In late March of 2011, a massacre was averted—not just any ordinary massacre, mind you. For had Qaddafi and his forces managed to crush the Libyan rebellion in what was then its stronghold, Benghazi, the aftershocks would have reverberated well beyond eastern Libya. As Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch wrote, “Qaddafi’s victory—alongside Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s fall—would have signaled to other authoritarian governments from Syria to Saudi Arabia to China that
if you negotiate with protesters you lose, but if you kill them you win.”It may be that some of the knee-jerk opposition to US involvement in Libya—that is, the kind that does not take into account the momentum from the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, or the support for NATO action by the Arab League and the United Nations—is an epiphenomenon of the left’s version of Obama Derangement Syndrome.
In the U.S., ODS is especially pronounced among the “netroots,” where “progressive” bloggers vie to outdo each other in the agonies of their disappointment in and/or the virulence of their disdain for Obama’s presidency. (Last I looked, they had moved on from determining that Obama is worse than Bush, and had begun deliberations as to whether he is the worst president in U.S. history—though one of the more restrained frontpagers at FireDogLake did say, in July 2011, “I’m not ready to crown Barack Obama the Worst President Ever just yet.”)
What I was newly struck by—in a way that challenged even my usual cynicism about human affairs—was the frequency and the volume of dead-ender sentiments that began popping up in almost every liberal/progressive blog’s comment threads. It was as if everyone and her brother already knew what to say, needing only to download the appropriate template for the occasion: Western relations with Qaddafi had warmed since 2003, so the attack was pure hypocrisy; this is all about oil; Qaddafi was just one of the monsters we created and supported from the beginning; the rebels are seeded with agents of the CIA; this is all about oil; the attack was planned long in advance, and merely wanted an opportune moment; Obama is Bush’s third term; NATO’s motives are not 99 and 44/100 percent pure; the rebels are thugs and theocrats, like the Kosovo Liberation Army before them; the rebels’ celebrations are just like those of post-Saddam Iraq; if the U.S. were really concerned about Libya then why isn’t it intervening in Bahrain and Syria and Saudi Arabia (though we reserve the right to protest if and when it does); and, once more for the old folks at home, this is all about oil.
For his dogged attempts to talk about Libya sensibly and evenhandedly, (Juan) Cole earned the admiration of much of the blogosphere, which, on matters of foreign policy, does not offer much that can be called informed comment. And he earned himself the usual sobriquets from the usual suspects for the usual reasons, which can be summed up reasonably well by the critics who stopped by his blog to tell him that he is an agent of the Empire. No doubt Professor Cole already knew that, although his secret-imperial-agent status did not prevent conservatives from organizing to deny him an offer from Yale University on the grounds that he was unacceptably critical of Israel. The ways of the Empire are mysterious.
http://www.thepointmag.com/2011/politics/libya-and-the-left
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