Africa

"When the new, and pro-American, French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, returned France to the NATO integrated command in the spring of 2009, a number of prominent French figures stated their reservations, the most articulate of whom was the former French foreign minister under François Mitterrand, Hubert Védrine. Much later, and more recently, in a report submitted to President François Hollande on Nov. 12, 2012, Védrine stated that although de Gaulle had been right in 1966, the world had changed since. And the United States, especially with the reelection of Barack Obama, had changed. The Americans now want an increased military role for the Europeans."

In his Nov. 25 Boston Globe column, “Arab Awakening, Act 2”, Nicholas Burns warns that, nearly one year since the start of reform and revolution across the Arab world, the region may turn more turbulent and violent in the months ahead.

"And what credit does Nicolas Sarkozy, or Barack Obama, for that matter, gain from the sudden and felicitous demise of Muammar Gaddafi. Very little. Both are up for reelection in 2012, and the odds are not good, both in terms of Sarkozy's perceived un-presidential and rough manners, and in terms of Obama's miseries over the economy."

"NATO, the Arabs and the international community could support the Libyan rebels because there was no counterweight.  That is not true anywhere else in the Arab world. This is a case study on leading from behind, but not a new international doctrine."

"But there are gainsayers, who declare that yet another American military intervention in the Arab world is nothing but counterproductive. Indeed, some Arab commentators see the intervention in Libya as a new manifestation of a colonialism returning to the Arab world, and this is certainly there as an undercurrent in Arab public opinion. But we should never lose sight of the fact that it was this ubuesque Colonel Gaddafi who brought us PAN AM 103 over Lockerbie (1988) and UTA 772 over Niger (1989)."

"A central tenet of both neo-conservatism and liberal internationalism/interventionism is the idea that democracy is both the ideal form of government but also one that is relatively easy to export to other societies. Never mind that democratization tends to shift the distribution of power within different societies, thereby provoking potentially violent struggles for power between different ethnic or social groups within society. Pay no attention to the fact that it took several centuries for stable democracies to emerge in the Western world, and that process was frequently bloody and difficult."

"With France as the unstated leader, the Mediterranean Union is also animated by a hope to stabilize the region, improve it economically and thus slow the flow of illegal Arab immigration, and provide an alternative to extremism and terrorism. A modern and open Libya, brought to the world by France, would be a major step toward a new European center of gravity, mainly France."

"The case study we do not have is whether a no-fly zone will aid rebel leaders in deposing a tyrannical leader in a predominantly ground combat civil war where the United States has a strong preference for who should lose, but almost no idea who the winners are. This is new territory."

"NEVER AGAIN!" promised Washington, London, Brussels, and the United Nations after the massacres in Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda. But the killing fields of Darfur are more than two years old, and still the world permits innocent farmers, children, and displaced people to be killed and women repeatedly raped. What is to be done?