Each day that goes by gives the White House more reason to regret its Libyan adventure. The overthrow of Gaddafi was a good thing, but from both the humanitarian and strategic points of view, nothing has changed. The war continues to look at best like a diversion, at worst as if the US fell for a cynical French ploy to get oil in a way that damaged our long term strategic interests.
Scattered reports of torture in Libyan jails and unrest in Libyan towns are beginning to coalesce into a picture of the exciting new reality created by last year’s humanitarian war-to-protect. If Amnesty International knows what it is talking about, Libyans are being “tortured to death” by the people we saved from Gaddafi and installed in power. Surprisingly, the Wilsonian hawks who gave us this inspiring policy haven’t yet sent a new barrage of airstrikes to stop the new round of brutality and bloodshed.
A police SUV burns in Bayda, Libya, during the first scattered protests
Meanwhile for Russia, the “lessons of Libya” are clear. Russia’s abstention on the Libya resolution at the UN Security Council extended a mantle of legitimacy over the Libyan bombs; this is now seen as a strategic mistake that must not be repeated over Syria. Russian oil companies have been heavily punished by the new Libyan government which instead rewarded its western backers with fat contracts. Russian arms deliveries to Syria and diplomatic support to the embattled government in Damascus — along with closer alignment with Iran — have been facilitated by Russia’s intense reaction to the Libyan misadventure.
In Russia, the belief that the West cynically uses internal instability as an excuse to replace unfriendly regimes with compliant puppets (often no more “democratic” or “humane” than the previous thugs) has become dogma, and this western propensity is now seen as a national security threat to Russia and the friendly regimes on its frontiers.
Libya didn’t cause this perception, but it has strengthened it, and considerably strengthened Russia’s determination to resist: this week, the Kremlin announced its intention to veto any Security Council resolution calling for Bashar al-Assad to step down.
The NGO activists and groups the humanitarian hawks represent and hope to bolster have also been set back by the war. The perception that the US and the Europeans promote instability and protest in hostile countries and then use those protestors and the resulting instability to advance their interests has been strengthened by Libya and its aftermath. The Egyptian crackdown on NGOs and the current refusal to allow US citizens connected to them to leave is yet another sign that the NGO world of civic activism is going to face more determined government push back around the world. Without advancing the cause of world freedom in any significant way, the Libyan intervention was a wake up call to the forces of darkness, and led them to conclude that while President Obama may be a kinder and gentler face, the Obama administration is no less committed to a project of ideological transformation than the Bush administration was in its first term.
As predicted, the Libyan intervention has strengthened Assad and ensured a longer period of delay and hesitation before any possible intervention in Syria. The tortures taking place in Libyan jails today and the blood flowing in Syrian streets cannot be separated from the humanitarian bombs about which the “duty to protect” crowd rejoiced so naively last spring.
Assad & Putin: best friends forever
Meanwhile, many analysts agree that the war in Libya, brilliant and strategic though it appeared to the White House at the time, may be making our options regarding Iran more limited. The west made a deal with Gaddafi: stop your nuclear program and we will treat you with respect. He kept his end of the bargain and we dispatched him to his eternal reward. What assurances can we now give the mullahs that would induce them to believe that they will be safe without nukes?
This makes it less likely that President Obama’s approach to Iran, infinitely more important for the future of US foreign policy than anything that has happened or could happen in Libya, will succeed. There is no pledge Obama could give the mullahs that can offer them the same protection that a bomb would give them; the “duty to protect” crowd does not believe it needs to honor any sort of pre-existing pledge to a leader it decides is “bad,” while reserving the right to strike anyone, anywhere, anytime, should a moral mood befall us. For Iran, the lesson of Libya is that the West will tell you anything to get you to give up the quest for nuclear weapons, but none of the beautiful pledges can be trusted. At the first sign of weakness, they will intervene to overthrow you.
Thank goodness the Bush crowd and those awful neocons are gone.
To be fair to the White House, and to the neocons for that matter, American foreign policy is hard. We are doomed to play two incompatible roles in the world. On the one hand, we are a status quo power that wants to keep the world stably operating within a set of legal norms and practical arrangements. We want treaties to be honored, boundaries respected, and disagreements to be settled in peace.
