The Bitter Lessons of America’s Intervention in Libya : Andrew Harrod
http://www.religiousfreedomcoalition.org/2015/07/20/the-bitter-lessons-of-americas-intervention-in-libya/
“How could we have done something so stupid,” asked University of Texas professor Alan J. Kuperman at the Charles Koch Institute’s (CKI) July 14 panel “What are the Lessons of Libya?” For answers to this question, over 100 audience members filled a conference hall in Washington, DC’s Mayflower Hotel for an insightful discussion over the American-led 2011 Libyan regime change.
For answers to this question, over 100 audience members filled a conference hall in Washington, DC’s Mayflower Hotel for an insightful discussion over the American-led 2011 Libyan regime change.
Kuperman examined what CKI vice president William Ruger called a “number of quite negative unintended consequences” from an intended humanitarian intervention. “Most people would agree now that this intervention was a disaster,” Kuperman assessed, “both for the Libyans and for our interests.” Libya’s dictator Muammar Ghaddafi most likely would have won a civil war in a few weeks when NATO intervened after a month’s fighting and 1,000 deaths. Instead, continuing conflict after NATO’s intervention has now claimed 10,000 lives in Libya.
Kuperman’s cost-benefit analysis of American and NATO actions in Libya was decidedly negative. Ghaddafi human rights abuses “pale compared to what we have had since the intervention,” he noted, including ethnic cleansing of thousands of black Africans. “Libya had by all measures the best economy in all of Africa prior to the intervention,” he contrasted, “today there is no electricity in the cities of Libya for most of the day.” Libya’s 1.65 million barrels a day oil production under Ghaddafi has now virtually ceased amidst violent instability.
http://www.religiousfreedomcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/tripoli-destruction.jpg
A family looks for shelter in the remains of Tripoli after NATO intervention. It has become much worse.
NATO’s misadventure created aftershocks beyond Libya. “We took a country that was an ally in the global war on terror and we turned it into a terrorist safe haven,” Kuperman stated while analyzing that “Ghaddafi of 2011 was not Ghaddafi of the 1980s.” He “had made nice with the West” by abandoning nefarious causes like terrorism, concurred fellow panelist Ivan Eland from the libertarian Independent Institute.
Newly empowered Libyan jihadists caused “spillover of war to Mali which became a new safe haven for Al Qaeda requiring French intervention,” Kuperman continued. Weapons proliferation from Ghaddafi’s looted arsenals included a shoulder-fired surface-to-air-missile (SAM) that shot down an Egyptian army helicopter over the Sinai. Anyone “thinking about giving up nuclear weapons is now going to think twice,” Kuperman also stated while examining Ghaddafi’s previous abandonment of weapons of mass destruction. Iranian and North Korean leaders had noticed that Ghaddafi’s “reward for giving up his nuclear weapons was to be overthrown, tortured, and killed.”
Kuperman rejected intervention justifications from his fellow panelist, RAND analyst Christopher S. Chivvis, who had predicted that Ghaddafi would emulate the brutality shown by Syria’s Bashir Assad against rebellion. Kuperman explained that the “signatures” of genocide such as atrocity internet photos were clearly absent in Libya’s case, contrary to his previous studies of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan’s “killing fields.” Ghaddafi had targeted armed rebels and let them flee in defeat, despite false Libyan rebel propaganda of a “bloodbath” threatening a “peaceful uprising.”
Such horror visions motivated President Barack Obama’s Administration along with ideas that a Libya intervention “would be very easy,” Kuperman noted. Yet rebel propaganda had additionally concealed that Ghaddafi enjoyed considerable support against divided rebels. “Libya was fractured,” Kuperman analyses, “along tribal lines, regional lines, radically Islamist versus secular lines.”
In dealing with exigencies like Libya, Kuperman analyzed, the “first step is to realize that people are trying to fool you,” something Obama Administration officials did not recognize. “Rebels around the world…want us to be their army and they want us to be their air force,” but like Pete Townsend sang in The Who “we should not ‘get fooled again.’” In Libya’s case, Ghaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam was a “very serious reformist,” Kuperman concluded, and the most likely successor to an ailing Ghaddafi. Negotiations during the Libyan uprising could have assured that Saif would replace a Ghaddafi who had already shown a willingness to relinquish power.
Kuperman rejected Chivvis’ thesis that post-Ghaddafi turmoil in Libya resulted from a “failed post-conflict strategy” in which “defeat was snatched from the proverbial jaws of victory.” On the basis of RAND studies, Chivvis claimed that 5,000-15,000 troops in a multinational force would have sufficed to stabilize Libya after NATO’s intervention. Kuperman countered that enforcement of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord in Bosnia required a NATO-led international force of 60,000 troops among a population of three million. A similar ratio among Libya’s six million people would have demanded 120,000 troops, not considering the fact that no peace accord existed among Libya’s warring factions. To disarm “hundreds of militias in Libya” would have demanded a “massive operation,” something “extremely unrealistic” following America’s “enormous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan with very, very mixed results.”
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Kuperman cautioned against temptations to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” in opposing all American military interventions. “Some interventions help a lot” like the 2003 Liberian operation with a “very, very different approach” from the Libya regime change. America’s “very smart diplomacy” here amidst two rebel movements and a falling government averted a “battle royal” in the refugee-filled capital Monrovia that “was going to be rather disastrous.” For a few brief weeks 200 United States Marines oversaw the settlement. In other circumstances when Americans “take no action and we create a vacuum” like in Iraq a danger like the Islamic State can grow.
Kuperman nonetheless emphasized that he has “said over and over again we should stop breaking countries….It is much, much easier, just like with Humpty Dumpty, to break them than to put them back together.” Eland concurred, citing a Carnegie Endowment study showing that “military intervention to promote democracy” has had only four successes out of 15 American interventions between 1900 and 2003. American regime changes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya have only since made the record worse.
Eland and Kuperman’s sentiments are perhaps nowhere truer than in Muslim-majority societies. America has learned in recent years through hard experience that Islam does not easily combine faith and freedom. In Libya and elsewhere stubborn facts have slowly but surely dissipated Western fantasies of Islamic cities upon a hill and righteous revolutions among Muslim masses.
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