Sunday, July 17, 2011

Martin Jay: ‘Qaddafi is our son of a bitch.’ Payback Day Number 1 began today. You bet

Alarabiya.net English

Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. (File Photo)
Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. (File Photo)
I remember the day like yesterday. April 27, 2004 was something a EU accredited journalist in Brussels simply couldn’t pass up. A free ticket to the latest farce in town, Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s visit to the European Commission President – fellow clown and near-buffoon Romano Prodi – complete with his entourage of dark blue cammo-esque clad Arabian bombshells, who, I must say would have looked absolutely breath-taking if the Belgian authorities had let them enter the country with the Baretta 9s strapped to their olive thighs.

Prodi and Qaddafi each had a podium and they took a few questions. But there was always a ridiculous rapture of laughter after each answer as many of us tried to catch the eyes of those girls, some of whom leant against the wall of the European Commission press conference hall, flanking the Colonel on each side, with one knee sticking out. The whole show was comical beyond belief but the serious messages which came with it was that the EU needed to bring Qaddafi in from the cold. After all, the Cold War had been over almost 19 years but this village tyrant was still giving the West the occasional ulcer. In fact Prodi – whom I interviewed twice in Brussels – was not the first to see that Qaddafi should be on the inside of the tent, pissing outward. Tony Blair visited the Libyan leader a month earlier and posed for that now iconic photo where he shakes hands with a man described as a “mad dog” by Ronald Reagan and whose country was still to remain on the US list of state sponsored terrorism until August 2005, where Washington officially changed tack with Qaddafi and followed the Europeans lead.
The European Union’s more recent intensive pro-active diplomatic efforts in the last few years though has been entirely driven by its loathing of Russian energy and how some countries in the EU are almost entirely dependent on Moscow for gas, for example. The turning point for Brussels – which has a slightly different take on the Libyan regime than the US – was when Russian tanks swept into Georgia in 2008. That single move of unprecedented defiance of Vladimir Putin and the classic quote which followed it after the EU condemned the move (more or less “go f---k yourself”) was a starter’s pistol to a new world order. It signaled that Russia could be much more of a problem for causing instability anywhere within the European continent or its periphery, and outlaw regimes which had high energy reserves were suddenly looked at very differently.

On a sweltering August day in 2008, the higher echelons of the European Commission made a lucid diplomatic decision, without even missing a heartbeat. The two chief pariah states in the region – both tarnished with terrorism charges - Libya and Algeria, which also both had enormous energy reserves would have their status re-jigged and would be brought closer to the fold. Never before had the old proverb, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer” rung truer.

And so just as that day in 2008 was a milestone, so too is today where the US and its main Allies when it comes to Libya (France and the UK) announce that the game is officially over for Qaddafi.

The implications of recognizing the ragtag opposition forces as a legitimate government are huge both politically and financially. And we’re not talking about how those rebel leaders spend the hundreds of millions of dollars locked up in Switzerland. That should cover some of the costs that countries like the UK coughed up to provide the “services” of pounding the incumbent leader’s troops on the ground (£250m to date according to press reports).

The real “payback” comes over the longer term. A new government will have to start from zero and will be a huge customer of the West when it comes firstly to military hardware (no prizes for guessing where those new Libyan leaders will be headed toward – US, France, Italy and Britain) for everything from aircraft, tanks, vehicles to even radio equipment. But then further down the line, there are the costs of nation building – institutions, training, consultancy, you name it. The EU will play a bog role here, for sure, but France and the UK will clean up on all military contracts over the next 20 years. There’s no way that London or Paris would let even one tank be sold to the new regime from Germany, mark my words.

That is the glaring gall of today’s meeting. It has nothing whatsoever to do with morals or human rights or even…insert two fingers in back of throat now “for peace in the region.” Today’s meeting in Istanbul could more or less be called an annual AGM for the major shareholders in a new company to be formed called “New Libya Inc.” So far those shareholders have provided seed capital to fund the expulsion of the previous management but now those same shareholders have told their CEO “there’s no more money left now. We can’t even afford the rockets. It’s time to get at their bank accounts in Geneva otherwise we will have pull our financing.”

The best way I can describe this situation is by comparing it to buying a fake painting. If you have ever paid scores of thousands for a genuine Francis Bacon only to be told by an expert that you’ve been conned into buying a copy knocked out by a St Martin’s student called Kevin you might understand it. The US, Italy, France and the UK have bought in to an idea that didn’t work. And like the fraudulent painting, the more you have shelled out, the harder it is to accept it cannot be anything but the real thing. And so those same governments just can’t face the reality that their money has been squandered on a military plan which didn’t work at all.

Qaddafi should have gone by now and we should be in filling our guts, profiteering. But we have overspent and have no real result. The obvious and most rational next step would be to admit we have made a mistake. But too much money has been spent, and journalists have an annoying habit of holding Western government to account for such folly. So it’s not an option to walk away. We’re in it and no matter how much it stinks, we have to go through to the end. Which means resorting to guesswork and fumbling about with the domestic policies of this new state, which I have decided to name as FRAUSUKIT after its main shareholders.

Hillary Clinton stood up today and said more or less (I’m paraphrasing) “We have a plan.” Oh yes ,we do. But if you thought the decision to bomb was loopy, then consider the decision to offset the West’s costs by lowering itself into the same cesspit as these so-called “rebels.”

Here’s the thing about Qaddafi. He was not mad. Like most African leaders he was at best deluded about his own image and status. But Qaddafi never took his eye off his own people for one second as he knew he has far from absolute support from them, in exactly the same was that Syria’s Assad knows that his country is divided over his legitimacy. It was always a put-down line and a convenient triumph of paternalism since Ronald Reagan called him the mad dog. Qaddafi was always a third axis in the cold war years as the Americans and British knew that fragile regimes in Africa could not be so easily bought off with Qaddafi in the background. As just one example, Qaddafi supported Charles Taylor in Liberia with arms and military training which helped him oust Samuel Doe, when Taylor could get neither financial backing from the US nor from Russia in 1989, the same year the Berlin wall was pulled down.

In this context we are reminded of that British MI6 memo to a counterpart in Washington during the early days of President Sese Mobuto of Zaire: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s OUR son of a bitch.”

The same can be said of Qaddafi. Despite the self styled allure of being a demented megalomaniac of an oil rich country which often funded rogue regimes around Africa which revered him (also the Rwandese patriotic Front (RPF), who he funded with military hardware in the brief civil war in 1990), Qaddafi for a long time was our pet madman. He was our son of a bitch, even more so of late when he realized the only way forward to politically legitimize his son’s inherited leadership was to befriend the West further. The decision to end his own WMD program in 2003 was genius.

But we don’t know who these young men are with their shiny new French assault rifles. All we know is they are killers and are determined to oust Qaddafi. No matter. They are, after all, our sons of bitches.

(Martin Jay is a veteran foreign correspondent who has worked extensively in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for most major international TV networks. He can be reached on makeminealargeoneincasa@yahoo.co.uk)

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