Why America was right to Intervene in Libya, and what went wrong after
Periodically, since the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, there appears a series of articles, couched in tones from tentative to vehement, suggesting that if NATO had stayed out and allowed Qaddafi to retake the rebellious city of Benghazi in March 2011 then Libya would now be stable and would not be haemorrhaging refugees.
With the onset of the refugee crisis in Europe, and Libya providing a major transit point for those trying to get to Europe, it was inevitable that this would happen again. But it is still mistaken: instability was coming to Libya no matter what the West did, and the main problem with the intervention was that it wasn’t early enough, forceful enough, or protracted enough.
Barbara Tasch wrote at Business Insider this week that Qaddafi was a “key ally who helped stem the [refugee] flow in the past”. Peter Hitchens wrote in The Mail that the NATO intervention in Libya “helped cause the huge migrant wave”. These arguments echo the last oratorical refuge the Qaddafi regime sought for itself.
Faced with a popular revolution, Qaddafi had used fighter jets within a fortnight and promised a “house by house” massacre of Benghazi. This raised the spectre of humanitarian intervention. Qaddafi retorted that his removal would result in chaos and jihadism in Libya and refugee waves in Europe.
“Bin Laden’s people would come to impose ransoms by land and sea [if I fall],” Qaddafi told reporters. “We will go back to the time of Redbeard”.
Grant it to the Colonel: he had a knack for rhetorical flourish.
But this neat narrative, that bad as Qaddafi was censorship, banning opposition parties, raping his own (male) ministers as a means of control, assassination of dissidents he at least contained the chaos and terrorism, doesn’t meet the test of evidence.
Qaddafi’s record as a source of terrorism has few rivals. Through Sabri al-Banna (better known as Abu Nidal) Qaddafi attacked numerous Western targets and assassinated any Palestinian leader willing to compromise with Israel. A French airplane was blown up in Chad by Qaddafi’s agents, and the American plane brought out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, has been officially traced back to Qaddafi.
Further, during the Libyan rebellion, Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, announced that the regime would side with the jihadists against the liberals. “Libya will look like Saudi Arabia, like Iran. So what?” Saif said.
So much for counter-terrorism.
If Qaddafi had sacked Benghazi, the result would not have been peace and stability in Libya. Benghazi has 600,000 residents; even Qaddafi couldn’t have killed them all. Qaddafi could have terrorized them, with artillery and aerial bombardment, into fleeing, as Bashar al-Assad has done in Syria, but then where would they have fled?
Once the uprising was underway, violence and instability were in Libya’s future regardless; better at that point to at least try to do the right thing. The alternative is on display in Syria.
The NATO intervention in Libya, which lasted eight months, accidentally killed seventy-two civilians. Assad kills more than one hundred civilians, deliberately, every day. During the Libyan war about 5,000 people were killed; even as the chaos spiraled the death toll in Libya from 2014 to 2015 was just over 4,000.
The United Nations stopped counting the Syrian dead at 100,000 in January 2014; a minimum of 230,000 Syrians — and likely closer to 300,000 — are now dead. More than 400,000 people have been displaced in Libya (about seven percent of the population). More than twelve million people have been displaced in Syria (more than half of the population).
Put simply, even with an unfinished Western intervention in Libya that left the country to warlordism and a proxy war pitting Qatar and Turkey against Egypt and the Gulf States (primarily the United Arab Emirates), which has allowed the rise of a branch of the Islamic State, Libya is still better off than it would have been without the intervention. The casualties and instability would have been reduced further if the intervention had included a stabilization mission after Qaddafi’s fall.
The international community drew and enforced red lines in Libya, which means the outside powers and their proxies have to play within certain bounds, unlike Syria where the West has shown itself able to tolerate mass-rape, ethnic cleansing, and sectarian extermination by the regime.
Whether it is the threat of Islamists, the lack of civil society and the collapse of the State after Qaddafi, or the inflamed ethno-social and tribal divisions in Libya: these are the products of the Qaddafi dictatorship.
Crushing all opposition except the Islamists, making the State the private property of a ruling family, and keeping control by divide-and-rule is a virtual algorithm of Arab dictatorship; it ensures that the only alternatives are fanatics, chaos, or both. Libya’s torments now are not the result of removing Qaddafi but of tolerating him for so long.
