Dear Barry,
mannfm11 wrote:
> I am going to go against the grain and say that this attack on
> Libya will be viewed as maybe the biggest blunder in US foreign
> policy history. We are told the fairy tale when in reality, these
> interventions are disasters. What we have done is set the table
> for a major civil war. This mess is much larger than Kadaffi. If
> he didn't have support, they would have gotten rid of him 30 years
> ago.
> People forget Abraham Lincoln sent an army into the south, which
> was made of of sovereign states and literally burned and destroyed
> half of them and the economies in them. Then the North sent
> looting business men to finish the job. That war was about a lot
> more than slavery, but the propaganda over the last 50 years or so
> has obscured that fact. There wasn't much complaint about the
> slaves the north held in the form of industrial workers and miners
> and such, the immigrants that were literally starved. The point
> isn't politics in general, but the response of governments in
> general to revolt. The people of the South were much more innocent
> than those in Libya.
> The point is that Libya was a territory formed by Mussolini, not a
> nation formed on its own. What the attacks have done is weaken the
> government and the country in general. What will ensue is chaos
> and we will see the seeds sowed for war and more chaos. This isn't
> much different than a group of bandits coming into town and
> someone bombing the police station because the view is the police
> are corrupt. With the police out of business or weakened, the
> bandits will have a time. When the government falls, we will then
> see the real genocidal war the west has no clue has been brewing
> for maybe 80 years."
I've been avoiding coming out of the closet on this question, but sooner
or later I'm going to have to.
The question that hasn't been definitively answered is this: When
was Libya's last generational crisis war.
In a posting a few weeks ago, I opined that it was the Italian
invasion of Libya that began in 1911, and reached a climax in 1920
with the destruction of the Tripolitanian Republic, and the agreement
with the Sunusis with the al-Rajma agreement of 1920.
That would appear to make the 1969 coup or its aftermath the next
crisis war. The problem is that even when I typed this I didn't
really believe it, since the 1969 coup would be too soon, and there's
nothing in the aftermath that "reads" like a crisis war.
A couple of weeks ago, an online correspondent wrote to me, putting
the case that Libya's last crsis war climaxed in 1931 with the Italian
massacre of Bedouins in Cyrenaica, and the massive settling of
Italians in Tripolitania.
So I wrote back to him as follows:
John wrote:
> I guess I'm emotionally reluctant to accept your conclusions
> because if you're right then it means that the current Libya war
> is a full-fledged crisis war, which means that things are certain
> to go very, very badly.
> So I think that for emotional reasons I'm going to postpone a
> decision a while longer, until it's clearer which way things are
> going, now that we're in three simultaneous wars in Muslim
> countries.
Generational Dynamics forecasting is at best probabilistic. It can
predict things with certainty over a long time frame, or with some
uncertainty in a shorter time window.
So at this point, I don't completely buy into the Libyan disaster
scenario. There are too many uncertainties, and I've come to have too
much respect for the power of chaotic events and political
interventions to delay trend events and the inevitable. Furthermore,
it's my fault that I haven't tracked down whatever books or histories
or whatever of Libya in the 1920s and 1930s to be able to reach a
definitive conclusion on what happened there -- though I have no idea
when I would have had the time to do that anyway.
At this point, all I can really say is that, based on the information
I have so far, there is a non-trivial probability that Barry is right
and that the Libyan intervention will degenerate into a bloody crisis
civil war. However, whether that probability is 30% or 50% or 70%
is not something I can say at this time. If I ever get the time to
do a thorough study of Libya in the 1920s-30s, then I undoubtedly
could be a lot more specific.
John