As the UN imposes its “No-Fly Zone” and as Gaddafi counters with a supposed Cease-Fire while combat still continues, it’s hard to know how the whole mess will turn out but it’s valuable to examine the possibilities in some detail.
"I don't think anybody disputes that Gaddafi has more firepower than the opposition," Obama said at a recent White House news conference.
"I believe that Gaddafi is on the wrong side of history. I believe that the Libyan people are anxious for freedom and the removal of somebody who has suppressed them for decades now. We are going to be in contact with the opposition, as well as in consultation with the international community, to try to achieve the goal of Mr. Gaddafi being removed from power,” Obama offered in response to journalists’ questions.
First, the comments at his news conference were most revealing. Let us examine that supposition: Is Gaddafi on the wrong side of history in the Arab world and are the Libyan rebels on "the side of the angels?
You do not have to get too far into Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis’ many penetrating histories and analyses of the Arab world and Islam before you recognize a pattern. For 1,400 years, we have seen an unvarying succession of rulers—Beys, Deys, Wazirs, Sultans, etc.—who have held power in this vast region. None has come to power through anything like the consent of the governed. Pericles of Athens? No. The Roman Senate? Not in the least.
The history of this region is replete with one strong man after another who came to power through force and who remained in power so long and only so long, as he had the ruthlessness to kill or exile any rivals for power.
So when Obama tells us that Gaddafi is on the wrong side of history, we have to ask: Whose history? Muammar Gaddafi is certainly not out of sync with the unbroken history of his region and culture.
Second, Napoleon’s cynical comment that “God favors the side with the larger artillery” seems at least worth considering here. Napoleon may actually have had greater artillery support at Waterloo than his British and Prussian foes, but charging, bayonet-wielding British and Prussian infantry nonetheless defeated him.
We have yet to see in the ranks of the Libyan rebels, who seem to spend much of their time dangerously firing their rifles in the air, the kind of discipline, skill, and determination required to take down an entrenched tyranny.
Obama’s own Director of National Intelligence, the hapless James R. Clapper, put his chips on Gaddafi’s surviving in testimony before Congress last week.
The White House was at pains to “walk back” Clapper’s statements, but he clearly said he expected Gaddafi to prevail.
Third, and this is most intriguing, where does that “wrong side of history” idea come from? Obama was at pains to tell the National Prayer Breakfast of his conversion experience. He certainly sounded sincere. However, “The Wrong Side of History” trope is drawn from Karl Marx. It presumes that there is a dialectic—a great impersonal, inevitable force moving through time and space. It presumes that history is going one way. Thus, to Marxists, you can be “on the wrong side of history.”
Not all “wrong siders” must be Marxists, of course. At the beginning of the 1990s, it was fashionable among big thinkers to speak of “the end of history.” It seemed then to some that democratic free enterprise systems had proven themselves superior by defeating Nazism and outlasting Communism and that there would be no reasonable debate about the future shape of governments and economies—only a variety of ways to get there.
That was before 9/11. That was before the U.S. and the Free World were confronted with a global conspiracy against religious freedom, constitutional government, and human rights.
We should have confidence that we must and shall prevail over jihadism. But one cannot say that our victory is assured by some inevitability of history. Ronald Reagan often said that every generation has the task of defending freedom. That task now falls to us.
Talk of the “wrong side of history” can only induce passivity. And it also invites the charge of arrogance. After all, who is this president to decree which way history is going?
So far, the history of this administration in foreign policy has been one of muddling through. It’s hard to be on “the “right side of history”, if such there is when most of the time you are straddling the fence.
This brings me at last to the "Mugwump" which is a mythical creature that spends its life sitting on a fence with its Mug on one side and its Wump on the other.
Or, in Obama's case concentrating on college basketball, a fact not overlooked by the European press and elsewhere.
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