The night that Moammar Gadhafi decided to divest himself of unconventional weapons, five people asked me at a party: “Doesn’t this show that, in the end, force works?”
So, the Libyan leader pulled the rabbit out of President Bush’s hat and presented him with an enormous prize: the first real proof that his pre-emption and unilateralism can work.
What do people like me, who are against the war in Iraq, say now? Well, several things:
First, congratulations to all the Americans and Brits and others who have toiled for this all these years–and the important thing to remember is that it has been years.
When Col. Gadhafi made his stunning announcement last week that he would voluntarily give up his illicit weapons program, including an apparently advanced program to create nuclear weapons, he was responding to many policy stimuli. Surely the invasion of Iraq influenced him–particularly the unflattering pictures of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein reduced to street derelict. But at least equally effective were the sanctions imposed by the United Nations after the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Libya had arrived at a point where it was economically frozen in time and simply could not move forward without foreign involvement.
Second, Libya has always been an “odd country out” in the Middle East and cannot be a reliable gauge for what other countries might do. It is a sparsely populated desert kingdom, rich only in oil and the quirkiness of its leaders. Gadhafi sees himself as a prophet in the region and his “Little Green Book” as the guide for life. He recently proposed that Israel and Palestine be combined into one country named “Isratine.” (Now, there’s imagination!)
Third, Gadhafi has sponsored some genuinely vicious guerrilla movements. In his training camps in the southern deserts of his country, he put together the savagely murderous guerrillas that have ravaged West Africa from Sierra Leone to Liberia.
But his guerrillas are noted for their lack of ideology or religiosity. They don’t fit into the larger picture of radical Islamic fundamentalism and appear to be as unconnected to it as Gadhafi and Libya are to the rest of the Middle East.
Therefore, it should not be expected that this Libyan pronouncement, welcome as it is, is a herald for the rest of the region.
Still, one must applaud the effect of the combination of threat of force (that came out of Iraq) with months of secret back-room negotiations between Libyan, British and American intelligence (that came out of the too often neglected tool of diplomacy).
Inspectors who have already been allowed into Libya were stunned by the extent of nuclear development. Libya had not acquired a nuclear weapons capability, the British said, but it was close.
Realistically, the Libyan announcement has little to do with the larger problem of Islamic radical and violent fundamentalism. The same day’s newspapers announced soberly that huge areas of southern Afghanistan were now off-limits to UN and humanitarian workers and are again run primarily by the Taliban. And Iraq remains, despite Saddam Hussein’s welcome capture, a country deeply divided between gratitude that the dictator is gone and a profound sense of humiliation that someone else had to do this for Iraqis.
Now that we’ve seen this first successful response to the force plus diplomacy effort, we must expand it. The Bush administration has been too overbalanced with sheer force, which does not and cannot alone address the compli-cated forces of Islamic fundamentalism and the ghostly legions it commands in today’s world.
What the Libyan case really shows (and of course, much remains to be proven by the Libyans) is that diplomacy–and wooing, cajoling, threatening and bribing with economic goodies–is even more important.
In fact, the Libyan case should show us where the real balance lies in the war against terrorism.
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E-mail: gigi(underscore)[email protected]