A brief note on Libya

When Hosni Mubarak briefly tried to crack down against the demonstrators in Egypt, I wrote: Even if Mubarak manages to cling to power, his regime has been fatally compromised. If he uses massive force to suppress the popular movement, it will be damaged even more. Mubarak himself is 83 years old, and even a successful ...

Walt-Steve-foreign-policy-columnist20
Walt-Steve-foreign-policy-columnist20
Stephen M. Walt
By , a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

When Hosni Mubarak briefly tried to crack down against the demonstrators in Egypt, I wrote:

When Hosni Mubarak briefly tried to crack down against the demonstrators in Egypt, I wrote:

Even if Mubarak manages to cling to power, his regime has been fatally compromised. If he uses massive force to suppress the popular movement, it will be damaged even more. Mubarak himself is 83 years old, and even a successful act of repression won’t buy him (or his domestic allies) a lot of time. If the United States is seen as complicit in keeping him in power, it will solidify Arab anger and make our exalted rhetoric about democracy and human rights look like the basest hypocrisy."

Needless to say, this same logic applies with even more force in the case of Libya, where Qaddafi’s brutal, narcissistic, and incoherent campaign of repression has been far more reprehensible than Mubarak’s. I’m wary of direct U.S. military intervention there, but U.S. spokesmen should be condemning his actions in the strongest possible terms and looking into both a Security Council resolution and the creation of an international peacekeeping force to keep order there in a post-Qaddafi environment.

I’ll have a lengthier comment on these upheavals tomorrow.

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Twitter: @stephenwalt

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