We have no clue how to deal with this, and we have even less inclination to try to deal with it. Maybe I just have a different definition of humanitarianism, but creating a country of disparate and hostile militias who have no intention of laying down their arms in a country with vast oil-wealth is not necessarily the humanitarian thing to do. Perhaps the smartest thing that Obama did was to make sure that we have almost no responsibility for the outcome of the revolution in Libya. We got permission to protect civilians and used it as a pretext to effect regime change, but we’re not invested in any particular power-sharing arrangement. That’s good, because we have no idea who we want to be winners or losers. Except, you know how this works. We will figure out who will give the most lucrative oil contracts to the West, and we will support them. There is really no end in sight for the Libyan Civil War.
By way of disclosure, I spent a good part of my high school years partying in Richard Falk’s home because he was always traveling. But I still think he’s worth reading on Libya.
Looking at the Libya experience from an international perspective raises several more concerns. The appraisal of NATO’s intervention will be mainly shaped by whether Libya emerges as a stable, democratic and equitable nation. This will not be knowable for years, but some aspects of the Libya intervention already make it a troubling precedent. The UN Security Council, which authorized the use of force under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, was either duped or complacent, possibly both. The authorizing resolution was framed by establishing a no-fly zone, with the justification for force at the time focused on protecting the threatened population of Benghazi. Yet this limited mandate was disregarded almost from the outset. NATO forces were obviously far less committed to their assigned protective role than to ensuring that the balance of forces be tipped in the direction of the insurrection. If this intention had been clear at the outset, it’s almost certain Russia and China would have vetoed the UN resolution. During the debate these two countries expressed misgivings about encroaching on Libya’s sovereignty, and they were joined by India, Brazil and Germany as abstaining Security Council members.
It is extremely disturbing that a restricted UN mandate was ignored and that the Security Council did not reconsider the original mandate or censure NATO for unilaterally expanding the scope and nature of its military role. By ignoring the UN’s limits, NATO may have destroyed the prospects for future legitimate uses of the principle of responsibility to protect.
Personally, I think it was impossible to fulfill the mission to protect without removing Gaddafi, but that doesn’t mean that no damage was done through the deceit that regime change was not the policy.
The real problem is a lack of peace and stability. It could emerge and I certainly hope it does. But it isn’t humanitarian to arm-up a country for a never-ending civil war. At best, under these kinds of circumstances, it’s a desperate gamble. It’s a gamble I was unwilling to endorse considering how peripheral it was to U.S. interests. But it’s a gamble that I hope pays off.
True, humanitarianism generally tends not to involve cruise missiles and close air support.
But you seem to be working really hard to avoid the fact that policy is made in the murky confluence of genuinely good intentions and the cynical exercise of raw power.
Libya was a one-time jackpot. The Europeans were all up in a tizzy, damn near every Arab nation under the sun hated Qaddafi since forever, and we used this to hammer through diplomatic language at the last minute that set the stage for regime change by force and the establishment of precedent for NATO to act as a global supercop under R2P.
Libya’s a huge, sparse, low-population country with like eight distant cities, one coastal highway linking them all together, and a bunch of Berbers in the mountains no one cares about. And a metric shit ton of oil underneath. I believe that’s the technical term. It’s a lovely place for a one-sided air war. We assumed basically zero cost for the intervention. Like I said, dude, jackpot.
And so the war may have ended with the razing of an entire city (that wasn’t Benghazi), the covered up executions of several hundred people, and the sexual torture and execution of a man thrown up on youtube for all to see, but none of that matters. All mission objectives were met. The plan, such that it was, succeeded. The Qaddafi family was annihilated. And liabilities are negligible. If you’re judging on strictly competence, it was a good nine months of work. You’d be a fool to have sided against such a “breezy” war just because of this ignominious end, just as you’d be a fool not to have expected it to go down this way. Wars suck. There’s nothing humanitarian about them. It’s about finding the lesser evil. And killing thousands and thousands of people to get there.
Although it probably isn’t a coincidence that Tunisia, the one country that has the weakest connection to the West (especially in terms of security arrangements), is the one doing so well. So it goes.
.
Oops … my comment grew larger – Tunesia Declares No-fly Zone over USA
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The Qadhafi family was not annihilated. Saif al-Islam is still at large as are a number of Muammar’s many other children, including the step-daughter who was supposedly killed by Reagan’s airstrike.
It was humanitarian in that more lives were saved as a result of intervention. Gadhafi’s threat to “exterminate the rats” in BenGhazi was taken seriously by a large number of members of his own diplomatic corp–who defected as a result. They primarily drove the decision to create a no-fly zone.
From NATO and the EU’s point of view, they have dodged a massive refugee crisis in Europe for the moment only to be caught in a financial meltdown because of bank insolvency. Greece’s financial woes were driven by the vampires in the bond market.
There is no evidence of widespread resistance of militias to the new Libyan government. There seems also to be unity within the transitional council, which has now formed a transitional government with definite plans.
Most foreign policy decisions are not matters of right and wrong. They are most often Hobson’s choices. And none of them are without national self-interest. That’s just the way the current international system works.
To change that requires some different system of collective global security. And a difference in the drivers of politics. So far, no one has discovered how to do that. Nor has anyone mapped out a viable transition to some other system.
Back to Libya, the NYT always seems to be the mouthpiece for the US national security establishment. So I expect this is their worry-wart view of the situation. More local coverage might give a different perspective, but this is an encouraging approach:
The real problem will be creating a civil society that makes separate militias politically unnecessary. Incorporating militia leaders into the development of that civil society seems a reasonable approach.
Wars are politics by other means. — Clausewitz
It’s not promising in the least. The militias are not going to disband. They are going to fight for leverage in the new government and to win spoils to their tribes/regions.
And, of course, you are begging the question.
You say more lives were saved through the intervention. That will not be clear for a long time. What was my concern from the beginning? That we would create the conditions for a sustained civil war that would decimate the country and lead to more loss of life than we prevented.
link
Also, too
Well, you’ve convinced me: we should have let Benghazi get it.
You need to stop writing every Libya story as your big chance to prove that you so weren’t totally wrong so shut up. It’s getting tedious, and it detracts from everything else you have to say on the subject.
It’s funny to see an opponent of intervention citing potential future violence, asserted with certainty, as the driving force for his argument.
It wasn’t too long ago that the human rights community and western governments’ belief that a massacre was about to take place was utterly and completely dismissed as a legitimate reason to undertake military action.
It wasn’t utterly dismissed by me. I said that France and Italy should take care of it if they thought it was wise to do so.
What I said at the beginning is that it isn’t humanitarian to prevent the decimation of a city by creating a hellscape of competing militias.
It was specifically our lack of intelligence and institutional knowledge about Libya than made it too big of a gamble for me considering our almost non-existent national interests in the matter.
Let’s face it, the mission was regime change and we got that. But if we were looking to save lives, I think it’s hard (and it will get harder) to argue that the mission was a success.