All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Juan Cole.
He's a professor of history at the University of Michigan, and he keeps the blog Informed Comment at juancole.com.
Sorry, I don't have the list of books in front of me.
But anyway, welcome back to the show, Juan.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
How are you doing?
Oh, Engaging the Muslim World.
That's the one that I've read half of.
Yeah.
There you go.
Yeah, Engaging the Muslim World.
That thing's out in paperback now?
It is.
There you go.
See, extra plug.
That makes up for me forgetting it for a minute there.
All right, good.
Well, welcome back to the show.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Let's talk about the latest out of Libya.
Looks like the United Nations has authorized war and, well, all necessary measures to accomplish whatever their goals are.
And Qaddafi has declared a ceasefire, and yet reports are that things are still exploding all over Benghazi this morning.
What do you know?
Yeah, well, it looks as though, you know, when a United Nations ceasefire is demanded by the Security Council, the people on the ground scramble to get the best end position they can get before it comes into effect.
So Qaddafi knows it'll take a while to scramble jet fighters over Libya.
It might not be till Sunday.
And so in the meantime, he's going to try to improve his position.
He's attacking.
He's attacking Misrata, this large city of 600,000 near to Tripoli that's in rebel hands.
And he's attacking Ajdabiya, an oil town to the east, which is kind of a gateway to the other major rebel-held city of Benghazi.
And so you think that he'll be able to, you know, grab whatever, you know, that much territory before the jets come?
Well, he's going to try to grab what he can.
You know, in some ways, as this event unfolds, the fate of the protest movement of the rebels against Qaddafi is in their own hands for a day or two, maybe as much as three days.
If they can hold out, then the cavalry is coming.
But if Qaddafi can get in there, he'll take as much territory as he can before the ceasefire goes into effect.
Well, but once the West intervenes, they're not going to be able to settle for anything less than regime change.
Well, it's not entirely clear that that's so, or how exactly it would be accomplished.
What's been authorized is a no-fly zone, airstrikes.
You can't change a regime that way.
Well, it says all necessary measures to protect civilian life, right?
I mean, that's pretty broad.
But it also more or less forbids boots on the ground.
Scott, the thing that I'm trying to say is they had a no-fly zone over Iraq for a decade, and Saddam was still there.
Yeah, true enough.
Although, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that I don't see, you know, a plausible way how it would work.
But that tends to be how these things start, you know.
Back when they passed that Iraq Liberation Act, which they said didn't mean we want war now.
It just means we want regime change someday.
Ron Paul said this is a virtual declaration of war.
It means we'll be invading Iraq, you know, within five years or something.
And of course, he'd called it.
And it seems to me like, you know, once they declare a no-fly zone, at least they're going to have to settle for splitting the country in something.
Well, de facto, it would split the country.
But, you know, I declare my interest.
I'm from an Army family.
And we just don't think the Air Force guys can do it.
They're a useful auxiliary.
You need somebody to take and hold territory if you're going to change the facts on the ground.
Yeah, you guys all have bad nicknames for each other and stuff.
So, you know, the only model that I can think of whereby this leads to Gaddafi's overthrow, well, there are a couple of possibilities.
But one would be a Afghanistan War situation where the rebels get armed and make a move on Tripoli, and the international air forces essentially give them close air support, plank Gaddafi's tanks, and enable them to march into Tripoli the way they helped the Northern Alliance go into Kabul.
That would be one possibility.
Another possibility would be that the officer corps around Gaddafi increasingly sees the writing on the wall that they're going to suffer a lot from the international community as long as he's there, and they throw him and his sons under the bus and then reach out to the rebels.
So, you know, there are ways in which this could unfold towards a resolution.
But, you know, the idea that the international community is going to go into Tripoli and overthrow Gaddafi, that's just not in the cards.
Yeah, well, I guess we'll see how it goes.
But, yeah, I mean, the whole thing is guaranteed failure one way or the other.
I think that much is clear, right?
Well, you know, I don't know whether it's a guaranteed failure or not.
That is to say, look, you know, the evidence is that Gaddafi was going to take back the country.
You had these big cities, Misrata, Benghazi, Tobruk, and a lot of smaller ones like Zawiya, which had gone into rebellion.
His forces had switched sides.
The local urban notables had taken power.
And he's got 2,000 tanks.
And he's got a lot of fighter jets.
And he deployed them, along with heavy artillery, to take back these cities one by one.
