Marc Lynch erklärt in seinem Blog auf Foreign Policy, warum es falsch war und ist, mit der Erfahrung des Irakkrieges gegen die Nato-Intervention in Libyen zu sein. Ich kann nur hoffen, dass in der deutschen Regierung solche Quellen gelesen werden. Denn es ist offensichtlich, dass die Deutschen bei ihrer Enthaltung voll in die Irak-Falle gelaufen sind. Merkel hatte einst in der Washington Post Schröder für seine Zurückhaltung gegenüber den amerikanischen Invasionsplänen kritisiert, nun wollte sie offenbar selber ihre Unabhängigkeit von Amerika demonstrieren.
Nie wieder Truppen für ein humanitäres Abenteuer in der arabisch-islamischen Welt, das war ihre (falsche) Schlussfolgerung aus dem Fehler, Bush gegen Schröder unterstützt zu haben:
The Arab public embraced the Libyan uprising in February, which began less than a week after Mubarak’s fall. They saw the Libyan revolution as part of their own common story of peaceful, popular challenges to entrenched authoritarian rule. They watched in horror as Qaddafi responded with brutal military force, and as his forces advanced on Benghazi they desperately called for the world to help.
I heard a lot of skepticism about this Arab demonstration effect after the NATO intervention began. Skeptics pointed out, quite correctly, that the regimes in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria seemed undeterred by the NATO show of force. But they generally ignored, or just didn’t care about, the overwhelmingly positive response at the time in most of the Arab public. The Arab public, watching the battle unfold on al-Jazeera and online, understood that a massacre had been prevented by the intervention.
A significant portion of American and Western commentators were quick to assume that Arabs would view the Libya intervention through the lens of Iraq. I assumed that too, at first. But the debate that I saw unfold in the actual Arab public sphere was entirely different and forced me to change my mind. While there were certainly Arab voices warning of imperialism and oil seizures and Israeli conspiracies, the overwhelming majority actively demanded Western intervention to protect the Libyan people and their revolution. The urgency of preventing the coming massacre mattered more to them, and despite all the legacies of Iraq they demanded that the United States and the international community take on that responsibility.
As for the demonstration effect on regimes, it is worth recalling that both Syria and Yemen saw significant escalations at exactly that moment which hardly seem a coincidence. The Syrian uprising really began to take root after the regime’s heavy handed response to rising protests in Deraa on March 18. Its violence in Deraa set in motion the cycle of repression and mobilization, which has brought hundreds of thousands of Syrians into the streets and turned Assad’s regime into an international pariah. The repertoire of escalating international condemnation, targeted sanctions, and International Criminal Court referrals now being deployed against Assad’s regime debuted in Libya.
March 18 was also Yemen’s „Bloody Friday,“ when Ali Abdullah Saleh’s forces opened fire on a large demonstration at Sanaa University. Over the following days, massive protests erupted across the country, al-Jazeera broke away from its wall to wall Libya coverage to focus on Yemen, and the defection of Major General Ali Muhsin and a host of government officials, ruling party members, and military officers made it appear that the regime’s end was near. Saleh refused to step down and Yemen descended into the grinding political stalemate it’s in today. But that shouldn’t make us forget how close Yemen was to real change in those weeks. Perhaps now there will be one final chance to push toward closure in Yemen before Saleh returns.
Libya lost its central place in the Arab public sphere as the war dragged on. Even if al-Jazeera continued to cover the war heavily, the agenda fragmented and darkened. Arab attention was consumed by new setbacks and stalemates, from the brutal repression in Bahrain to the incomprehensible stalemate in Yemen, to the escalating brutality in Syria. But over the last two days, Arab attention refocused on Libya. Arabs from Yemen, to Syria, to Morocco experienced Qaddafi’s fall as part of their own story. And they are clearly inspired, galvanized and energized.
Arab activists across the region will now likely try to jump-start protest movements which had lost momentum. Some will succeed, others won’t. (…)