From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Wed Aug 24 2011 - 11:22:06 EDT
Robert Fisk: How long before the dominoes fall?
The West is offering lessons in democracy to New Libya; how to avoid the
chaos we ourselves inflicted on the Iraqis
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
The remaining Arab potentates and tyrants have spent a second sleepless
night. How soon will the liberators of Tripoli metamorphose into the
liberators of Damascus and Aleppo and Homs? Or of Amman? Or Jerusalem? Or of
Bahrain or Riyadh? It's not the same, of course.
The Arab Spring-Summer-Autumn has proved not just that the old colonial
frontiers remain inviolate an awful tribute to imperialism, I suppose
but that every revolution has its own characteristics. If all Arab uprisings
have their clutch of martyrs, some rebellions are more violent than others.
As Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said at the start of his own eventual downfall,
"Libya is not Tunisia, it's not Egypt...It will become civil war. There will
be bloodshed on the streets." And there was.
And so we gaze into the crystal ball. Libya will be a Middle East superpower
unless we impose an economic occupation as the price of Nato's
"liberating" bombardment and a less African, more Arab country now that
Gaddafi's obsession with central and southern Africa has disappeared. It may
infect Algeria and Morocco with its freedoms. The Gulf states will be happy
up to a point since most regarded Gaddafi as mentally unstable as well
as mischievous. But unseating tyrannical Arab rulers is a dangerous game
when unelected Arab rulers join in. Who now remembers the forgotten 1977 war
in which Anwar Sadat sent his bombers to pulverise Gaddafi's airbases the
very same airbases Nato has been attacking these past months after Israel
warned the Egyptian president that Gaddafi was planning his assassination?
But Gaddafi's dictatorship outlived Sadat by 30 years.
Yet like all the others, Libya suffered from the cancer of the Arab world:
financial and moral corruption. Will the future be any different? We
have spent far too much time honouring the courage of Libyan "freedom
fighters" as they scurried across the desert floor, far too little time
examining the nature of the beast, the glutinous Transitional National
Council whose supposed leader, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, has still been unable to
explain if his own chums connived in the murder of their own army commander
last month. Already, the West is offering lessons in democracy to New Libya,
indulgently telling its unelected leadership how to avoid the chaos which we
ourselves inflicted on the Iraqis when we "liberated" them eight years ago.
Who will get the backhanders in the new regime democratic or not once it
is in place?
And just as all new regimes contain dark figures from the past Adenauer's
Germany as much as Maliki's Iraq so Libya will have to accomodate
Gaddafi's tribes. The scenes in Green Square yesterday were painfully
similar to the crazed adoration on display at the same location for Gaddafi
just a few weeks ago. Recall, then, the day De Gaulle was asked by an aide
how the crowds greeting him after the 1944 liberation of France were as
large as the crowds applauding Pιtain a few weeks earlier. "Ils sont les
mκmes," De Gaulle is said to have replied. "They are the same."
Not all. How soon will the world be knocking on the door of the supposedly
dying Abdulbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber if indeed he was guilty
of the crime to discover the secret of his longevity and of his activities
within Gaddafi's secret service? How soon will the liberators of Tripoli get
their hands on the files of Gaddafi's oil and foreign ministries to find out
the secrets of the Blair-Sarkozy-Berlusconi love affairs with the author of
the Green Book? Or will British and French spooks beat them to it?
And how soon, we must ask, before the people of Europe demand to know why,
if Nato has been so successful in Libya as Cameron and his mates now claim
it cannot be used against Assad's legions in Syria, using Cyprus as a
territorial aircraft-carrier, devastating the regime's 8,000 tanks and
armoured vehicles as they besiege the country's cities. Or must we heed the
neighbours; Israel still secretly hopes (as it shamefully did in the case of
Egypt) that the dictator will survive to be a friend and make an ultimate
peace over Golan.
Israel, which has been so skewed and immature in its response to the Arab
awakening why on earth did its leaders not welcome the Egyptian
revolution, opening their arms to a people who showed they wanted the
democracy which Israel always boasts of, instead of shooting dead five
Egyptian soldiers in the latest Gaza shoot-out? has much to ponder.
Ben Ali gone, Mubarak gone, Saleh more or less gone, Gaddafi overthrown,
Assad in danger, Abdullah of Jordan still facing opposition, Bahrain's
minority Sunni monarchy still suicidally hoping to rule for eternity. These
are massive historical events to which the Israelis have responded with a
kind of appalled, hostile apathy. At the very moment when Israel might be
able to claim that its Arab neighbours are only seeking the freedoms that
Israelis already possess that there is a brotherhood of democracy that
might go beyond frontiers it sulks and builds more colonies on Arab land
and continues to delegitimise itself while accusing the world of trying to
destroy it.
But the Ottoman empire cannot be forgotten at so critical an hour. At the
height of its power, you could travel from Morocco to Constantinople without
papers. With freedom in Syria and Jordan, we could travel from Algeria to
Turkey and onwards into Europe without so much as a visa. The Ottoman Empire
reborn! Except for the Arabs, of course. Be sure they will still need visas.
We are not there yet. How soon will the Shiites of Bahrain and the listless
Saudi masses, sitting atop so much wealth, ask why they cannot control their
own countries and press on to overthrow their effete rulers? How gloomily
Maher al-Assad, brother of Bashar and commander of Syria's infamous 4th
Brigade, must have listened to al-Jazeera's last phone call to Mohammed
Gaddafi. "We lacked wisdom and foresight," Mohammed complained to the world
before gunfire broke across his voice. "They are in the house!". Then: "God
is great." And the line went dead.
Every unelected Arab leader or any Muslim leader "elected" through fraud
will have pondered that voice. Wisdom is certainly a quality much lacking in
the Middle East, foresight a skill which the Arabs and the West have both
neglected. East and West if they can be divided so crudely have both
lost the ability to think of the future. The next 24 hours is all that
matters. Will there be protests in Hama tomorrow? What is Obama to say on
prime time? What is Cameron to say to the world? Domino theories are a
fraud. The Arab Spring is going to last for years. We better think about
that. There is no "end of history".
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