Dirty Hippies » Libya

The U.S. in Libya: Like it or not, we’re in for the long haul

Rafael Noboa y Rivera — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:12:47 +0000

Yesterday, news broke that President Obama had signed a secret order – called a ‘finding‘ – which authorised the covert support of the United States government for the Libyan rebel forces.

Basically, a finding is one of the principal forms by which the president authorises secret operations by the Central Intelligence Agency.

As an Iraq War veteran, I’ve approached our increasing involvement in the Libyan civil war with a gradually escalating sense of foreboding. The lack of clarity in what we want to achieve in Libya, and how we intend to achieve it, is eerily reminiscent to me of our entanglement in Iraq. Part of me will always be that team leader in Iraq in 2003, trying to discern my commander’s intent.

There are a few things that come to mind here, now that we are ‘covertly’ supporting the Libyan rebels.

1. Colour me totally unsurprised here. Matter of fact, from a foreign internal defence perspective, I’d believe it negligent to the point of incompetence if we didn’t have people on the ground from various, um, agencies on the ground already. That’s probably who’s calling in air strikes. I’m pretty certain that the UK has folks there, and so do the French – the French most of all, since North Africa was their version of Mexico/the Caribbean.

2. When I first saw the news of our covert involvement break, I was pretty ticked off at the leak – you just don’t go yapping about what the covert community is doing. The more I thought about it, though, this sounds like a deliberately engineered leak.

So, what now? Why do I continue to feel such unease about our Libyan War?

My guess, based on following the conflict and talking to various folks/listening to various folks? The Libyan rebel army doesn’t exist. Let me say that again:

The Libyan rebel army doesn’t exist.

What you’re seeing on CNN/MSNBC/BBC/your evening news is a rabble. A gang. Those guys on pickup trucks? They’re, at best, military tourists. You maybe have about 1,000 people in the Libyan rebel rabble that could compose the nucleus of a fighting force. It’s not just a question of providing them with arms. By now, the Libyan countryside is swimming with weapons. The rebels have access to weapons, and they have access to ammunition.

What they don’t have is the training needed to use those arms effectively, and to hold any ground that they capture. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that every single time the rebels retake, say, Misrata, the very moment that they come under bombardment, whether it’s by mortars or artillery, they immediately surrender that ground. That, to me, is a mark of an untrained fighting force. I could go on, and on, and on…but really, what you all should do is read this by Gulliver at Ink Spots: http://tachesdhuile.blogspot.com/2011/03/arming-libyan-rebels-its-not-only.html

It goes into a lot of detail as to why arming the Libyan rebels is a very, very bad idea, and other subjects as well.

Also, if you’re following me on Twitter, you’ve seen me line up along with guys like Andrew Exum of CNAS and our own Richard Allen Smith, among others, in being very concerned about our war in Libya. Part of it is because a part of me will always be that forward observer in Balad, Iraq, in 2003, trying to discern my commander’s intent.

But part of it is because we’re trying to discern the Commander-in-Chief’s intent, and we’re failing to do so. Let’s say the goal is regime change, which the President has stated. I don’t have any doubt that Gataffi will fall. Nato has committed itself to seeing that happen, in effect, regardless of what UN Resolution 1973 says. The problem right now is that at least two things aren’t clear at the moment:

how we get from where we are currently, with a disorganised rabble not doing much more than barely surviving against what looks like an 8,000-to-10,000 strong Libyan government force, to the fall of GDiddy’s government;
more importantly – what does Libya after Khaddafy look like? Simply, we don’t know jack about who will take power in Libya once Qadafi falls. There’s a multiplicity of groups and interests at work here, not necessarily in sympathy with providing the people of Libya a greater voice in government, regardless of whether that voice is friendly to our interests or not.

