“VICTORY” IN LIBYA: NO MODEL FOR U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
Doug Bandow
Huffington Post, August 31, 2011
It took the greatest military alliance in history five months to push the Libyan rebels across the finish line. Nevertheless, Western politicians are claiming victory. Yet the ultimate consequences of allied intervention remain uncertain. While few mourn the demise of “the Colonel,” liberal democracy may not result in Libya.
Libya was yet another unnecessary war of choice.… When President Barack Obama intervened in Libya’s civil war he could point to no discernible American security interest. Moammar Gaddafi was an unpleasant dictator, but until March he had been feted by the West for abandoning his nuclear program and combating Islamic extremism. Indeed, Gaddafi became a poster child for cooperation with Washington.
Unfortunately, ousting his regime has made proliferation more likely. Abundant Libyan chemical weapons and anti-aircraft missiles may leak abroad. Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch warned: “weapon proliferation out of Libya is potentially one of the largest we have ever documented—2003 Iraq pales in comparison—and so the risks are equally much more significant.”
Moreover, U.S. and NATO intervention will encourage unpopular regimes to develop and keep WMDs. While the West’s attack did not result from Tripoli’s disarmament, the campaign was possible only because of Tripoli’s disarmament. What other pariah regime, including Iran and North Korea, is going to agree to peaceful denuclearization when the allies might later decide to initiate regime change?
The war also may energize regional terrorist networks. Islamic militants have been freed from Libyan jails. A number of the rebels fought with al-Qaeda in Iraq or battled U.S. forces in Afghanistan; some radicals, including a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, hold leadership positions in the TNC military. Their ambitions remain unclear, but National Defense University’s Walid Phares worried that “The Islamist militias within the rebels are the most organized, widest network.”
The Western program also made future United Nations backing less likely even for a war of necessity. The U.S. and Europeans won Chinese and Russian acquiescence to a UN resolution authorizing military action for the limited purpose of protecting Libyan civilians. However, the allies ostentatiously turned the operation into a campaign to oust the Gaddafi government. Moscow complained about NATO’s overreach and Beijing was not happy losing a friendly oil producer. Neither may be so willing to allow Washington and Europe to borrow UN legitimacy in the future.…
Worse, turning Libya’s internal blood-letting into a NATO conflict further transformed the alliance into a transmission belt of unnecessary war. NATO was created to promote a shared interest: European security. War with the Soviet Union would have been horrific, but the allies believed their survival to be a vital interest worth fighting for.
That shared commitment has dissipated. Since NATO members no longer face any common threat of consequence, they use the alliance to drag their partners into narrower conflicts of limited interest to others. Washington drew reluctant European members into Afghanistan and Iraq. Britain and France pulled the U.S. and other European nations into Libya. Even so, only nine of 28 NATO members provided air-to-ground support in the latter.…
The war’s backers proclaimed the military mission to be humanitarian, even an outgrowth of the UN’s proclaimed “responsibility to protect.” Alas, these claims were fraudulent.… The Libyan conflict had been raging for a month before the U.S. and NATO intervened, and Gaddafi had slaughtered no civilians in any of the cities he had retaken from the rebels. He was a thug, yes, but did not appear to be bent on mass murder.…
In any case, by adopting a minimalist military policy, Washington and NATO prolonged the conflict, resulting in far more deaths. Low-tech civil wars usually are bloody: outside estimates run from 10,000 to 30,000 dead in Libya, while the TNC figures 50,000 deaths over the six month rebellion. Yet the Western powers refused to use the force necessary for a quick victory. Five months of costly fighting ensued. If one goes to war to save lives, one should not do so in a manner that maximizes casualties.…
Having changed the regime, what have the allies wrought? Gaddafi’s demise is welcome, but a liberal, democratic future for the North African nation remains a distant hope. Precedent suggests caution. The fall of Baghdad generated similar rapturous but sadly temporary applause. In Cairo an intolerant anonymous authoritarian state appears to be rising. The problem is not that there are no good people in the Transitional National Council. The problem is that there are not only good people in the TNC.…
Victory has transformed the TNC’s principal task.… Now the TNC must govern. And a bitter post-war political and possibly military struggle for control is likely. Libya is a large, artificial nation with about 140 tribes and a multitude of regional, social, ethnic, and religious divisions. There is no democratic heritage upon which to draw. Gaddafi established a unique form of personal rule that left few institutions—civic, political, or government.…
The West is particularly concerned about Islamic influence. One draft constitution establishes Islam as the state religion and Sharia as “the principal source of legislation.” The Libyan people obviously can choose a religious government if they desire, but similar systems elsewhere have not created hospitable environments for minority faiths or individual liberty.…
However, the most important impact of the war is on domestic American institutions. The marginal cost of the military campaign was “only” about $1.2 billion, a rounding error for a government with more than $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities. But costs will escalate if the administration heeds the advice of analysts…who suggest the necessity of a Western…force in the third Muslim nation in a decade. There also have been mutterings about the need to ensure order coming out of London.…
The conflict also reinforced presidential lawlessness. Past presidents have routinely lied the U.S. into war and abused their authority afterwards. Candidate Obama promised to be different, telling the American people “No more ignoring the law when it’s inconvenient.” However, the president’s claim that Libya was a humanitarian venture was no[t] believable.… Indeed, President Obama has shown future chief executives the way to war, claim to save lives while pursuing other objectives.
