Arab revolutions: The limits of intervention | Editorial

The conflict inherent between policy and principle continues to this day The international community has been compromised by the revolution sweeping the Arab world. In three uncertain weeks, the United States vacillated from urging stability to shore up a strategic ally in Hosni Mubarak to cheering his overthrow. France trod the same path in Tunisia. Happily, the foreign minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, whose first reaction to the uprising was to offer Ben Ali France’s superior knowledge in riot control, has finally resigned. But her family’s involvement with the ancien regime (her parents had shares in a property company owned by a businessman close to the regime) provided its own morality play. Few were disinterested observers. When it came to the crunch, such as organising the interrogation under torture of jihadis picked up in Pakistan, the CIA, among others, traded with the darkest elements of Mubarak’s regime being denounced with such ardour today. Russia and China, both of whom have much to fear from spontaneous demonstrations by their own people, have fared little better. The conflict inherent between policy and principle continues to this day. While the world’s attention has been focused on a mad colonel’s dying days, Libyan troops are not alone in firing on unarmed demonstrators. After a mass demonstration in another Tahrir Square, this time in Baghdad, Iraq’s security forces detained 300 people, among them prominent journalists, artists and intellectuals, some of whom were later beaten up or tortured in custody . At least 29 died nationwide in Iraq’s “day of rage”. Rather than denounce an ally in Nouri al-Maliki, whose coalition government Washington toiled hard and for many months to create, the US embassy in Baghdad played down the violence. Three lessons should be drawn from the revolutions taking place in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. The first is that they belong to the people who made them. The Libyans, Egyptians and Tunisians have made enormous personal sacrifices to get this far, humbling eyewitnesses with their determination and heroism. They do not want, nor have they yet sought foreign intervention . The ownership of change across the Middle East does not, however, make international action irrelevant. The vote in the United Nations to impose travel and asset sanctions on Gaddafi and his entourage broke new ground for the international support it mustered, helped not least by the Arab League, the African Union and support from Libya’s own US mission, which defected en masse. It is unlikely to continue, but the process of rediscovering the benefits of genuine international coalitions and institutions like the human rights council is a healthy

Posted by on March 1, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry