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February 23, 2011
The Libyan Conundrum
Jim Hoagland’s open letter to the daffy, but unfunny clown prince of Libya strikes me as very close to the mark. Given what I now believe about the need for national leaders to retain credibility in the eyes of their polity, it seems unlikely Gadaffy can hang on to power much longer; however, he is not without assets and could still make a bloody fight of it in terms of the number of innocent victims his supporters might kill before he is forced from power, all of which poses a real problem for the issue of sovereignty upon which the “rule of law” ultimately depends. If a sovereign is corrupt, how can the law be worthy of respect? Put another way: who decides when (and how) the king must go? That principle becomes even more troublesome in the United States where federal laws conflict with newly enacted state laws and prosecutors have the option of what amounts to dual prosecution under cover of dual sovereignty.To return to the problem represented by a rogue government like Libya that has flouted international norms in the service of a tyrannical dictator versus a rogue nation like Somalia which is run by well organized criminals, precisely because there is no effective government. Both present serious problems for which effective policing is the only reasonable long-tern solution. The problem in each case is how obtain control of the problem nation and then impose credible police power which can eventually be turned over to a legitimate government, a process that has often proved far easier to describe than to carry out.
The pressure is now on the UN Security Council which will, if they run true to form, attempt to stall without taking action. In the meantime, there is growing discontent in a broad swath of Moslem countries across North Africa and the Middle East from Tunisia to Iran. Not all are Arab or oil-rich, but what they do have in common is the Moslem faith, autocratic (or ineffective) rule, and a population bulge concentrated in the 18-30 demographic.
In a real sense, the uprisings that have erupted in the Moslem world are youth dominated and were foreshadowed by the counterculture that sprang up without warning in the United States between the mid-Sixties and the end of the Viet Nam War.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at February 23, 2011 02:19 AM