He's Dead, so Now What?

Around 11:30AM EST, the Libyan Transitional National Council confirmed that Gaddafi had been killed. A ruthless dictator from September of 1969 to September of 2011, Gaddafi’s regime has lasted longer than most of us have been breathing. He orchestrated the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, which killed 270 people. In the eighties he systematically murdered political opponents at home, and sent out killing squads across the globe to exact his revenge. He has been the sponsor of terrorist groups and a friend to all those that have opposed the West and the United States. His was, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “the Mad Dog” of the Middle-East. Now he lies dead, killed by a combination of predator drone attacks on his convoy and Libyan rebels on the ground. The question we all need to ask and should have been asking is, “What now?” With an unemployment rate of over 30%, literacy hovering around 75%, and at least a third of that nation’s 6.5 million below the international poverty line, a lot of questions remain on the future for Libya.

Much hot air was made in the press about young students returning home to fight in the war against a dictator that had controlled their lives and the lives of their parents. Will those young people stay there? How many of them are secular? Can they work with the radical Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization responsible for numerous atrocities? I ask my dedicated readers (those few brave souls!) to treat this event with a cautious eye. What comes from revolution is not always a pretty sight. In fact, the American example that we have all internalized is unique to human history. It does not take a life’s worth of studying to realize that in unstable, disorganized situations the most ruthless, pragmatic, and organized groups tend to seize control. It is impossible to say whether a truly free and democratic Libya will emerge from this chaos, or whether the country will simply stagnate into a pit of unending bloodshed. 

This brings me to my final and most pertinent point of all. Where are we in all of this? True, we managed to get a decent bang for the buck (something like 1.1 billion dollars in total as of September), but did we gain a friend in northern Africa? After all, where was the President when the Iranians took to the streets? A lost opportunity. What about in Syria? Another lost opportunity. We fed Hosni Mubarak to the dogs when he no longer seemed useful to us, and it’s doubtful that Egypt will be any better off now that he is imprisoned. Some months back, a young Libyan man being interviewed said, “We will not forget. We will not forget who helped us and who ignored us. We are watching.” What I think we are seeing in the Middle East is a disintegration of American dominance. My friends on the Left will cheer it as a blow to the Great Satan’s imperialism, but I see it as something more fundamental than that. What I see possibly emerging in the next few years is something even more violent, and even more anti-American. The loss of American power abroad forces us to turn our attention inward, leaving the rest of the world to fend for itself in an ever-more unstable, dangerous arena. Without America to keep order, there will be none.