It’s easy to mock Michele Bachmann’s position on Libya because in greater context she has opposed every element of the Arab Spring. She is clearly wetting her pants at the prospect that average Arab citizens will have some actual say in the policies of their governments. She has explicitly said that America was better off when we could control Arab countries by cozying up to repressive dictators. She reminds me of a hard-line Soviet watching the breakup of the Eastern Bloc.
Yet, we ought to be a little more humble. I am seeing a lot the same attitude on the left that I saw on the right after we invaded Iraq and toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein. Anyone who questioned the wisdom of the war was laughed out of town. “Are you saying we were better off with Saddam in power?” they asked. “Look at how few casualties we had,” they boasted. “The Iraqi people have been liberated,” they predicted.
No one talks about the initial stages of the Iraq war anymore. Everything that matters happened after Hussein was driven out of power.
What’s disturbing about Bachmann’s position is that she opposes our intervention in Libya for all the wrong reasons. She opposes democracy in Arab countries because she doesn’t like Arab public opinion. She doesn’t care about Libyans. Her opposition isn’t based in any humanitarian concern about the risks of creating a power vacuum in a highly tribal oil-rich state with no democratic institutions or history. She isn’t concerned about our responsibility for flooding the country with weapons that are now in the hands of militias that do not answer to any central authority.
She’s predictably wrong about everything. But it’s way too early to be mocking people who thought the U.S. should stay out of the Libyan uprising. And if Libya turns out a lot better than Iraq did, part of the reason why will be that the president was smart about limiting our risks and responsibilities.
And if Libya turns out a lot better than Iraq did, part of the reason why will be that the president was smart about limiting our risks and responsibilities.
But it’s specifically because the President limited our involvement and responsibilities that 1) your “day after Saddam fell” comparison fails, 2) we have reason to be much more optimistic about how events will play out from here, and 3) so many of the anti-Humanitarian Intervention voices* deserve to be mocked, since it was their absolutely certainty about “mission creep” and “boots on the ground” and “imperialism” and “quagmire” and “entrenched stalemate” other failures to acknowledge and understand those limitations and their implications that led them to be so wrong in the first place.
Whereas for the pro-intervention liberals, it was these very limitations that allowed us to support it. Hence, noting these limitations isn’t really a defense of opposition, or a tweak for supporters. That was a big part of what we supported.
*I don’t call them “anti-war” because they were not opposing a war. There would have been just as big a war regardless.
That doesn’t make sense to me. When Obama announced his plan for limited intervention, that was the end point of a month-long debate. You act as if that was the point at which the debate began.
Once he made his announcement, a second debate began, based on different facts.
For example, during the first debate, I argued that we should not put troops on the ground. In the second debate, I argued that it would be better to just go get Gaddafi than to arm-up a bunch of ill-trained and undisciplined militias who would take many months to win and would leave the country awash with armed kids with different tribal allegiances who might very well turn on each other in the quest for oil wealth.
Of course, I don’t think I made many, or any, of the arguments you ascribe to the anti-intervention crowd
Maybe your problem, BooMan, is that your primary interest here is in defending the honor of a group called “opponents of the war,” of which you consider yourself a member, instead of your own actual positions. Nobody has accused you of making the Skeery al Qaeda Mooslems argument, but don’t pretend it wasn’t being made, frequently and loudly. You can ask John Cole about that, for one.
Also, when you say When Obama announced his plan for limited intervention, that was the end point of a month-long debate, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Obama never articulated any different position and then settled on a limited intervention. The absence of ground troops was known from the very beginning. The possibility was always a figment of the imagination of the opponents. Liberal supporters of the intervention were pretty much universal in their opposition to such an action as well.
My first piece was on Feb 21st, and it merely observed that Gaddafi’s rule looked like it was going to come to an end in the near future. When people started arguing for no-fly zones, I said “Fine, then let the Europeans do it, and pay for it.” As for the Mooslems, I said this on March 2nd.
Your position, your arguments, through this whole episode have been quite a bit better, more responsible, more reality-based, and more principled than many I’ve seen.
Which is why I don’t think you should feel any compulsion to defend the likes of Michelle Bachmann or Jane Hamsher.
If you read this as defending Michele Bachmann, you have disappointed me.
I read it as, “She’s wrong on the whole, but…“
And I don’t think that’s a misreading.
Bachmann: “We don’t know who the next leaders will be…it could be a radical element.”
As someone who actually opposes imperialism, this is not a bug. It’s a feature. It was specifically because the TNC were not a CIA creation, run by some George Washington of Libya that our media fluffed, whom we knew would be a pliant client, that this intervention didn’t have the stink of Reagan’s Latin American policy on it.
