Letter from the Colonel

The Times International Page ran a small story about Qaddafi writing a second personal note to Obama “urging him to stop NATO’s airstrikes” (“Qaddafi Writes to Obama, Urging End to Airstrikes,” NYT, 4/7/11). Times reporters David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim don’t specify whether the letter was an e- or s-mail, but they do describe the Libyan leader as resorting to outright flattery to get what he wants. “You will always remain our son whatever happened,” Qaddafi wrote. “We Endeavor and hope that you will gain victory in the new election campaigne.” As if Barack Obama were so weak willed and needy that he would buy this obvious bullshit! Addressing Obama as “Mr. Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oumama,” Qaddafi resorts to a bit of noblesse oblige, conferring a title on his newly appointed vassal. And then he goes the Polonius route, only it’s not “neither a borrower nor a lender be,” but “As you know too well democracy and building of civil society cannot be achieved by means of missiles and aircraft, or by backing armed members of Al-Qaeda in Benghazi.” When you think about it, it’s kind of sweet of Qaddafi to buddy up to Obama and treat him like the Libyan version of a good ole boy, but Qaddafi’s point about the fireworks is debatable. Firstly, Qaddafi forgets the words of H. Rap Brown, who prophetically said, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” Secondly, since Qaddafi himself has extensive experience as a tyrant, he should know that missiles and aircraft are not mutually exclusive of civil society. The missiles and aircraft are like the appetizer at a state dinner. First you have your shrimp cocktail (the missiles and aircraft), then you get your steak, pheasant or whatever main dish is tantamount to the building of civil society.      

Sacred Syntax

Admittedly there is a lot wrong in the world. The Republicans are doing everything they can to shut down the federal government while blaming the Democrats for their intractability (“Budget Stances Harden as Deadline Nears for Shutdown,” NYT, 4/5/11). Qaddafi is hard to eradicate and the ragtag Libyan rebels lack cohesion or identity. Efforts to cool the defective Fukushima Daiichi reactor threaten to sow the seeds of further problems (“U.S. Sees Array of New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant,” NYT, 4/5/11). Yemen is a mess, the Sudan is worse and Somalia is a breeding ground for pirates. But in a front-page story in Wednesday’s Times (“Ivory Coast Leader Swayed by Force as He Considers Exit,” NYT, 4/6/11), writers Adam Nossiter and Scott Sayare produced a first paragraph that reads thus: “Holed up in a bunkers under his residence, Ivory Coast’s strongman, Laurent Gbagbo, negotiated the terms of his potential surrender on Tuesday, as opposition forces closed in, his generals called on their forces to lay down their arms and French and United Nations negotiators demanded that he officially renounce control of his country.” Here we have a case of journalistic double indemnity: an overly long sentence that also happens to be a run-on. It’s actually refreshing to find such a blunder in the paper of record (a blunder that could easily have been corrected by the paper’s copy editors had they simply killed the comma after “Tuesday,” replacing it with a period and capitalizing “as.” Are we to assume that editors at the Times have been so overwhelmed by the deteriorating condition of our planet, an old battered warship now wobbling perilously through the solar system, that they have forgotten the basics of grammar? In a more activist society, there might have been protests against the Times similar to those in Kandahar against the burning of the Koran by a preacher in Florida, but the error produced no such outrage amongst grammatical fundamentalists.

Dirty Hands

Are we seeing a replay of the Bosnia situation in the dilatory behavior of the Obama administration in imposing a no fly zone, or worse a replay of George H.W. Bush’s reticence to topple Saddam Hussein during the first Iraq war (despite the mandate he had in defending Kuwait), only to leave the U.S. to pursue a Johnny-come-lately policy that resulted in the loss of more lives 13 years later? Admittedly, the politics of intervention are complex. You are constantly shaking hands with the devil. We armed what is now the Taliban against the Russians, only to find our own weapons turned against us. Qaddafi is now using his huge lode of hard currency—piled up from oil sales to Western democracies—to hire mercenaries. If we are to opt for the no-fly zone, then perhaps we will realize that, contrary to those officials who the Times recently described as fearing “a backlash against the United States for meddling in what is a homegrown political movement” (“Obama Seeks a Course of Pragmatism in the Middle East,” NYT, 3/10/11), the U.S. will gain the moral credibility it has all but lost in its policy of supporting a host of repressive monarchies and self-appointed generalissimos for no other reason than to safeguard its oil interests. To complicate matters further, the latter is a source of renewed concern, particularly in light of the anti-nuclear-energy drive that is bound to result from the Japanese tragedy. We came late to Bosnia (“After the Vultures: Holbrooke’s Bosnia Peace Came Too Late,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 1998), but if we hadn’t come at all, the genocide would have continued beyond the devastation of Sarejevo and Srebranica. Looking at it on a country-by-country basis, Bosnia is an example of an intervention that paid off. The bad guys (Milosevic and Karadzic) were routed and eventually tried at the ICC, we didn’t end up with “dirty hands” (to invoke Sartre’s famous existential play) and for the most part everyone lived happily ever after.