Anne-Marie Slaughter is the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She served as chair of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion during the Bush administration and Hillary Clinton tapped her as Director of Policy Planning for the State Department where she served until last month. She defended the invasion of Iraq and then asked us all to forget about it, for which she received the full Glenn Greenwald treatment in March of 2008. Now she has taken to the opinion page of the New York Times to advocate that we embroil ourselves in Libya’s civil war.
Her format is to take five objections to getting involved and then dismiss them. The first objection, passionately and articulately voiced by Wesley Clark, is that we have no compelling national interests in Libya. She ignores the substance of his argument and latches onto just one part of it. Clark noted that we don’t buy our energy from Libya. Slaughter objects to making it about oil.
Framing this issue in terms of oil is exactly what Arab populations and indeed much of the world expect, which is why they are so cynical about our professions of support for democracy and human rights.
But, of course, Wesley Clark didn’t frame his objections around oil. His main objections were political and military. Clark provided the shorthand for his critique with this:
…on whatever basis we intervene, it would become the United States vs. Gaddafi, and we would be committed to fight to his finish. That could entail a substantial ground operation, some casualties and an extended post-conflict peacekeeping presence.
He then went on to detail criteria that must be met to justify intervention and why Libya doesn’t meet them. Energy security was a minor, almost irrelevant element of his argument. Moreover, the Arab world isn’t cynical about our promotion of democracy because we don’t “frame” things properly, as Karen Hughes and Condi Rice discovered, but Prof. Slaughter evidently did not.
Slaughter next tackles the advice of Al Jazeera’s director general, Wadah Khanfar. Khanfar says that western intervention will play into Gaddafi’s hands. She acknowledges the perception problem but argues plausibly that many rebels have openly asked for help and that the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Arab League have all voiced support of a no-fly zone. That might make the perception problem a wash, but her proposal to have the no-fly zone enforced by a coalition that includes some Arab nations is curious. Which Arab nations does she have in mind? I can only laugh at the idea of Saudi pilots patrolling Libyan skies in defense of democracy. Does Egypt want to make war on its neighbor? She’d have more credibility if she showed any sign that she’d thought these things through or, at least, taken them seriously.
Next, Slaughter replies to U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo H. Daalder’s prediction that no-fly zones will be inadequate and lead to mission-creep. Slaughter’s rebuttal has to be seen to be believed:
…Colonel Qaddafi cultivates a mad-dictator image, he has been a canny survivor and political manipulator for 40 years. He is aware of debates with regard to a no-flight zone and is timing his military campaign accordingly; he is also capable of using his air force just enough to gain strategic advantage, but not enough to trigger a no-flight zone. If the international community lines up against him and is willing to crater his runways and take out his antiaircraft weapons, he might well renew his offer of a negotiated departure.
She seriously argued that we don’t have to worry about mission-creep because Gaddafi only “cultivates” his madness and can be relied upon to “renew his offer of a negotiated departure.” There is no solid evidence that Gaddafi has ever offered to depart and the only claims that he has considered it come from the opposition and are not credible.
So, we’re are supposed to commit ourselves to a course that will probably lead to a western occupation of Libya and a prolonged peacekeeping force because Gaddafi will help us avoid that by leaving voluntarily. Meanwhile, he prepares to retake Benghazi. I mean, this is absolute garbage as analysis.
To the objection that we might not like what replaces Gaddafi, she is equally glib, “But the choice is between uncertainty and the certainty that if Colonel Qaddafi wins, regimes across the region will conclude that force is the way to answer protests.” It never occurs to her to ask why we should give a damn, but let’s accept that we have a (at least, aspirational) bias in favor of democracy and human rights in the Middle East. Getting ourselves bogged down in a civil war and foreign occupation of Libya is not a wise or efficient way to persuade Arab leaders of the virtues of human rights. Remember, aside from Assad in Damascus, all the main remaining Arab leaders are “our sons of bitches” already. We talk to them by making or withholding lucrative arms deals or subsidies, not by invading countries in their region. It’s almost as if Slaughter has made no cost/benefit analysis at all.
Finally, Slaughter takes on the argument that we should just arm the rebels instead of doing the fighting ourselves. At least here, she recognizes the stupidity of arming the losing side of a civil war that has no real leadership or training in heavy weapons. She also notes that Gaddafi will have crushed the revolt and retaken Benghazi by the time we can get the weapons in the rebels’ hands. So, how is a no-fly zone going to prevent that? She doesn’t say.
Here’s the bottom line. Gaddafi has won the civil war as a battle between his forces and the forces of rebellion. He is in the process of mopping up. If we want to change that, we’re going to have do a lot more than patrol the skies of Libya. We’re going to have to fire at troops on the ground. And we’re probably going to have invade with a not insubstantial number of ground troops. And then we’re going to have to pick the winners. Who gets to control the oil fields? And then we’re going to have to pray that the fighting stops and that we won’t need to keep peacekeepers in the country until the end of time.
What Prof. Slaughter needed to do is tell us why we would want to take those risks and pay those costs. She failed.
Now, it is significant that the Arab world has formally invited the West to intervene. A lot of the losers in this civil war are going to need asylum. It’s very likely that Gaddafi will seek a brutal revenge. The United Nations should be prepared to authorize force to protect the population and even to oust Gaddafi if that becomes necessary to protect the innocent. But there are a lot of other countries in the world, and many of them have direct interests and experience in Libya. Let them fly the planes, land the troops, and provide the peacekeepers. Let them pick the winners. We’ll send a check.
In the meantime, a failed rebellion is not our problem or our responsibility, and the choice here is not a clear-cut case of supporting tyranny or democracy. We don’t support this tyrant, and there are no democrats on the other side. There’s a ragtag bunch of kids with guns they don’t even know how to clean.
Someone’s got to inject a little reality into this conversation, because our best and brightest, like Prof. Slaughter, aren’t getting it done. Our elites continue to fail us.
