Gadhafi went out this morning in the most predictable way possible in his neighborhood - he was whacked by his own people. Folks keep telling me that the "Arab Spring" is changing the game, but it's living up to its history in deposing leaders. And you know what? That's the way it should be!
The popular view out there is that Gadhafi was one of history's great monsters, which is all the proof you need that the popular view is made almost entirely of stupid.
Ole Mo' was, for the most part, a ridiculous little man - a caricature of what a great dictator is supposed to be. By his final years, he even started looking ridiculous, so addled by plastic surgery and megalomania that he looked like Muhammad Ali and dressed like Michael Jackson. Yes, he would blow up discos and airliners full of innocent people from time to time, but he was largely a joke. A hilarious joke, to be sure, but a joke, nonetheless. Any guy who surrounds himself with chick bodyguards usually is.
And jokes were a useful resource to American foreign policy during the Reagan years, and even today. Libya was never a major player in international terrorism. But the Soviet Union and Iran were. And you know what they were dished out by the White House? The Soviets got state dinners and treaties, while Tehran got fairly advanced weaponry and a personally autographed bible from the president of the United States. Shit, Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein were Ronald Reagan's best friends, until they weren't.
Libya, being a piss-ant little country that most Americans can't find on a map and led by a silly cartoon character in grandiose costumes, got bombed. Moammar Gadhafi was demonized because he was easy to demonize. And he was even easier to fucking bomb.
That's still true today, and it says a whole lot about the much ballyhooed War on Terror than pretty much anyone wants to admit. Iran killed more Americans in the 80's than Gadhafi did, but Iran could fight back and had oil, so Libya got the tits blown off of it. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia provide the lion's share of money, muscle and ideology to the modern jihadi movement, but Afghanistan and Iraq get blown into even bigger shitholes than they already were.
That's not to say that I'm a proponent of attacking Iran, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Those motherfuckers are rich, well-armed, will to fight and generally crazy. An America that's used to fighting idiots like Moammar Gadhaffi and Saddam Hussein isn't anywhere near ready to punch in the weight division of International Terror's real badasses. Iraq and Afghanistan have broken the United States military, maybe past the point of no return, and the shit only got serious in both places after the original villains were tossed out on their asses. Given that very real history, what do you suppose an attack on Pakistan or Iran would bring?
The correct geostrategic answer is that no one wants to find out, other than grotesquely unserious Tea Party fucks and Fox News blowhards.
Lookee, I'm as glad as the next asshole that Gadhaffi's finally croaked. The man was a monster to live under. However, that hasn't historically been the metric under which leaders are deposed with foreign support. You know how I know that? Because Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile and a long, long list of other countries were America's favoured dance parters when they were headed by far more monstrous folks that Boy Mo was on his worst fucking day.Pinochet killed political opponents in downtown D.C, and that didn't stop him from being feted by at least three successive presidents.
The scary thing is that the world's real monsters know that as well as I do. And they also know another important piece of recent history that escapes most Americans. That is that taking out a comic book villian, more often than not, creates a vacuum that real villains quickly fill. That's precisely what happened in Afghanistan, where demonic communism was banished by psychopathic militant Islam. Even in the best case scenario, you get Nicaragua, where Daniel Ortega was eventually replaced with ... Daniel Ortega.
Let's get real for a second, shall we? Without NATO air support, Libya's "freedom fighters" would have accidentally killed more of one another than Gadhafi would've, which is why NATO air support was given in the first fucking place. Sure, President Obama said otherwise, but President Obama was consciously lying. He does that sometimes.
As the great Dan Carlin has often said, "When you depose Mossedegh to bring back the Shah, you get Khomeini." The fact is that we don't know the first goddamned thing about the leaders of "democratic Libya." But that isn't stopping us bringing out our political blowjob machines to welcome them to power. And if they turn out to be monsters, by Christ, they're gonna be our monsters. And I hope we don't forget that after we stop congratualting ourselves.
Friedrich Nietzche didn't live in the Oprah-friendly 12-step world of today. If he did, he famous quote
| "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." would read more like "Whoever dutifully avoids fighting real monsters should see to it that in the process he does not enable greater monsters where only minor ones exist today." You neer know if the streetcorner corner is shooting up to supress the urge to rape kids. And where I come from, it's the better part of wisdom not to find out. |
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