Juan Cole on Qaddafi

My guess is that the great majority of American voters remain unacquainted with the segment of the American Internet Left that once again mourns the overthrow of a mass murderer, this time the dictator of Libya for 40 years. I write of the tyrant Qaddafi (whose name has been spelled at least nine ways).

These mourners are, to borrow a descriptive term from Juan Cole, daft.

Let's look at what Cole had to say about the claim that the Libyan war was about oil. "That is daft. Libya was already integrated into the international oil markets, and had done billions of deals with BP, ENI, etc., etc. None of those companies would have wanted to endanger their contracts by getting rid of the ruler who had signed them. . . . Moreover, taking Libyan oil off the market through a NATO military intervention could have been foreseen to put up oil prices, which no Western elected leader would have wanted to see, especially Barack Obama, with the danger that a spike in energy prices could prolong the economic doldrums. An economic argument for imperialism is fine if it makes sense, but this one does not, and there is no good evidence for it . . . and is therefore just a conspiracy theory."

But why do most of us on the Left oppose dictatorships to begin with? It's not as if what we call Western Democracies are responsive to their citizens. If they were, the United States would have a single payer health care system. Western Democracies are obviously oligarchies run for the benefit of the rich--but the rest of us do have, on occasion, some small impact on decisions. Built into our governance systems is a bit of flexibility not found in the rigidity of dictatorships. We can and do change--to a degree--with the times. That's better than nothing. It's better than a dictatorship.

At least some of American mourners of Qaddafi suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome. They blame the war on Obama, giving little credit to the ordinary citizens of Libya, armed with handguns and axes, who attacked the dictator's tanks. Qaddafi's fall is Obama's fault, they totally believe, and so is everything else.