Sunday, April 03, 2011

COMO IA DIZENDO

aqui,

o que é novo na política de intervenção militar dos EUA na Líbia não é a alteração da estratégia dos norte-americanos para a Arábia mas a forma com essa estratégia deve ser consumada.
A Obama doctrine destaca-se da anterior práxis bélica norte-americana para aquela zona do globo pelo não envolvimento isolado na defesa de interesses dos EUA que são também interesses de quase todos os povos do mundo.

No caso da intervenção na Líbia continuo sem me aperceber dos interesses que estavam neste momento em causa, para além, ainda que muito condenável, da ferocidade de Kadafi para com o seu próprio povo. Lamentavelmente, está longe de ser caso único e muitos outros ficaram até hoje impunes. Estaremos perante um precedente perigoso ou virtuoso?

Mas, sobretudo, continuo a não me aperceber do modo como tal intervenção  possa compatilizar-se com eventuais rebeliões contra regimes ditatoriais protegidos pelo Ocidente.
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Transcrevo, do Economist desta semana, mais um artigo sobre o tema:

IT IS Pavlovian. As soon as a president does something new in foreign policy, the world wants to know whether he has invented a new “doctrine”. The short answer in the case of Libya is that Barack Obama has not invented a new doctrine so much as repudiated an old one. What he is also doing, however, is challenging an American habit of mind.

The doctrine Mr Obama has repudiated is the one attributed to Colin Powell, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and George W. Bush’s transparently miserable secretary of state when America invaded Iraq in 2003. That held, among other things, that America ought to go to war only when its vital interests are threatened, when the exit strategy is clear, and when it can apply overwhelming force to ensure that its aims are achieved. Nothing could be more different from the account Mr Obama gave Americans on March 28th of his reasons for using military force in Libya. He does not believe that America’s vital interests are at stake (though some “important” ones are); the exit strategy is not entirely clear (Colonel Qaddafi must go, but who knows when, and not as a direct result of American military action); and the force America is willing to apply (no boots on the ground) is strictly limited.

None of this should be a surprise. In “The Audacity of Hope”, the bestseller Mr Obama wrote as a senator in 2006, he set out a theory of military intervention. Like all sovereign nations, he argued, America has the unilateral right to defend itself from attack, and to take unilateral military action to eliminate an imminent threat. But beyond matters of clear self-defence, it would “almost always” be in its interest to use force multilaterally. This would not mean giving the UN Security Council a veto over its actions, or rounding up Britain and Togo and doing as it pleased. It would mean following the example of the first President Bush in the first Gulf war—“engaging in the hard diplomatic work of obtaining most of the world’s support for our actions”.

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