There are many reasons to be concerned about during the interim period in Libya. True, the National Transitional Council has been recognized by the whole world. However, there is a power struggle in the country, manifesting itself through the rivalry between the political leadership, particularly the interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril, and the rebel leadership, or Abdul Hakim Belhadj, the man who served in Afghanistan and had ties with al-Qaeda. In short, the rebels who played a key role in bringing the regime of Muammar Gaddafi to an end fear that the politicians may be seeking to monopolize power, and are stating now that the political leadership is not involving the rebels in the decision-making process. While both sides have stressed that all Libyans subscribe to a moderate form of Islam, it is clear that there are radical minorities that want a role for themselves in the new regime. The American Right is urging the Obama administration meanwhile to stop ‘leading from a backseat position” and to seek establishing a new pro-Western regime in Libya. However, the administration's priority, ahead of any such bid, involves its concerns regarding the chemical weapons that are supposed to be in Libya's possession. It seems that Gaddafi, after announcing that he would abandon WMDs in 2003 for fear of meeting the same fate as Saddam Hussein, had not fulfilled all his promises. The Americans and weapons experts are talking now about ten thousand tons of mustard gas that Gaddafi had managed to hide away from the eyes of the inspectors. With its oil revenues, Libya can indeed repair what Gaddafi had ruined. However, Libya's oil is another source of concern. For one thing, there is an urgent need to repair the oil facilities to resume exports. In 42 years of Gaddafi in power, there was no plan for economic development of any kind, and oil has therefore come to represent 95% of the country's GDP. Rebuilding the oil sector will enable the transitional government to accelerate the march towards democracy through a constitution, parliamentary elections and guarantees for local and foreign private sectors to contribute in the reconstruction of the country. I have another reason to be concerned; namely, it is Western greed. The role France and Britain played was not at all for charity's sake, and we now know for certain that the Labour government in Britain had cooperated with Gaddafi, to the extent of handing over suspects to him despite the fact that they knew they were going to be tortured, in return for oil deals and so forth. The same applies to France, while Italy went even further with the special relationship between Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi, and the feminine role in it. Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron visited Tripoli and were given a hero's welcome. For a single day, they were even more popular in Libya than they are in their own countries, and I appreciate the Libyan people's acknowledgement of the role NATO played in striking Gaddafi's forces. However, something about this visit aggravated my fears deeply. In the photos I saw (I followed the television and live coverage only a little), Sarkozy and Cameron were almost always accompanied by Bernard-Henri Lévy, an extremist with Likudnik inclinations, and a man that has declared stances against Arabs and Muslims, especially the Palestinians. I saw him in some of those photos walking in front of the French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, in fact, perhaps because of his status of informal adviser to the French President. BHL had also visited Benghazi in March, proclaimed his support for the rebellion against Gaddafi, and advised Sarkozy to support military intervention there afterwards. I have no confidence in the intentions of Lévy with regard to Libya or any other Arab country. For instance, BHL often defends Netanyahu's gevrnment, despite the fact that it is a fascist and criminal one. He also chooses to criticize the slightest move by Palestinian resistance, but he ignores the elephant in the room, i.e. the extremist gang in power today in Israel. Lévy is better at public relations than he is at philosophy. Last year, BHL was at the center of a scandal revolving around his book ‘On War in Philosophy', wherein he quoted at length a philosopher named Jean-Baptiste Botul, to support his attacks on Immanuel Kant, whom he called “raving mad” and “fake”. However, it then turned out that this Botul is a fictional person, and had been invented by a French journalist as a hoax. On 9/2/2010, the Sunday Times ran a story about this entitled “Bernard-Henri Lévy a laughing stock for quoting fictional philosopher”. Personally, I would have hoped that every Arab country bars Lévy from entering its territories, so that he could only peddle his vacuous philosophy in his own country, instead of trying to sell us his Israeli allies. They, rather than any Arab fighter, are his raison d'être. [email protected]
