Thursday 24 March 2011

Libya: The reality of the multilateral alliance



New York Times columnist David Brooks confirms, what professor Stephen Carter said earlier:

Finally, multilateral efforts are built around a fiction. The people who organize coalitions pretend that all the parties are sharing the burdens. In reality, only the U.S. can do many of the tasks. If the other nations falter, the U.S. will have to leap in and assume the entire burden. America’s partners go in knowing they do not bear ultimate responsibility for success or failure. Americans do.
All of this is not to say the world should do nothing while Qaddafi unleashes his demonic fury. Nor is this a defense of unilateralism. But we should not pretend we have found a superior way to fight a war. Multilateralism works best as a garment clothing American leadership. Besides, the legitimacy of a war is not established by how it is organized but by what it achieves.

Read the entire column here. 

PS
Let´s hope NATO will be allowed to take a formal leading role in Libya, at the same time recognizing that the operations in reality will continue to be led by the US.

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