Right now, it really does seem as though the Administration is fighting this war by the seat of its pants. It really does feel as though people expected that the initial Nato involvement would serve as the decisive factor, allowing the rebels to defeat Kazzafi without the need for added military aid. I don’t think that was ever going to happen, nor was I the only one.

So now, the next stage of the debate is going to take place. The longer the rebels take to defeat Qadhdhafi, the greater the chances are that you’ll see ground forces deployed to Libya, regardless of what President Obama says. I’m already seeing the precursors of the arguments for that eventuality being made by folks like Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Judis, among others.

That’s why I stated earlier that maybe that disclosure of CIA presence in Libya was a planned leak. Now we have CIA on the ground. The next step will be disclosing that Special Forces are on the ground. Let’s say that it’s June of 2011, and we’re still watching the rebels futz around, which wouldn’t be surprising. You’ll see the President make another address, saying that we’re now deploying Nato forces to assist the Libyan rebels in a final push against Gheddafi’s forces…

But I digress. The bottom line is that we own Libya now, for the long term. We won’t abandon the rebels, regardless of how utterly feckless they are. We also own the Libyan aftermath – and we have no idea of how that looks like. We have a lot of hopes for what it may look like, but as we learned in Iraq, hope is not a plan. And that’s why those of us who served in Iraq and Afghanistan were so bloody reluctant to get involved in Libya – because in some key respects, it bore a highly uncomfortable resemblance to what we experienced.

Libya No-Fly: “Interventionism” Versus “Isolationism” Is Still a False Dichotomy

Joshua Holland — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 20:29:42 +0000

Conceptually, humanitarian intervention is a rather beautiful thing. State sovereignty had been seen as absolute for 350 years, but then the universal human rights regime emerged and the idea took hold that a state’s responsibility to defend its people trumped its right to territorial sovereignty. When a state massacres its people rather than protecting them, the human family, working through broadly legitimate international institutions, would intervene, militarily if need be, to spare the vulnerable. This has become known as the “responsibility to protect,” and you can read all about it here (PDF).

As one who believes in this principle, I can’t say that I “oppose” the no-fly zone established over Libya. The country offers a rather clear-cut example of a despotic government poised to massacre thousands of its own, and here is the international community responding forcefully to spare their lives. Perhaps it will be a text-book example of the “responsibility to protect” in action.

I imagine that most of those who “oppose” the action would like nothing more than to have their skepticism be proven to be unfounded.

At the same time, there is every reason to be deeply cynical about the prospects of success. Because while the principlesunderlying humanitarian intervention are well developed, the institutions charged with implementing them are certainly not.

For those of us who have long argued to develop those institutions more fully, this no-fly zone creates distinctly mixed feelings. Under the circumstances, doing nothing would not only be profoundly irresponsible, it would also violate our core belief in the imperative of respecting essential human rights. Yet, having studied our history, we also know that the potential for unintended consequences — for a bad situation to be turned into something worse — are real, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, or due to wishful thinking.

Books have been written about the challenges of humanitarian intervention, but here’s a very quick-and-dirty summary of three of the most daunting.

1) Mission creep

I wrote yesterday that limited interventions — with promises that the goals will be limited and, in the case of no-fly zones and naval embargoes, that no ground troops will be deployed — are like a “gateway drug” leading all-too-easily to expanded conflict. This is an institutional reality — the Security Council states are now invested in this conflict, but there is no reason to be confident Gaddhafi’s regime will fall quickly. As the saying goes: “in for a penny, in for a pound” — having entered the conflict, the temptation to escalate our involvement — to add “regime change” and “state-building” to the agenda — is going to be difficult for the Security Council to resist.

You can go through the history of multilateral interventions — from Korea through Somalia (but not really in Rwanda!) — and what you’ll find in virtually every case is not a single Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force, but a series of them authorizing ever-greater military involvement in the conflict. This reality cannot be ignored.

2) Insufficient resources

If the mission creeps — or, if it drags on — then history also suggests that we’re likely to end up with the worst of both worlds: a broad mandate coupled with insufficient resources to do the job right.