But Bachmann is on the other side; she is, plainly, very much a believer in Kissingerian power politics revolving around the United States keeping control of other countries out of the hands of those countries’ citizens and making sure “the devil we know” is in control. I expect to see arguments like this from such a person.
It’s seeing this same argument from putatively liberal, putatively anti-imperialist voices – “OHNOES, we don’t know who these people are! They could be skeery al Qaeda Mooslims!” – that has been so disappointing to me.
Yeah, I hear you.
My concern going in was that it seemed like no one in our government really knew the players or who we might want to empower or disempower. It’s not really possible to take a side in a multifaceted war without empowering and disempowering certain factions. We hopefully solved that by allowing the Libyans to create a provisional government and deal with their own internal struggles within it.
Yet, they are a long way from ending this war.
Let me point out, BooMan, that it was specifically because we didn’t bigfoot into Libya and end the war quickly (by using overwhelming firepower) that the different rebel factions were able to come together as equals.
It was a largely-Berber force that came out the Nafusa mountains and cut off Tripoli from Algeria. The Misrata forces that defended their city, then broke out, and ended up taking Sirte were an entirely different command, and full of different people, from the Benghazi crew. Residents in and around Tripoli rose up before the advancing troops got there – they often rolled into towns and neighborhoods they thought they’d have to fight for, to be greeted by cheering crowds of locals.
And now, all of those different groups stand as equals with the Benghazi people. How much harder would the political outcome have been among the diverse population of Libya if everyone else had been passively liberated by Benghazi?
Yes, that is a major advantage going forward, but don’t ignore the problem of the militias, which must be integrated now into some kind of national security force, or disbanded. They wouldn’t exist, and wouldn’t be battle-hardened, if the 101st had just gone in and snagged Gaddafi, or forced him into hiding. There are trade-offs in everything. We’ll work with the advantages we have, but do not assume that Libya will easily reintegrate and disarm with all that oil money on the table.
They wouldn’t exist, and wouldn’t be battle-hardened, if the 101st had just gone in and snagged Gaddafi, or forced him into hiding.
Give ’em six months, and they would have been plenty battle-hardened by the insurgency they would have taken up against the occupation troops. I’m sure the jihadists that would have flooded into the country just to screw with us would have armed them up quite nicely.
That’s not what I was recommending. It wasn’t a choice between an Iraq-style invasion and occupation and what actually happened.
The policy, first of all, was regime change. Can we agree that the stated-NATO policy was a lie intended to make it pass all the international law boxes? I’m actually okay with that, considering that the humanitarian problem couldn’t be solved with Gaddafi still in power. But a lot of people pretended to take the official line seriously.
So, I was talking about whether or not we should get involved in an effort to produce regime change that would rely on creating tribal militias, would take months, and would leave the country in a perilous condition, or whether we should just go find Gaddafi and remove him to the Hague, and then let the Libyans deal with the aftermath. Unlike with Saddam, I believe we could have pulled off that mission, and we could have done it without major casualties.
It remains to be seen what the costs of doing it this way will be. We know the benefits. And we will seek to take advantage of those benefits.
That’s not what I was recommending. It wasn’t a choice between an Iraq-style invasion and occupation and what actually happened.
I don’t think you can get one without the other. International law requires an invading power to provide security in the territory of a government it knocks over. This idea that we could pack everyone up and GTFO once the regime had fallen is a fantasy. If you think the Free Libya Forces don’t have their act together now, imagine the likelihood of them being able to take over security in April. Any ground invasion by us would mean an occupation by us.
Besides, this has always been an academic question. The Libyans themselves didn’t want foreign ground forces. The Arab League didn’t want them. The UN didn’t want them. NATO didn’t want them – there were enough nations that would have scotched the idea to prevent NATO from being able to act. A ground invasion was simply never an option. It was a mission to degrade the regime’s ability to engage in combat (and slaughter civilian populations), or nothing.
Unlike with Saddam, I believe we could have pulled off that mission, and we could have done it without major casualties.
We overthrew Saddam and toppled the Baathist government without major casualties. It was what came after that was such a bloody mess.
We skirted international law anyway. You’re right that we would have created some chaos. We will see what kind of chaos we created by arming up the militias. With any luck, we’ll be better off this way.
Gaddafi was never going to the Hague. Bush and the corps has cleared him all his crimes against humanity. Gaddafi was free to travel the world until march of this year.
