Remember when I said it wasn’t humanitarian to create a power vacuum filled with armed militias from rivaling tribes that would fight each other for power in an oil-rich state? Well, that’s what we did in Libya. I’ll admit that it went better than I feared. But that’s in the past now. The future looks every bit as grim as I feared. Are they better off without Gaddafi? Some people are. Overall, though, the situation is worse. Are more people alive because we intervened? That’s highly doubtful, and grows more doubtful everyday.
This is also a lesson for Syria. The situations are not exactly analogous, but they are similar enough for Libya to serve as a warning. As we should have learned from Iraq, countries that are ruled by dictators are generally unstable by nature. The dictator isn’t so much the cause of repression as the symptom of a society that won’t live together in peace by choice. Remove the repression and people will act out against their neighbors.
This isn’t an argument that Arabs are incapable of living in pluralistic democracies. It’s more an observation about the difficulties created by the colonial powers when they created the modern Arab nation-states without due consideration for ethnic and religious and tribal rivalries. Or, perhaps, the states were designed to be unstable. Regardless, that’s all in the past now. The world has to deal with the counties that we have.
I think the Assad regime needs to step down from power in Syria, just as I thought the Gaddafi regime needed to leave power in Libya. And the international community needs to stand ready to lend assistance to the people of Syria, including arbitration and peacemaking to prevent the outbreak of a very lethal civil war. But the United States should not be involved militarily and should not have a lead role. Neighboring Arab states should take the lead role. If a western power is asked to put boots on the ground, it should be France since Syria is their creation.
The international community has humanitarian responsibilities, not just the United States. And regime change may be necessary in Syria at this time, but no one should assume that regime change will magically make things better. For the short and medium term, it will almost certainly make things worse, just as it did in Iraq and Libya.
“I’ll admit that it went better than I feared. But that’s in the past now.”
I.e., “no matter how horribly, laughably wrong I was before, and now matter how many people told me so at the time, allow me to learn ZERO from before, and merrily tromp down the road of progressive handwringing idiocy YET AGAIN, because I know I’ll have the company of other whiner progressives.”
Me: “it isn’t humanitarian to turn a country into Somalia just so you can pretend that you don’t have any boots on the ground….”
In other words, don’t flood the country with weapons that will be used by militias that you can’t control or disband. If you want to get rid of Gaddafi, get rid of him.
You spoke against the Messiah. Blasphemer!
that the Libyans are better off with Gaddafi is really just a crazy argument to make.
The last place, besides Beijing and Moscow that is, where you can find a full-throated defense of the Westphalian soverign nation-state is on the left of the internet.
Which is odd, when you think of it.
What happens in Homs, stays in Homs.
Really? Did you read the article? Do you want more articles?
Is it really hard for you to put yourself in the shoes of an average Libyan whose life is much worse off today than it was for the last several decades?
How about in Syria? Are people better off there right now than they were before civil war broke out?
How about in Iraq? How many of the dead are better off than they were under Saddam?
Removing dictators is nice but it is no panacea. Sometimes it is necessary, but the alternative is rarely peace and civil rights and ponies.
I am being polite.
You are arguing that people were better off in a totalitarian police state where the wealth of the country was stolen and where people killed for no reason.
You are arguing that they are better off being slaves.
That is precisely the arugment you are making. It is a repugnant argument.
It’s like arguing that the US was better off with slavery, because to end it we had to fight a Civil War.
There are many valid reasons for opposing US intervention. Arguing that people are better off as slaves like they were under Ghaddafi is not one of them.
Admittedly, it’s been a while since I made my arguments about Libyan intervention, so you can be forgiven for not knowing them.
My argument was that Europe should act since it was in their interests, not ours. My argument was that, if it was necessary to remove Gaddafi, that it should be done directly by main force and not by arming up the militias for a prolonged civil war. The reason I gave was that it would be a momentary inconvenience and political problem for Western Powers to go into Tripoli and snag Gaddafi but that it would be vastly preferable to turning the country into a Somalia-like society of roving bands of heavily-armed and ill-trained rival militias.
So, what I am saying now is that Libya is a Somalia-like society of roving bands of heavily-armed and ill-trained rival militias, and it didn’t have to be this way. And, yes, the average Libyan is worse off than they were under Gaddafi, and they’re worse off than if the Western Powers had followed my advice.
I’m not arguing that people should be forced to live under brutal dictatorships. But I am arguing that you shouldn’t cavalierly remove dictators. You should understand why they’re in power and what will happen if no one wields that power. If you remove them, you’re responsible for the outcome. And the outcome is likely to be worse unless you know what you’re doing. It might be worse even if you do know what you’re doing. At least, in the short to medium term, that’s almost a rule.
So, what’s humanitarian? Was the invasion of Iraq a humanitarian act? Was the decision to save Benghazi not outweighed by the legacy of that act that has destroyed Libyan society? Is toppling Assad going to save lives?
Rather than seeing what I’m saying as an argument against freedom or against intervention, you should see it as an argument in favor of thoughtfulness and realism.
That ignores the entire notion of collective responsibility as a multilateral norm, and I would doubt was even taken seriously as an option by the administration or its UN representatives.
It also, for a self-proclaimed “realist,” ignores the composition and capabilities of NATO here in the 21st century. Everything that’s a NATO problem is inevitably an American problem.
Admittedly, I made the argument about Europe more to make a point about their impotence than in any real expectation that they’d actually do it. It was the thumb in the eye part of my argument.
you were making precisely the argument that they were better off under Ghaddafi.
I cannot tell you how morally repugnant that argument is. Great – you post some articles about really bad things going on since Ghaddafi was deposed. Have you read the stuff that went on before he was deposed? Totalitarian states have the appearance of stability, because they use terror.
You say the Libyans were better off under Ghaddafi.
HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS? HAVE YOU ASKED THEM? ARE THERE MASSES OF PEOPLE CALLING FOR HIS FAMILY’s RETURN?
I can’t take this post seriously because you haven’t really thought about whether they would what they had before. I seriously doubt they would.
There are many arguments to make against intervention. It was not in the US Interest, for example, to invade Iraq. There may have been better ways to intervene which would have lessened the chaos in Libya. All of these are very real concerns.
When you start, however, by arguing that the Libyans are now worse off with no real knowledge of what the Libyan people actually think, it is difficult to take the broader argument seriously.
Booman Tribune ~ Libya and Syria
I’ve no problem with that, and like virtually all of the European left, I opposed the invasion of Iraq even though I despised Saddam Hussein (unlike many on the right who were happy to do business with him). But that was because we knew the invasion wasn’t about human rights or even regime change. It wasn’t even about access to Oil because Saddam was willing to sell to all at “free market” prices. It was about giving US corporations control of the oil and the profits to be made from extracting it.
Similarly Gaddafi was willing to sell oil to all and sundry, although he did have a history of supporting terrorism in Ireland and the UK. However I was willing to support limited actions aimed at removing him provided they didn’t extend to trying to take over the country and its resources afterwards. If Gaddafi hadn’t gone off the deep end by threatening to liquidate all who opposed him, perhaps the Gaddafi dynasty could have survived indefinitely. But dynasties never do, and without democratic institutions in place there is no mechanism for effecting such a transition peacefully.
But the time-frame you are using to judge the Libyan intervention is ridiculously short. Nothing that has happened since has surprised me or changed my view of the intervention. Come back in ten years time and we’ll see whether life without Gaddafi is better than it was with him. Most probably we’ll conclude that the transition could have been “managed” better, but sovereign democracies are rightly very reluctant to put their troops lives on the hazard for another nation’s benefit.
Ultimately this is about whether National Sovereignty is Absolute and should always be respected regardless of the depredations of the ruling class, or whether there are some inalienable human rights enforceable under international law. We live in one world, so I tend towards the latter approach, despite being aware that the vast majority of foreign interventions in the affairs of sovereign states have been for anything but humanitarian reasons. You just have to judge each case on its merits. In my view Libya was (marginally) one of the better interventions and there is still hope for a better future, perhaps with the help of UN or Arab League peace keeping troops.
But reasonable people can differ on what must ultimately be nuanced decision making. One of the consequences of almost total US military hegemony is that few Nation states are able to intervene is a sustained and major way even if they wanted to. If the US wants other states to take on a larger share of the burden it may have to force the issue by downsizing its own military operation which is overwhelming compared to any other.
The US does not have total military hegemony. It might have theoretical air superiority in most places, but that’s about it.
Even the Libyan intervention by France/UK relied extensively on US satellite intelligence and comms not to mention US designed and made armaments and ordinance.
That’s because they wanted to run a super high tech sound and light show. But that’s quite different from implying that the US military has a global hegemony, which is an idea that’s been pretty well exploded in the last decade.
The US has troops and installations in over 100 “sovereign” states. It may not be very good at countering urban guerilla warfare but that requires non-technological skill-sets and a sense of common purpose with local populations they haven’t always been good at generating. However there is no other power that could conceivably invade the US which is not something you can say about many other countries.
Why would they invade when they could just buy off it’s elections? More seriously, the idea that america is immune from invasion is at best conditionally and temporarily true. And its a long way from that to saying that our armed forces are so indispensable that Europe could not possibly make any effective intervention in Libya without it. They ruled out serious numbers of soldiers in country because they had the moral luxury of doing so, not because a directed military coup of Qaddafi was impossible without american help.
“My argument was that, if it was necessary to remove Gaddafi, that it should be done directly by main force and not by arming up the militias for a prolonged civil war. The reason I gave was that it would be a momentary inconvenience and political problem for Western Powers to go into Tripoli and snag Gaddafi but that it would be vastly preferable to turning the country into a Somalia-like society of roving bands of heavily-armed and ill-trained rival militias. “
Your argument is wrong, for two main reasons.
The “Somalia-like society” you’ve decided exemplifies the entirety of Libya is a consequence of the political vacuum produced by the fall of the regime, not the rather paltry amount of foreign arms that were brought into the country. This power vacuum would have existed regardless of whether the government fell to foreign invaders or to Libyan rebels. The militias would also be just as heavily armed, or nearly so, during the post-war period, since the vast majority of the weapons in the country were “liberated” from government armories, not imported.
The existence of militias and the lack of a strong central government is unrelated to the question of foreign intervention. If anything, the fact that the government fell to locals who have a claim on legitimacy and existing bases of support in Libya makes it more likely that a government capable of governing will emerge sooner rather than later, compared to a situation in which foreign powers take over the country, and then try to figure out who to hand it off to while, oh yeah, their lingering presence created an insurgency that becomes and anti-government insurgency.
Booman Tribune ~ Libya and Syria
Of course not. But Assad managed to foment a civil war all by himself without much help from the West. The choice is not repression under a dictator or civil war afterwards, but how can a terrible transition already under way be expedited and ameliorated. Dictatorships can stay in power with relatively few deaths for long periods of time. But when they become unstable they become unstable in a big way because no civil society or other democratic institutions have been allowed to develop that might facilitate an orderly transition. This is a feature, not a bug of dictatorships. To perpetuate themselves they must destroy all potentially competing centres of power. The end is always bloody. The question is how bloody, and there is generally no “good” solution to mitigate the cost of an unavoidable transition..
in the US after the Revolution broke out? Was it better after the Civil War broke out?
The South started the Civil War. It would have been better if they had been willing to compromise even if it took a little longer to abolish slavery in the states where it already existed. It was worth fighting to keep the Union together and to abolish slavery in the bargain, but it would have been madness to start a war with the South when negotiations were still possible.
As for the American Revolution, it doesn’t fit the model of Libya on any level. The outside powers were the bad guys. The rebels didn’t turn on each other, nor was British rule required to prevent that from happening. And the militias were fairly well-regulated and disbanded without much incident.
