By Patricia H. Kushlis
In the March 21 issue of Newsweek, Niall Ferguson opined that although the best revolutions may be organic they usually have help from outside. He rightly included French assistance to the Americans in the Revolutionary War against the British in 1789.
Ferguson makes an excellent point about the importance of foreign support – military, economic and otherwise - to anti-government rebels in tipping the balance in civil wars but then he strangely continues by suggesting that the most effective way to deal with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi could be to get him to sign onto an apparently updated worldwide version of the 1975 Helsinki Accords because the Accords had such a galvanizing effect on anti-Communists just a decade or so after the document had been signed that they rose up and evicted entrenched Communist rulers from East Berlin to Vladivostok through non-violent people-power revolutions.
A little research suggests, however, that Ferguson’s reference was only to Article VII of this Cold War era document that also calls for the inviolability of the territory of the countries that signed it.
Gaddafi and Gorbachev not cut from the same cloth
There’s one thing, however, about dealing with an ailing Brezhnev and a Soviet Union that endorsed those controversial accords but ignored the dictates Ferguson quotes or a Gorbachev educated in the country’s best law school who more or less did versus a crazed, poorly educated North African dictator who has gone out of his way to terrorize, antagonize and humiliate people from the Gulf States to North America throughout four decades of his rule turning them into enemies to aggrandize himself and his family.
As the civil war in Libya grinds on and grizzly footage from the battle for the port city of Misurata continues to flash across our television screens, I have to wonder how in touch with reality Ferguson is. It’s not that I don’t think it preferable for the world to live by an updated version of the Helsinki Accords and the UN Declaration of Human Rights but I’ve seen too much of Gaddafi’s actions to think that he will abide by such civilized declarations.
Gaddafi's Alternative Universe: How Not to Win Foreign Friends
Gaddafi inhabits a different world and plays by different rules. Neither is he guided by the tenets of Islam. If he were, neither the United Arab Emirates nor Qatar would be supporting the anti-Gaddafi rebels and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan would not, finally, be publicly telling Gaddafi that it is time for him to leave.
US President Reagan did not take the killing of US soldiers in that German night club lightly and the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986 – including that of Gaddafi’s presidential palace - was Reagan’s limited response. It killed Gaddafi’s adopted daughter but not him. He had been tipped off shortly beforehand apparently by Italian politician Bettino Craxi. That bombing raid temporarily stopped Gaddafi from further attacks on Americans and US installations – until that is, Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988.
The French Connection
The 1989 bombing of the French airliner (UTA 772) in Africa was also directly linked to Gaddafi and his opposition to French support for Chad, an act which effectively blocked Gaddafi’s claims to a contested strip of Chad and his reach into Central Africa.
No one should be surprised, therefore, that the French have taken a lead in NATO’s support for the Libyan rebels, expelled Libya’s diplomats from Paris and recognized the rebel government as the legitimate one for the country. The French government, obviously, hadn’t forgotten UTA 772.
No Friends in the Arab World
Gaddafi is also rumored to be behind the attempted murder of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah in 2004 when he was crown prince. Gaddafi’s bizarre behavior at international gatherings and in particular at the Arab Summit meeting in Doha, Qatar in 2009 infuriated not just the Saudis but also the Qataris who have taken to selling rebel controlled Libyan oil on the world market and remitting the profits to the rebel government.
I was a member of the US delegation to the 1992 Helsinki Review Conference of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the first post-Cold War CSCE Review Conference and the first large CSCE Conference held in Helsinki since the Accords were signed in 1975. I have great respect for that document. The Helsinki Accords did not, however, gain real traction until Gorbachev’s time after he was handed an unsustainable and bankrupt nation ruled by a failed ideology. Even then the Baltic independence leaders I talked with at the time feared for their own safety and were far from sure of the outcome of their actions.
Let’s face it, Gaddafi is not Gorbachev. Libya is not the Soviet Union or most countries of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, as Maureen Dowd wrote in Sunday’s New York Times: “Only fools and knaves would argue that we could fight Al Qaeda’s violence non-violently.”
Gaddafi, beware.