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PETER'S NEW YORK, Sunday, April 24, 2011--My wife tells an interesting story from her home country, the Philippines. A young friend of hers, a teenager at the time, was on her way to a wedding, riding in one of the many motorcycle-powered passenger vehicles the country is known for. Tragically, the vehicle was sideswiped by a bus, and the young woman was injured. In the Philippines, according to the way my wife tells it, if a bus driver hits and injures someone in the road, they back the bus up over the person. That way the bus company only has to pay out some kind of reparation to the dead person's family. This is considered standard practice, she says.If a person is hit by a bus, and there is not someone sympathetic enough to take the person away from the scene of the accident, the bus driver will back up over the hapless victim and kill them. And so the bus driver in this instance did back over and kill the young girl. Whether this is an urban legend, or a true story, I cannot say. But to us in the West, such a practice would certainly be among the most maccabre we can imagine. Yet America is involved in something similar on the international level.
The United States, via President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others, has announced that Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi must go. Now that it has been announced, there is no way for the United States to back down on such a declaration. Therefore, the United States must back the bus over Gaddafi, or lose face.
To make matters worse, the United States has bombarded Libya with missiles. Since it has physically damaged the country and taken Libyan lives, the United States must justify its actions by a wholesale trashing of the country, and by toppling its leader.
However, there is precedent for doing things another way. Perhaps we can learn from history. In 1998, Indonesian President Suharto decided he would implement an economic program called "IMF (International Monetary Fund) Plus." He planned to institute a currency board to supply the nation's money. Apparently, the IMF did not approve. In reaction to Suharto's plan, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton sent none other than former Vice President Walter Mondale to clear up the matter. Whatever was decided on at that meeting between Suharto and Mondale, it was not what Clinton wanted, because, sure enough, riots magically erupted in Indonesia, and Suharto was booted from power.
Pleased with the victorious engineering of a regime change in Indonesia, the Clinton Administration sent Vice President Al Gore to Malaysia to see if he could score a similar hit on that country's leader. As it turned out, the president of that country, Mahathir Mohammed, not only enjoyed widespread popularity, but he also managed to protect the country from the economic upheaval that was known then as the Asian Flu. Mahathir's independent, even "defiant" economic policies did not sit well with Washington, because they did not conform to the prescriptions of the IMF. So in a speech at a conference in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur in 1998, Gore suggested in so many words that the people of Malaysia overthrow Mahathir. However, this never happened. As it turned out, in spite of the rather public and controversial statement by Gore, the U.S. never backed its bus over Malaysia. Mahathir was able to serve out his term. And nobody was the worse off for it.
We have a situation in Libya which is somewhat similar. The Obama Administration has said that Gaddafi must be toppled. But does America have to back its bus over Libya and its leader in order to save face? Perhaps not. From the Gore experience, there is another way. Libya should be permitted to prosper under current leadership. Libya is distributing a large portion of its oil revenues among the population in terms of free education, health care, and other benefits, making it among the most prosperous places in Africa, or anywhere in the Third World. The fact that Libya was an importer of labor tells one that economic circumstances must have been quite good there. In fact, National Public Radio finally got around to interviewing an individual (click here) who insisted that although he was not a supporter of Gaddafi, the Libya he knew under Gaddafi was one where he was the beneficiary of services other countries did not have. The man said he had traveled quite a bit, and said his knowledge of the way other governments treated their people made him hope for a return to the status quo in his own country.
I'd like to add another story I inadvertently uncovered. A friend of mine used to practice dentistry, and in the early 1980s he was connected with a hospital in an affluent Western European nation. His job was to fix people's teeth to prepare them for heart surgery. As it turns out, dental health is very important in safeguarding patients against infections that may spread to the heart after surgery.
My friend said he was treating a lot of poor people who came from Libya. Gaddafi had sent them there for heart surgery. The teeth of the people he treated were of two types. In some cases, they were in very bad condition, while in others, the teeth were in excellent shape. After observing this trend, my dentist friend concluded that people from oil-rich regions where there was a Western presence suffered from advanced decay because Westerners brought their diet along with them, including a heavy reliance on sweets. In places where oil was not produced, people's teeth were in much better condition, because they relied on the traditional diet of the Libyan people.
All this is said merely to underscore the point that this unsolicited story rang true, which was that Gaddafi, even 30 years ago, was having the poor people of his country shipped to Europe to undergo heart surgery at the state's expense.
Since Libya in recent years made so many concessions to the West, such as taking responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, which it very possibly had nothing to do with, paying over a billion dollars in reparations for that tragic event, and disbanding its nuclear weapons program, it is just that much more unbelievable that the United States has once again blacklisted that country and placed it on an active "enemies" list. Some submit that this new American stance is the result of a decision by Libya to refuse to price its oil in dollars, and in doing so, challenge the stability of the Western financial system. At any rate, in the midst of the recently emerging (or CIA-created) "Arab Spring" only weeks ago, Gaddafi suddenly became the bad guy, and had to go.
But America does not have to back its bus over Gaddafi. It can just decide that it was enough to have his and Libya's feathers ruffled, the same way Gore's statement about Mahathir was enough to stir the pot for Malaysia. Now is the time to back away from such demands, as Bill Clinton did, and let Gaddafi continue his relatively successful work of economic development. America is said to be on the verge of bankruptcy and cannot economically, or some say even militarily, open up a new front before it puts Afghanistan and Iraq to bed. It cannot use its major military advantage--nuclear weapons--because of the radioactive pollution from the use of such weapons, and because of the public outcry that such use would generate. Therefore nuclear weapons are of no strategic advantage to the West in the Libyan conflict. The nuclear advantage only applies in protecting America from other nations that might threaten it with the same weapons.
We know that the the United States must have had something specifically in mind when it decided to attack Libya. The humanitarian mission is likely a pretext for some other goal, such as controlling Libyan oil, or, even more importantly, for destroying the prosperity which North Africa had begun to enjoy because of the economic engine for the region Libya was fast becoming after its rapprochement with the West. As a result of NATO's recent military advances, Libya has been injured. It is enough. Instead of backing over Libya, the Obama Administration should back away and let Libya be.
