Say, did you see the news from Libya — the last country we bombed because its leader crossed a red line or was about to? Here's a dispatch from Libya in the Sept. 3 British newspaper, The Independent:
"Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Qaddafi two years ago. Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country. ... Output of Libya's prized high-quality crude oil has plunged from 1.4 million barrels a day earlier this year to just 160,000 barrels a day now."
I keep reading about how Iraq was the bad war and Libya was the good war and Afghanistan was the necessary war and Bosnia was the moral war and Syria is now another necessary war. Guess what! They are all the same war.
They are all the story of what happens when multisectarian societies, most of them Muslim or Arab, are held together for decades by dictators ruling vertically, from the top down, with iron fists and then have their dictators toppled, either by internal or external forces. And they are all the story of how the people in these countries respond to the fact that with the dictator gone they can only be governed horizontally — by the constituent communities themselves writing their own social contracts for how to live together as equal citizens, without an iron fist from above. And, as I've said before, they are all the story of how difficult it is to go from Saddam to Jefferson -— from vertical rule to horizontal rule — without falling into Hobbes or Khomeini.
The Obama team wanted to be smart in Libya: No boots on the ground. So we decapitated that dictator from the air. But then our ambassador got murdered, because, without boots on the ground to referee, and act as the army of the center, Hobbes took hold before Jefferson.
If we were to decapitate the Syrian regime from the air, the same thing would likely happen there. For any chance of a multisectarian democratic outcome in Syria, you need to win two wars on the ground: one against the ruling Assad-Alawite-Iranian-Hezbollah-Shiite alliance; and, once that one is over, you'd have to defeat the Sunni Islamists and pro-al-Qaida jihadists. Without an army of the center (which no one will provide) to back up the few decent Free Syrian Army units, both will be uphill fights.
The center exists in these countries, but it is weak and unorganized. It's because these are pluralistic societies but they lack any sense of citizenship or deep ethic of pluralism. That is, tolerance, cooperation and compromise.
I still believe our response to Bashar Assad's poison gas attack should be "arm and shame," as I wrote Wednesday. But, please do spare me the lecture that America's credibility is at stake here. Really? Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting since the 7th century over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad's spiritual and political leadership, and our credibility is on the line? Really? Their civilization has missed every big modern global trend — the religious Reformation, democratization, feminism and entrepreneurial and innovative capitalism -– and our credibility is on the line? I don't think so.
We've struggled for a long time, and still are, learning to tolerate "the other." That struggle has to happen in the Arab/Muslim world, otherwise nothing we do matters. What is the difference between the Arab awakening in 2011 and South Africa's transition to democracy in the 1990s? America? No. The quality of local leadership and the degree of tolerance.