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Fouad Ajami
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
by Fouad Ajami
the outrageous costumes, the tent he carried with him to distant capitals, the rantings in international forums, the phalanx of female bodyguards in a conservative Muslim society, and the four voluptuous Ukrainian nurses who travelled with him everywherewent hand in hand with official terror against dissidents who dared question his despotism. Europe was nearby, and the madman knew how to exploit its fears: He was standing sentry, he said, on behalf of Europe, and were he to falter or to be offended, he would turn Europe black, he said, overwhelm it with illegal African immigrants. There was cunning in Gadhafi. How else can one account for the reparations he had exacted from Italy for the interwar Italian occupation of Libya? The greed of others saw him through: He could kill en masse passengers aboard American and French airliners and still find room to play on the international stage. He never ran out of foreign interlocutors keen to bring him into the fold of normal nations. A regime of this barbarism and incoherence needed foreign indulgence, and the man in Libya had it aplenty. The best day after a bad emperor is the first, the great Roman historian Tacitus observed. Doubtless, Libya after this hurricane will have to contend with enormous challenges. There are no viable institutions to sustain it, so determined was Gadhafi to leave the country barren of any meaningful public life. There will remain the schism between the provinces of Tripolitania in the west and Cyrenaica in the east. Libyans will insist that these differences have been healed by a common history of torment at the hands of the despot. This could be a sincere sentiment, and may pull the Libyans through. But from the time this country was put together by the Western powers some six decades ago, that schism had a force all its own. The rebels in Benghazi will be called upon to show clemency and restraint in the aftermath of their victory. A hunt for demons and collaborators will betray the new Libya, for four decades of totalitarian dictatorship are sure to sully practically all with any experience in public life. Because we led from behind and never fully embraced this rebellion, American diplomacy ought to approach the emerging new order with a measure of reticence and modesty. In our attempt to divine the ways of this rebellion, there were fears that radical Islamists, even elements of al Qaeda, could be found in the ranks of the rebels. This was, in part, an alibi for the hesitancy that marked the American approach in this crisis. It had been Gadhafi himself, it shall be recalled, who dragged a reluctant Barack Obama into this conflict when he threatened Benghazi with the prospect of draconian punishment. But there was sincerity as well in the worry about the rebels, and it came in the form of evidence gathered by U.S. intelligence in Iraq in 2006-07. Libyan jihadists had made their way to Iraqthey were second in numbers to the Saudis, and they predominantly hailed from the eastern part of the country.
Fouad Ajami
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
There is no way that a blanket assertion can be made that this massive Libyan upheaval is free of Islamists. What we have is the more compelling evidence of the rebellion itselfits composition, the earnestness of the professionals and civil libertarians active in it, their promise that the terrible autocrat will not be replaced by a zealous, unforgiving theocracy. Revolutions can be stolen and hijacked, this we know, the moderates overwhelmed by determined extremists. But if a bet is to be made on the spectacle now before us, it should be easy to see a better Libya than Gadhafis monstrous regime rising out of this contest.
Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution and cochairman of Hoovers working group on Islamism and the International Order.
Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the cochair of the Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. From 1980 to 2011 he was director of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Arab Predicament, Beirut: City of Regrets, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, and The Foreigners Gift. His writings also include some four hundred essays on Arab and Islamic politics, US foreign policy, and contemporary international history. Ajami has received numerous awards, including the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism (2011), the Bradley Prize (2006), the National Humanities Medal (2006), and MacArthur Fellows Award (1982). His research has charted the road to 9/11, the Iraq war, and the US presence in the Arab-Islamic world.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. 2011 Dow Jones & Co. All Rights Reserved.
Fouad Ajami
Hoover Institution
Stanford University