This is almost always the case in the UN system, which has no independent source of funding and must rely on the dues and pledges of its member states to undertake any action. It’s the same whether you want to talk about humanitarian intervention or relief from famine, drought or natural disaster. At the beginning, with shocking footage of rebel forces being massacred, children starving or tsunamis hitting the beach flashing across the world’s TV screens, it’s easy to commit all kinds of resources to help. But these actions are costly, and those resources have to be authorized by domestic legislatures. And it’s not just the money at stake — national governments also have to deal with all manner of domestic and international political calculations.

In the case of military interventions, under-funding can lead to disastrous results, with the most obvious example being the horrific failure of UNAMIR leading up to and during the Rwanda Genocide.

3) Politicization

Finally, the nature of the UN decision-making process itself is a huge challenge to these kinds of interventions being viewed as legitimate. Central to the “responsibility to protect” concept is that it is based on an imperative to uphold certain basic human rights, and not on international political (or economic) considerations. So the entire venture rests on the decision of when and where to intervene being made in some relatively apolitical fashion. In the real world, of course, given that the power of the Security Council, and thus the entire United Nations system, rests in the hands of the 5 permanent, veto-wielding members — the most powerful states, each with its own internal and external politics to manage — this is impossible to achieve.

That an intervention be widely perceived as legitimate is not just some abstract academic issue. Combatants are far less likely to engage in the political process that must always accompany such actions if they view them as prettied-up acts of neo-colonialism or cover for other, more powerful states’ agendas.

So, again, many who oppose — or are at least skeptical of humanitarian intervention — support it in theory, and have long argued for reforms that might address these issues.

Security Council reform — gradually phasing out the veto power enjoyed by “permanent 5,” or providing a mechanism to override a veto — has been a long-time goal of human rights activists. But, as you might imagine, the P-5 have fought it tooth-and-nail.

There have also long been calls for a dedicated and independent UN intervention force, which wouldn’t rest on the ad-hoc pledges of UN member states. Similarly, reformers have long argued that an independent funding mechanism for UN actions — both military and humanitarian — must be created through some variation of the “Lula Fund” or “Tobin tax.”

A final but important note: anyone who holds an idealized view of “clean” and “precise” modern warfare is simply deluded. As of this writing, there are reports of US cruise missiles being fired at targets in densely packed Tripoli, and French fighters engaging “regime tanks” on the ground. Despite being widely portrayed by the media as a UN air patrol designed to deny the regime’s forces the capacity to wipe out their enemies from above, Western powers are dropping munitions on Libya. Make no mistake: innocents will die. There will be “collateral damage” — it’s the nature of the game, and that can’t be ignored.

Rather than “opposing the no-fly zone,” I find myself deeply conflicted. Hopefully, it will work exactly as promised — lives will be spared, opposition forces will be emboldened and the Libyan regime will crumble under the pressure of international isolation. Hopefully, the skeptics among us will be proven wrong.

But it’s important to understand that the history of these adventures, no matter how well intentioned, doesn’t provide much cause for optimism. And one doesn’t have to be an “isolationist” to see that.

Libya No-Fly Zone: “Limited Intervention” Is Like a Gateway Drug for War

Joshua Holland — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 20:07:47 +0000

Having mixed feelings about the no-fly zone established over Libya by the UN Security Council seems wholly appropriate. One can’t ignore the massacre perpetrated by Gaddhafi’s air-force, yet at the same time, events of the past decade have given the concept of “humanitarian intervention” a black eye. We can thank the neocons for that.

The good news is that Obama said exactly the right thing about his policy at today’s presser:

Obama, offering his first justification to Americans for getting the U.S. military involved in Libya, said the goal is to protect Libyan citizens from what he called Gaddafi’s campaign of repression against his people.

And he said the U.S. role would be limited.