What Caused the Libyan Civil War?
Critics charge that the NATO intervention was responsible for or somehow caused Libya’s current state of chaos and instability. For instance, after leaving the Obama administration, Philip Gordon, the most senior US official on the Middle East in 2013-’15, wrote: “In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster.”
The problem here is that US intervention did not, in fact, result in a costly disaster, unless we are using the word “result” to simply connote that one thing happened after a previous thing. The NATO operation ended in October 2011. The current civil war in Libya began in May 2014, a full two and a half years later. The intervention and today’s violence are of course related, but this does not necessarily mean there is a causal relationship.
To argue that the current conflict in Libya is a result of the intervention, one would basically need to assume that the outbreak of civil war was inevitable, irrespective of anything that happened in the intervening 30 months.
This makes it all the more important to distinguish between the intervention itself and the international community’s subsequent failure — a failure that nearly all the relevant actors acknowledge — to plan and act for the day after and help Libyans rebuild their shattered country.
Such measures include sending training missions to help the Libyan army restructure itself (only in late 2013 did NATO provide a small team of advisers) or even sending multinational peacekeeping forces; expanding the United Nations Support Mission in Libya’s (UNSMIL) limited advisory role; and pressuring the Libyan government to consider alternatives to a dangerous and destabilizing political isolation law.
While perhaps less sexy, the US and its allies could have also weighed in on institutional design and pushed back against Libya’s adoption, backed by UNSMIL, of one of world’s most counterproductive electoral systems — single non-transferable vote along with an institutional bias favoring independents. This combination exacerbated tribal and regional divisions while making power sharing even more difficult.
Finally, the US could have restrained its allies, particularly the Gulf States and Egypt, from excessive meddling in the lead-up to and early days of the 2014 civil war.
Yet Libya quickly tumbled off the American agenda. That’s not surprising, given that the Obama administration has always been suspicious of not just military entanglements but any kind of prolonged involvement — diplomatic, financial, or otherwise — in Middle East trouble spots. Libya “was farmed out to the working level,” according to Dennis Ross, who served as a special assistant to President Obama until November 2011.
There was also an assumption that the Europeans would do more. This was more than just a hope; it was an organizing principle of Obama administration engagement abroad. Analysts Nina Hachigian and David Shorr have called it the “Responsibility Doctrine”: a strategy of “prodding other influential nations … to help shoulder the burdens of fostering a stable, peaceful world order.”
This may be the way the world should operate, but as a set of driving assumptions, this part of the Obama doctrine has proven to be wrong at best, and rather dangerous at worst.
We may not like it — and Obama certainly doesn’t — but even when the US itself is not particularly involved in a given conflict, at the very least it is expected to set the agenda, convene partners, and drive international attention toward an issue that would otherwise be neglected in the morass of Middle East conflicts. The US, when it came to Libya, did not meet this minimal standard.
Even President Obama himself would eventually acknowledge the failure to stay engaged. As he put it to Friedman: “I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this.”
Yet it is worth emphasizing that even with a civil war, ISIS’s capture of territory, and as many as three competing “governments,” the destruction in Libya still does not come close to the level of death and destruction witnessed in Syria in the absence of intervention.
In other words, even this “worst-case scenario” falls well short of actual worst-case scenarios. According to the Libya Body Count, around 4,500 people have so far been killed over the course of 22 months of civil war.
In Syria, the death toll is about 100 times that, with more than 400,000 killed, according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research.
Was the Intervention in Libya a Failure?
Most criticisms of the intervention, even with the benefit of hindsight, fall short. It is certainly true that the intervention didn’t produce something resembling a stable democracy. This, however, was never the goal. The goal was to protect civilians and prevent a massacre.
Critics erroneously compare Libya today to any number of false ideals, but this is not the correct way to evaluate the success or failure of the intervention. To do that, we should compare Libya today to what Libya would have looked like if we hadn’t intervened. By that standard, the Libya intervention was successful: The country is better off today than it would have been had the international community allowed dictator Muammar Qaddafi to continue his rampage across the country.
Critics further assert that the intervention caused, created, or somehow led to civil war. In fact, the civil war had already started before the intervention began. As for today’s chaos, violence, and general instability, these are more plausibly tied not to the original intervention but to the international community’s failures after intervention.
