Muammar Gaddafi was certainly more than
prophetic during the summit of the Arab
League (AL) in 2008 when he inquired about the fate of his Iraqi
predecessor for Western military interventions: Saddam Hussein.
“The ruler and head of an AL member has been hanged. Why?” he
asked. “In the future it’s going to be your turn. Even you, the
friends of America,” he told the Arab leaders present as the
audience was rolling on the floor laughing. “Friends of America…
No, I say,” said Gaddafi, “We are friends of America, but America
can approve of our hanging one day.”
Two years later, the eccentric dictator was dragged out of
a sewage channel and lynched by a mob of rebels after the regime
succumbed to an alliance of domestic insurgents and NATO air
strikes. In the White House, Obama hailed Gaddafi’s demise, saying,
“One of the world’s longest-serving dictators is no more. The dark
shadow of tyranny has been lifted.”
Well, Gaddafi might be no more, but his long shadow keeps
chasing Obama and other enthusiasts of the intervention in Libya
even now. When Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, the
rationale behind the award rested in significant part on the
president’s commitment to nuclear
disarmament, with the Nobel committee’s
citation hailing Obama for a “vision of a world free from nuclear
arms.”
Furthermore, the citation affirmed the following:
“Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for
resolving even the most difficult international
conflicts.”
Or as Professor Juan Cole — the go-to Middle East
“expert” for pundits like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald
—
put it: “Barack Obama was given the
prize because he is a game-changer.… Two years ago we were talking
about whether Cheney could convince Americans to go to war on Iran.
Now Washington is engaging in direct talks with Tehran that have
eased tensions.”
However, when the next installment — the Libyan civil war
— of that reality show otherwise known as the Arab Spring was
hitting TV screens, NATO involvement attracted an unwanted and
unintended audience: namely, North Korea and Iran.
An unnamed North Korean foreign policy official quoted by
North Korea’s news agency
lambasted air strikes on Libya and
drew a direct parallel between his country’s nuclear arsenal and
the ill-fated WMD program of Libya, which Gaddafi dismantled in
2003 as part of his plans to co-operate with the West. Calling the
West’s bargain with Gaddafi “an invasion tactic to disarm the
country,” the North Korean official said that the subsequent
bombing of Libya by NATO forces was “teaching the international
community a grave lesson,” and proclaimed that a powerful military
was the only means of ensuring peace in the Korean
Peninsula.
More ominously for the administration, the implications of
the war in Libya did not escape the attention of Iran’s Supreme
Leader — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Supreme Leader
compared the West’s tempting Gaddafi
with diplomatic and economic incentives in 2003 in exchange for
giving up his nuclear ambitions to “giving candy to a child.”
Khamenei said Iran was right to reject restrictions on its nuclear
program, making it clear that one can fool a child with sweets, but
only once. Having seen what happened to Gaddafi, Iran is not going
to trade its nuclear ambitions for any “candy.”
The non-proliferation connection of the war in Libya was
completely missed by many analysts. The same Juan Cole
endorsed the war in Libya as follows
(while expressing slight reservations over the fact that Obama
continued U.S. participation without authorization from Congress):
“The Libya intervention, in and of itself, is therefore legal in
international law in a way that the Iraq War was not. I personally
believe that the UN attempt to forbid unilateral aggressive war is
absolutely central to our survival on earth, and although it has
had many failures, it is an ideal worth reaching for.” His position
on Iran remained unchanged.
In a
blog post last October, Juan Cole
again called for dialogue between the administration and Iran,
“Obama came into office convinced that the negotiating table was
the only plausible way to deal with Iran. He should go back to
that.”
But by now it has become abundantly clear that if a
plausible way to deal with Iran exists at all, it is not the
negotiating table.
Common sense suggests that a regime will only abandon a
WMD program on the understanding that the other party will not
subsequently try to take advantage of the degradation of the
regime’s deterrence capabilities.
By backing the anti-Gaddafi forces in the Libyan civil war
to the point of pushing a de facto policy of regime change (and not
simply “protecting civilians”), Obama broke the United States’
tacit agreement with Gaddafi that had been in place since the
Libyan autocrat gave up his WMD ambitions in 2003. The president
has indeed become a “game-changer”… by eliminating the negotiating
table from the list of options for dealing with Iran.
Gaddafi was not even the first dictator in the Middle East
to be toppled after it dismantled its WMD program at the request of
the Wet. That honor belongs to Saddam Hussein. Yet unlike Saddam,
Gaddafi was never accused of failing to carry out his part of the
bargain. After reaching a de facto agreement to give up his WMD
program, Gaddafi joined forces with Western powers as a supposed
ally against terrorism and became a regular visitor in Western
capitals.
The truth is that the casus belli behind the NATO
intervention in Libya was the violent crackdown on a popular
uprising against Gaddafi’s rule. On the other hand, violent
crackdowns on popular uprisings are exactly what Iran has been very
busy with in recent years. The regime crushed the Green Revolution
in 2009 under heavy criticism from the same Western powers that
later intervened in Libya when Gaddafi forces were on the verge of
defeating the rebels. At the beginning of 2011 the regime in Tehran
faced off an attempt to revive the protests.
Meanwhile, the Saudi prince
stated the monarchy’s position on
Iran’s nuclear ambitions in very clear terms at a conference in
Riyadh: “If our efforts, and the efforts of the world community,
fail to convince Israel to shed its weapons of mass destruction and
to prevent Iran from obtaining similar weapons, we must, as a duty
to our country and people, look into all options we are given,
including obtaining these weapons ourselves.”
The Saudi warning, while clearly being insincere as
regards Israel’s nuclear weapons that have existed for a few
decades, leaves no doubt regarding the nasty potential for a
nuclear Iran to unleash an Arab-Persian nuclear arms race in a
region that is generally not known for stability or
predictability.
In 2010, the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador in the U.S.
was even more frank. Calling Iran the only country in the region to
pose a threat to the UAE, Yousef Al-Otaiba
said, “We cannot live with a nuclear
Iran.”
Today the Obama administration is facing a dilemma
undreamed of in the philosophy of Professor Cole. The manner in
which the ideal of preventing unilateral aggressive wars ended with
the lynching of Gaddafi has unnerved the regimes of Iran and North
Korea. The chances that either country
will voluntarily discontinue WMD programs or surrender existing
weapons have turned from very slim to non-existent. Indeed, on what
basis should they do so in light of Gaddafi’s fate?
Under the present circumstances, the Obama administration
may well be considering a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear
installations before the regime acquires a nuclear deterrent and
sends the whole region on a WMD acquisition spree. Contrary to the
arguments of some pundits like
Jeffrey Goldberg, a preemptive attack
is the only realistic option now, if Obama’s vision of a nuclear
free world is to have any chance of survival in the Middle East in
the near future. The regime in Tehran is not going to back off
through a carrot-and-stick approach of negotiations and sanctions
after what transpired in Libya.
However, such a unilateral, preemptive
attack was certainly not the original
intention of the Nobel committee that commended Obama’s
non-proliferation efforts with the Peace Prize. Nor did Juan Cole
have such an outcome in mind when he was lauding the
administration’s “leading from behind” in Libya.
Truly one should never underestimate the shadow of a dead
man: in this case, Gaddafi.
