A Justifiable War: No More Watching and Waiting

Military intervention in Libya is demanded of the West. By supporting the United States, Europe could make up for past mistakes.

The shame of the world lies some 3,500 kilometers south of Libya in Rwanda, where the Hutu majority attacked the Tutsi minority in 1994, while the United Nations, the United States and Europe all stood on the sidelines and watched. U.N. troops on the spot were expressly forbidden to intervene in the conflict to protect the Tutsis from the murderous masses. The massacre lasted 100 days. In the end, the streets, the fields and the churches were littered with bodies that had been hacked to death with machetes.

We have no idea how many people Moammar Gadhafi’s mercenaries can murder in 100 days. But we do know that the West can’t stand helplessly by this time as a despot tries to stay in power using any brutality necessary. Whoever sends jet fighters against his own people has surrendered any legitimacy he may have had to settle the conflict at the negotiating table.

That’s the reason this incident in Libya can’t be considered “an Arab matter,” as the Arab League claimed yesterday in rejecting any outside intervention. It’s a matter for the civilized world, even a duty for the West to intervene militarily in Libya. And if Europe demonstrates “a reaction time similar to a rock formation,” as Christian Ultsch wrote in this newspaper’s Sunday edition, then it’s incumbent upon the world’s only remaining global policeman, the United States, to take action. The strong always have a duty to protect the weak; the strong have a duty to not avert their eyes as civilians are being massacred.

The reluctance to intervene currently displayed by the Pentagon can be explained by the experiences it encountered with “regime change” in the past. The American military machine has been bogged down in Iraq for seven years, fighting a war that it at first explained with bogus reasons and then later tried to explain with lies. The war began with the excuse that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. When those weapons failed to materialize, they tried to justify it as a war to topple a Middle East dictator, the theory being that the other despots in the region would fall like dominoes.

Now they’re indeed falling, and the United States can wage a justifiable armed intervention. It wouldn’t be a ground war; it should begin with the imposition of no-fly zones to prevent Gadhafi’s followers from shooting the rebels from above like fish in a barrel. In the end, it would also take out selected military installations that enable a dictator to put down any struggle for freedom by the people.

Hillary Clinton, America’s highest-ranking diplomat, appears to have grasped the situation correctly. With a frankness the State Department doves weren’t used to, she went before Congress to make a case for no-fly zones — perhaps because of a guilty conscience over 17 years of inaction; her husband was president at the time of the Rwanda massacres. Today, he regrets his political and military inaction as the biggest mistake of his presidency.

Alone and without international support, the United States certainly won’t put its military on the march. On the one hand, that would be playing into Gadhafi’s hands when he argues that the rebels are being egged on by his archenemy. On the other hand, the recent U.S. incursions into the Arab world could strengthen Islamic fundamentalists.

If, due to its antiquated structure, the United Nations Security Council is incapable of voting to intervene in Libya, then Europe has to pull itself together and stand at America’s side against a mass murderer. By being proactive in Libya, the failures of the Yugoslavian War, in which the U.S. showed initiative while Europe discussed the genocide taking place on its doorstep, could be rectified.

Bill Clinton said he has sleepless nights when he thinks about Rwanda. Now the Western leaders have the chance to make sure their future sleep is undisturbed.