The very fact that the Libya intervention and its legacy have been either distorted or misunderstood is itself evidence of a warped foreign policy discourse in the US, where anything short of success in this case, Libya quickly becoming a stable, relatively democratic country is viewed as a failure.
Why Did America Intervene in Libya?
The US entered the conflcit with the explicit instructions to not conduct “regime change.” Rather, the US military (along with their NATO partners) only sought to limit the destruction caused by the Libyan regime which was conducting massive bombardments of rebel held cities. The US put no ground troops into the fight and focused predominantly on ISR and refueling for NATO strikes.
The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 which dictated the following:
- demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians;
- imposes a no-fly zone over Libya;
- authorizes all necessary means to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas, except for a “foreign occupation force”;
- strengthens the arms embargo and particularly action against mercenaries, by allowing for forcible inspections of ships and planes;
- imposes a ban on all Libyan-designated flights;
- imposes an asset freeze on assets owned by the Libyan authorities, and reaffirms that such assets should be used for the benefit of the Libyan people;
- extends the travel ban and assets freeze of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1970 to a number of additional individuals and Libyan entities;
- establishes a panel of experts to monitor and promote sanctions implementation.
So the US and NATO were executing a UN mandate to end the conflict in Libya and to protect civilian lives.
More generally, Libya represented the first test of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P or RtoP) is a global political commitment endorsed by all member states of the United Nations at the 2005 World Summit to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
The principle of the Responsibility to Protect is based on the underlying premise that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect all populations from mass atrocity crimes and human rights violations. The Responsibility to Protect provides a framework for employing measures that already exist (i.e., mediation, early warning mechanisms, economic sanctions, and chapter VII powers) to prevent atrocity crimes and to protect civilians from their occurrence. The authority to employ the use of force under the framework of the Responsibility to Protect rests solely with United Nations Security Council and is considered a measure of last resort.
Libya was the first case where the Security Council authorized a military intervention citing the R2P. Following widespread and systematic attacks against the civilian population by the Libyan regime, and language used by Muammar Gaddafi that reminded the international community of the genocide in Rwanda, the Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 1970 on 26 February 2011, making explicit reference to the R2P. Deploring what it called “the gross and systematic violation of human rights” in strife-torn Libya, the Security Council demanded an end to the violence, “recalling the Libyan authorities’ responsibility to protect its population”, and imposed a series of international sanctions. The Council also decided to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.
NATO intervened to protect civilians, not to set up a democracy
As stated in the UN Security Council resolution authorizing force in Libya, the goal of intervention was “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” And this is what was achieved.
In February 2011, anti-Qaddafi demonstrations spread across the country. The regime responded to the nascent protest movement with lethal force, killing more than 100 people in the first few days, effectively sparking an armed rebellion. The rebels quickly lost momentum, however.
Already, on the eve of intervention, the death toll was estimated at somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000. (This was when the international community’s tolerance for Arab Spring–related mass killings was still fairly low.)
As Obama’s advisers saw it, there were two options for military action: a no-fly zone (which, on its own, wouldn’t do much to stop Qaddafi’s tanks) or a broader resolution that would allow the US and its allies to take further measures, including establishing what amounted to a floating no-drive zone around rebel forces. The president went with the latter option.
The NATO operation lasted about seven months, with an estimated death toll of around 8,000, apparently most of them combatants on both sides (although there is some lack of clarity on this, since the Libyan government doesn’t clearly define “revolutionaries” or “rebel supporters”). A Human Rights Watch investigation found that at least 72 civilians were killed as a result of the NATO air campaign, definitively contradicting speculative claims of mass casualties from the Qaddafi regime.
Claims of “mission creep” have become commonplace, most forcefully articulated by the Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations. Zenko may be right, but he asserts rather than explains why mission creep is always a bad thing. It may be that in some circumstances, the scope of a mission should be defined more broadly, rather than narrowly.
If anything, it was the Obama administration’s insistence of minimizing the mission including the absurd claim that it would take “days, not weeks” — that was the problem from the very start. Zenko and others never make clear how civilians could have been protected as long as Qaddafi was waging war on them.