But at the same time, we are an even more revolutionary country today than we were in 1776. The political ideas that form us, and the economic system which makes us strong, are fundamentally at war with the political, economic and even religious ideas that hold sway in much of the world.
There is no perfectly harmonious way to balance the two sides of America’s presence in the world. There is no glitch-free path down which our foreign policy can smoothly glide to untroubled success. Contradictions, mishaps, mixed signals and unintended consequences are an inevitable and irreducible element of American foreign policy even when planned and executed at the highest level, and even a great foreign policy president and secretary of state will have a bumpy ride.
Critics of an administration’s foreign policy often judge its success or failure by the bumpiness of the ride. That’s a mistake. Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy in his second term was pretty smooth, but only because the US sat passively as Nazi Germany, Fascist Japan and Stalin’s USSR cooked up the most dangerous global challenge we have ever faced. Given the state of US public opinion at the time (humanitarian legalists and crackpot isolationists were stinking up the place with bad ideas) there might not have been much FDR could do, but a bumpier foreign policy would have been better for the country.
It should also be remembered that on the whole, even taking misadventures like Vietnam, Iraq and — in its small and low-rent way — Libya, into account, Washington’s failures to act have been much worse for the world (and the US) than even the most misguided steps we have taken. There is reason to argue that in American foreign policy the tie should go to the runner: in a closely balanced situation there is usually a good case for doing something than sitting passively by.
So rather than judging the pilot on the bumpiness of the flight, we should ask some other questions about American foreign policy. One would be the issue of importance: are we putting the most effort and attention behind the most important issues? If we are having trouble, does our distress at least come because we are wrestling with the most important issues of the day?
Here, I think, Libya fails. From any point of view (humanitarian, political, strategic), Syria was more important than Libya in the spring of 2011. It is more important than Libya now. Tripoli was a diversion from Damascus rather than a road to it; whatever our policy was going to be, we should have put more weight on Syria and less on Libya.
Second, there is a question of strategic coherence: can the results we intend be achieved by the initiatives we propose? Here too the Libyan war falls short. This was proposed as a humanitarian war: a war to protect. Such a war must succeed in political terms: its success will be judged on political rather than strategic grounds. Are Libyans better off than they were before Gaddafi fell? Are they safer? Is the country more stable, more cohesive, less oppressive?
Perhaps it will be. I certainly hope so. But this is a goal that we have no way to achieve. It is not in our power to give a good government to the people of Libya. It is not in our power to ensure that the successor to Gaddifi, when and if one emerges, will be better for the Libyans than was the Great Loon. Yet thanks to the circumstances of the war and to the rationale we proposed at the time, our success in Libya will inevitably be judged by an outcome over which we have limited influence and no control.
We can get lucky in Libya if things work out to some kind of acceptable outcome — and I hope we will. But we cannot make our luck: the intervention has made us more vulnerable — not less — to outcomes we have little ability to shape.
A third question would relate to possible gains: what do we get if we win? Do we preserve our existence as a nation in a war of self defense? Do we advance important political or economic interests? Do we nip an emerging threat in the bud? Do we weaken a strategic enemy? Do we advance an important principle of international order and law? Do we prevent a great evil?
Clearly, the Libyan intervention was primarily shaped in response to the last two questions. It was billed as a war to prevent a slaughter and as a war to advance the concept of the duty to protect. It may have achieved the first objective, though by the time all the killing is finished it will be hard to calculate whether more people died in the war to overthrow Gaddafi, the battles to succeed him, and in the prisons of the new regime than might have died if Gaddafi had crushed Benghazi all those months ago.
Protestors in front of the White House show support for the Libya intervention
Far from securing the second objective — advancing the doctrine of the duty to protect — the net effect of the war in Libya is to weaken the hold of that idea both in the US and abroad. This isn’t because we failed in the mission. We failed by succeeding in Libya.
