Has Qadhafi become a great power and we don't know it? So why are the most powerful armies in the world unable to achieve a decisive victory against him, while making all kinds of excuses that they are unable to finish him off once and for all?
Qadhafi is still provocatively claiming that his troops are humiliating the allied troops who will go, in his opinion, into the trash bin of history.
The allied troops, for their part, say that they have stopped the Colonel's troops from advancing on the rebels' camps and that they have forced his planes to remain grounded. Despite this, the rebels say freely that Qadhafi's forces still surround important areas in Ajdabiya and Masurata.
Despite NATO's insistence that the Colonel's troops are not complying to the announced resolution to halt military operations, these countries refuse to deploy infantry troops onto Libyan terrain, their excuse being that this would violate international law. There is much evidence that international law has been violated by these countries who now refuse to violate it.
The American President is trying, in this context, to convince NATO countries that they have achieved their goals in the current operations.
He said this in order to pave the way for the withdrawal of his country from this alliance, in anticipation of the strong push-back he will face from within the United States regarding a military entanglement and the huge costs which the U.S. knows about from its experience during the war in Iraq.
The American President has called French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron to grant NATO the lead role in applying the no-fly zone resolution over Libya, which would then reduce the U.S. and French role. France opposes this, claiming that handing control over to NATO would diminish Arab contributions, though without specifying what Arab countries are currently contributing.
The withdrawal of the U.S. from what is unfolding in Libya remains a source of great contemplation; is it really because of domestic opposition, because of the costs or for other reasons which are unclear at this stage, particularly after Qadhafi's declaration that the overthrow of his regime would lead to disarray and disruption of the security and peace of the region and in Israel? For if Qadhafi is able to overcome this crisis, will the U.S. want that he submit to their beck and call?
We must not glance over this viewpoint, because the U.S., supported by the West, has forgiven Qadhafi's (what they considered) past mistakes; so why do they not pardon him now? In my opinion, the matter is not confined to Libya and its stance on Israel. What is going on in Libya is exactly what happened in Tunisia, then what moved to Egypt and after that to Yemen. Does this mean that the Arab world is on the cusp of a great political transformation?
It is not a difficult question to answer for us, since we can look at what is currently happening in Tunisia and in Egypt. Without delving into details, we wonder: have those two countries reached a new stage in their history, namely, achieving democracy? Or is this merely a transitory stage on the way toward an ambiguous future? Most likely it will be just a "waiting" period, because the transition from an era of totalitarian rule to a time of democratic rule needs a new political and cultural climate which is not in abundance in the Arab world at the present time.
There are three issues at which the Arab world must take a long look in order to guarantee that it is headed down the right road. The first is education, since the Arab nation cannot begin down the road of progress unless it has a real awakening with regards to its education system. This scholastic awakening in the Arab world is tied to the school. Many do not realize that the school can be one of the most dangerous means of mental malefaction if society does not see to it that the requisite freedoms are maintained
within the schools. We know however that the school in the Arab world is simply a means to get a diploma which then leads to obtaining a job; many people live this way in society. But this is not the case in most western countries, where people in society are not categorized by what kind of diploma they have, but by what they can offer. This is to say nothing of the matter that many of those who have diplomas in the Arab world obtain them through illegal channels and then find their way to the faculty at universities where they compete with those who have genuine abilities and real qualifications.
This reality, in sum, has led to the appearance of a trend in the western world currently, calling for the establishment of a school-less society, as presented in the book by Ivan Illich, and it might seem that this trend is idealistic and would not catch on in the Arab world. The important thing is that we realize that educational reform in this Arab world is not limited to opening more schools and calling for the development of curricula, but fundamentally, it needs more freedom, whereby students can learn a culture of freedom in the schools and their minds do not become dark from rotten ideas and values. There are legitimate debates in many Arab countries around what the schools are capable of creating in the mind of a pupil who spends his youth there and whose mind is loaded with notions that are not useful in a modern society.
The second issue concerns the economy. We have recently seen an idea prevalent in the Arab world, calling to lay siege upon the rich, to hunt them down and to take possession of their money, in order to transfer it to the people, as the propaganda of this new trend says. But the result has been two-fold, the first of which has been to set up nationalized companies taken over by "big wigs", who then transform the companies to serve their own special interests. The second result has been that many rich folks smuggle their money to foreign banks in order to remove it from circulation in the national economy. In this way, smuggling has become a culture, so now we hear about many presidents smuggling hundreds of billions of poor peoples' money and putting into circulation in foreign economies without the people getting any benefit. Sound and right thinking would be for serenity and peacefulness to take hold in the minds of the rich so that they do not move their money outside of the country. For if it were to stay in circulation in the national economy, many would benefit, regardless of who owns the money, as long as it will be used for the sake of all individuals of the society. This is the situation in many developed countries, where it is of no import who owns the money; what matters is that the money serves everyone. In light of this reality, most will accept paying taxes because they realize that a system of social security will offer most of them the closest thing to a decent life.
The third issue is a social structure founded on a civil culture which isolates no faction or individual of society from another even when this stems from his ideology, religious beliefs or doctrine. For all people are capable of co-existing within the modern civil society as is the case in many western countries, who clearly pronounce it a culture and which they also have named a culture of a multicultural and multi-ethnic society.
The reality which we have explained is the one that is the most conducive to building modern societies, not just for the purpose of overthrowing regimes, then wending one's way toward an unknown future. In this light, Arab societies must ponder not about replacing governments with governments but replacing ruling systems with ruling systems; as democracy does not presently exist in the Arab world, the farthest people can fathom is replacing a regime with another regime, thus to start the old story from the beginning.
http://www.alquds.co.uk/index.asp?fname=today\23qpt698.htm&arc=data\2011\03\03-23\23qpt698.htm
*italics are mine for the purpose of clarification of the meaning
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