“This is sin”, said a bloodied Muammar Gaddafi to his tormenters in a last moment of humiliation. “Do you know right from wrong?” After NATO airstrikes destroyed his convoy and forced him to flee on foot through Sirte, Libya’s deposed leader was seized from a drainage ditch. Footage off of a captor’s cell phone shows a howling rebel mob parading him along the dusty city blocks of his birthplace. Beaten, pistol-whipped and sodomized with a knife, Gaddafi was then summarily executed with a gunshot to the temple. His body was displayed as a trophy of war, and his secrets were effectively buried, never to be revealed at another farcical international tribunal in The Hague.

U.S. policymakers weren’t likely planning on the mass release of a Gaddafi snuff film. In their jubilation and braggadocio, the Libyan “freedom-fighters” ruined the enjoyment of a private viewing session available only to a chosen few within the Beltway. And so an eccentric dictator with a terrorist past and delusions of pan-African grandeur evoked unforced human sympathy as he suffered and died before a world audience. Colonel Gaddafi knew grave sin well; this was the man who ordered the passengers of Pan Am 103 blown out of the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. He had since come to terms with the West, paying restitution to the victims’ families and scrapping his nuclear weapons program in favor of restored diplomatic and commercial ties eighteen years later. Yet when Benghazi and the rest of Cyrenaica rose up against the regime in early 2011, Washington, London and Paris smelled blood in the water.

In some ways, I’m glad that Colonel Gaddafi has (apparently, at least) been captured and killed in his hometown of Sirte by the barbaric hordes that he had kept at bay for so long. I don’t say this because I have much hope for the democratic dawn in Libya. Indeed, my guess is that one of two outcomes are most likely under the new leadership:

1) The rebels become Washington’s puppets, who make sure that the oil flows (and gets denominated in U.S. dollars), enrich themselves through foreign aid, hold onto power by their fingernails, and become justly reviled by their people;

2) The rebels begin slitting each others' throats, and the country swiftly descends into failed-state status.

Instead, I am somewhat gladdened by the reported outcome because there is a certain heroism to Gaddafi’s demise, which would have been lost were he to live out his life in secluded exile. We can now remember Gaddafi in happier times, when he cut the figure of a dashing dictator.

But what does it all mean? Here are three perspectives:

In past blog postings for AltRight, I have discussed the phenomenon of what I call “totalitarian humanism,” a particular worldview that I regard as being at the heart of the most serious political and cultural problems currently facing the modern West. Specifically, I consider totalitarian humanism to be an intellectual and ideological movement among contemporary Western elites that serves as a replacement for older worldviews such as Christianity, nationalism, cultural traditionalism, Eurocentrism, or even Marxism. Such features of modern life as political correctness and victimology serve as a representation of the totalitarian humanist approach to domestic policy. The present war against the Libyan state provides an illustration of what the totalitarian humanist approach to foreign policy and international relations involves.

The regime of Colonel Qaddafi poses no conceivable threat to Western nations. Allegations of Qaddafi’s insanity not withstanding, his substantive efforts over the past two decades to ease tensions between Libya and the West have shown his capabilities for behaving as a rational actor and practicing realpolitik. As recently as August of 2009, Qaddafi was described by David Blair of the Daily Telegraph as having “gone from being the epitome of revolutionary chic to an eccentric statesman with entirely benign relations with the West.” These benign relations ended with the outbreak of the present civil war between Qaddafi and opponents of his regime. Richard Spencer has pointed out the nearly identical parallels between Western intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and the current intervention in Libya. Both interventions serve as prototypes for the vision for the world that our contemporary elites possess. An interesting discussion that aired earlier today on ABC’s This Week cuts to the chase of the matter. Former Congresswoman Jane Harman, now of the aptly named Woodrow Wilson Center, monster neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, and Wilson Center scholar Robin Wright provided rationales for the intervention that involved no consideration whatsoever of national interests, geopolitical questions, or legitimate defensive concerns. Essentially, their rationales amount to little more than “Qadaffi runs an illiberal regime.”

Libya under Qadaffi represents everything Western elites despise: a conservative, religious, nationalistic, traditional, patriarchal, tribal society that has resisted the penetration of its own culture by the norms of Western, secular, liberal, humanism and globalism. According to the religion of Western elites, Qaddafi is an infidel and must be punished or destroyed. The intervention in Libya is essentially about spreading the Jacobin revolution to the Middle East (a plausible argument of a comparable nature could be made concerning the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq). The role of the United Nations and the participation of certain usually rather pacific European nations in the assault on Libya is rather telling. The vision of the elites is one where a global super-state maintains an international army whose purpose is the eradication of political institutions and cultural values that fail to conform to the standards of totalitarian humanism. Kosovo and Libya are essentially pilot programs for this future vision.

