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March 23, 2011
Stability is a key strategic interests pursued by the United States in the Middle East since it became the region’s sole superpower.Thus stable regimes have pumped the petroleum to the world market, keeping the price per barrel relatively low and allowing the US Navy to police the tanker lanes. For 40 years, with an occasional dissent, stable Arab regimes have acquiesced in Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Stable Arab regimes enlisted in the US-led war on terrorism and repress the less militant Islamist movements that have long raised the most credible specter of disruption to the preferred order.
Whilst non-religious popular uprisings have given flesh to the threat of disorder and instability it is still the commitment to stability that guides the White House and European nations. So why did Europe intervene? After all the Arab street represents the specter of disruption to the preferred order.
In their Of Principle and Peril the editors of the Middle East Research and Information Project say that the European intervention into Libya was based on fears that oil flows might be interrupted, but that more importantly because migrant flows might spike as Libya morphed into a “failed state.” The say:
In France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, immigration from Africa is a white-hot potato, not only because (as in the US) native-born Europeans resent competition from low-wage labor, but also because white Europeans fear their liberal laws and post-Christian culture will be overrun by unruly, yet doctrinaire Muslims. The EU has spent billions of euros to assuage this fear, both on tightened border security and on the “Euro-Med” family of socio-economic development programs, which are intended to lessen the poverty and despair propelling migrants northward. In the 2000s, the concern with stanching the North African migrant flow was augmented by worries about transmigration -- the movement of black Africans across the Sahel and Sahara, through North Africa and then into Europe. Qaddafi’s Libya, along with Morocco, Algeria and Ben Ali’s Tunisia, became an increasingly watchful sentinel along the byways of transmigration, as the local press stoked anxiety about black Africans, unable to reach the promised land, settling in the Arab-Berber spaces en route. A scantly governed Libya, wracked by revolt and starved of revenue by external sanctions, would be unable to block transmigration, even as it produced its own stream of refugees. The southern-tier EU states cannot abide a “Somalia.”
Scarier still to the Western powers is the specter of Libya as Afghanistan or Iraq, or Bosnia or Chechnya, a ruined land drawing radical Islamists from far afield to assist the jihadis among the Libyan rebels in their fight.
They add that a post Qaddafi Libya would look nothing like the democratic state of liberal interventionist dreams, and quite a bit like post-Saddam Iraq.
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