We failed on two fronts. In the first place, we failed because victory took so long to achieve, and that victory has been so dismal and unsatisfying (all that blood in the streets, all those tortured to death in the cells) that it tends to reduce enthusiasm for new ventures of this kind. The next group of humanitarian hawks trying to sell a liberal president on a war of good intentions will have a harder time making the sale than this group did. Far from anchoring a principle in US foreign policy, the Libyan war provides intellectual ammunition for critics of the idea and puts new weapons into the hands of political opponents of such ventures.
Secondly, success in Libya has given new strength to the international opponents of the “duty to protect” idea. The Security Council is less likely to bless further such ventures now. Russia and China will oppose new ventures of this kind with more vigor — and with more support from other countries, including some democratic ones. In world politics today, the duty to protect looks less like an objective principle of law and more like a mask for western interests than it did before the Libyan war.
The war in Libya stopped a probable slaughter. It overthrew a horrible man and liberated a nation from one of the world’s more destructive dictatorships. It reinforced the world’s sense of America’s great military might — though the hesitating manner in which we fought reassured many of our opponents that we are less likely to use that power in decisive ways than we were ten years ago.
But it did not — and, really, could not — advance significant US strategic, economic or political interests. It did not and could not make the world a safer place. It weakened our hand in dealing with both Syria and Iran. And it provided new ammunition to those, at home and abroad, who want to resist the kind of order-building the war was intended to promote. It was a well-intentioned war, but not a good one.
Libya is not the first or the costliest mistake the US has ever made. And it is very far from a total disaster. Gaddafi is gone. Yet we spent money and political capital for a net-negative result and must now deal with much more serious and urgent problems made worse by the “success” of the Libya venture.
I can see we shall have to revise “Responsibility to Protect” to “Responsibility to Dissect.”
I didn’t think at the time, and still don’t think we had a dog in the fight in Libya. I also think that if the French have a hand in the affair, it is always better for the US to keep its distance, as they will always stab us in the back.
There is no such thing as a ‘duty to protect.’
The concept itself is absurd.
Overthrow of dictator that ends badly by Democratic president: humanitarian
Overthrow of dictator that ends fairly well by Republican president: crime against humanity
I’m confused.
The brilliant 2008 Obama campaign bulldozed the Clinton war room. Then these Chicago Boys ripped old pol Republicans in the general. They pushed every button and played three-corner bank shots as if they were tiddly winks.
How did these geniuses pivot so completely to short-sighted buffoons who never see the long-term ricochets of their actions, both domestically and internationally?
“How did these geniuses pivot so completely to short-sighted buffoons who never see the long-term ricochets of their actions, both domestically and internationally?”
Playing to the lowest common denominator doesn’t always work, nor forever.
Or, there are great differences between political campaigns and military ones.
1. As you note, Ghadaffi did what we asked wrt WMD–and we overthrew him for his trouble.
There is also Pinochet, who voluntarily relinquished power–and was persecuted abroad and domestically thereafter.
The next time a buyout makes more sense than forcible removal of a tyrant, well, good luck to us with that.
2. As you note, Syria was a bigger issue than Libya, yet we acted against the latter.
9/11 made it even more unmistakable that we have a core conflict with Islamism. Nevertheless, we acted against the secular Baathist regime of Iraq instead of the Iranian theocracy. I have often asked for but never received a cogent rationale for that priority.
> The brilliant 2008 Obama campaign bulldozed the Clinton war room.
The Clintons were used to having media support. Without that, they were completely lost.
> Then these Chicago Boys ripped old pol Republicans in the general.
They beat McCain, who thought/thinks that a media that applauds him when he bashes Repubs is a media that won’t trash him to elect their guy.
> They pushed every button and played three-corner bank shots as if they were tiddly winks.
Not really – that’s just the press that they got, and the press was “nudging” the balls.
> How did these geniuses pivot so completely to short-sighted buffoons who never see the long-term ricochets of their actions, both domestically and internationally?
The US press can’t control perceptions outside the US or rig the game.
Hmmmm.
IMO the instability in Libya doesn’t end there. It will be a source of instability in Egypt not only for the revolutionary forces that will reside in Libya but also because Egypt is in a dire fiscal situation.
