Free Exit the Colonel by Ethan Chorin Page B

all of this emerges, however, a question for any prospective judge and jury: does the fact that Saif ’s actions had a positive effect in loosening the media and human rights climate in Libya prior to the Arab Spring—and in creating this new class of “regime-enabled, half-in, half-out reformists,” who would play such an important role during and after the revolution—mitigate whatever crimes he may have committed
shortly before, or after, February 17, 2011? Ironically, the Iraq debacle conditioned both the US and Western involvement in Libya since 2004, and also conditioned the desire of President George W. Bush’s successor, Barak Obama, to try to reassure the people of the Middle East that the United States was, in fact, capable of change and a return to its founding values, which he attempted to do through the 2009 Cairo address. While many in the region dismissed the speech at the time as eloquent talk, it clearly played a key role in the US response to Libya’s spring.
    On the Libyan side, there were those who wanted to convince the world (the Libyan people, and themselves, presumably), that Gaddafi’s Libya could change. When the Revolution arrived, these people—former regime officials, regime interlocutors, Saif ’s direct associates (about whom much has been written here), and others who served as regime mediators—convinced the Libyan people that they were sufficiently “anti-Gaddafi” that they could be trusted to guide the revolution. All said, collectively, they did a pretty good job.
    While many would challenge Washington lobbyist Randa Fahmy Hudome’s pre-Revolution statement that Saif deserved a Nobel Prize for his role in the West-Libya rapprochement, without a “Saif-like figure” and “his people,” the Libyan version of the Arab Spring would likely have taken a very different course—and not necessarily a better one. When Saif chose to stand with his family and regime, his previous protégés stepped in to fill the void. With Saif now playing the role of his father, they collectively became, and did, what Saif perhaps could not have been, or done.
    With Libya’s liberation from Gaddafi’s regime, it arrived at a new, odd, and—with hefty recognition of the personal sacrifice made by the Libyan people—fairly accidental, discontinuity. Ten years from now, we may find that the contours of history have been redrawn, or re-traced: a new strongman, a repressive Islamic state. Or, one might find that all, or parts, of North Africa has reached a more or less comfortable equilibrium under a collection of representative governments in which moderate Islam is the principal political currency; or Libya will continue to prove its “uniqueness” in safeguarding its Islamic character under a more or less secular, representative government. It is too early to tell. The fact that, as of July 7, Libya had succeeded in holding free and fair elections, one national and several local, and that an alliance of “non-Islamist, culturally conservative moderates” had won 80 and 60 percent, respectively, of the vote in Tripoli and Benghazi—and a majority in the infamous city of Derna—vindicates those who
insisted a year earlier that Libya was a “wholly different animal” from Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Despite the very real constraints facing the United States and the West with respect to intervention in other Arab Spring states (Bahrain and Syria are the two most obvious cases), the fact is the West did intervene in Libya; the United States did not repeat the mistake it made in buying off the Karamanli warlord before William Eaton and his Benghazi soldiers could overthrow him (nor, for that matter, did the US repeat the “watch and see” approach pursued during massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia). The Secretary of State has reinforced US willingness and interest to deal directly with