The Arab world’s handling of the intervention in Libya has amounted to another disgrace for a region where the people are finally rising up against their leaders’ seemingly boundless capacity for ineptitude.
The Arab League and the GCC voted their clear support for imposing a no-fly zone over Libya; correctly, they sought U.N. Security Council blessing for the mission. However, when it came time to scramble the aircraft and commence the operation, the Arab nations were reduced to their traditional posture of immobility as the U.S., U.K. and France coordinated and carried out the implementation of Resolution 1973.
To be sure, Qatar is contributing a whopping four jets to the effort – the planes, though, have yet to join in with the mission, which late Monday appeared mostly finished, at least as far as securing the no-fly zone and halting Gadhafi’s violence against Libya’s citizenry. The UAE, meanwhile, also pledged material support, but the country’s foreign minister has yet to let the world know just what one oil-rich Arab nation will do for the benefit of another one.
If the issue was so clear to the various Arab heads of state that Gadhafi had to be stopped, then why didn’t they do anything about it themselves? If such a legitimate cause for military intervention arose in the Arab world, why couldn’t the Arab nations manage any significant part of that intervention on their own?
Alas, the military capabilities of Arab states represent just one more item on the list of failures of the Arab world’s largely tyrannical and corrupt leaders. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted in the Middle East to fashion armies that can charitably be called impotent.
Of course, these staggering sums misspent on fashioning feeble armed forces could have been put to much better use in countries which still suffer from poverty, low-quality education and inadequate infrastructure.
The Arab embarrassment in the matter, however, does not end with mere inaction. The Western warplanes had barely landed after their first sorties when Arab League chief Amr Moussa began criticizing the strikes. Moussa, of course, was not alone. Arab disunity hardly counts as news; the hypocrisy of the backtracking was the truly nauseating part.
The Arab world bleats incessantly about U.S. and Western colonialism and imperialism; but when Arab leaders needed help in an emergency, they went begging to the West. Once the help came, many reverted to accepting the unproven view of a bloodthirsty mass murderer – Gadhafi – that civilians were killed.
Arab bosses have obviously not yet learned that if action is necessary and justified, then they should act. If they ask others to act on their behalf, then those actors become their partners, and the consequences of action are their responsibility, too.
