THE UNILATERAL COWBOY'S MULTILATERAL ALLIANCE SCORES BIG
What's behind Libya's choice to disarm and allow UN inspectors in to verify? I see three things leading up to it: A desire on Libya's part, going back at least a few years, to lose its pariah status and get itself off our list of terror-sponsoring states list, both to get itself out of our crosshairs and to remove US sanctions; a close-up view of events in Iraq, especially over the last nine months to a year, convinced Gaddafi that the US was finally serious about crushing terror-sponsoring states; and seizure of hard evidence that Libya has for the past few years been part of a rogue WMD alliance with Iran, North Korea and possibly Iraq. Once the US had that proof in hand, coupled with the recent capture of Saddam Hussein, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi knew that he must comply with US disarmament demands to disarm or face moving up the A team in the Axis of Evil.
So how did the US get that hard proof? The alliance formed to stop Kim Jong-Il from shipping weapons to his allies and to anyone with the cash to pay for them, called the Proliferation Security Initiative, played a major role:
US officials told the paper that Washington's hand was strengthened in negotiations with Gaddafi after a successful operation, previously undisclosed, to intercept transport suspected of carrying banned weapons.The Telegraph said a top US State Department official confirmed last week that the Proliferation Security Initiative, an international, US-led scheme to halt the spread of banned weapons by seizing them in transit, had "netted several seizures."
Nice how they call a major new alliance a "scheme," but I'll pass over that bit of editorial comment buried in a news report to talk about why this is so important. As I've noted before, the PSI is one of the most underreported stories of the year. Most journalists don't know anything about it, and liberal commentators like Josh Marshall have simply elected not to mention it since it gets in the way of their "Bush is an unrepentant unilateralist" critiques of administration policy. The PSI is extremely important to the future of weapons proliferation and to the world community generally. It not only acts as a de facto blockade against Kim Jong-Il, but the PSI unites 11 of the world's most powerful states, all democracies, in an anti-proliferation alliance that operates outside the aegis of the UN to perform a function that the UN has clearly failed to do--stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. And it's the brainchild of Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, one of the more maligned figures in the Bush administration.
The PSI is just getting started, and already it has focused attention on stopping North Korea's weapons programs and has helped net a medium-sized fish in Libya. If the US ever decides to junk the UN and start over with something that promotes democracy while effectively making the world safe for it, it could do much worse than use the PSI as a starting point.
MORE: Momentum is building, I tell ya, to ditch the UN or get some kind of pro-democracy group off the ground. Check out Italian PM Berlusconi:
The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, believes the United Nations should intervene militarily wherever dictatorships abuse human rights.He delivers a passionate defence of America's intervention in Iraq in an interview in today's Spectator magazine in which he suggests it should mark the start of an era in which a "community of democracies" intervenes in the internal affairs of countries ruled by despots.
Now, I think he's gone over the top a bit. Thanks to the yawning tech and training gap between US and all other militaries, all of these "international" interventions will in fact have more than a trace of American might in them, and we just aren't in the business of putting troops in every single nook and cranny of the globe, unless we give away much of our tech know-how, which would be an insane thing to do. Further, it basically means a neo-colonial end of national sovereignty for a majority of the states around the world, and there's the whole question of who gets invaded first? Do you start big, like, say, China, hoping to cow the little tinhorns, or do you start small, like, say, Cuba, hoping to persuade the bigger ones? Then you have to have some pretty robust way to manage all this activity, something far stronger than the UN, or it all devolves to the enforcing democracies which would end up getting stuck with the bill. It's totally unworkable, and undesirable, for us to basically put the sword to the entire world to democratize it. Still, Berlusconi gets a gold star for his enthusiasm.
And hhmmm..."community of democracies." Where have I heard that before?
And check out this money quote--it should please all you conspiracy types out there:
A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."
Go ahead conspiracy theorists, connect the dots. You'll get it right, for once.
MORE: Libya was about two years away from developing operational nuclear weapons, according to US and British investigators given full access to Libya's program. We dodged a nuclear bullet this weekend.
(thanks to Hanks)