Disillusioned leaders of the Libyan Revolution accomplished by NATO bombing are now complaining that the US/UK/EU combination is not tending to Libya's needs. They destroyed the functional Libyan State established by Gaddaffi, leaving Libya Stateless. If the overthrow of Gaddaffi had been conducted by a revolutionary force representing the great majority of the people—which is how it was represented when the shapeless opposition groups were recognised by the EU etc. as the legitimate authority—Libya would not have remained Stateless after Gaddaffi was murdered. It is Stateless because it was not Gaddaffi's Libyan opponents who overthrew his regime. NATO destroyed the regime, flattering the disorder of opposition groups out of their minds while doing so. The opposition groups were even primed to say to the world that they were in political command, and they they had just "outsourced" the air strikes to NATO. But, when they murdered Gaddaffi for world television, they found themselves without a State, and in a condition of megalomanial delusion on the subject of States, which is not conducive to constructing one.
States, even bad ones, are not easy to construct out of chaos. States of the kind that we call democratic are the outcome of long historical gestation in which democracy is a late development within systems of authority. But when powerful democratic states want to destroy some State which they have marked down as an enemy, they do not scruple at telling the inhabitants of that state that democracy comes as easy as eating pie. Just get rid of the bad man and it will happen.
(President Obama has said as we write that the leader of North Korea is a bad man.)
The point of the destruction of the Libyan State was not to put a better State in its place—a State better able to conduct Libya as a Power in the world system of Powers. It is just not in the interests of the militaristic democracies—US, UK, France—to erode their own power by helping other states, sitting over valuable raw materials or sited at strategic junctures, to become more effective at tending to their own national interests.
A development not much noted is the use of murder as a form of politics by President Obama. We have come a long way since the use of murder—the killing of an individual beyond the battlefield—was a war-crime. It was treated as such in the Nuremberg Trials. Otto Skorzeny was charged with planning to murder an enemy commander, General Eisenhower. The case was dropped on the ground that there was insufficient evidence, but probably because the Western democracies were getting ready for war on their eastern ally who had actually defeated Nazi Germany, and resourceful Germans began to be looked on kindly.
We did not hear that murder was ever struck off the list of war-crimes. And, if it is a war-crime, then it must be doubly a peace-crime.
The Israeli State pioneered murder as an open proceeding, and was not reprimanded for it. President Obama has now normalised it as a procedure of the greatest democracy in the world, which now appears to see it as its destiny to bring the world to heel. It has also established torture as a proper democratic procedure.
The grand ideals spun out of the war against Nazi Germany and the Cold War against Communist Russia have been blown away during the past 20 years—the era of the unchallenged dominance of the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.
We are not being pessimists. We just don't see living in illusion in these matters, and having inoperative ideals manipulated, as a very good thing.
Of course there are signs of change. We may be progressing towards the dominance of the world by a number of Great Powers. Russia is restoring itself. And China, which only wanted to live at peace within its own borders until Britain invaded it in the Opium War and broke it open, has realised that if it wants to be let live at peace within itself, it must make itself a military World Power. It must also show that it is capable of destroying the world if it is interfered with in order to ensure that it will not be interfered with and broken up.
The twenty years of unipolar dominance of world affairs by the greatest democracy the world has ever seen have been years of irresistible destructive wars by that democracy. The restoration of a system of more or less equally powerful World Powers, with each acting as the protector fo weaker states against the others, seems at this juncture to be the only way of establishing an element of stability in world affairs.
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