Juan Cole (Wikimedia Commons)
No one will ever confuse Juan Cole with an imperialist, a militarist, a centrist, or an enemy of Arab peoples.
His thoughts on Libya are therefore particularly salient. And his thoughts run counter to some of the reactions circulating both on the left and the right. He explicitly compares the final stand of Muammar Qaddafi in the town of Sirte to that of the cult leader Jim Jones in Guyana. He also reminds everyone of the extent of Qaddafi's violent tyranny. He also says the end result vindicates the Arab League, President Obama and NATO.
The final defeat of Qaddafi and Qaddafism is a victory for the Fourth Wave of democratization that began in Tunisia and continued in Egypt. There is now a contiguous bloc of 100,000,000 Arabs in North Africa who have thrown off dictatorship and aspire to parliamentary government (Tunisia’s elections are coming up on Sunday). Those who dismiss this movement because Muslim religious forces will benefit are exhibiting a double standard. Roman Catholicism benefited from Third Wave democracy movements like those in Poland and Brazil, as did Eastern Orthodoxy. Were democracy to break out in Burma, Theravada Buddhism would benefit. So what?
The Arab League, President Obama and NATO have been vindicated in their decision to forestall the massacre of eastern Libyan cities such as Benghazi. The region’s remaining bloodthirsty tyrants, who have not scrupled to massacre non-combatants for exercising their right of peaceable assembly and protest, should take the lesson that mass murder is a one-way ticket for them to the sewage drain of history. As I told the NYT today, “The real lesson here is that there is a new wave of popular politics in the Arab world… People are not in the mood to put up with semi-genocidal dictators.”
I saw George Friedman of the Stratfor group on Erin Burnett’s CNN magazine show rather apocalyptically predicting a Baghdad on the Mediterranean in Libya. Those with investment capital who short Libya out of such overblown concerns will only be missing a big opportunity. The Transitional National Council needs our support now, and the new, liberated Libya will remember who befriended it in these uncertain times. The bulls are running in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.
I highly recommend the entire post. This was not a Bush-Cheney invasion and occupation, this was support for a spontaneous people's uprising. This is not about an attempt to control a foreign country and its valuable resources, this is a genuine opportunity to help nurture a genuine attempt by a nation's people to create a genuine democracy and control their own political and economic destiny. It has only just begun, and Cole sees reason for optimism.