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The spark was lit in Tunesia by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi. Yesterday the Tunesian people went to the polls for their first ever democratic election. Of the registered voters, 90% voted and many more registered late in order to be able to vote. To see the elderly cast their vote was very special after decades of authoritarian rule. BRAVO to the people of Tunesia.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The fundamental difference between the two situations is that we forced a change of government in Iraq and in Libya we supported a grassroots movement that sought a change in government.
The agenda in Libya now is unity and rapid movement to a constitutional assembly. And Tunisia has provided the model for the Arab Spring countries.
The next step will be harder because it is the same as what the US faces–getting the economy going and people, especially young people working at things that provide a decent income.
My own opinion from the beginning was that on Libya, Obama got it right specifically because he did not consider the issue as part of a larger campaign. The US policy continues to be a recognition that each Arab country undergoing change is different, and that US interests and ability to exert leverage is also different. Saleh’s military and the Khalifa family of Bahrain are not as easy to reason with as the Egyptian military were–and they are more closely tied to the problems of corruption and the security state than the Egyptian military was. Mubarak had isolated the military politically because of the Sadat assassination.
The fundamental difference between the two situations is that we forced a change of government in Iraq and in Libya we supported a grassroots movement that sought a change in government.
He picked the Dean strategy instead of the Rahm strategy?
He picked a strategy related to the facts on the ground and not a theoretical strategy driven by one ideology or another.
There were compelling reasons to stay out of Libya and compelling ones to join NATO forces there. After doing my best to understand the situation, I took a bold stand: I stayed on the fence. Why? This is reality and reality is often more complex than a bunch of corporate media types want to make it. Sometimes we are in a position where there are no clear, superior choices. Sometimes in life there are only hard, close decisions to be made between unattractive options.
The reasons not to go into Libya seemed a little more urgent sometimes, but for me that had to do with journalists “covering the last war”. There were too many comparisons with Iraq.
I didn’t read as broadly as you, Booman, but the arguments I saw against US involvement all failed to address one thing:
I agree that there is a rush by too many people to assume that this intervention worked and “everything is fine now”. It’s early. Hey, that is our idiotic, ignorant, shallow corporate media. But the current Republican meme on this deserves to get called out.
It looks like the Islamist party won in Tunisia, which will surely be used by people like Bachmann that we were better off with pliant dictators.
Good.
I want to see one of these Islamist parties actually have to govern for a term and then face the voters.
Let’s hope that they face the voters. That’s always the test.
Indeed. Let’s hope it’s not One Man, One Vote, One Time.
The moderate Islamic party. That looks a lot like the governing party in Turkey or the Christian Democrats in Germany.
Nonetheless the “I” word will have the usual suspects foaming at the mouth.
Good catch.
I certainly wouldn’t vote for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, any more than I’d vote for Gary Bauer here in the US, but religiously-oriented parties can certainly operate within a democratic system.
Given that they 1) represent the aspirations of an awful lot of the population, like it or not, and 2) provide people who do believe in mixing religion and politics with a vision of how to go forward that doesn’t include suicide vests, it’s probably a good thing that such parties are playing a role in the new politics of the Arab Spring nations.
In the US, explicitly religious parties are problematic probably because of ideological more than legal problems. Which is why religious concepts and special pleading get framed in terms of “freedom” or “values”.
So just your basic center-right party then. Good to know.
Here’s something else to keep an eye on. Anti-Sufi behavior coming to the fore.
Remember that Saif al Islam Gaddafhi is still at large.
There will no doubt be plenty of Shays Rebellions and their ilk in the aftermath of this revolution, as there are after any revolution.
Overthrowing a dictator is a crap shoot. You know what’s not a crap shoot? Keeping him. You know just what you’re going to get.
So you really think the transition from the Shah to the Iranian Republic made America better off?
Just asking.
(Doesn’t mean we could or should have prevented that change.)
Booman is right. This is an idiotic line of attack for any liberal group to engage in. There are plenty of solid reasons to ridicule Michelle Bachman’s foreign policy views, but “If you were president, Qaddafi would still be in power” isn’t one of them. It’s a political cheap shot that is constantly leveled at anyone opposed to any military action. It’s one that was being leveled at Obama early in the conflict and could easily have been the road he chose to take himself. It is exactly the choice he made with respect to Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast. And it was certainly the advice Defense Secretary Gates gave him at the time.
It opens up any president to accusations that he’s coddling dictators that he hasn’t declared war on.
If Bachman were president Qaddafi would still be in power. If Booman were president Qaddafi would still be in power. The differences in their reasons, are entirely beside the point of the question. By this argument, Obama has chosen to allow Ali Saleh of Yemen, Bashar Assad of Syria, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran and dozens of other dictators around the world to continue in power. Is this really the line of attack we want to pursue?