Again, the issue is more how Gaddafi was removed than whether he was removed.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is displeased with you right now.
“Better” “compromise” “little longer” Those are ignorant words. Once you concede that the slave-society South or Gaddafi or Assad and so on were the aggressors, you have no space for counterfactuals or idealist longings.
could’t have known what the result of the war would be. He had to suspent habeus corpus to prosecute the war. And he could have simply accepted the South’s secession.
This argument to me, is unbelievably absurd:
” It would have been better if they had been willing to compromise even if it took a little longer to abolish slavery in the states where it already existed. “
You do realize what you just wrote.
Regarding the American Revolution, I guess the French don’t count as outsiders.
I’m not really sure the analogy of slavery in the US really holds up with pre- and post-Gaddafi Libya. Strikes me as a bit of a ‘well, you’re an appeaser like Chamberlain, do you prefer the Nazis?’ argument.
And of course there are examples the run in the other direction. The Russian serfs/slaves were brutalized under the Tsars, but I’m not sure one can argue that because of that, Stalin was better.
I’m not saying I disagree with your overall point. I’m just not convinced with how you’re making it.
Yeah, I wrote that it would have been wrong for the North to start a war with the South that wound up killing over a half a million people when there was still the possibility of settling the question of slavery in the new territories in their favor.
But since the South seceded and started firing on our forts before Honest Abe could even be inaugurated, we had that option taken away from us.
Slavery is morally abhorrent, which is why the Republicans and Abolitionists didn’t want to see it expanded. That doesn’t mean it was a moral imperative to invade the South and kill a half million people.
It could be morally defended, of course. But I’d side with the people who were trying to end slavery without resorting to civil war. They had just won a presidential election, after all.
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Read some opposing views and don’t get once again trapped in the Neocon lies – Stellar Propaganda on Syria by BBC and US MSM . UK, Libyan and Qatari “advisors” have been on the ground in Turkey and inside Syria. Weapons have been flowing freely to the rebels in the Sunni enclaves. Even Israel is having some second thoughts. The scholars of the Brookings Institute have made the Syrian war plans.
This is and never was a people’s revolt. Perhaps Assad should apply the democratiserings lessons the US and Britain used in Iraq?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Is it really hard for you to put yourself in the shoes of an average Libyan whose life is much worse off today than it was for the last several decades?
Please tell us more about whose shoes are representative of average Libyans, based on the anecdotes you read in the cabin.
that the Libyans are better off with Gaddafi is really just a crazy argument to make
It’s also not an argument than any Americans should be making when the Libyan people themselves so clearly felt the opposite.
Booman Tribune ~ Libya and Syria
I agree the Brits should never have given independence to the USA…
Wrong.
Did the Brits stay home and fight the revolution by dumping shipload after shipload of muskets on our ports?
in breaking news, the Soviet Union should have stayed together and the Warsaw Pact was a good thing because it prevented violence in Yugoslavia.
Clearly the Russians were better off under Communism.
Shaking off the yoke of a dicator is messy. Life expectency has actually dropped in Russia after the collapse of Communism.
So clearly people were better off under Communism.
One aspect of SD that is interesting, and known by I would bet not a single person reading this blog, is that SD had the first 2 Arab-American senators. Jim Abourezk
and Jim Adbor (R) were both senators back in the 70s and 80s. Both are out of politics now, but Abourezk and his wife Saana run a restaurant. Saana is Syrian. I asked her what she thought. She said that many Syrians, especially westernized ones, back the dictator. Dictators keep the tribes in line. Women have been treated very well by Assad and also by Hussein in Iraq. Nobody wore the veil in Iraq before 2003. Jews lived there and were not killed. Now, in Egypt, we see the rise of religious fascism, and this is also true in Iraq and will be found in Syria.
So, it is not always obvious which horse to back. While Assad is a very bad person, what will come after him?
It’s easy to take a small sample size and extrapolate it outwards irresponsibly.