“The United States is not going to deploy ground troops into Libya and we are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal, specifically the protection of civilians in Libya,” he said.

The problem is that it’s easier said than done; once the “international community” resolves to use military force, history suggests those modest goals are easily replaced with a more far-reaching policy — it’s easier to engage militarily than it is to disengage.

The classic example is probably Truman’s decision not to cease his campaign in Korean after achieving the originally stated goal of pushing the North Koreans past the 38th parallel — a decision that cost tens of thousands of lives before eventually leading to a decades-long stalemate along that very same 38th parallel.

But Bush the senior’s intervention in Somalia is also illustrative, and more similar to Libya in terms of context. Most people think of Somalia as a disaster — a boondoggle made famous by Blackhawk Down. But what many don’t remember is that it began with what was arguably among the most successful examples of humanitarian intervention in the history of the United Nations.

In the early 1990s, Somalia was facing a humanitarian crisis — its people were starving. Aid was being diverted by the “Somali warlords” and aid workers’ lives were being threatened. The UN Security Council authorized a modest intervention, UNOSOM I, with very limited and achievable goals: to create a safe zone through which vital humanitarian supplies could be delivered. This worked pretty well: Blue Helmets secured the main port, and the major thoroughfares through which food, medicine and other relief aid could be delivered.

It wasn’t perfect, however. The warring factions defied the UN, the ceasefire that had been established was broken many times and less than 100% of the aid got through. But matters got considerably worse with the launch of UNOSOM II, which had a much broader mandate — nation-building — and authorized all necessary means to achieve it.

Of course, authorizing and doing are two different things, and the UN has no troops of its own, so what we eventually ended up with was a sweeping mandate backed by a woefully insufficient military force for the task at hand. The legitimacy of the intervention was questioned, and the whole enterprise soon devolved into a typical interventionist farce.

So the worrisome thing about this Libyan no-fly zone is what happens next. Gaddhafi isn’t going to cede power, his forces appear to be in control of large swaths of the country. His military probably won’t be able to simply crush the rebel forces with ease, which is obviously a good thing. But it means we’ll likely see a stand-off, and it will be very tempting for the “international community,” having invested in the despot’s ouster, to escalate that no-fly zone to a peace-keeping force in Benghazi, and who knows where that might lead.

The “limited humanitarian intervention” certainly has its appeal, but easily becomes a gateway drug leading to the hard stuff.

Will Gaddafi End up in a Hidey Hole Like Saddam?

Russ Wellen — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 02:49:45 +0000

Assad, Amin, Sadat, and Gaddafi, 1972

Will Gaddafi meet his end strung up like Mussolini, shot like Nicolae Ceausescu, or hanged like Saddam? Or will he find exile in Saudi Arabia, like Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine BenAli?

The fates of tyrants in recent history are diverse. Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko was rejected by Togo but admitted to Morocco, where he soon died. Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam lives in Zimbabwe. Former president of Haiti Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, apparently short of cash and options, returned to Haiti, where he was promptly arrested. Charles Taylor of Liberia’s seven-year war crimes trial is coming to a close at the Hague.

In his 2004 book Talk of the Devil: Encounters With Seven Dictators (Walker Books), Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio tracked down and spoke with the exiled likes of Mengistu and even Idi Amin Dada, who, like Ben Ali, was welcomed to Saudi Arabia where he lived out his life in leisure.

In fact, it was Gaddafi himself who helped pave the way for Amin’s soft landing. Orizio writes.

In April 1979 . . a private plane sent by Gaddafi saved Idi Amin from being lynched by the Tanzanian army and Ugandan rebels. The Libyan leader, who had persuaded Amin to break off diplomatic relations with Israel and side with the Arab terrorists organizations in exchange for economic aid, offered him the use of a villa on the Tripoli coast. Later Gaddafi sent him to the Saudis.

Who will come to Gaddafi’s rescue?

Cross-posted from the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.