By Bill Hayden
Western aerial warfare intervention in Libya has not been all that wise, as I never once doubted, and the United Nations' Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, invoked to justify it, is long on high-minded aspirations but very short on practical understanding of the realpolitik of international relations.
Emotive reporting of the noble dissent in various Middle Eastern countries as ''pro-democracy activists'' may be good copy but it is mostly misleading. As far as I can see, the dissidence in Libya comes from a rag-tag team of scarcely coalesced tribal groups that are very interested in taking control of oil resources.
While they are resisting Muammar Gaddafi's tyranny, they almost certainly would, if they could form a genuine coalition, opt for an Islamic theocratic state that may not be benign. However, their prospects as a military force are bleak.
What happens when the aerial intervention has run its course, with Gaddafi still pushing ahead successfully on the ground? The US has made it clear it won't be putting military feet on the ground there, or anywhere else in the Middle East. So the old guideline (so popular in capitals other than Washington) of fighting wars of principle to the last drop of American soldiers' blood is no longer in fashion.
In any case, the Arab League opposes any such intervention. One expects R2P will be discredited by the Libyan experience. More relevantly, we cannot reliably answer "who" or "what" is the West supporting in Libya because we simply do not know.
I am afraid that out of the widespread chaos in the Middle East, the biggest winner is likely to be Shiite-dominated Iran, the last outcome the US would want.
In Bahrain, the internal turmoil is about Shiite Islam revolting against the dominant ruling family. The put-down of dissidents, with Saudi military help, has been fierce and brutal, but there has been little protest from the West; no invoking of R2P. Bahrain is home to the US Fifth Fleet and a major supplier of the West's oil. That's realpolitik.
Saudi Arabia is apprehensive of similar dissent by its Shiite population, as is Syria. If the Muslim Brotherhood has much influence on the course of Egypt's near-term destiny, that country is likely to become an austere Islamic theocracy. Yemen could go to jihadist influences if the West has not intervened constructively, and the West is clearly reluctant to get involved. Iraq, of course, is likely to increasingly be a satellite state of Iran when the US permanently withdraws, reflecting Iranian Shiite influence.
And when US and coalition forces leave Afghanistan in the near future, we will be back to where we started: the Taliban will be riding in the box seat of that country's destiny, as it was before Western intervention, with al-Qaeda certainly diminished but Osama bin Laden as elusive as ever, or dead.
Pakistan could crumble as a nation-state into a clutter of rump regions beyond central authority.
Concurrently, the US will be increasingly hobbled by a public debt of 96 per cent of its gross domestic product. That means less money to spend on defence.
More broadly, the US domestic economy, which has been kept afloat with regular and large injections of Chinese currency, could be on the verge of marked difficulties. And if the Chinese switch to domestic consumerism, the US will have to exercise even more austere economic management than it has been used to for some decades.
Given all this, it is not inconceivable that the world will slide into a number of spheres, where concerts of major nations do the heavy lifting once done by the US, on a regional basis. Germany, France and Russia give some impression of testing the ground for such a future development. And where will Australia be in this evolution?
In the meantime, messes like those in the Middle East today will continue and the West, perhaps, will have to recognise, frustratingly, its limitations to do much about them.
Bill Hayden was federal minister for foreign affairs and trade from 1983 to 1988 and governor-general from 1989 to 1996.