Zawiya, just to the west of Tripoli, Zawiya out on the border with Tunisia, Ras Lanuf, and then on down to Brega.
And now he's fighting for Ajdabiya.
So if nothing were done, it looked pretty clear that Misrata and Benghazi would fall this weekend.
And, you know, when I say fall, it's not a pretty picture.
He's deploying heavy artillery, aerial bombings, the tanks against lightly armed rebels, and in urban areas.
So, you know, in Zawiya, it appears to be the case that there was a mass grave.
He's committing massacres.
I mean, this is Milosevic-style stuff.
It's not on exactly the same scale, but it's similar.
And so, you know, it's a moral quandary.
Do you let this happen?
Do you let Gaddafi not only take back the country, but commit a series of massacres as he did so?
You know what's going to happen to the rebel leadership in Benghazi.
The entire city of Benghazi is against him.
If it fell to his forces, it really would be a massacre.
So you don't want a war, and you don't want boots on the ground.
If that process of reconquest could be stopped with the no-fly zone, then I think it's well worth it.
Wow.
Well, we'll see.
I'm kind of surprised to hear you say that after all we've been through.
Juan, I mean, you give these guys permission to go kill Ayman al-Zawiyahiri, and they kill a million Iraqis instead.
Well, I'm not giving them permission to do anything, Scott.
All I'm saying is there have been instances where the international community has intervened to stop a massacre, and not doing anything is sometimes a collaboration with evil as well.
So I always thought well of Clinton's intervention in Kosovo.
I'm not an isolationist.
I think there are points at which a targeted intervention that has the support of the international community can be a useful thing, and I approve of the way this was done.
There's the United Nations Security Council resolution, which Bush did not get for Iraq, and there's a lot of limitations on it.
The Arab League is aboard, and there's no boots on the ground.
All right.
Well, let's hold it right there and go out to this break.
We're talking with Juan Cole.
The website is juancole.com for the Informed Comment blog.
The book is Engaging the Muslim World, and we'll have more about Libya and some other revolutions going on, successful and not so successful, after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
We're on the line with Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan, keeper of the blog Informed Comment at juancole.com, and we're talking about intervention in Libya here, and I guess here's my thing, why I'm disagreeing with you, Juan, about maybe a no-fly zone is a good idea.
It's because, like you said, hey, this guy's got a bunch of tanks, so now you need a no-fly, no-drive-your-tanks zone, and then he's got, you know, mercenary dudes who can run on foot with AKs, so now you need a no running on foot with AK zone, and now you have a war.
Well, you've already got a war.
Yeah, but now you have a war that involves America, potentially, and then we're taking responsibility for the outcome.
Now we've got to figure out who's in power next, and all this.
I mean, if we're going to, even as you said, like the best case scenario, we provide the air cover, the West, meaning we, meaning the West, provides the air cover for a successful overthrow.
Now, if bad guys come to power, well, we can't have that, because we helped them come to power, so now we have to go intervene more.
Right now, Libya is more or less none of our business, seems like.
Maybe we should leave it that way.
Well, you could leave it that way, but you're going to end up with Qaddafi, and I just will remind you what Qaddafi has said the last two weeks, which is that he's entirely willing...
He hasn't killed nearly as many people as Barack Obama has killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan this week, in the last couple of weeks.
Has he?
Well, you know, Scott, I don't agree with the analogy.
What's going on in Libya is the kind of civil war, and the question is, what outcome would be good for international law, for the human rights of the Libyans, and indeed for the region?
Let me just put it to you that Libya is a potentially very wealthy country.
It's an oil country.
It's got...
Qaddafi has billions squirreled away.
If he puts down this thing, what's to stop him from making a move on Tunisia and trying to undermine the achievements of the protest movement there?
I mean, I understand the concern about getting involved in a war, and as you know, I didn't approve at all of the invasion of Iraq.
I thought the whole thing was a huge disaster from beginning to end.
But if this ends up being more like Kosovo, well, Kosovo worked out all right.
As I say, I don't think you can use a one-size-fits-all approach to looking at the ethical and political dilemmas of a situation like this.
It looks to me more like Yugoslavia than it looks like, to me, Iraq or boots on the ground adventure like Afghanistan.
The question is, do you let Qaddafi come back to power?
And once he's back in power, how does he behave in the Mediterranean world?
I personally think he's a terrorist.
He blew up that Lockerbie airliner.
