Military Action Would Be a Shot in the Foot

It’s just as well that United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said days ago that anyone who advises the White House to “send a big American land army” to troubled regions in the Middle East or Africa “should have his head examined.” Big or small, one should add, given the news that Washington decided to deploy air and naval forces stationed in the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf close to the Libyan coast. What’s more, Washington began to examine strategies with its NATO allies to speed up the end of Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s regime, which has already lost 80 percent of its territory, where its principal oil fields are located.

On Monday, while participating in a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that, “no option is off the table,” so as not to preclude an armed intervention in Libya. The U.N. meeting was convened to suspend Libya from the Human Rights Council and to open an investigation into the dictatorship’s violence against the population since the beginning of the uprising — in which, according to estimates, between 1,000 and 2,000 civilians have died. But she made a point of adding that none of the governments that she had been talking to place the military option “at the top of the list,” and that the purpose of the deployment of the American forces is to give eventual logistical support to humanitarian missions in Libya.

So be it. The use of foreign force against Gadhafi would throw away everything that the United States has won — without lifting a finger — in the battle over values, with the democratic windstorm traveling through the Arab world, seeding a political metamorphosis in the region that, who knows, may be comparable to the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. In no moment in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain and now Oman was the ritual hitherto inseparable from the demonstrations of the so-called Arab street, repeated — the burning of American flags. And, in all of those countries, the masses would have had reason to denounce Western support of the tyrannies against which they rose.

In Washington, it is rumored that the objective of the movement ordered by the government is, as it is said in Brazil, “to put pressure” on the Libyan regime, which has been struck since last weekend by a sequence of economic and military diplomatic sanctions that are now being broadened by the United Nations. One of the next steps could be the beginning of an investigation against Gadhafi in the International Criminal Court — created, ironically, against the will of the United States — for crimes against humanity. So the mobilization of North American armed resources in the area isn’t due to any of those reasons that would lead its author to “have his head examined,” as Secretary Robert Gates would say — precisely because an armed intervention would be all that the isolated Gadhafi needs to heroically hold on to power and, in defense of his proclaimed anti-imperialist revolution, infuse new spirit in his supporters and prove his litany that the West is inciting civil war in Libya to seize its oil.

The democracies already have too much to do for the Libyan people to be giving ammunition to the colonel. There is a great humanitarian crisis to be confronted, with legions of refugees converging on the country’s borders with Tunisia and Egypt. And, if it’s about supporting Libyan combatants for democracy, the huge disembarkation of food, medical supplies and field hospitals in ports like Benghazi and Tobruk is incomparably better than flashing the revolver. Arms should be sent only at the request of a provisional government in a freed Libya — which still has not been formed, and, once formed, would need to be recognized by the international community. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 swept the option of unilateral actions off the table. The aid to end the maddened Moammar (“my people love me”) Gadhafi’s tyranny demands U.N. backing and the consent of the Arab League and the African Union. The alternative would be a shot in the foot.