What would Libya look like if NATO hadn’t Intervened?
It’s helpful to engage in a bit of counterfactual history here. As Niall Ferguson notes in his book Virtual Alternatives, “To understand how it actually was, we therefore need to understand how it actually wasn’t.”
Applied to the Libyan context, this means that we’re not comparing Libya, during or after the intervention, with some imagined ideal of stable, functioning democracy. Rather, we would compare it with what we judge, to the best of our ability, the most likely alternative outcome would have been had the US not intervened.
Here’s what we know: By March 19, 2011, when the NATO operation began, the death toll in Libya had risen rapidly to more than 1,000 in a relatively short amount of time, confirming Qaddafi’s longstanding reputation as someone who was willing to kill his countrymen (as well as others) in large numbers if that’s what his survival required.
There was no end in sight. After early rebel gains, Qaddafi had seized the advantage. Still, he was not in a position to deal a decisive blow to the opposition. (Nowhere in the Arab Spring era has one side in a military conflict been able to claim a clear victory, even with massive advantages in manpower, equipment, and regional backing.)
Any Libyan who had opted to take up arms was liable to be captured, arrested, or killed if Qaddafi “won,” so the incentives to accept defeat were nonexistent, to say nothing of the understandable desire to not live under the rule of a brutal and maniacal strongman.
The most likely outcome, then, was a Syria-like situation of indefinite, intensifying violence. Even President Obama, who today seems unsure about the decision to intervene, acknowledged in an August 2014 interview with Thomas Friedman that “had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria. … And so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction.”
If the U.S. hadn’t intervened, the result might have been another Syria-like situation of a protracted civil war. I was in favor of intervening, but I also warned at the time that the U.S. needed to seriously prepare for a post-Gaddafi Libya, and that the only way to ward off chaos was to send an international peacekeeping force.
The Problem with Obama In Libya, was that he employed American airpower to topple Muammar Gaddafi but refused to sanction any follow-on peacekeeping forces to help a new, pro-Western government establish its authority. The predictable result: a vacuum of authority that allowed militias and terrorist groups to flourish. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues paid with their lives for that failure.
The Obama administration’s mission while “leading from behind” over the skies of Libya was never regime change. “Of course, there is no question that Libya and the world would be better off with Qaddafi out of power,” Obama said in an address to the nation. “But broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.” In that address, the president noted that regime change in Iraq was not worth the cost in lives or dollars. That’s perhaps why the administration was ill-prepared for the crumbling of Gaddafi’s regime.
The Mistake of Libya was not enough Intervention
With the Arabian Revolt sweeping the Middle East in early 2011, Libya’s turn came on February 17. Throwing off decades of fear, and not bothering with peaceful demonstrations as Tunisia and Egypt had to free themselves of tyranny, nor the Syrians who tried peaceful demonstrations for six entire months, the Libyans went straight to armed rebellion, and soon the city of Benghazi had been pried from the regime’s grip and become the de facto capital of the revolution. The Libyans had no confidence in protests to alter the regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi. They were right. The demented Colonel responded with a brutality that included using fighter jetsagainst civilian areas. As the violence escalated, on March 17 the U.N. Security Council passed resolution 1973, which
Authorize[d] Member States …, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, … to take all necessary measures … to protect civilians.
Celebrations erupted in Libya at the news that deliverance was coming. For reasons unclear there was a 48-hour delay, which allowed Qaddafi’s forces to be right at the gates of Benghazi by the time the American intervention came on March 19 in the form of Operation ODYSSEY DAWN. Qaddafi’s rudimentary air defences were disabled and a no-fly zone instituted. President Obama then made the decision, on March 31, to hand the operation to NATO. This was the infamous “leading from behind“. Still, it was enough to bring down the regime. In late August, Qaddafi was driven from his capital, and on October 20, Qaddafi’s escape from his hometown of Sirte was cut off by French jets and he was pulled out of a drainage ditch and given to the crowd. They were not pretty those closing scenes in Sirte, but they were long overdue.
The Russians would protest that their abstention on the U.N. resolution was never meant to encompass regime-change, and the West, including the U.S. Defence Secretary and the British Chief of Defence, denied that this had been the intention. How they proposed to protect civilians without killing the despot giving the orders that endangered them was never explained. On Oct. 31, NATO’s Operation UNIFIED PROTECTOR was ended, and that was more or less it for Western involvement, except for the victory lap of course.