We know that.
And he had come back into the cold a bit, but now he's making threats to go back to blowing up airliners.
And I think he's an element of instability in the region, that his survival in office would be bad, not only for Libya, where there will be massacres as he puts down the rebellion, but that then he'll go on to play a sinister role, both in the Middle East and in Italy and in places like France.
So, you know, I don't shed any tears if there is a way to get rid of him.
Well, so should we have a no-fly zone over Bahrain to prevent the Saudi Arabians from helping them put down the revolution there?
Yeah, well, that's a real question of hypocrisy, and I share it with you.
It's shameful that the world community has acquiesced in this invasion of Bahrain by the Saudi Arabian government.
Maybe we, for your readers, should say a little bit about it.
Bahrain is a small country.
It's an island country.
The citizen population is something like 600,000.
But then it's got another 600,000 guest workers, a lot of them from India, Pakistan, and so forth.
Among the 600,000 who are citizens, probably about two-thirds are Shiite Muslims, and the other third are Sunnis.
And the monarchy is Sunni.
And it's not just that the monarchy is Sunni and ruling over a Shiite majority, but that monarchy are hardliners towards the Shiites.
They have a history of doing whatever they can to make sure that Shiites don't get power, that they remain marginalized, that they remain at the bottom of the totem pole.
And so the constitution specifies an upper house of 40 members and a lower house of 40 members in the legislature.
But the upper house is appointed by the king, is all Sunnis.
And in the lower house, the elections are gerrymandered, so the Shiites only have about 18 of the 40 seats.
So you've got this overwhelming citizen majority, but it's not expressed in the legislature.
So the upper house can overrule the lower house at will, and the king can overrule both of them.
So, you know, that legislature is a debating society.
The king is a kind of absolute monarch.
And they've been repressing Shiite political movements.
They've been torturing people.
They've been shooting people.
And when it looked like the king just couldn't control his Shiite majority anymore, they were coming into the streets, as happened in Egypt and Tunisia.
The king asked Saudis to come in, and they had built a causeway over to Saudi Arabia, across which these troops came.
There are troops from other Gulf countries, like the United Arab Emirates, but the majority of them are Saudis.
And the Saudis are Wahhabis.
It's a form of Islam that is very, very anti-Shiite, and the Saudi Shiites have suffered a lot from the Saudi treatment of them.
So for the Bahrain Shiite majority to have their Sunni king bring in these Wahhabi troops to repress the Shiite majority, this is historical.
And I don't see how the king ever comes back from that.
I think he has, by doing this, really lost all legitimacy among his majority population.
Which means things really might come to a head.
Well, they already came to a head.
The protesters were cleared from the Pearl Roundabout downtown forcibly, and it seems like the Saudis helped.
And the country's gone under a state of emergency for the protests are being forbidden.
There have been clashes between Shiites out in the suburbs, like Citra, away from Manama, the capital, with the security police.
And right now things are kind of seething and so on.
There are a lot of Shiite Friday sermons are being given condemning the government.
So it's a very bad, tense situation.
Frankly, I don't believe that Washington was happy about it.
That is to say, at least what they said in public was that they wanted the king to give some loans to the Shiite majority to redo the constitution a little bit and let them have more of a say and let them feel like they're represented more and avoid a really deep division that could go to civil war.
The U.S. has a major naval base in Manama.
The headquarters of the Fifth Fleet is there.
And it's the way the U.S. makes sure that you can fill up your tank in your car.
And they would be very unhappy to lose that naval base.
So I think the Saudis and the Bahrain government decided to do this thing, whether the Americans liked it or not.
And in some ways, you know, Bush has so overstretched us and we're economically still weak because Wall Street stole from us so much that Washington really doesn't have much to say about this.
What could they do?
Well, and this really goes right to the heart of what we're talking about with intervention in Libya.
You know, to read the Washington Post version of it, the White House is much less enthusiastic about revolution in Yemen and Bahrain.
And they're really trying to work with those dictators, you know, to have them moderate a little bit.
So, you know, in other words, anything but lose power.
And then here they're on the side of the people in the revolution against Gaddafi in Libya.
And the obvious difference is these are our close allies, the Saudis, the Yemenis, the governments of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain.
And, you know, they were dragging their feet as long as they possibly could on Egypt before they really endorsed that thing until it was really a fait accompli.
And it seems to me that the only reason they're intervening in Libya is because, you know, might as well be Syria or Iran.