I must confess that I have a half-written blog entry on how the Obama administration has, in essence, given up on the American Empire. Due to fiscal constraints, its own incompetence, and its lack of self-assurance in the wake of Iraq and rising anti-Americanism, the Democratic power elite (along with allies like Robert Gibbs) simply doesn’t have the will to act. It was thus unwilling to save Israel’s ally Hosni Mubarek and has been dragging its feet instituting a no-fly zone over Libya. Actively toppling the Gaddafi regime would be out of the question.

I further argued that this inaction will be opposed and demeaned by the mainstream Republican presidential contenders (with the possible exception of Haley Barbour), who will shriek about how Obama is “appeasing dictators.” (On this front, see the Politico’s recent piece “The Return of the Neocons.”)

I was to conclude that for those of us who think the American Empire is a liability for both the American people and the West in general, the Democrats‘ dilly-dallying is actually preferable to the Republicans’ lunatic war-mongering.

Well, needless to say, my half-written blog has been overtaken by events, and my sense that the Democrats are giving up on empire now seems like wishful thinking.

Instead, what we are experiencing today in Libya is a situation that, in many ways, resembles the last time a Democratic president engaged in major military action overseas.  It’s Kosovo all over again:

• The UN offers its imprimatur;
• NATO provides the muscle;
• The U.S. declares war on a small national regime with no clear objectives or exit-strategy;
• A statesman (Milošević/Gadaffi), whom Washington had dealt with civilly only months before, is depicted as a Hitlerian menace (and the dutiful media eats it up);
• The U.S. takes sides in a civil war and uses its air and missile power on behalf of a group (the KLA/Libyan rebels) that is—at best—highly dubious.

Libya might actually turn out far worse than Kosovo in that it will eventuate in a failed state and a mass Muslim refugee flow into Europe.

Daniel Larison is quite good on these matters:

The similarities with Kosovo are eerie, and that is a very bad sign for the people living in eastern Libya. Perhaps the only thing worse than intervening in a civil war in which the U.S. and our allies have nothing at stake is to intervene and then opt for those tactics that will do just enough to commit us to the fight without protecting the people our forces are supposed to be protecting. Quite apart from the outrageous harm done to both Albanian and Serb civilians in the prosecution of the air campaign, the war in Kosovo facilitated and caused the mass refugee exodus from Kosovo that it was officially trying to avert. The U.S. and our allies weren’t going to be responsible for what happened to the people in eastern Libya, but our governments have now assumed responsibility for them.

Whatever you want to say about them, the ’99 House Republicans were steadfastly against Clinton’s Kosovo adventure; Gov. George W. Bush (in another life) actually scolded Al Gore for engaging in “nation-building.” After the entire mainstream GOP went “all in” for Iraq, they now have nothing to run on.

Is this not reason enough for the West to prop up the faltering regime of Muammar Gaddafi (or "Khadafy" or "Qaddfi" or what have you)?

Libyan despot Moammer Khadafy warns West: If I go down, illegal African immigrants will swarm Europe

BY Corky Siemaszko

Daily News

March 7th 2011

 

Libyan leader Moammer Khadafy played the race card Monday, warning Europe that if he falls they will be deluged by hordes of illegal African immigrants.

"There are millions of blacks who could come to the Mediterranean to cross to France and Italy, and Libya plays a role in security in the Mediterranean," he told the France 24 television station.

"Libya may become the Somalia of North Africa, of the Mediterranean," Khadafy's son, Seif, added. "You will see the pirates in Sicily, in Crete, in Lampedusa. You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door."

Of course, Gadaffi is simply trying to hold onto power (and maybe secure some more foreign aid in the process.) But one shouldn't forget that the colorful Colonel has been quite honest and perceptive about the danger his own people pose to Europe and America. And who would know better than him?  

I recognize that this is a cry in the wilderness, but—for once!—could Western foreign-policy makers put aside their "democracy" fetish and actually pursue what is best for us? Gadaffi and his sons are people we can deal with. The stability of his dictatorship is infinitely more attractive than the refugee crisis that would almost certainly ensue were the Libyan regime to disintegrate.

Now that I think of it, I probably shouldn't even be writing about the refugee possibility, as most Western bureacrats would see a Camp of the Saints scenario as positively attractive and a justification for seeking Gadaffi's overthrow. We shouldn't give them any ideas...