Humanitarian Intervention and the Credibility Issue in Libya

Abstract

The assumption was that the Western powers wanted to separate the region of Barga, which stretched from Sirte in the west to Al-Salloum in the east, on the border with Egypt, and to establish a kind of federal system with semi-autonomous states, as in Iraq. The Great Game in the Middle East, however, was far too complex for this proposed federalist solution. The competition between the mid-size actors was intensifying because of the radical ethnic and, above all, religious differences involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), as well as Iran. These differences clearly came to light in the theaters of the Cold War, which the United States and the western powers continued to wage against Russia since it had recovered economically and politically, and since China emerged as a global power to compete for the markets and sources of raw materials in Africa and in all other continents.

Al-Qa’ida was also asserting itself as an important invisible actor in the Great Game of the Middle East. Usamah bin Ladin greeted the uprisings in the Middle East with joy and, 1 week before his assassination, he wrote in a letter seized in Abbotabad by the SEAL commandos that the Muslim Brotherhood, as keeper of the Salafist doctrine, should take the reins of these movements and establish the true Islam, the rule of Allah according to Shari’ah, in the countries of the Middle East. Qatar funded the Muslim Brotherhood and bin Ladin understood that the current conditions—the revolts against the “tyrants” in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Syria, who were considered apostates and heretics—brought “unprecedented opportunities” and that the coming Islamic governments should follow the Salafist doctrine in favor of Islam. He hoped that the regimes in Libya, Syria and Yemen would fall, just as those in Tunisia and Egypt.