Non-Violent Insurgency: How Smart Rebels Win small wars

[Dayuhan]

Actually Qaddafi jumped on board the GWOT ally bandwagon and has been suppressing his populace in recent years in the name of US blessed counterterrorism.

Nominally, yes, though calling him a US ally would be a huge exaggeration, and it's not as if he ever needed or asked our permission to suppress his populace. Certainly the US isn't in any way enabling him, nor do I see any evidence that the US is perceived as a supporter or enabler.

I am, however, surprised at the ruthless comments coming from his son, as I was under the impression from an article I had read a while back about his son being much more moderate and wanting to implement several reforms that would have granted the populace greater rights and liberties.

I'm not that surprised... I had the feeling that the son was being set up in a sort of "good cop" role, but that the "reforms" under discussion were never intended to be more than cosmetic. The son is in the same boat as the father, and knows it; if that boat is threatened he'll defend it as viciously as any of them.

I have also said that over reliance on "facts" is dangerous, as these type of uprisings are based in perception, rather than fact. And as Wilf often says, in this reason everyone has their own perspective on what the "facts" are. I doubt many share our perspective in that regard.

I've also said many times that managing perception is very different from managing fact, and we have to know the difference. If people are responding to actual policies or actual circumstances, we may be able to alter their response by altering policies or circumstances. We can't do that if people are responding to a perception that is not in fact grounded in any reality subject to our influence.

Since we speak of perception, we also have to accept that any US attempt to intervene in or influence domestic policy in other countries, especially in the Muslim world, will be perceived as self-interested meddling, no matter what we say or what we actually intend. Nobody anywhere will ever believe that we are the champion of the populace, least of all the populace. We cannot impose ourselves uninvited in that role with any credibility: what we intend is irrelevant, the perception will be that we are trying to influence or control events for our benefit.

We cannot correct the perceptions left by past meddling with present or future meddling. The answer to bad meddling is not good meddling, it's less meddling. We also can't change these perceptions overnight: they will take as long to change as they took to create, possibly longer: trust is more easily broken than built. We can start the process by thinking twice, and then twice more, before pushing ourselves into other people's domestic affairs.