Shibley Telhami: The Striking Arab Openness to Intervention
[Shibley Telhami is Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution.]
For a region that has been obsessed with Western imperialism, and to a degree still is, one of the most striking aspects of the current Western-led international intervention in Libya has been the absence of major opposition to it in the Arab world. In fact, the only world leader who is misreading the current state of affairs is Hugo Chavez who in the past several years has managed to gain a degree of popularity both for being seen as standing up to American foreign policy and for vigorously criticizing Israel in its 2008 Gaza war. Standing by his friend Muammar al-Qaddafi and portraying the international intervention as an episode of Western imperialism has fallen on deaf ears in the Middle East—and probably ruined his reputation among the Arab public for some time. It is also striking, particularly in historical perspective, that France, a former colonial power in North Africa, would try to "redeem" itself in Arab public opinion after its missteps in the Tunisian revolution by actually intervening militarily in another North African nation.
Muammar al-Qaddafi himself labels the intervention a "colonial crusader" war, trying to capitalize on two of the biggest fears among Arabs and Muslims. Yet there is little evidence that his message is resonating. Arab media and blogs, and wider public sentiment seen in the ongoing demonstrations remain decidedly against him. While we have not had scientific public opinion polls to capture feelings on the street, I have conducted preliminary research with my team using popular websites to try to offer some measure of the public reasoning on Libya. Not surprisingly, there has been ambivalence about intervention, as Arabs are caught between the sense that someone has to intervene to stop Qaddafi on the one hand and mistrust of Western powers on the other. Ideally, they would have loved to see the Libyan story evolve the way of Tunisia and Egypt, but they sense that was not to be. As a consequence, those who oppose the Western intervention remain a minority. (For a flavor of reader comments on two popular websites, Aljazeera.net and Alarabiya.net, please see the translation below of 25 consecutive comments on each site. Overall only 28% of Al-Jazeera comments, and 36% of Alarabiya's opposed military intervention.)
Even more striking at a time when the public is trying to replace autocratic rulers is that both the public and governments have opposed Qaddafi; rarely does one find broad support of this sort on an issue as potentially divisive. There are a number of things that explain these attitudes...
Read entire article at National Interest
For a region that has been obsessed with Western imperialism, and to a degree still is, one of the most striking aspects of the current Western-led international intervention in Libya has been the absence of major opposition to it in the Arab world. In fact, the only world leader who is misreading the current state of affairs is Hugo Chavez who in the past several years has managed to gain a degree of popularity both for being seen as standing up to American foreign policy and for vigorously criticizing Israel in its 2008 Gaza war. Standing by his friend Muammar al-Qaddafi and portraying the international intervention as an episode of Western imperialism has fallen on deaf ears in the Middle East—and probably ruined his reputation among the Arab public for some time. It is also striking, particularly in historical perspective, that France, a former colonial power in North Africa, would try to "redeem" itself in Arab public opinion after its missteps in the Tunisian revolution by actually intervening militarily in another North African nation.
Muammar al-Qaddafi himself labels the intervention a "colonial crusader" war, trying to capitalize on two of the biggest fears among Arabs and Muslims. Yet there is little evidence that his message is resonating. Arab media and blogs, and wider public sentiment seen in the ongoing demonstrations remain decidedly against him. While we have not had scientific public opinion polls to capture feelings on the street, I have conducted preliminary research with my team using popular websites to try to offer some measure of the public reasoning on Libya. Not surprisingly, there has been ambivalence about intervention, as Arabs are caught between the sense that someone has to intervene to stop Qaddafi on the one hand and mistrust of Western powers on the other. Ideally, they would have loved to see the Libyan story evolve the way of Tunisia and Egypt, but they sense that was not to be. As a consequence, those who oppose the Western intervention remain a minority. (For a flavor of reader comments on two popular websites, Aljazeera.net and Alarabiya.net, please see the translation below of 25 consecutive comments on each site. Overall only 28% of Al-Jazeera comments, and 36% of Alarabiya's opposed military intervention.)
Even more striking at a time when the public is trying to replace autocratic rulers is that both the public and governments have opposed Qaddafi; rarely does one find broad support of this sort on an issue as potentially divisive. There are a number of things that explain these attitudes...