It’s Time to Stop NATO Action in Libya

The West’s interference, which began with NATO’s military attack on Libya, increasingly points in an uncertain direction. Efforts to end the regime of Moammar Gadhafi as soon as possible with a blitz attack failed. Up to this second Gadhafi’s reign still exists, and is ferociously and continuously quelling the opposition movement. In the meantime, his status as an international fugitive following the issuance of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court at the Hague in the Netherlands will apparently not solve the problems.

It cannot be denied that Gadhafi’s brutality in quelling the opposition is against principles of humanism. However, the military intervention of NATO — chiefly the United States, France and Britain — has also proved not to be the right course of action. The Arab League, which supported the UN resolution for a “no-fly zone” over Libya, diverted the attention of the world from the Arab peninsula to North Africa. While the world was fixated on Libya, the revolution in Bahrain was almost unnoticed.

The NATO military intervention even makes a repetition of the tragedies in Iraq and Afghanistan possible. The air attacks increasingly heighten the atmosphere of war between the two camps — that is, the regime in power and the opposition — while civilian activities are repressed. Mass displacement occurs as a result of the humanitarian disaster. Humanitarian interventions are also inhibited, due to the emergence of a battlefield between NATO, Gadhafi and the opposing militants. The climax of war, no matter what form it takes, is bound to be bad for the future of Libya. That is what distinguishes Libya from Egypt and Tunisia, the places where the people’s revolutions began reverberating and resulted in successful regime changes. There remains a lot of work to do post-revolution to erect pillars of democracy, which is another problem entirely that will still take months for Egypt and Tunisia. In Libya, it might be difficult for the international community to allow the slaughter of civilians to take place. However, this military intervention has changed the path of the struggle for a people’s democracy.

What’s happening now is a revolution versus a counter-revolution. The results can be predicted: Whoever “wins” this conflict will not be different from when Colonel Moammar Gadhafi emerged as the central leadership after winning the war against the regime in power in 1969.

It is not the seeds of democracy being sown, but rather candidates for tyranny that are being prepared on the battlefield. It is increasingly clear that NATO and the West in general must reformulate their approach to intervention, because the military option leads to a dead end.

Surviving the impasse with increasingly aggressive attacks could drag Libya into “Iraq Volume II.” The decision by the International Criminal Court to establish Gadhafi as an international fugitive should be used as a breakthrough maneuver to restart diplomatic intervention. The process to completely end military action must begin and work must then be handed over to diplomacy. The main goal is the demilitarization of the the political struggle in Libya, so that the democratic process does not take place under the barrel of a gun.