Help not wanted

I don't know about you, but I've been fascinated by the news reports of recent weeks.

The demonstrations that toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt have spread to Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Oman and even Saudi Arabia. Kuwait took the hint and offered concessions before any protests happened. As George W. Bush said, several years too early, "Freedom is on the march."

Is this the neoconservative dream of a free and democratic Middle East coming true? Possibly. But it's not the result of anything we've been doing or could have done (except invent Facebook).

Time to get involved?

In the last several days, however, prominent neoconservatives — the same ones who predicted a democratic domino effect from a US invasion of Iraq — have been on American news shows advocating various kinds of military intervention.

Mostly they mean a UN-sanctioned no-fly zone. But there's also been talk of blockades and weapons smuggling. Last week, several British commandos landed in eastern Libya in an apparent attempt to influence what was going on. The rebels, who were in control of the area, made them leave.

No one — absolutely no one — has been asking the West for help. The silence has been deafening. And it seems to be clear to a lot of decision-makers that the Arab revolution has the best chance of permanent success if Arabs are in control of it.

As with Tunisia and Egypt, Libya presents a real foreign-policy dilemma in which the US has needed to be on both sides of the issue. It knew Colonel Gaddafi was a bad guy, yet by engaging in dialogue, it got him to give up his chemical-weapons program and terrorist ambitions.

The shores of Tripoli

If Gaddafi stays in power as our enemy, there's no doubt he'll go back to his old ways. Then we probably will have to send in the Marines, whose official song mentions the Libyan capital:

"From the Halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli, / We fight our country's battles / In the air, on land, and sea..."

US warships are in fact patrolling the shores of Tripoli as we speak. Fortunately, though, Defense Secretary Robert Gates put my mind at ease in an unusually frank speech at the West Point Military Academy on 25 February.

"We can't know with absolute certainty what the future of warfare will hold, but we do know it will be exceedingly complex, unpredictable, and — as they say in the staff colleges — 'unstructured.' ... And I must tell you, when it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right."

Gates continued:

"In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it. By no means am I suggesting that the US Army will — or should — turn into a Victorian nation-building constabulary, designed to chase guerrillas, build schools, or sip tea."

One step would be to give help not where it's needed, but where it's asked for. While the Libyans prefer to handle things on their own, I think millions of people in Côte d'Ivoire would welcome our help right now.