Advantaging The Revolution

Now that the heavy lifting by NATO forces has been concluded, and the spectacle of rebel forces in Libya vying with the regime's military forces for exacting carnage on one another, perhaps it is time for NATO to sit back and seriously evaluate the relevance of its decision-making. Apart from the need seen to aid and protect the rebel factions of one country and not another in very similar circumstances.

There is the need to contemplate the reasons why one tyrannical dictator is considered to be more abhorrent than another. In the case of Libya and Syria, both regimes sponsored and encouraged terrorism. Both regimes manipulated and oppressed their people. Both regimes were grievous human-rights abusers. Both regimes posed as a potential danger to the international community.

Both regimes cultivated deliberate alliances with other like-minded, societally-destructive regimes. Both had attempted to build nuclear installations that would result in their ownership of nuclear weaponry. Both had a clearly disruptive effect within the world community. And both had launched surreptitious attacks on international targets. Both championed violent military action against a neighbour.

But it was rebels in Libya exclusively, not in Syria, that NATO chose to become involved with. With the blessing of the United Nations. In both Syria and Libya, as elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, Islamist and Salafist jihadist groups were both allied with the government and attempted to overturn it to install a fully Sharia-based national infrastructure.

With the upheavals completed or at a standstill in each country, as has occurred in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, with more minor protests occurring in Sudan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and lurking in the background of each of those countries, Islamists awaiting their opportunity to reveal their agendas, like that of the Muslim Brotherhood. The area remains a tinder-box of political activity.

Western countries should ask themselves what, precisely, they are doing. The fact is those Western countries are held there, in contempt. There has been ample time for reflection with the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in the background, and the illustrative effects of sectarian violence, tribal belligerence, and Islamist surges to inform that these are events that must be faced and solved by the countries involved themselves.

In Libya, the United States, France, Britain and Canada have played a major role within NATO, while other NATO members have held back, contributing little-to-nothing to the original pledge to ensure that slaughter did not ensue with the well-armed Libyan armed forces (who, just incidentally, procured their military hardware from the obliging West) mercilessly putting down the insurrection.

The result has been the U.S. withdrawing from its front-and-center-role after dispatching the original rocketry, leaving the airspace defense of Libya to France, Britain and Canada primarily. A leader who was once wined and dined, despite his defiantly anti-Western and pro-terror agenda, was now being hounded by the very same countries that had given him respect as his due.

And now that the regime of Moammar Gadhafi is finally well routed, the spectacle of the rebels torching, looting, murdering in the very same manner as government troops, is most instructive indeed. While waiting in the wings for their opportunity to bring themselves forward is possibly a contingent of al-Qaeda-associated groups prepared to mount their bid to form the next government.

Which is a problem in the Middle East and North Africa with majority-Muslim populations led by fundamentalist Islamists, is it not? It is the old question of making do with the devil you know, rather than inviting a devil far more devious and destructive to make his entrance.