Mick Hartley

After a brief flirtation with the idea that democracy and freedom might possibly be the aim not just of the West, but of societies everywhere, we seem to be back to the idea of strong men – bastards, but our bastards – because, you know, they (mainly in the Middle East) aren't ready for such fripperies yet. Look what happened with Iraq, etc. etc.. As a result we now have Aleppo, where strongman Assad, backed by strongman Putin, is slaughtering his way to some kind of victory while the world stands by and watches, hands behind its back, unwilling to do anything to stop the carnage.

An interesting article by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in the LARB, looks at this return of Hobbes, the end of democracy promotion, and the new world order as the US, too, now gets its very own strongman in the form of Donald Trump:

Barack Obama’s response to the Arab Spring was unenthusiastic. He had participated reluctantly in the NATO campaign to oust Gaddafi. But since the overthrow, as Libya has collapsed into chaos, the perceived lessons of Libya — conflated with the perceived lessons of Iraq — have congealed into an isolationist ethos that discourages situational responses to crises. The dogmas of doctrinal realism, which had gone out of fashion after Bosnia and Rwanda, once again guide foreign policy. Unless national interest is at stake, say the “realists,” there is no moral imperative to intervene.

This is the wisdom that Obama followed in Syria — and the effects have been disastrous.

But even as Aleppo replaces Srebrenica as a metaphor for tolerated mass atrocity, there is little sign of regret or reappraisal. Indeed, the proponents of inaction have retrenched and, conscious of a losing argument in Syria, have reached for a winning proposition in Libya. Libya, they say, is the fate that awaits Syria should the West intervene to impose a no-fly zone. Like Iraq, they argue, Libya was an avoidable war of choice.

This argument is appealing as long as it is insulated from fact and logic…..

Consider Syria and Libya. In Libya, the West intervened to prevent large-scale atrocities and, at the cost of 72 civilian deaths, cut short a civil war that had killed up to 10,000; over two years of relative peace followed, even if by failing to protect Libya’s nascent experiment in democracy, the West left it vulnerable to subversion. In Syria, the West was reluctant to intervene, set red lines it was reluctant to enforce, chose allies it was reluctant to assist, and made enemies it was reluctant to confront. The result? Despite the Western abdication, violent deaths in Libya since the beginning of the new civil war in 2014 number 5,851; the Syrian War has killed up to half a million. And while the Libyan crisis has created 27,517 refugees and 435,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), in Syria the number of refugees and IDPs is 4.8 million and 6.5 million, respectively.

Such juxtapositions were ignored when a British parliamentary committee gave its official imprimatur to inaction in September, based on a Hobbesian reading of Libya…..

For those persuaded by the Blunt Report, which concluded that the Libyan intervention was a mistake based on erroneous assumptions, Ahmad provides the most powerful critique I've yet read. The Foreign Affairs Committee reached the conclusions it reached because those were the conclusions that Crispin Blunt and the rest wanted it to reach. They chose their witnesses carefully, and where that wasn't enough they just made stuff up. Their main conclusion: yes, keep those strongmen, because the natives just aren't ready for anything better.

Perhaps it’s hard to be intellectually consistent when applying 17th-century ideas to 21st-century reality. The mess in the Levant shows that the Western emphasis on stability hasn’t yielded friendly Leviathans. It has only left it with a field full of flailing monsters and people living in continual fear and danger. The United States is despised in countries where it has backed friendly authoritarians — because when self-determination runs up against Leviathan, life turns solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. People resent that. But in Libya — the one country where it resisted this temptation — the United States and Britain remain popular. The lesson of Libya then is not that it should’ve been treated more like the Levant, but that the Levant, too, should have been protected from Leviathan. Getting rid of Leviathan isn’t enough to guarantee democracy, because democracy also requires the strength to resist subversion. The failure in Libya was the hasty disengagement that left democracy vulnerable to subversion — mainly from extant and would-be Leviathans. But in a supreme irony of history, the fate that the United States had accepted for others now imperils its own democracy. Barack Obama wanted to foist a strongman on Iraq and Syria; he will now be surrendering the United States to one.