Waiting for the man

April is the cruelest month. But March had    its share of cruelty for the West, too. Ten years after the attack    on the Twin Towers in    NewYork, twenty-two    after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, just three since the    economic crash, we still have not learned how to walk    the razor’s edge between choice and necessity. Faced now with the war in Libya and the fear of nuclear catastrophe    in Japan, it is clear that we live in a world of    wavering in the face of threats, bereft of leadership. It might not be the worst of all possible worlds.

But the best of possible worlds is only one in which we come    to terms with circumstances, no matter how harsh – political and existential circumstances that are the basis    of the daily dilemma between security and guilelessness. What’s at stake is the capacity to govern, because it is    a matter of saving society, not the soul. The West is in disarray. In the aftershock of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami, the difficulty in coping with    the fear has been inversely proportionate to the capacity to manage the accident’s outcome. Heroic Japanese technicians descended into the reactor and flew above it in helicopters, defying the radioactive cloud, confronting    the disaster with stoic dignity. Meanwhile, Western leaders fell into a trance in front of ineluctable world    events. A huge accident caused by an unprecedented earthquake and tsunami seemed like an irreparable catastrophe, an “apocalypse” Günter Oettinger called it.

It was as if the opportunity to remedy the worst with    intelligence and technology had been dismissed out    of principle. It is certainly true that the management    of nuclear safety needs a credible and    transparent society capable of ensuring the    necessary controls, which is exactly what democracies are. But it is equally true that    if the ruling elite refuses to exercise a rational    moral suasion, democracies    lose their advantage – namely the    ability to know things for what they are and how to overcome panic collectively. The world    burns energy even when it reflects on security, when it    aspires to freedom and desires peace, not just when creating wealth. The price and risk of energy production are equal to the price and risk of our daily lives. But the West is in disarray. There is a patent eclipse of direction in both the US and Europe, even under the    deafening attempt to overcome the Libyan tragedy with    the art of muddling through with half-measures.

The protracted strategic oscillations in addressing the    Mediterranean crisis and, ultimately, what to do with    Gaddafi have deep-rooted causes. They arise primarily    from the confusion between shared leadership and    reluctant leadership. The US appeared caught in an embarrassing    Hamlet-like ambivalence. The much-touted multilateralism has proved itself tragicomic. After saying that Gaddafi must go, the US and Europe had no    choice but to launch military action when the Libyan leader was defiant. It is likely that they underestimated Gaddafi’s  resistance from the beginning, as if Barack    Obama and the European leaders had been swayed by  the hope for Gaddafi’s capitulation. As a result, once familiar  positions on the merits of military intervention  have been upended. We have focused only on the precondition of the legitimacy for an intervention: a resolution by the UN Security Council, the support of the Arab League. Judging by the hasty and chaotic start of operations, it seems that the difficulty of reaching an    agreement was considered more than actually enforcing it. Had no agreement been reached, it would have sheltered the US from having to take the initiative – but    also from the possibility of success.

The UN resolution, however, obviated Washington’s inclination toward isolationism after Iraq. But then, the announcement (subsequently taken back, thanks mainly to Italian insistence) of a handover to an ersatz NATO coalition sans    NATO flag – i.e. to France – unleashed chaos in the defeatist    pseudo-coalition.    The Wall Street Journal took the evanescent Obama    Doctrine to task. Polemics aside, is the president sure    that the US will be able to hold back and let the international coalition take charge if the effort falters? Nicolas Sarkozy’s jingoism, prey to the opinions of France’s intellos, will take care of the rest. The question    of who is in charge and to what purpose has exploded in very European fashion – reminiscent of the dispute during the Bosnian crisis. But in this case the matter  is    more serious. It is not just a question of divisions between a Germany still recalcitrant with respect to its role in Europe, or a France eager to reconstitute its erstwhile grandeur, or the inexperience of the young David Cameron.

By now the problem is no longer about having taken action too late. Rather, the most delicate point    is the substance of a resolution authorizing “all necessary measures  to protect civilians under threat,” which    opens the way to conflicting interpretations, as the second thoughts of Russia and the Arab League have    demonstrated, pushing the powers involved into a new  cul-de-sac. At the start of operations, President Obama,    with resolution in hand, insisted that the goal was not   regime change, while Sarkozy openly admitted that he “would go all the way.” But will we go all the way? If so, then the international Odyssey will    have tomuster up some sort of pragmatic    hypocrisy to make such a fragile coalition worthy of Ulysses’ adventure. The long-term goal, unspoken but well understood, is regime change, removing  Gaddafi’s government and replacing it with a new regime built around the rebels.

The situation today is where it was when the crisis began: with Colonel Gaddafi determined to fight, only direct intervention by the US and its allies – a coalition of the willing from the  Norway to Qatar – would have enabled the ragtag insurgents    to prevail. And if we don’t go all the way? In the absence of    strategic alternatives to an insidious Libyan stalemate feared by the Pentagon, we will have created a potential    disaster in the Mediterranean – a split Libya. On one    side there would be a ferocious enemy in the saddle, again wreaking havoc on the West; on the other, a neighboring government of rebels with indecipherable contours,    inclined to believe that the West is an unreliable friend and an innocuous enemy. The first principle for any coalition using force is    to ensure it succeeds. And succeed we must. In Iraq and Afghanistan the West has learned that unseating    a regime is relatively easy. The hard part    is promoting an acceptable alternative. The intelligence failure in Libya and across the    Maghreb has proved to be staggering. Western leaders know almost nothing    about the Libyan insurgents or about  what is happening on the ground. So how can they have any notion of what might follow?        

(tratto da Longitude)