As fighter aircrafts pound Libyan military installations with bombs, it is inevitable that our thoughts go back to the last time the western powers attacked a middle-eastern regime. No need to be pressed for memory here because that particular war is still going on. Yes, Iraq might finally have achieved what could pass off, on a good day, as stability but it did go through hell since that fateful first missile in 2003. And Afghanistan, that other quagmire, still festers on; the certainty that things will fall apart the minute the western coalition forces leave the country would hit even the most casual of observers in the face.
With the inevitable comparison between the invasions comes the inevitable comparison between Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi. Though both were brutal dictators, Saddam Hussein had a mind for infrastructure development, a fostering of the middle-class and increasing the per capita income. Gaddafi, on the other hand, has little to show for his forty years over an oil-rich country twice the size of Peshawar. But Hussein kept ethnic, tribal and sectarian rivalries tightly coiled up with social control. So might have Gaddafi. Once that happens, will we see any of that Iraq-style turmoil in Libya? The brutality of the Libyan regime might clear for all to see but, as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Talking about good intentions, however, is a little premature. Zimbabwes Mugabe was once shown in a political cartoon thanking God his country didnt have oil; as always, humour explains it better than hard-nosed analysis. The wests decision to intervene in Libya alone in the entire Arab spring must have been powered by an economic calculus that looks at the bottomline as well. Ambivalence about Bahrain, for instance, whose Shia uprising has Iran rooting for it, is particularly jarring. The USs principal ally in the middle-east, Saudi Arabia, just sent in troops to aid the Bahraini regime to quell the uprising. Expect more duplicity in the times to come.