It’s been mere months. And in the case of Libya, there was literally no recognizable government apparatus that could be kept and transferred over from the Gaddafi “state.” But even that’s no guarantee of immediate stability. Egypt has a truly democratic parliament, but its SCAF-chosen cabinet is still a paranoid, corrupt mess and the country still must write a constitution. 2000 people have died since February because of violence in the streets, only 1000 died in the month long uprising that toppled Mubarak.
That doesn’t mean that upending the government in already economically perilous times was a bad idea. It means change takes time. Look at our revolution. It took a full decade of complicated politics to shape the nation we recognize today. And though that time wasn’t marked by extreme violence (except against black people, which the state condoned regardless), I’m sure many people wondered if they hadn’t made a huge mistake in the revolution, and weren’t about to get picked apart and devoured by the European empires in the end.
It’d be nice if every revolutionary country around the world could be like Tunisia, but to write off the Arab awakening in such a short timeframe is irresponsible. Societal evolution, just like in nature, isn’t a clean process.
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and stern warning. You’re leading the political blogs on the Middle-East issue and not getting blindsided by the Neocon gangs. Thanks BooMan! Each country has to be evaluated before [military] action is taken. Invading Iraq was illegal and the only uprising were the Shiites and Iranian influence. In Libya the jury is out, but the vast country has a population of only 6.6 million. Egypt (pop. 82 million) and Tunesia were a true people’s revolt and should be supported. Syria (pop. 22.5 million) was an imposed rebellion by outside forces NATOGCC and will create much bloodshed and a civil war. No peace commitment by Israel in the coming decade … poor judgement by Western politicians with a short term vision (next election).
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The transition was never going to be clean or bloodless but I think it is way too early to declare the way we and our allies intervened a failure. Even where we had no military intervention, Egypt, the transition has included some violence. This will take time
it is an exaggeration to say Libya is Somalia like. Yes there is some violence and out of control militias but no from reading that article and other news about the transition it has not descended into Somalia like levels of chaos. There is a large matter of degrees here.
I don’t want to get into a back and forth here, but I think it is wayyyyyy too soon to make any real a judgement on the entire Arab Spring. It’s only been a year! We’ve seen that even robust countries like East-Germany can take decades and billions (trillions) of dollars before they become what we would recognize as a “Western” style democracy.
Turkey used to have coupes from their military all throughout the 21st century, even after a strong leader like Ataturk, up until recently when democracy has finally been rooted strongly enough that that is no longer a real possibility. One year before calling it a success/failure/better/worse is silly, the world just doesn’t change that fast… as you should know, because we’re still fighting the culture wars domestically about issues that empirically were solved long ago.
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Cross-posted from my diary – Obama In Bed with Israel and Neocons
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."How is this at all comparable to the American Revolution? It’s not the same at all. Also, agreed with Booman regarding the Civil War analogies, and the history in general. The difference between Booman and Ron Paul is that Ron Paul believes secession is legitimate. I think that’s worth debating as a philosophical argument, but no country has ever accepted secession as “legitimate.” Also, doesn’t TNC agree with Booman rather than disagree? I’m pretty sure the North tried compromising with the South, and the South wouldn’t accept anything short of them leaving.
Anyway, I agreed with Booman and still do. Perhaps it’s too early, but then you could argue that it’s been “too early” for the Iraq War, too. And it’s far cry from being against “The Arab Spring” (a term coined by Westerners). Syria is on the verge of civil war, if not already. As Lysander pointed out in another thread, those in opposition are not peaceful protesters demanding to be heard, they’re militias taking up arms against the government of Syria (just like the Libyans). I don’t understand why we have to pick a side here. I oppose both the government of Syria and the Opposition. Just the same as I opposed Gaddafi and the Libyan Rebels.
Booman Tribune ~ Libya and Syria
Czechoslovakia?
The UK (in relation to Northern Ireland or Scotland if a majority vote for it)?
The Soviet Union – Baltic states etc.?
