The Value of the Question

If we ignore the specific context of the Russian leadership tandem, we will discover nothing unusual about the contradictions between Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev on the situation in Libya. In many countries, including the U.S., there has been a lively discussion in the last weeks on whether it is worth interfering in the Libyan civil war, and, if the answer is “yes,” on what conditions to do so.

It was none other than U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who publicly expounded his arguments on why military interference in the Libyan conflict was undesirable for the U.S. True, the head of the Pentagon did so before the corresponding decision was made.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 was mainly adopted for political expediency. The reason for military interference was not, of course, Libyan oil, as many seem to think, but the forthcoming elections in a number of countries that supported the intervention. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy, having “slept through” the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and even having been accused of having ties with Arab autocrats, is losing his popularity.

In light of the elections coming up in 2012, he needed to score political points from Libya. The U.S., if it had not been a democracy, probably would not interfere in Libya. In reality, however, Barack Obama just could not afford to stay neutral on the threshold of a bloodbath in Benghazi — just 20 months before “the first Tuesday after the first Monday” in November (American presidential elections are traditionally held on this day).

President Medvedev defended the text of the U.N. resolution in vain — as Moscow was neither an author nor an initiator of this document. Obviously, the resolution cannot be implemented without exposing the lives of innocent people to danger, and Moscow could not but realize this.

Instead, Dmitry Medvedev should have explained why the decision to abstain from voting and to allow the resolution to pass was dictated by sober judgment and care for the national interests of the Russian Federation. Such an explanation would sound cynical, but it would be perceived as a sign of self-confidence.

Meanwhile, the war in Libya is not the first “humanitarian intervention” to be undertaken. In the increasingly shrinking world we are living in, there is no question regarding whether we should react or not to mass repression in other countries.

A genocide, ethnic purges or massacres are as intolerable as military aggression. The question is how to react. What should be the scale of sanctions and against what actions? One more question follows: Who is the investigator and prosecutor, who is the judge and who is the executor?

Thus Libya must provide a spur not to a dispute between Putin and Medvedev, but to the question of how to act better when the next internal conflict awakens the international conscience.