I caught Secretary of State Clinton’s statement just a bit ago and while I haven’t come across a transcript of it, the most telling part of it was where the Secretary of State asserted that the United States finds the recent Saudi intervention in Bahrain to suppress dissent acceptable. Clinton couched it in terms of the Bahraini government having the right to “call in” forces from the Gulf Cooperation Council, but the naked fact is that the United States has disinterested itself in the fate of Gulf movements aimed at change of government.
This seems to have been the price extracted for Arab support of the no-fly operation in Libya – an operation, it must be noted, which does not have any stated goal other than a nebulous “protect civilians”. Essentially, we have indicated that while we’re ok if the Libyan rebels, under the cover of no-fly, manage to oust Gaddafi…but we won’t do anything to advance that goal, nor will we offer any support to any other Arab/Moslem people who desire a radical change in government. We want stability.
Its the old, old game with them – what is there today must be perpetuated in to the future so that US policy is never called upon to change. If people have to suffer under brutal and corrupt dictatorships then that is the price they’ll have to pay because foreign policy “experts” figure that any actual armed conflict is worse than any state of peace, even if it is the peace of the grave (and, of course, as long as the shooting goes on behind prison walls; Gaddafi’s crime in State Department eyes is that he started massacring his people in public).
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are just doing as they are told – but it is in conformity with their basic world view. This world view asserts that stability is worth any price, that the UN (which, by the way, had Libya on its human rights panel) is necessary for any action, that the weakest and most corrupt member must call the tune, that American power is to be subservient to the goals of non-Western interests in general, and non-American interests in particular.
I do hope that under the no-fly regime that the Libyan people manage to oust their particular tyrant and that the successor regime is in some respects civilized (a highly doubtful prospect, but anything is possible). But I think this is the end of rebellion, for now. Further explosions are bound to happen as the corrupt regimes of the Moslem world continue…but for this day,and for this time, it looks like the whole world is gathering together to sustain the brutes currently in power.
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