In the elections that followed liberation in June 2012, the tribalists/nationalists would carry the day; the Islamists were trounced. But the problems had already begun. Between April and September 2012 there had been “at least five … attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi,” and this would culminate in the fiasco on Sept. 11, 2012, when the American ambassador and three other U.S. citizens were killed by al-Qaeda jihadists at the Consulate in that city. There were many democratic and pro-American people in Libya — protesters had expelled the Islamic militants who attacked the U.S. Consulate from their base in Benghazi after the attack — but a small group of violent fanatics can impose themselves if nobody else has the power to resist them. Lawlessness was allowed to overtake Libya, and the decent government that had come to office by elections was unable to enforce its writ. America had made one effort to send a training mission to Libya to buttress the forces of law and order but it was withdrawn in mid-2012 “until the security of U.S. personnel and equipment could be guaranteed“!
2013 did not shape up any better. The parliament passed laws at gun-point, a proposed NATO training mission went nowhere, and there were numerous kidnappings, including the Prime Minister. The east of Libya had always been fertile ground for the jihadists. Derna, for example, had contributed “far and away” the most holy warriors on a per capita basis to the jihad against constitutional government in Iraq. With no State to keep this at bay, and collapsing order around Libya, notably Mali, the jihadists converged on Libya for shelter and al-Qaeda and other Salafi-jihadists’ presence in the country became more pronounced.
Elections in June 2014 had again defeated the Islamists but this time the zealots decided to take by force what they could not get by the ballot, and on Saturday, the situation unravelled completely when Tripoli fell to Islamic militants under the banner of Fajr Libya (Libyan Dawn). The Islamists set ablaze Tripoli International Airport, further destruction of the city was reported, and the remnants of the police and army, as well as militiamen loyal to the government, were being systematically rounded up by Dawn. In the east, fighting is ongoing between the Islamists and the supposedly-nationalist militias of Khalifa Haftar, a former General, a leftover of the old regime who has seemingly modelled himself on Abdel Fattah as-Sisi, a putschist and autocrat who claims he can keep the Islamists in check. Libya’s Parliament calledfor international intervention earlier this month and was rebuffed. This is the harvest.
But this wasn’t all. Regional dynamics soon intruded:
Twice in the last seven days, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have secretly launched airstrikes against Islamist-allied militias battling for control of Tripoli … The United States, the officials said, was caught by surprise: Egypt and the Emirates, both close allies and military partners, acted without informing Washington, leaving the Obama administration on the sidelines. Egyptian officials explicitly denied to American diplomats that their military played any role in the operation … In recent months, the officials said, teams of “special forces” operating out of Egypt but possibly composed primarily of Emiratis had also successfully destroyed an Islamist camp near … Derna …
Several officials said in recent days that United States diplomats were fuming about the airstrikes, believing the intervention could further inflame the Libyan conflict as the United Nations and Western powers are seeking to broker a peaceful resolution.
Officials said the government of Qatar has already provided weapons and support to the Islamist-aligned forces inside Libya, so the new strikes represent a shift from a battle of proxies to direct involvement. …
“In every arena — in Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Libya, even what happened in Egypt — this regional polarization, with Saudi Arabia and the … U.A.E. on one side and Qatar and Turkey on the other, has proved to be a gigantic impediment to international efforts to resolve any of these crisis [sic],” said Michele Dunne, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Middle East specialist at the State Department.
A snapshot but a very dense one: The region’s actors, perhaps especially America’s allies, have taken to free-lancing because they have no confidence that the President will actually do anything; Qatar is playing as destructive a role as it can; the struggles within the Muslim world are the major front in the region (Israel is not even on the radar of these States); the Obama administration’s failure to intervene properly and stay to secure the aftermath has led to disaster in Libya, as it has in Iraq; and while bad actors are making real military gains, the administration worries that using force to stop them will only make it worse and tries to bring about a political solution in situations that have long-since passed the point of no return.
Credit where it is due: The United States had come to the rescue of Libya when nobody else would (Russia and China) or could (the Arab League). But the U.S. had not secured the aftermath, the one lesson all sides of the argument should surely have learned from Iraq.
