Saturday, March 19, 2011

The gun of the West

The war that seems to start as far away as remote as Afghanistan or Iraq. Libya is part of our geography - is a shot of Scud from Lampedusa - and the pages of our history (not the best: there, our aviation invented the bombing of civilian populations, 1911). It 's even a not insignificant piece of our economy.

All this makes it even more surreal randomness with which suddenly urgent moral calculations of others, evanescence our smallness and European catapult us into a conflict. A conflict is not only very dangerous for us than for others, especially when unrelated to any strategic rationality.

Apparently, bomb, bomb, without having a clear plan, a clear perspective of what is and what we want. Maybe it's too late to be able to invent the "political solution", however, relied on by the UN resolution, which could avoid the irreparable. But it would be criminal not groped. Having placed a gun on the table, now the West has the strength to do what they should have done long before, with determination to support the cease-fire and negotiations between the regime and insurgents.

It is the most effective way to stop the offensive of Gaddafi, and if someone judged a compromise, too accommodating to the dictator, consider that to offer it is also the International Crisis Group, an international think tank tread was liberal interventionism in ' former Yugoslavia, far from peaceful.

According to the International Crisis Group, to destroy the Libyan Air Force would not change substantially the balance of power between Gaddafi's troops, well trained and well armed, and the commotion of the insurgents. According to other observers, is at least doubt that stronger military action could open the dawn of a victorious war of liberation.

And even then, a long internal conflict that Libya hand over the leadership of the libertarian weapons and militias. Tribal militias, Islamic, pan-Arab, patriotic venture: in any case warrior formations that tend to become attached to the command and cultivate an idea very dismissive of the rule of law.

They take root in Libya is not a good omen for the future of the country. It could be devastating for the region and fatal territorial unit of Libya. If the "no-fly zone" is not decisive, as all roughly agree, because in these weeks we have failed to produce anything more than a solution that does not work? First, because Libya today is a measure of the inaccuracy of the ruling classes of Europe.

Governments and media have understood little of what was happening. They exchanged a totalitarian despotism Egyptian and Libyan illusion that Gaddafi would have gone the way of Mubarak. But the staff "revolutionary" in a totalitarian state is not recyclable and usually pay with their lives the break up of the scheme.

Especially if, as in Libya, has made for forty years all sorts of violence and arbitrariness. In other words, the end of the Libyan regime seem like the end of fascism and the collapse of European socialism or Arab despotisms. This is why people will fight to the last man to Gaddafi, at least until they receive guarantees.

He will square around the "Revolution" and Its Head, Gaddafi, not out of conviction or devotion, but otherwise would to the wall. Having determined that Gaddafi had counted the hours, the Europeans have seen fit to make us forget the compromises of the past by downloading the Libyan to the speed with which they had downloaded Ben Ali and Mubarak.

Until yesterday, members and friends of the dictator, suddenly ordered him to remove him from his feet. For the press was a ridiculous fool. The Down to Tripoli. A scrap. A loser. Two weeks later we find that the madman is not crazy enough, if he has trouble catching up to put in a military situation that seemed hopeless.

However, Gaddafi alone. If it were the paranoid that we tell, her loneliness left him indifferent. But on the contrary, man is very pragmatic. In 2006, the fierce realism that leads him suggested that he pay all the prices that the West is asking, even the most humiliating, though no longer a pariah of the international community.

The same realism with which then closed the closet the ideological arsenal of the "Libyan revolution," today might advise him to accept a compromise on the future of Libya. And this will probably work those countries who see the inadequacy of Western policy in the region the opportunity to enter (or return, and, in the case of Turkey).

As for the future of Gaddafi, six years ago when I interviewed him, I thought of his role as arcistufo Last Revolutionary Leader. Had affair with any armed movement in an attempt to come up as the new Nasser Arabic, African Bolivar, the beacon of the fight against colonialism, imperialism, and so on.

He had always gone wrong. In recent weeks threatened to be ousted from the only revolution still possible that against dictators like him. As his cynicism is boundless, I doubt that burns the desire to emulate in Cyrenaica Marshal Graziani, fascist mass murderer. If you offered a kind of internal exile, however well disguised, and accompanied by guarantees for himself and his children, maybe they could accept.

In any case it is not a fool and will not escape abroad, where his condition would become precarious. So the negotiation should be attempted. And it is hypocritical that Westerners think it but do not say so, as they are prisoners of a cheap morality that prescribes not to talk to Gadhafi because he shot at people.

This is not just a childish argument (if we decide that you do not talk to those who "fired on the people" we should turn a lot 'of embassies, starting from Tehran, Beijing and Riyadh), but also of ethical rigor too ostentatious good to be true. Mimic moral intransigence has always been the most effective way to conceal their opportunism.

In any ethical foreign policy that is not false can not escape the method call that philosophy consequentialism: to decide the morality of our choices is not only their commitment to an abstract principle, but especially those choices that actually produce results. In other words it is a sin to shoot on the hunt for Gaddafi, if it really stops his troops.

But if it means bombing continue to deceive the insurgents in military victory and urge them not to treat, perhaps because in Europe only a few hacks from Napoleon to swell and some pens association wants to look out on oil wells in Benghazi, then that would not only be a mistake, would be a crime.

And this time there would be forgiven. Just follow the Al Jazeera television to see the changing moods of the Arab public opinion. Before irate over the inaction of the European friends of Gadhafi, now look warily, if not with suspicion, the activism of France and Great Britain on the same side of the Mediterranean that saw the protagonists of the last colonial adventure, the ill-fated attempt to recover the Suez Canal (1956).

It 's true, there is no peace without justice, as we recall the radicals. But it is also true that sometimes the times of peace and times of justice do not coincide. The one who received the killers as heroes dell'Achillle Lauro, just to mention one of the many faults of Gaddafi, is worth a thousand times to finish before the International Criminal Court.

But now it is more urgent to save Libya from the abyss in which the regime is falling. Still, the truth is perhaps still too cumbersome to be successful in entering into a courtroom. Among the British journalists who followed the trial for the massacre of Lockerbie, many were convinced that the condemned man, a Libyan spy, was innocent.

And who came there to seek the truth in a terrible time sequence: the first four months that a bomb did blow up a Pan American plane in the skies of Scotland, in the Persian Gulf a U.S. warship had shot down a commercial airliner of Iran Air, perhaps engaged in electronic espionage (but this did not blame the passengers).

If he had evidence of Iranian responsibility, London and Washington could not exempt themselves from considering the attack an act of war, with all that implies. The other cases (the Syrians, the provocation of an Allied espionage) were no less demanding. If the culprit was the fool of Tripoli, the matter could still handle.

And this, not just the oil business, then explain why the British authorities have deported a Libyan convicted under the pretext of non-existent health reasons. In other words: the story is more complicated than our moral categories (and attributed to Gaddafi prefer to believe all that - delusions, which perhaps did not commit murder, Macbeth empty talk from the desert now besieged and won - apparently not helped to clear back).

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