The reality is that I fully expect Egypt will invade and subjugate Libya on a pretext in order to gain access to the oil fields and the vast sums of money in various banks. Additionally Russia may bankroll this invasion in order to roll the dice again and get a better position vis a vis an Egyptian leadership installed in Libya.
And as China has shown the world once you’ve established that some piece of territory might have been at one point a part of some ancient hegemonic homeland. Well then you’ve got a claim for all eternity.
You make some very reasonable points, particularly towards the end of your piece, but I find that you might be overstating the negative impacts of the Libyan adventure. Would you please address the following:
A) To what extent has this really affected thinking in the Kremlin? Can you supply some additional evidence. It seems likely to me that the Kremlin was always going to defend Syria more vigorously than Qaddafi.
B) Has this really affected the calculus in Tehran? Given the examples of Iraq and North Korea in the past decade, my impression is that Iran had determined long ago the desirability of possessing nuclear weapons.
Thanks.
-Tacitus
They didn’t – they were short-sighted buffoons to begin with. They happened upon a golden opportunity (a “well-spoken” (per Biden) black democrat on the rise, a particularly supportive press (even more so than usual)) and leveraged the crap out of it entirely for short-term gain (get the Presidency NOW, no matter how badly those promises turn out later).
They didn’t “play three-corner bank shots as if they were tiddly winks”, they screwed the crap out of things repeatedly, and the press (the “ref” in that game reference) covered for them. To switch metaphors, they were bowling with the bumpers pressed so close together, the ball was riding them to a perfect strike.
Anybody who looked at the man behind the curtain could (and did) say they were buffoons (heck, I WANTED Obama to win the primary – I couldn’t imagine such an empty, obvious cult-of-personality campaign making it through the election). Far too many people closed their eyes to that and elected him just because he was black.
(For the record, I was supporting Cain, and I would happily have supported Condoleeza Rice – race is IRRELEVANT to me in terms of fitness for office… and almost everything else.)
This is an side, because I find myself wholeheartedly on side with what WRM has written about Libya – an expensive sideshow that has distracted the world from more important issues and that has thoroughly alienated Russia and China in the UNSC, yet again.
What I cannot understand (in today’s news) is how Egypt has been allowed to prevent US citizens from leaving the country for any longer than it takes the US ambassador to inform the Egyptian government that such a policy is completely unacceptable. US power in the region is such that no government should risk a confrontation with Washington over something so important as the safety of its citizens abroad.
Where are all the yard signs in the progessive(ly wrong) side of town, “No Kinetic Action for (French) Oil!”?
Inattention and incompetence do not explain this administration’s record in the ME of having presided by rhetoric and action over a radicalization of the Crescent governance and a distancing from, or perhaps more like a dissing of, Israel.
At least, Obama doesn’t want America to be alone in the grand comeuppance he seeks.
FDR foreign policy in his 2nd term was smooth?
Pleez.
Why do you think that Japan attacked the USA in 1941? Why do you think Germany immediately declared war on the USA after Pearl Harbor? Both countries had wanted to avoid war with the USA at almost any cost. (Germany fighting England and Russia, Japan fighting China.) Both countries had been forced into a corner by US economic and military warfare orchestrated by FDR.
Defend or condemn FDR for his actions, but realize foreign policy was very bumpy during FDR’s 2nd term.
I have a friend who is a retired Marine officer with extensive service in the Middle East and Africa. His assessment at the beginning of the Libya misadventure was that Obama got rolled by the Europeans.
“It’s their mess,” David said. “This is an after-affect of French and Italian colonialism. The Libya war is neo-colonialism by the Europeans. And the United States is like fraternity pledges that the brothers make mop up the frat house floor on Sunday morning after an all-night kegger that they didn’t attend.”
Yep.
Libya was only a failure if you think the goal was setting up a democracy. It wasn’t – the goal was getting rid of Ghadafi (in order to encourage other dictators who might be inclined to mess us about)
“I’m confused.
The brilliant 2008 Obama campaign bulldozed the Clinton war room. Then these Chicago Boys ripped old pol Republicans in the general. They pushed every button and played three-corner bank shots as if they were tiddly winks.
