Lessons from a war

The first lesson is easy: The world is no longer hospitable to despots.

It took half a year more in Libya, but it’s gone down the same way. Of course as I write this Moammar Gadhafi is still calling on the residents of Tripoli to rise up to resist the rebels or face a bloodbath, and you never know. The world counted him out six months ago but he still managed to cling on, stemming the tide of revolt and even establishing a stalemate. But this time around, his position is desperate, if not hopeless.

The way his son says confidently that his father is safe and is still in control of government is the way Ferdinand Marcos sounded on the eve of his exile when he said confidently that he was still in command of the military and that he would scuttle the Edsa Revolt soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the time this comes out, Gadhafi will have gone the way of Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

In fact Gadhafi merely postponed the inevitable. The writing on the wall was plain for him to read months ago, after a wave of revolts swept across that part of the world. Which writing should also start becoming more legible to countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The longing for freedom from repression or iron-fisted rule has always been there, but what has turned the ember into a raging fire is not ideology but technology. Over the last few decades the world has balled up, or become a global village, in ways that have gone beyond Marshall McLuhan’s wildest dreams. Facebook, in particular, has proved revolutionary in more ways than one, playing a tremendous role in the various uprisings that have swept the Arab world. Freedom in one part of the world exerts an irrepressible force on another, turning tyranny into a no longer immovable object.

These days you can no longer keep things hidden from the people. The only way you can do so is by remaining backward and brutal like Burma, but which too is a surefire recipe for revolt.

The days of the old tyrants, or long-time rulers, are gone. Or at least they are numbered, for those who have still managed to stay on.

The second lesson is just as patent: Self-determination is still the key to freedom. You see that when you compare the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya to the US invasion of Iraq.

The sudden surge of the Libyan rebels, or resistance fighters, after months of stalemate is of course now being attributed to Nato, an elite group of which directed the course of events from the air. So the charge of external intervention continues to be levied against the countries—the United States, Britain, France—that mounted it in Libya.

But there is a monumental difference between this and Iraq.

This at least is multilateral and based on a compelling need, or at least a compelling need of the Libyans. Gadhafi’s rule had become intolerable for his people and his continuing stay, bought at the price of countless lives, unconscionable. The invasion of Iraq was barefacedly unilateral, ignoring as it did the United Nations’ refusal to sanction it—the UN had become irrelevant, the American authors of that atrocity ranted—despite a coalition of the conscripted that had been hastily assembled to give it a patina of international consent. And it was based on a lie about Iraq harboring weapons of mass destruction. The only compelling need for it was the imperial ambitions of the American Right.

But infinitely more than that, the Iraq invasion was done without the consent of the people in whose name it was done. It did not have the consent of the Americans themselves who had merely been stampeded into paranoid acquiescence by the lie of WMDs aimed at their heartland. And it did not have the consent of the Iraqi people who lost kin and friends to George W. Bush’s “smart bombs,” which proved only as smart as he. When no WMDs were found in Iraq, Washington changed its justification to liberating the Iraqis from Saddam. There was only one problem: The Iraqis weren’t asking for it. Certainly they weren’t asking to be liberated from Saddam by America and for America. That was jumping from the frying pan to the fire.

There was such a call by the Libyan people upon the world. That is the one fundamental thing about Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. All of them began as homegrown revolts, all of them ended as homegrown revolts, give or take a hand or two from outside. The external intervention was secondary, however it hastened the ending, however it saved more lives. The internal determination was primary, the Libyan people rising the way other oppressed peoples have risen in the past and in the present to throw off the yoke around their necks. Take it as much from religion as from politics: God helps only those who help themselves. The world can liberate only those who liberate themselves. That is the road naturally taken, and it makes all the difference.

The question being asked today is: What happens to Libya now? Well, one thing we can say with reasonable assurance. However it goes, it won’t be like Iraq. There will be a lot more confidence in it. There will be a lot more progress in it.

There will be a lot more freedom in it.

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Something is rocking the CCP right now. No, it has nothing to do with phalluses though it can be an orgiastic experience as well. It’s a week-long jazz festival called “The Story of Jazz: The 1st CCP International Jazz Festival.” It started the other day and will end this Sunday.

You can still catch the tail-end of it this weekend. On Saturday, Cooky Chua sings the blues with the exquisite Bluesviminda band, while on Sunday Mel Villena storms into the stage with the formidable AMP Big Band. Catch the cool on Saturday and the heat on Sunday. Either one should be a treat, both should be a blast.