by Zack Beauchamp
In the same vein as the Lynch post Patrick highlighted, Tom Finn thinks Qaddafi's fall has revitalized Yemeni revolutionaries:
With little prospect of NATO or other foreign troops on the ground in Yemen, Saleh may not be as rattled by the Libyan experience as some might hope. Yet the sight of Qaddafi behind bars could still have an earth-shattering effect in Yemen. If Egypt was anything to go by, Libya might still prove inspirational enough to set things here in motion again.
Rania Abouzeid thinks the same about Syria. Larison worries about the downsides:
The danger here is that emboldening protesters in the absence of any prospect of outside backing is just the sort of irresponsible thing that “rollback” advocates did in Hungary and the first Bush administration did in southern Iraq after the Gulf War. The scandal of American inaction in those cases was that Washington had led people to believe that the U.S. would side with them if they rose up. However, our government had no intention of doing this. That empty promise of support prompted them to take risks that they would probably never have taken without this encouragement, and they suffered greatly because of it. Outside intervention in Libya has always had the potential to mislead other protest movements into expecting direct backing from the U.S. and other governments. It might also conceivably encourage protest movements that the best way to gain outside backing is to provoke harsh crackdowns by taking up arms. Viewed this way, it is not an entirely good thing that protesters and revolutionaries are emboldened. Of all the supposed demonstration effects that the Libyan intervention was supposed to have, this is the one that I have rarely discussed.
Ed Husain pushes back against replicating the Libya model in Syria. Husain's argument that Syrian protestors are demanding Western intervention is critical to Larison's position. If it's the fall of Qaddafi simpliciter, and not the fact that it was accomplished via Western intervention, that's inspiring Syrians and Yemenis, then the dangerous effect Larison's talking about here wouldn't be at work in this case. If people are mostly energized by the sight of Libyan's celebrating and Qaddafi's fall more broadly, and still don't want Western intervention, then they're not hinging their protest strategy on a Western intervention that won't be coming. Whether or not Husain's right is an open question at this point.
(Video: Syrians in Homs on August 21st chant "Al Gadaffi tar tar, isha dorak ya Bashar" which the uploader translates as "Gadaffi flew Away! Bashar Your Turn is Next!")
The Dish 