Libya in the News: Violation of the Just War Doctrine, the Just Third Way, and The Third Jihad

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

    In the past, history has usually been written by the victors.  In the Arab world’s “new era” this may change, and perhaps in time even to make a difference in the present.  Three news items of the past three days are especially relevant.

    Now we learn from the public media that early on Colonel Qaddafi offered to “step down and leave Libya” even before passage of U.N. Resolution 1973.  This offer was rejected by American and European strategists.  Deja vu!  Like when President Bush refused to accept the Taliban’s offer to turn Osama bin Laden over to a neutral country for trial in 2001 and then two years later refused to accept Saddam Hussein’s offer to accept the UAE’s offer of asylum in 2003. 

    If this news of Qaddafi’s offer is true, then clearly the American and NATO intervention violates the most important of the seven requirements of the Just War Doctrine, namely, that all means other than armed violence must have been exhausted.  In English Courts of Equity, as well as in English Common Law, which governs in America, this principle is known as “exhaust your remedies”.

    Relevant to the legitimacy of the allied intervention is an item today in the NYT that the rebel government in Benghazi has established its own central bank, presumably to receive Qaddafi’s $30 billion dollars of sequestered funds from Western banks.  This bank could arrange to provide individual accounts for every Libyan citizen to own equal shares of inalienable, voting stock in Libyan oil, gas, and hydrocarbon industries, so that they can pay for their own retirement, ordinary health care, and unlimited education and can also invest their own profits as stockholders in new down-stream industries throughout the country of Libya.  This could be a sentinel step toward The Just Third Way (http://www.cesj.org), other than socialism based on envy and capitalism based on greed (i.e. self interest at the expense of other human beings). 

    If the new rebel government does not serve to devolve power, both economic and political, to the level of the individual citizen, then for all practical purposes, it is a tool of foreign imperialism.  Of course, if Qaddafi does not do so as his parting gift to humanity and the Libyans, then he is just as guilty as everyone else.  His little Green Book, which is reverenced by his followers on a level with the Qur’an (astaghfiru Allah), is a fraud unless its implications are actually implemented.  The actual system of government in Libya for forty years has been unadulterated fascism beautified by the lipstick of welfare bribery to prevent revolution (just like to a lesser degree we find in America).

    Of equal importance for the future of peace, prosoperity, and freedom through compassionate justice in the “new era” was the first public mention yesterday that I have ever seen of the third (intellectual) jihad, the only jihad specifically mentioned in the Qur’an.  The first great scholar in the contemporary world to emphasize this jihad was Syria’s Grand Mufti Samahatu Shaykh Ahmad Kuftaro, in whose house I lived sixteen years ago while editing a collection of his talks.  He impressed on me very firmly that it is my responsibility to publish this collection of his life’s work as a pioneer in interfaith understanding and cooperation, despite the expected vehement opposition by the corrupt coterie around him, including the worst of them, his own son, who took over Naqshbandi responsibilities against his father’s wishes.


    Now that the “new era” may be dawning in the world’s most efficient police state and in its associated rival in Tripoli, perhaps the time has finally come to publish such scholarly works as part of the Third Jihad to pursue truth and its expression in the eight universal principles of justice developed over many centuries and now being revived in the maqasid al shari’ah.  In sha’a Allah.