It didn’t have to be this way. Consider an alternative history of the region over the last three years. If the intervention against Qaddafi had come sooner, in the first two weeks rather than after four, and if it had targeted him and his elite directly and unapologetically, the war would not have dragged out for eight months; there would have been much less destruction and the jihadists would have had much less time and space to set themselves up. If Special Forces, military advisers, and other help were made available to the elected government afterwards then order could have been restored, in no small part because it wouldn’t have broken down so badly. If fifteen or twenty thousand troops could have been left in Iraq it would have allowed a fighting chance of keeping peace between the sects, stopped Iran using Iraq as a transit point to support the Assad dictatorship, kept Syria’s furies largely out of Iraq, and ensured that the Islamic State didn’t get a chance to regenerate in Iraq.
If an early aerial intervention were mounted in Syria in late 2011 or early (or even mid-) 2012 it would have stopped the Zarqawi’ites metastasizing on Syrian soil, denying them the conditions they needed — including the complicity of the regime and Iran — and ensured a much better outcome by helping to power nationalists, who were overwhelmingly powerful early in this rebellion, breaking Iran’s power in the Mediterranean, and not incidentally preventing a great deal of killing and destruction. Project the worst you like for casualties from a NATO intervention in Syria and it’s not 220,000. (In Libya, 72 civilians were collateral damage in NATO’s entire campaign, less than one day’s work from Assad, and estimates of the total casualties are being revised down all the time.)
For those who worry that this is taking on too much, just remember: The West is going to get dragged in anyway. It will be on terms much less advantageous, the outcomes will be worse than they could have been with earlier intervention, and many more people will die, but these situations will eventually reach a point where they can no longer be ignored whether, as in Iraq and Syria, it is the rise of transnational terrorist groups or, as will soon be the case in Libya, the rise of transnational terrorist groups and a destabilising flood of refugees into Europe, some of whom will be agents of these terrorist groups. In Iraq and Libya, it would have been much easier to simply stay on and secure the gains the West had already achieved. As in so many other cases, what to do about Syria has not been made easier by letting it drag out.
The next question of the anti-interventionists tends to be on the “exit strategy,” but this is a fantasy on at least two counts. One is that it sets up a standard of prescience on interventionists that anti-interventionists never get held to. For example, Edward Miliband, having organised the defeat of the proposal in the British Parliament that said Bashar al-Assad should pay a military price for gassing children, now bears partial responsibility for everybody who has been killed in Syria by the regime since last August because he emboldened it by sending the message that chemical weapons use was cost-free.
But somehow the costs of inaction never seem to register in the same way. Second, an “exit strategy” can’t be known until it’s seen. The U.S. still has troops in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Bosnia, and Kosovo — and so much the better. Look how well they turned out as opposed to the American South, Somalia, Haiti, and Iraq where American troops were pulled out too soon. By being prepared to stay for as long as it takes, there’s every chance you won’t have to stay so long. If it is understood that you are determined to see it through, the local actors will make their long-term arrangements with you. If, like Obama in Afghanistan, you announce a commitment and simultaneously announce the end-date, the local actors make their arrangements instead with internal and external forces they know will be there forever.
In short, the lesson of Libya is not that the intervention in 2011 was a mistake. It is the lesson once articulated by Representative Charles Wilson of Texas, who was rather over-sold as having single-handedly driven the Red Army out of Afghanistan in the excellent film Charlie Wilson’s War. “These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world,” said the Congressman. “And then we fucked up the endgame.”
Did the United States Violate its Nuclear Agreements with Libya?
To Quote Wikipedia:
In 1968, Libya became signatory of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), ratified the treaty in 1975, and concluded a safeguards agreement in 1980. The Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials were quoted “Libya had bought nuclear components from various black market dealers”, and provided the various designs of centrifuges to U.S. officials and gave the name of its suppliers.”
So right there, you have Libya admitting to violating the NPT.
Recognizing that his country was vulnerable to a similar fate as Iraq and wishing to have lifted the sanctions that had been in place since the 1980s, Gaddafi announced his intention to destroy his WMD and to allow inspectors to confirm this fact. The process began in December 2003 and was officially completed by February 2014.