It's the one that's really not under our control.
And they can, you know, spin it for PR purposes to make it look like, you know, who's on the side of what dictators?
Look at us.
We're the good guys saving the people of Libya and change the entire narrative from the revolutions in the Middle East against the American backed dictators to America's Superman coming to save the Arabs from their dictators.
Yeah, but, you know, the United States didn't spearhead the Libyan initiative.
That was David Cameron in Britain and Sarkozy in France.
Bob Gates, the Secretary of Defense, things like you, he doesn't want anything to do with that.
And he's being dragged into it a bit.
But I think that Britain and France will probably be the leads on it.
I think Italy is already offering its bases.
The United States will be involved.
I don't think it'll be the lead country.
Ironically enough, it looks like they're going to bring over some fighter jets from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, the same group that voted for the intervention in Bahrain to be lead Arab fighters in the no-fly zone.
So, look, you know, Scott, the fact is that the Bahrain king, as bad as he is on human rights, didn't order tanks to fire into the crowds at Pearl Roundabout.
He didn't order a heavy artillery bombardment.
He didn't order fighter jets to bomb the crowds from above.
And I think you're downplaying a little bit the brutality, the sheer, vicious, bloody-mindedness.
No, I just refuse to believe that that has anything to do with the motivation of these Western politicians is all.
Well, I don't think you can make a blanket statement.
I think it's certainly, you know, Canada and Norway have announced today that they're on board with helping with the no-fly zone.
I think for Norway, the behavior of Gaddafi with his crowds is probably extremely important.
You know, Norwegians don't have to do this, but they care.
Well, I can't wait to see them liberate Iraq from Nouri al-Maliki.
Well, there are, as you know, there are big crowds from time to time in Iraq taking their relief from the Egyptian protests, demanding new elections.
And al-Maliki has been put under severe pressure.
He's trying to take some anti-corruption measures.
And Iraq is a basket case.
It's just going to limp along like that for a long time.
And, you know, it's not as if the problem in Iraq is that the army is too strong or that it's a dictatorship.
It's a ramshackle, corrupt system that people are complaining that they're not getting water, they're not getting electricity, that Maliki is acting like a soft, strong man, high-handedly.
And the likelihood is that there's just going to continue to be substantial discontent and fragility in the Iraqi scene for some time to come.
And one of the very interesting things that's happened in Iraq is that a significant section of the Kurds is now protesting against the virtual authoritarian government of Massoud Barzani and the Kurdistan Alliance up in Kurdistan.
And so the elements, the victorious elements of the coalition that came to power under Bush are all under pressure now from their own people.
I wrote a column for Truthdig this week in which I pointed out that what's happening in Iraq is a pretty good refutation of the idea that Bush is in any way responsible for the people's victories in Tunisia or Egypt.
Yeah, except maybe in a provoking a blowback kind of a situation, you know, destroying the dollar, which, you know, drove up the prices and making everybody hate their American-compliant dictatorships even more than they did before, that kind of thing.
You could, I guess, give them credit in that kind of way.
You hear that, Eric Edelman?
You did good there, buddy.
I know he listens to the show.
I see.
Yeah, well, what you say is true.
The disasters that Bush created may have had something to do with it, but it's the good thing about...
Well, I'm trying to be charitable for the neocons, you understand.
Yeah, I know you have a soft corner in your heart for them, but the good thing about what happened so far is that it's been, it's come from the people themselves.
It's indigenous, you know, in Egypt, in Tunisia, and, you know, the darndest thing is that you've never seen any American flags burnt.
Right.
Yeah, they're keeping it all very local.
That's been something to behold.
It's not an Islamic thing.
It's not a Marxist thing.
It's not an anti-American thing.
It's just we want economic freedom.
We want to end to the torture and the emergency laws.
We want real courts and, you know, real basic human liberty-type representative government sort of stuff.
Yeah, they want the ability to form unions at will without government interference and to engage in collective bargaining.
Same thing as being taken away in Wisconsin.
All right, well, I'm sorry.
We've got to leave it at that.
We're over time, and I've got a phone call to Israel I've got to make here, but I really appreciate your time today on the show, as I always do, Juan.
It's good talking, Scott.
Take care.
Everybody, that's Juan Cole.
He's the author of Engaging the Muslim World.
He teaches history at the University of Michigan, and he keeps the blog, Informed Comment, at juancole.com.
