The New Neo

There is a famous quote from Lenin that shows a remarkable understanding of the West:

The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

Lenin was talking about the urge to do business. And of course he was wrong about who would hang whom first—at least, so far. But he was correct about the West’s lack of instinct for shrewd self-preservation, particularly today.

Case in point: Libya. When the uprising first spread to that country, I wondered in my very first post on the subject about the answer to a simple question: who are the rebels? It seemed not tangential to the issue, but basic.

If we as a country are going to put blood and treasure behind a movement in a civil war, we’d best know what that movement represents. In Libya, the fact that our government does not seem to know, and that pundits are answering the question with facts that are very, very troubling, is shocking (even though I thought my capacity to be shocked by what Obama does had been worn out).

In the Telegraph, one can find this description of al Qaeda influence in the movement. Andrew McCarthy takes up the topic in greater detail in National Review (please read the whole thing):

…[T]he rebels are a mixed bag. The strongest faction, particularly in ideological influence, is the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been in Libya for 70 years. There are also militant groups, such as Hasadi’s LIFG, that have ties to al-Qaeda, though they do not necessarily agree with bin Laden’s decision in the 1990s to take the violence global. In addition, there are Islamist organizations (such as the National Front for the Salvation of Libya) that claim to be non-violent and that oppose Qaddafi because they have come to regard him as non-Muslim, an apostate whose eccentric brand of Islam is seen as heterodox, and who persecutes his Muslim people. Moreover, there are undoubtedly al-Qaeda operatives in the mix, because al-Qaeda goes wherever the action is.

To describe these factions is not to discount the existence of some secular opposition to Qaddafi: some leftists who see an opportunity, and even some Western-influenced freedom fighters. Interventionists delude themselves, though, when they portray the latter as predominant, as the face of the rebels…

We’ve seen this show before. The rebels are not rebels ”” they are the Libyan mujahideen. Like the Afghan mujahideen, including those that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Libyan mujahideen comprise different groups. What overwhelmingly unites them, besides opposition to Qaddafi, is sharia. The Libyan mujahideen will exploit us but never befriend us. If they succeed, so be it. But we have no vital interest in orchestrating that success, even if it would mean a thug like Qaddafi finally gets his just deserts. If we empower them, we will eventually rue the day.

Mark Steyn has a more colorful way of putting it:

Now suddenly [Qaddafi’s] got to go ”“ in favor of “freedom-loving” “democrats” from Benghazi. That would be in eastern Libya ”“ which, according to West Point’s Counter Terrorism Center, has sent per capita the highest number of foreign jihadists to Iraq. Perhaps now that so many Libyan jihadists are in Iraq, the Libyans left in Libya are all Swedes in waiting. But perhaps not. If we lack, as we do in Afghanistan, the cultural confidence to wean those we liberate from their less-attractive pathologies, we might at least think twice before actively facilitating them.

Steyn also has some more general observations on the new American way of war. I happen to be in agreement; I believe that limited involvement and commitment are inherently problematic:

There are arguments to be made for being on the other side of the world for decades on end if you’re claiming it as sovereign territory and rebuilding it in your image, as the British did in India, Belize, Mauritius, the Solomon Islands, you name it. Likewise, there are arguments to be made for saying, sorry, we’re a constitutional republic, we don’t do empire. But there’s not a lot to be said for forswearing imperialism and even modest cultural assertiveness, and still spending 10 years getting shot up in Afghanistan helping to create, bankroll and protect a so-called justice system that puts a man on death row for converting to Christianity.

Libya, in that sense, is a classic post-nationalist, post-modern military intervention: As in Kosovo, we’re do-gooders in a land with no good guys.

I have never believed that the rebels in Libya (or for that matter, even the protesters in Egypt) are controlled or led by “good guys.” Oh, there may be some in that crowd, but they are probably in the minority (perhaps even the vast minority, for all I know). What’s more, however many they are, they are very likely to be overpowered in the chaos to come by the bad guys. Iran is the template, although the winners in Egypt and Libya will not look exactly like the ayatollahs of Iran.

But we will have sold them the rope with which they will attempt to hang us.