During this Labor Day weekend I read a very interesting passage. This passage came from Richard Fontaine, foreign-policy adviser of the Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush:

 ‘‘In Iraq, we toppled the government and did an occupation and everything went to hell. In Libya, we toppled the government and didn’t do an occupation and everything went to hell. In Syria, we didn’t topple the government and did not do an occupation and everything went to hell. So, broadly, this is the Middle East. Things go to hell….’’

What he said was spiced with humor, but for those Arabians living in that "hell" it would be too callous. In the report published by the weekly New York Times Magazine, which describes the foreign-policy teams of the Republican presidential candidates, experts unanimously criticized Obama's policy being too weak. They all agreed that the United States should take more military actions. However, we would like to ask, if the United States did not overthrow other people's government from the very beginning, would the Middle East produce so many "hells"?

This involves a fairly fundamental issue, and that is the Middle East's dictators: Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Libya's Gaddafi and Syria's Bashar al-Assad. They have often behaved brutally and violently: Saddam had killed a large number of opponents with poison gas; Mubarak often tortured Muslim brothers and followers; Gaddafi had sent terrorists to blow up an international flight; Assad sinisterly dealt with those not of his ilk, and so on. Overall, their evil deeds were very obvious and their crimes deserved more than death. However, for the majority of the people in these countries, hasn’t these dictators’ safeguarded stability had its value in comparison with the fate of civil strife, fleeing from calamity, starvation, and death? If there were a great deal of ethnic or religious differences in the societies they ruled, wouldn’t there be a reason for these dictators’ existence? We can take Libya as an example.

George W. Bush is undoubtedly the creator of the Iraq hell while the Libyan hell is obviously the masterpiece of Obama and Hillary Clinton. Located in North Africa, Libya is a country made up of many large and small tribes, and many tribes are still nomadic. With its borders staying open, at any time there are about two million foreigners residing in its territory (in the United States these people are called illegal immigrants). Dependent on oil income, the country’s education and healthcare are free. Gaddafi and other dictators alike were not devout Muslims, so there were equal educational opportunities for girls and boys. In December 2010, an unemployed college student immolated himself in Tunisia, which sparked a mass movement and set off the so-called Arab Spring (perhaps it should be renamed the Arab Winter) in the Arab world. The Western media thought that it was a great democratic movement, and immediately gave moral support as well as other open or secret assistance. However, it was actually two distinct groups who participated in the movement against the dictatorship; one group was the Muslim congregation, while the other group was the intellectuals who had received Western ideology and education. Tunisia's mass movement soon spread to Egypt, Libya and other Middle Eastern countries. On February 17, 2011, the so-called Day of Rage event took place in Lybia, which was a major clash with the police.

Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton probably thought that a huge tide of democracy was raging in the Middle East and overshadowed the earth; it was unstoppable, but still needed outside help in order to win. So after a month, on March 17, the United Sates prompted the Security Council of the United Nations to adopt a resolution on the grounds that Gaddafi's crackdown on the mass movement might cause ethnic cleansing, so the international community had the responsibility to intervene. France and Britain scrambled to enter Libya and established a no-fly zone over Libya with the support of the United States to eliminate the Lybian government’s air superiority while providing weapons and satellite intelligence to the opposition forces. In October 2011, that is, after a short period of seven months, the opposition force in support of the United States shot Gaddafi dead in a gutter. What then? Contrary to the belief of the West, Libya soon fell into chaos, until today, four years later. We can call Lybia a failed state.

The March/April issue of the bimonthly Foreign Affairs magazine this year published an article entitled “Obama's Libya Debacle” written by University of Texas professor Alan Kuperman. The article says that in fact Gaddafi's repression of the opposition faction did not kill a whole lot of people, unlike the Western media’s reported door-to-door killings. According to the information he obtained, only about 1,000 Libyans died. However, after the fall of the Gaddafi regime, the four years of continued ethnic conflicts resulted in two separate governments and many local independent forces.  The death toll, according to the data gathered by the author, was as high as 10,000 people. Oil production plummeted, economic activity dropped, and the people deported by the new regime fled in all directions. He pointed out that the two other consequences were that Islamic terrorists sneaked into Lybia, and the sophisticated weapons Gaddafi accumulated over the years were lost in the vastness of Africa. The authors said that “The error in Libya was not an inadequate post-intervention effort; it was the decision to intervene in the first place. “ Obama later also acknowledged regrets about Libya.

The success of Lybia’s opposition faction inspired the Syrian opposition faction and turned the peaceful protests there into violence. Due to the disaster in Libya caused by Obama, he refused to use military force in Syria. This was another tragic consequence. In addition, after overthrowing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the elected new Egypt president is not the kind of fighter for democracy that the West expected, but instead was Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood's political wing. Soon after Morsi took office, he was arrested by another group of military and sentenced to death, and the government returned to the military dictatorship. But this time the United States kept silent.

According to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at the end of 2014, the number of refugees in the world has climbed to sixty million, an increase of about eight million from the end of 2013.  Most of them showed up in the Middle East. Now many of these refugees have not been able to endure life in the refugee camps, so they flock to Europe in large numbers. The United States is the largest machine which manufactured the Middle East refugees. But the country is domestically bickering about illegal immigrants, so it has been reluctant to take a stand on the refugee issue. Recently, seeing that Germany was actually willing to receive eight hundred thousand refugees, probably really feeling ashamed, Obama announced the intent to accept ten thousand refugees. However, unless the Middle East condition can stabilize, millions of refugees will continue to beat people's consciences and prompt them to ask: United States, you support the democratic movement, you want to overthrow the dictators, what will you do to be responsible for the consequences of the hells you have created?

Considering this problem, we must think how we should treat dictators and authoritarian regimes. My personal conclusion is as follows. First, having a functional government is better than having chaos. Second, where wisdom is in short supply, or where serious ethnic division exists, a movement toward democracy will only lead to civil war and chaos; it is almost impossible to produce a stable democracy and it would cause serious damage to the economy; economic development is the absolute necessity for people's livelihood. Third, according to the Buddhist view, hell has a total of eighteen levels; different dictatorial regimes have their pros and cons and may occupy the top ten levels, whereas chaos occupies the eight floors below.