Worse was President Obama’s violation of the Constitution and War Powers Resolution. The former mandates a congressional declaration of war; the second requires legislative assent for any military action after 60 days. Even President George W. Bush won congressional authorization for his two wars. But President Obama made the ludicrous claim that Libya didn’t count because it really wasn’t hostilities—even as U.S. planes, missiles, and drones were killing Libyan military personnel and destroying Libyan military materiel. Top members of his own legal team objected to his refusal to follow the law.…
The world is better off with Moammar Gaddafi’s ouster. But that welcome result does not justify Barack Obama deceiving the public and violating the Constitution. Even if events in post-Gaddafi Libya turn out surprisingly well, the cost to American liberties will have been too high.
(Doug Bandow is a senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.)
LIBYA’S DARK LESSON FOR NATO
Steven Erlanger
NY Times, September 3, 2011
The war in Libya may be one of those quietly telling moments in the history of more important nations. For the first time, the United States has taken a secondary role—“leading from behind,” if “leading” is even the right word—in a war prosecuted by the NATO alliance and driven by Britain and France, the two strongest military powers in Europe.
But oh what a war! More than six budget-busting months against one of the weakest militaries in the world, with shortages of planes, weapons and ammunition that were patched over by the pretense that NATO was acting simply to “protect civilians,” when it was clear to everyone that the alliance was intervening on one side of a civil war. All resemblances to the Kosovo war, of course, are a priori inadmissible. That was the war—78 days of bombing Serbia and thousands dead before Slobodan Milosevic finally capitulated—when NATO said: “Such a success, never again!” Yet here we are—with the “responsibility to protect” the new mantra, replacing Kosovo’s “humanitarian intervention.” Both are debatable, given the failure to intervene in the separatist Russian republic of Chechnya then and Syria, Bahrain or Yemen now.
Libya has been a war in which some of the Atlantic alliance’s mightiest members did not participate, or did not participate with combat aircraft, like Spain and Turkey. It has been a war where the Danes and Norwegians did an extraordinary number of the combat sorties, given their size.… Only eight of the 28 allies engaged in combat, and most ran out of ammunition, having to buy, at cost, ammunition stockpiled by the United States. Germany refused to take part, even in setting up a no-fly zone.
Although Washington took a back seat in the war, which the Obama administration looked at skeptically from the start, the United States still ran the initial stages, in particular the destruction of Libya’s air defenses, making it safe for its NATO colleagues to fly. The United States then provided intelligence, refueling and more precision bombing than Paris or London want to acknowledge.…
The question, however, is whether European members of NATO will ever decide to embark on such an adventure again. Either Europeans will develop the security and defense identity they have advertised for so long, so Europe can have its own credible voice in a world not only run by soft power, or given the expense and difficulties of defeating even Libya, they will simply stop trying. The jury is out, but the verdict is important.…
Just possibly, given the cost and strain of the Libyan operation, combined with the vital necessity to cut budget deficits at home to save both the euro zone and themselves, even the eight European nations that fought will decide that a real European security and defense identity is too expensive and that their already shrinking defense budgets will continue to shrink past the point of utility—at least to Washington. After all, the European Union itself played no role at all in the war.
