IF “FREEDOM” is simply the absence of tyranny and oppression, then in the last week it has taken great, heartwarming strides forward. Libya’s slowly-evolving Arab Spring has at last borne fruit and given the lie to pessimists all too quick to say the region’s season of revolution had passed. On the contrary, reports suggest, the momentous events in Tripoli are also rekindling movements in places such as Syria and Yemen where they may have been flagging.
The idea that the region’s tyrants would simply drop like rotten fruit from a tree one after another was never more than wishful thinking. Winston Churchill’s characterisation of the defeat of Rommel in the deserts of North Africa is perhaps apt: we are not at the beginning of the end of the Arab Spring “but perhaps the end of the beginning”.
Ben Ali of Tunisia is gone. Egypt’s Mubarak, gone. Gadafy, gone. Saleh in Yemen, teetering. Syria’s Assad, in mortal danger. Abdullah of Jordan remains in trouble. Bahrain’s monarchy survives only by force. Iran’s protests may be in abeyance, cowed by mass jailings, but its leaders are increasingly openly at each others’ throats. Even Israel’s young are on the streets aping the protesters of Athens and Madrid.
If “freedom” is, however, more than the absence of fear, if it instead means the real embedding of democratic values and institutions, peace and the rule of law, then there is still much more to be done. We are not at a “mission accomplished” moment yet; the political and economic challenges of reconstruction and reconciliation faced by the National Transitional Council are huge.
Yet, for good or ill, whatever Libyans make of their new freedom, assisted, it is to be hoped, by a generous and non-prescriptive international community, the UN-mandated Nato air support that was crucial to their success has been vindicated.
As former US State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter argues tellingly: “Imagine the UN did not authorise the use of force in Libya. Nato did nothing. Col Muammar Gadafy overran Benghazi . . . the Libyan opposition was reduced to sporadic uprisings, quickly crushed. The regimes in Yemen and Syria took note, and put down their own uprisings with great vigour. The West let brutality and oppression triumph again in the Middle East.”
The case for that mandate was based formally on the UN doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect” civilians but the Nato campaign has been criticised for morphing into one with a “regime change” agenda. In truth, however, given the nature of Gadafy’s war against his own people, the protection of civilians could never be anything other than aid to the rebels and regime challenging.
That reality does nothing to undermine the primarily humanitarian nature and rationale of the mission. Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, moreover, regime change has not been engineered from outside or imported, but was the product of the courageous insurrection of the Libyan people. It was right and proper to assist them.