How did these geniuses pivot so completely to short-sighted buffoons who never see the long-term ricochets of their actions, both domestically and internationally?”
The answer is quite simple really. The competance of the Obama campaign was an illusion. Obama just promised everybody the moon, and with cover from the MSM, too many rubes beleived those promisses. But making profligate impossible promisses is one thing, delivering on them is another. And once the promisses meet with the facts, and with his actual record, a few of the rubes finally wised up, and now refuse to beleive the next round of glowing promisses. To at least a few of the rubes, it is now a case of Fool Me Once Shame On You, Fool Me Twice Shame On Me.
“Meanwhile for Russia, the “lessons of Libya” are clear. Russia’s abstention on the Libya resolution at the UN Security Council extended a mantle of legitimacy over the Libyan bombs; this is now seen as a strategic mistake that must not be repeated over Syria.”
True, but not quite complete.
The mantle of legitimacy covered the authorization to use force to protect civilians. In the beginning, the Obama administration and NATO used that authorization for its intended purpose. In short order though, they perverted that into regime change and acting as close air support for the rebel army. That was not what Russia or any of the other abstaining nations had agreed to allow.
It’s no surprise then, that not only Russia, but also Brazil, India, China, South Africa, and other nations now have zero trust in the Obama administration to stick to the spirit and letter of any resolution regarding options against Syria. Or anywhere else for that matter.
“Duty to protect” is a dead concept for now, and any who wish to protest that should direct their complaints to the arrogant and short-sighted Obama administration.
“Humanitarian bombs” or humanitarianism bombed?
Good intentions, hell and all that. What good are guided missiles with misguided aims?
“In Russia, the belief that the west cynically uses internal instability as an excuse to replace unfriendly regimes with compliant puppets (often no more “democratic” or “humane” than the previous thugs) has become dogma, and this western propensity is now seen as a national security threat to Russia and the friendly regimes on its frontiers.” The aforementioned and the intimation about French ploy for oil are most salient aspects of essay vis-a-vis U.S. Foreign Policy interests and the strategic difficulties engaging foreign policy in world alliances – U.S. interests globally (international order, open sea lanes, etc.) are varied but must have coherence (importance to national interest).
Deoxy @ #11: “For the record, I was supporting Cain, and I would happily have supported Condoleeza Rice – race is IRRELEVANT to me in terms of fitness for office… and almost everything else.”
If a candidate or an office-holder is a “race man” and looks to administer that office through the lens of race, then no, race is _not_ irrelevant. Rather, it is highly relevant. Obama was and is a race man. Therefore, his race is highly relevant to voters, not because of his physical appearance but because of what he has in mind, based on his deepest loyalties; that is to say, it’s relevant in a “Who? Whom?” sort of way. Race is about things far more deep and difficult than pigmentation, and these things necessarily inform politics; indeed, they are a major part of politics.
On the other hand, if a candidate is not at heart a race man (and good luck finding one of those, except among white candidates), then race would be a lot less relevant in an election. But because race is never entirely absent from human perceptions, it’s unlikely the issue would ever be 100% irrelevant, simply less so or more so, depending. That’s because human beings choose up teams and take sides, in a “Who? Whom?” sort of way. It’s just part of how the species operates, there’s no real getting around it.
To think otherwise is naive.
Wow. In an earlier post, I laid out the case that Iran’s mullahs might go after Israel and Iraq because groupthink may lead to the idea that if they can’t get the Great Satan, Allah will bless their effort to get Little Satan on the Jordan and meanwhile take advantage of chaos in Iraq to wipe out their erstwhile Sunni enemies. Then they’d have Iraq’s oil, too.
And if Russian oligarchs wanted to fund this effort with their own oil and other money, well, why not?
With Americans war-weary and Obama focused on winning his second term, in which he wants to pursue his “fundamental transformation” of America into the Blue European Social Model — if he gets it, what then?
Imagine if Iran made a move on Israel. Oil prices would immediately shoot up, helping both Iran and Russia. Russia would then have more money to fund Iran, plus access to the Persian Gulf through Iran. It’s a straight shot across the Caspian Sea.
