Will Libya Be the First War of the Obama Era?

The first war of the Obama era began Saturday when a French jet attacked a military vehicle on Libyan territory. Paris, London and Washington have, of course, the authorization from the U.N. Security Council. However, two of the three permanent members of the Security Council, Moscow and Beijing, abstained. The vote was 10 to zero, with five abstentions. The countries and votes in this Security Council decision allow for eloquent arguments, as we will see below.

The dictator Moammar Gadhafi experienced the biggest defeat because no one voted against the resolution. Not even Brazil. London, Paris and Washington, in order to succeed in approving the resolution, had to achieve more than nine votes from the 15-member council by convincing “militarily powerful” nations such as Portugal and South Africa.

The running commentary in the United States is that three women convinced Barack Obama to agree to the interventionist stance that is galvanizing the French government. The women include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (her husband Bill Clinton intervened in Yugoslavia to stop the massacres of Muslims in the heart of Europe and was successful); Samantha Power, Obama’s international adviser and author of a book that tells how the United States omitted themselves from the massacres in Africa in the ’90s, when 2 million people were killed in ethnic civil war; and Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

Strangely, despite Gadhafi being a well-known criminal, there are no secret service documents, no evidence, no YouTube videos showing that there are massacres taking place and much less a genocide happening in Libya. The risk exists.

Libya, located between Egypt and Tunisia — that is, between two nations that have undergone sudden revolutions in this internet wave, in this avalanche of protests or cries for freedom — is now a country that can suffer an intervention with jets from even the United Arab Emirates (the small dictatorship that voted in favor of the U.N. resolution, but also the small country that intervened militarily some days ago in Bahrain, its neighbor in the Persian Gulf) because of another unfolding revolution in this wave of revolts occurring in this digital age. Because of this, Ambassador Susan Rice even criticized the Emirates, but now the country is an example, or exemplar.

Rousseff’s Brazil abstained and gave a reasonable explanation: U.N. Resolution 1973 has a vague concept. It requires that Gadhafi stop attacking innocent civilians, but without restricting the intervention to something less than the simple implementation of a no-fly zone and containment of aircraft and missiles, given any advances or disobedience from the Libyan dictator. The resolution also permits that the intervention evolve into a broad international invasion.

The aides, or rather, Obama’s aides, ensure that the United States will not be sending ground troops under any circumstance. The likely hypothesis is that the they will arm the rebels of Benghazi as soon as the dust settles from these last few days.

The 8 million barrels of oil once produced daily by Libya will return and will continue to serve as collateral for the United States and Europe. While a beleaguered Gadhafi calls the rebels followers of al-Qaida and bin Laden, the reality is that in the Obama era, this presidential winner of the Nobel Peace prize faces extremely difficult challenges: to revive the American economy, which is facing unemployment and a loss of capacity to compete at the global level, and to avoid repeating the Bush era mistake of starting a war. Bush decided interventions and wars unilaterally without giving any heed to the U.N.

The Americans are angry for having gotten involved in Iraq and Afghanistan. So an intervention with the backing of the U.N. seems to be a frigid compromise from Obama, who has now only a minority in the House and Senate. Even if the conservative hawks were not the majority in Congress, even if there were not three women warriors around him, Obama would continue making it clear, as before and now, that nobody in America wants unilateral action anymore. Today a battle begins to be won by the U.N. The United States is being low profile and acting discreetly. Obama is in Brazil, far from President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is the general this time around; and Hillary, Obama’s secretary of state, is in Paris saying that Washington is supporting an international effort, but not even hypothetically accepting to land American ground troops in Libya.

With so much international support, it is likely that Gadhafi will be killed before a possible rapid advance of the revolution or an outbreak of civil war. The death of the dictator will be good for the world, a world that always becomes less sad when a society strengthens its freedom.

Therefore, regardless of Libya’s destiny and the nuclear crisis in Japan, Islamic dictatorships — be it in Iran, Saudi Arabia or many other places — have their hairs on end at the start of 2011. Today they are all frightened by the “threat of democracy” in this digital age, in the wake of cascades of information and revolts: a real tsunami of avid dreams for freedom and respect for human rights.