François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst with the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said that the decisions made in Washington to “lead from behind” and in Berlin not to participate at all will have “major strategic consequences for both NATO and the European Union.”
The lack of a sustained American “shock and awe” campaign probably left more of Libya’s infrastructure intact for the new government, he noted. But less happily, he said, “if ‘leading from behind’ becomes the rule rather than the exception”—which he regards as likely given United States budget cuts—“then European force planners will have to invest” in air-defense suppression and more close-air support. How likely, after all, is that?…
So Libya may be a dark model for NATO’s future: internal coalitions of the willing, hemmed in by conditions and national “caveats,” running out of ammunition and targets, with inadequate means to achieve stated political goals.
The economic crisis has only exacerbated Europe’s unwillingness to live up to its grand ambitions to play a global role in foreign and defense matters. The biting complaints of Robert Gates, the former United States defense secretary, about the fading of Europe and a “dim if not dismal future” for an increasingly “irrelevant” alliance, were only an echo, if said more harshly, of similar speeches that many NATO secretaries general have made before him.
In February, at the Munich Security Conference, Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen of NATO ominously noted that in the last two years alone European defense spending had shrunk by $45 billion—the equivalent of Germany’s entire military budget. Only France, Britain and Greece (which can’t afford it), are spending the agreed 2 percent of G.D.P. on defense, and Britain is now cutting sharply. If those trends continue, Mr. Rasmussen said, “we risk a divided Europe” and “a Europe increasingly adrift from the United States.…”
HAMAS LESSON FOR LIBYA
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, September 7, 2011
Libya’s rebel fighters have still not clinched control over a few areas such as Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, the desert town of Sabha and Bani Walid, but there is already talk of instituting democratic elections to choose a new leadership to replace Gaddafi’s dictatorial regime. Not long after Libya’s National Transitional Council won control over Tripoli, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the council’s chairman, called for a new constitution and elections within 18 months.…
However, judging from numerous examples in recent decades, the hasty implementation of “democratic” elections can be wrought with danger and can often lead to strife, bloodshed and even civil war. Academic studies have backed up the argument that rushing to the ballots is often a bad idea.
Dawn Brancati of Washington University and Jack Snyder of Columbia University have found, based on looking at elections that took place around the world after civil wars since 1945, that the sooner a country went to the polls the more likely it was to relapse into war. On average, Brancati and Snyder found that waiting five years before holding the first election reduced the chances of war by one-third.
And there is a local example of what happens when the trappings of democracy are introduced before the prerequisites for any democratic regime—administrative institutions, rule of law, political and social stability and cultural norms—are put in place. In January 2006 Palestinians went to the polls and granted Hamas—a terrorist organization bent on using violence, including suicide bombings, to destroy the Jewish state—a landslide victory in the Palestinian elections for parliament.
The vote led to the eventual split between the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip and the Fatah-controlled West Bank, and further complicated the already impossible chances for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Elliot Abrams, at the time a special assistant to president George W. Bush and the National Security Council’s senior director for Near East and North African Affairs, rightly noted in an interview with The Jerusalem Post’s Herb Keinon in June that in retrospect the US position on allowing those elections was mistaken. A hasty implementation of “democracy” can mean that citizens’ first experience with democratic elections might very well be their last.
Similarly, Libya is far from ready for democratic elections. The country lacks a stable civil society and is bereft of modern institutions, while its oil-based economy has fostered rampant corruption. Further exacerbating the situation is the all-too-real danger of a new round of fighting. While the rebels won a decisive victory over Gaddafi…the balance of power among the victorious factions still remains in flux.…
Democracies must be built from the bottom up, starting with administrative institutions that can help ensure the rule of law and protect basic human rights. Citizens must be educated to participate in civil rule and appreciate the benefits of a true democracy: freedom, liberty and equality. Until Libya makes significant progress in these areas, it would be not only unwise but downright dangerous to push ahead with “democratic” elections within 18 months, as Libya’s National Transitional Council chairman is calling to do.
