The West and Qadaffi

The week after Muammar Qadaffi's brutal death, the West -- or at least the government and media which give it expression -- are still jubilant about the events in Libya. You have to wonder exactly why. For four decades, Western leaders shook Qadaffi's hand, and Western media outlets adored him for his headline-friendly flamboyance. Meanwhile, Western governments made no serious objection to his dictatorship, and media outlets didn't even bother covering his repression of his own people or the very real and damaging role he played in many African and Middle Eastern crises -- including the precipitation of the genocide in Darfur.

So what changed? Why are the media so happy for the Libyan people, whose political existence was barely acknowledged by editors and journalists for almost half a century? What made Western world leaders suddenly hate Qadaffi for the same crimes they once loved to ignore?

What's changed is the balance of power in the Middle East, or at least Western perception of it. Aside from a few Western footholds -- namely Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia -- the Arab states were largely anti-Western and, so, pro-Russian and pro-Chinese in their national policies and public sentiment. The West's influence over these states came with extremely high price tags, if it came at all.

Today the Western governments and media outlets celebrate the Arab Spring not so much as the birth of democracy in the region, but as one of those very rare tectonic shifts that can change the balance of power. They see it, that is, as an opportunity. For governments it means a chance to bring Arab power under Western influence. For the media it is, first and foremost, a good story, but it's also a vindication, or maybe an absolution, of the Western interventionism that members of the press often view with a guilty conscience.

But there is a danger in all this. The West in its enthusiasm has offered the newly forming Arab governments like the Libyan NTC unconditional love, when strict conditions are exactly what's called for in these times of political upheaval and revolution. If the "Arab Spring" turns out to be not an Arab Spring but an Islamist Bloom (for example), then Western enthusiasm will become, once again, an instrument of folly, as it has been so many times in this region.

Skepticism should be the West's watchword and a conservative, rational and optimistically wary outlook should be guiding its decisions. In the international arena, these are the only checks and balances that can be applied to newly forming, quasi-democratic governments. They may not come with the gush of joy that Western actors have permitted themselves over the past weeks, but neither do they come with the terrible risk of yet another Western political catastrophe in the Middle East.