Obviously I’m speculating. But what are the odds that Iranian mullahs and Russian oligarchs might decide a second Obama Administration would be the perfect moment to take action? What are the odds that this would be fine with oil-rich Azerbaijan and Kazachstan, which also border the Caspian Sea, and might join the Iran-Russia alliance?
Also obviously, I don’t know the answers. Prof. Mead, has this possibility occurred to you?
Both Europe and the US could come to regret the Blue Social Model, for lack of funds to counter Islamic theocracy wed to Russian ambitions. Gulp.
If nothing else, the state of the world today proves that the U.N. is obsolete except for non-controversial data-gathering and humanitarian projects. For Americans and Europeans to refer to “the Security Council” is Orwellian. Its permanent membership ensures that any project important to the U.S. and Europe will be vetoed.
Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy in his second term was pretty smooth, but only because the US sat passively as Nazi Germany, Fascist Japan and Stalin’s USSR cooked up the most dangerous global challenge we have ever faced. Given the state of US public opinion at the time (humanitarian legalists and crackpot isolationists were stinking up the place with bad ideas) there might not have been much FDR could do
I am surprised to see such a condescending and ahistorical analysis of American non-interventionism during the 1930s.
In the case of the USSR, many American intellectual, cultural, and political elites praised the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. They believed that, but for American “reactionaries” and “religiosity,” the American people would be living like Soviet citizens they saw on their carefully orchestrated tours to the Stalinist equivalent of Potemkin villages. Common people and “crackpot isolationists,” ironically, opposed communism far more than their purported betters. Elite opinion, much more than the “crackpot” or “reactionary” opinion, was wrong about Stalin.
The New York Times’ Walter Duranty, for example, received the 1932 Pulitzer prize for his articles praising Stalin, his methods, and his actions in the Ukraine. Among his Pulitzer Prize-winning articles was an article, written on June 24, 1931, lauding the incipient anti-Ukrainian genocide later called the Holodomor. (6,7) Nearly six million Ukrainians (and large numbers of other ethnic groups) would soon perish by starvation, disease, gunfire, etc. Throughout the 1932-1933 genocide, the NY Times’ Duranty and The Nation magazine in the US — along with prominent British writers George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells — supported Stalin’s actions in the Ukraine and denied (or minimized and justified) the suffering of the Ukrainian people. (1) They also vilified anyone who tried to point out the truth. As late as the 1980s, many American leftists engaged in Holodomor denialism and smeared those who tried to discuss it as far-right extremists.
American elites were also amazed at how ethnic tensions seemed disappear under Stalin; in reality, troublesome ethnic minority groups were often murdered en masse and/or shipped to prison camps in Siberia or Soviet Central Asia. The Crimean Tartars, for example. (2) Again, the American establishment of the time smeared those who tried to tell the truth as “reactionaries.”
Many in the Congress and the Roosevelt administration were also solid supporters of the USSR The VENONA intercepts and other records show that there were Soviet spies and agents of influence (e.g., Harry Dexter White) throughout the Roosevelt administration. (3,4) Congressman Samuel Dickstein, co-founder and vice-chair of what would become the House Un-American Activities Committee, was on the payroll of the Soviet NKVD. Dickstein regularly used his position to attack Eastern European-Americans and others who opposed Communism. (5) Any “humanitarian legalists and crackpot isolationists” who tried to “stink[] up the place with bad ideas” found themselves aggressively targeted by the Roosevelt Administration, HUAC, etc.
Blaming American non-intervention vis-a-vis Stalin on “humanitarian legalists and crackpot isolationists” ignores the very substantial support for the Soviet Union among American elites of the 1930s. Some, such as Congressman Dickstein, used their very real power to destroy Americans who criticized Stalin; at the same time, they worked to destroy anyone who opposed war with Hitler.
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(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Contemporary_denial_outside_of_the_USSR
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatars#In_the_Soviet_Union:_1917-1991
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Dexter_White
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Dickstein_%28congressman%29
(6) http://www.pulitzer.org/durantypressrelease
(7) http://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/duranty_1931_8.htm
“We should be the friends of liberty everywhere but the champions only of our own.”
Who said that? John Adams?