India in relation to Pakistan, Pakistan in relation to Bangla Desh
Sudan/Southern Sudan
Italy/Vatican- Lateran Treaty
Indonesia/East Timor
Not to mention all the colonies who seceded from various empires
Czechoslovakia is fair.
The UK…uh, that took a lot. A lot of terrorism, too.
Baltic States…the Soviet Union fell.
India…lol, I definitely don’t count that. Still doing battle over Kashmir in any case.
Sudan. Again, after a shit ton of war.
Italy/Vatican is a weird circumstance; a mix combined with the rise of Fascism and a desire to make the Church irrelevant in political decisions.
Indonesia? Really? Indonesian invasion of East Timor
The point remains that these were not accepted as legitimate. They were forced to accept it through military violence.
but then you could argue that it’s been “too early” for the Iraq War, too
The government of Iraq was toppled nine years ago.
The government of Libya was toppled five months ago.
You “could” argue a lot of things, but you can argue some things a lot more credibly than others.
BooMan isn’t just arguing that Libya would be better off as it was under Khadaffy before Arab Spring, than it is now and will likely be in the future. UN intervention didn’t start the protests, or the violence, or the war. On March 21, the war had been going on for a couple of weeks and the loyalist forces were driving on Benghazi, with orders to hunt down the rats door to door. That’s the point when the question of foreign intervention came into play.
BooMan isn’t just arguing that Khadaffy’s rule was better than Libya is today. He’s arguing, instead, the Libya would be better off today if Khadaffy’s forces had won the war, smashed the Free Libya Forces in the field, stormed Benghazi and done whatever, stormed Misurata and done whatever, finished going through the mountains, crushed the rebellion, taken their reprisals, and then imposed Khadaffy rule.
Jesus. Where do you get that? You’re wrong on every particular.
I argued that what happened in Libya wasn’t something that was in our national security interests and so we should not put boots on the ground. We didn’t.
I argued that a no-fly zone should be enforced by Europeans, since the outcome did matter to their national security interests.
And I argued that, despite the cover of the UN and the Arab League, we actually did have people on the ground (CIA) and that it would ruin Libya if we armed-up the militias to fight a prolonged civil war. I argued that if we deadset on regime change, we should give up the fiction that we are acting under the authority of the UN and just go land the 82nd Airborne on Gaddafi’s compound.
The only thing I got wrong was that the civil war only lasted several months. I thought it might last longer. But my concern about arming up the militias and using them in combat situations has been vindicated.
Yes, it is good that Gaddafi was ousted by Libyans, although it was our hellfire missile that led to his capture. It’s good that we don’t have any UN responsibility for governing Tripoli. But we could have skirted that responsibility safely with a good snatch and grab operation.
My idea was that, if the goal is to save lives, then make saving lives your primary goal. Civil War and armed militias do not accomplish that goal.
I get that from everything you’ve written on the subject, including on this very thread. I get that from exactly where I explained in the very comment you replied to – from your opposition to stopping Khadaffy as he was in the process of crushing the rebellion. I get that from your argument, repeated over and over again, that the actions taken to prevent the government from crushing the rebellion were wrong, and should not have been done.
if we armed-up the militias to fight a prolonged civil war
Magic ponies weren’t going to stop the Khadaffy forces. Our choices, as the United States, were to get involved, or let the rebellion be crushed.
I argued that if we deadset on regime change, we should give up the fiction that we are acting under the authority of the UN and just go land the 82nd Airborne on Gaddafi’s compound.
Except that you further argued that, if we did not do that, we should let the rebellion be crushed.
But my concern about arming up the militias and using them in combat situations has been vindicated.
No, it hasn’t. This claim can only be true if you assume that the Free Libya Forces would not have distributed arms from the government’s depots upon capturing them, but we know that they did. Or if we assume that there wouldn’t have been blood letting and reprisals from the Khadaffy side if they won.
But we could have skirted that responsibility safely with a good snatch and grab operation.
False. If the government was toppled, there would be chaos and militia rule in the vacuum, whether that vacuum was created by a (rather implausible) smash and grab operation, or by a rebel uprising.