In one of those weird turns of history, NATO are at war with colonel Gadhafi's Libya. It came together around much French diplomacy as well as Kevin Rudd flying around telling people the rebels of Libya needed a no-fly zone to at least have an even chance to oust Colonel Gadhafi.
On a political level, Mr Sarkozy badly wanted to restore the credibility of French diplomacy after failing to read the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and then Egypt. Last month, he had to get rid of his foreign minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, after she not only offered French security “savoir faire” to the Tunisian regime just days before it fell, but then failed to explain her links to a businessman close to the deposed rulers. French diplomats have been mortified by the damage this did to the country’s standing. Moreover, Mr Sarkozy had personal reasons to want to turn the screws on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who last week called him a “clown”, and whose son, Saif al-Islam, alleged without evidence that Libya had helped to finance his 2007 presidential-election campaign (a claim denied by the Elysée).
Another factor has been the arrival of Alain Juppé to replace Ms Alliot-Marie. A former prime minister, and one-time foreign minister, he has brought heavyweight experience to the job. Initially hesitant about intervening militarily, he laid down various conditions for backing the establishment of a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace: it would need the international legitimacy of a clear United Nations Security Council resolution; it should not be a NATO operation because of the Alliance’s image in the Arab world as an American tool; it would need at least symbolic Arab military participation; and it would require an explicit call from the Arab world.
Last week, Mr Juppé cancelled a trip to Berlin at the last moment to fly to New York to plead France’s case in person at the UN Security Council on March 17th. (The speech carried distinct echoes of that by Dominique de Villepin, a former foreign minister, who argued just as passionately against military intervention in Iraq in 2003.) By the time resolution 1973 was passed, and with the nod of the Arab League, all of Mr Juppé’s conditions had been, broadly, met. The Paris summit tied up the loose ends, and supplied non-Western legitimacy, however symbolic. On French television a few hours after French fighter jets had begun to strike Libyan tanks, Mr Juppé spoke persuasively and calmly of “calculated risks”, and the restoration of French honour in defending its values.
If you add in that wars can help politicians in the polls, maybe it's not surprising. Wars are an interesting adjunct to the post GFC landscape as the West now has ample motivation to go and fight a gratuitous war to increase military spending and by extension help the GDP. America is less motivated to join this war because it's already got Afghanistan, and barely got out of Iraq having gone there exactly to shore up markets after 9/11. Of course thre's the dirty big debt that got racked up to think about, but nobody is capable of dealing with that.
The other thing to watch of course is oil price. Libyan crude is actually the best crude in the world and goes into airplanes. So not only will the oil price rise, it will likely rise in a way so as to hurt airline margins. It's not something that will show up immediately but you can bet your bottom dollar this is going to hurt industries around the world. The longer the action continues in Libya, the more we're going to line ourselves up for GFC part 2. The ideal scenario is a quick finish, but it's actually hard to see an endgame in the Libyan contest. Do these rebels really have what it takes to oust Gadhafi from his lair/bunker/stronghold in Tripoli? It's a good question sure to worry at least more than Nikolas Sarkozy or Mr Juppé.
You wonder why so much of the world continues to be happy relying on oil for fuel when it is so vulnerable to events in the middle east. One would have thought that other industries might have put on more pressure for energy companies and the like to look for better alternatives that don't put us all at the whims of dictators and Arab militants and other assorted complications that are opaque, irrational, and willfully hostile and difficult. I mean, do people like say, Steve Jobs or George Soros or Steve Ballmer or the guy running General Motors these days really enjoy this affecting their share prices?
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