Enforce a no-fly zone over Libya

Enforce a no-fly zone over Libya By: Freeyad Ibrahim- Al-zabarjad Today Libya’s tyrant is paying mercenaries to shoot his people in the streets like “rats” and “cockroaches”. Yet his people are paying a terrible price for freedom. And the fear is that even now Mr Qaddafi will in one way or another clamber over the corpses littering the streets to seize back the power that has slipped away from him. In Libya Mr Qaddafi seems to crave blood. On February 22nd, he vowed to “cleanse Libya house by house”. If he prevails, dictators over the world will know which course to follow. Rather than appease them and make dirty deals for the sake of oil and geopolitics, the argument goes, the only ethical foreign policy is to reject them and walk away. Indignation alone could pave a way for a strategy for dealing with dictators. And that was what the West tried with Mr Qaddafi a quarter of a century ago, after his diplomats shot a British policewoman, his agents bombed a nightclub in Berlin, and his secret service had blown down airliners. Yet it seldom makes sense to isolate large parts of the world permanently, no matter how cruel and inhuman the tyrants who govern them. The question raised by the wave of protests spreading across the Middle East is how to deal with the tyrants. The priority is to push the strongmen towards reform and away from violence. Barack Obama, America’s president, was right to stand behind the protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and now Libya. America’s army chiefs were right to use their influence to restrain Egypt’s armed forces from shooting into the crowds. And if Mr Qaddafi uses his air force to kill large numbers of his own people, the world would be right to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya. 6-3-2011 www.freeyad Ibrahim.nl