“On 22 September 2011, near Sabha, Libya, toward the end of the Libyan Civil War, anti-Gaddafi forces discovered two warehouses containing thousands of blue barrels marked with tape reading “radioactive” and plastic bags of yellow powder sealed with the same tape. The IAEA stated, “We can confirm that there is yellowcake stored in drums at a site near Sabha … which Libya previously declared to the IAEA. … The IAEA has tentatively scheduled safeguards activities at this location once the situation in the country stabilises.””
So maybe he didn’t actually give up his WMD as promised?
At any rate, the US lifted its sanctions against Libya in 2004 as promised. (U.S. Lifts Remaining Economic Sanctions Against Libya)
SEVEN years later, the Libyan people decided to overthrow the Gaddafi regime. When he responded by indiscriminately bombing their cities, NATO enacted various “no fly zones” in order to minimize the civilian casualties. This air support from NATO allowed Libya rebel forces to topple Gaddafi’s regime and eventually kill him.
Conclusion:
The failure of Western policy in Libya was not the decision to intervene to prevent a massacre in Benghazi and to help the Libyans with their only viable defence against Qaddafi, namely toppling the dictator. The failure was in not committing what would have been really quite limited resources mostly military and intelligence trainers and advisers to stabilising the aftermath. Indeed none other than President Obama appears to agree with this assessment.
“Had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria,” said the President. His close adviser Ben Rhodes echoed this sentiment. So Obama agrees that the intervention per se even with a messy outcome — was better than no intervention. In Libya, 72 civilians were killed accidentally in NATO’s entire campaign, less than one day’s work from Assad, and estimates of the military casualties are being revised down all the time. In Syria, 300,000 people and more are dead and the chaos has opened the way to worse actors. (That Obama has elsewhere said the idea that intervening earlier in Syria to support the moderates would have resulted in a better outcome was “horseshit,” can be safely put down the political necessity of never admitting a mistake.)
On the other half of this argument that more needed to be done in the aftermath Obama also agrees but says he “underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this.” Obama ran for office against the Iraq invasion in no small part highlighting the incompetence of the Bush administration’s reconstruction. The need for a post-war plan is the most salient lesson of the Iraq experience. It seems unlikely this came to Obama after 2011: the 2012 Election, where the President ran on his record of extricating the U.S. from the Middle East, Iraq most notably, serves as a much better explanation for why Obama would not commit to Libya in a way that could be interpreted as “boots on the ground”.
Ultimately, the lesson of Libya is one that keeps being shown from Afghanistan to Iraq to Bosnia: by refusing the small, early intervention when allies would be easier to enlist, the U.S. ends up intervening at much greater cost later, almost alone, and achieving a far less desirable outcome.
The way we remember Libya suggests that the way we talk about America’s role in the world has changed, and not for the better. Americans are probably more likely to consider the Libya intervention a failure because the US was at the forefront of the NATO operation. So any subsequent descent into conflict, presumably, says something about our failure, which is something we’d rather not think about.
Outside of the foreign policy community, politicians are usually criticized for what they do abroad, rather than what they don’t do. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, “[Qaddafi] was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it.” If the US had decided against intervention, Libya would have likely reverted to some noxious combination of dictatorship and insurgency. But we could have shirked responsibility (a sort of inverse “pottery barn” principle if you didn’t break it, you don’t have to fix it). We could have claimed to have “done no harm,” even though harm, of course, would have been done.
It’s easy for some to suggest that Western interventionism is the problem here, and the world would be better off if the cries of the civilians Gaddafi slaughtered went ignored. That’s only an argument that can be made from outside the Oval Office, but it is one that has a broad political constituency. To claim that Libya is a “neo-con” failure, however, is a willful misrepresentation of neo-conservatism. Libya is a disaster today as a result not of Western engagement but withdrawal. The worst lesson from the Libyan debacle is: half-measures will almost always produce suboptimal results.
There was a time when the United States seemed to have a perpetual bias toward action. The instinct of leaders, more often than not, was to act militarily even in relatively small conflicts that were remote from American national security interests. Our country’s tragic experience in Iraq changed that. Inaction came to be seen as a virtue. And, to be sure, inaction is sometimes virtuous. Libya, though, was not one of those times.
