solve. Of those who remain, many will be tortured or killed. If things really go south, a good friend of mine may be among them.

The miraculous thing in all this is that would-be rebels still believe that, when push comes to shove, the rich countries will come down on their side. Granted, it’s almost never happened before, certainly never in a timely fashion. But this time, they must say to themselves, it will be different. Our dictator has been a thorn in everyone’s side for years: surely, this time the rest of the world will act.

But once again, they are wrong. Once again, we will dither. And once again, they will die.