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 Libya Intervention Was an Illegal Failure. Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Project on US Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy and the author of the forthcoming book Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World. The 2011 U.S.-led NATO intervention in Libya against the dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi was a complete failure. 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. A decade and a half after Mexico initiated its justice system reforms, 95 percent of federal cases still go unpunished. Claims of “mission creep” have become commonplace, most forcefully articulated by the Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations. I didn’t want to live in an America where we would stand by silently as a brutal dictator—using that distinct language of genocidaires—announced rather clearly his intentions to kill. • Three Lessons. Then when … (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.). According to the Libya Body Count, around 4,500 people have so far been killed over the course of 22 months of civil war. 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. The Libya intervention (2011): neither lawful, nor successful Patrick CR Terry Abstract The intervention in Libya in 2011 was claimed to have been a triumph in two respects: on the one hand the UN Security Council, by passing resolutions 1970 and 1973, had demonstrated its ability to react to In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster.”. “The goal was to protect civilians and prevent a massacre,” he notes. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it.” If the U.S had decided against intervention, Libya would have likely reverted to some noxious combination of dictatorship and insurgency. If it is a “model intervention,” as senior NATO officials claim, it is a model of failure. Yet Libya quickly tumbled off the American agenda. The Libya intervention marked the third time in a decade that Washington embraced regime change and then failed to plan for the consequences. This relative paucity of R2P implementation begs the question of why intervention in The Libya intervention is not legacy-defining for Barack Obama. This, however, was never the goal. In fact, the civil war had already started before the intervention began. Libya is, however, the defining feature of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State (with the Russian reset in second place). It’s easy to ascribe the chaos in Libya today to the intervention, but while this is comfortingly simple and familiar, it is lazy, and based on a failure to … The RAF’s ability to carry out future missions is under threat if Britain’s intervention in Libya continues beyond the summer, the head of the Air Force’s combat operations has warned. Therefore, it became heavily involved in the Libyan conflict, particularly after signing the military and … The Libya Intervention Was an Illegal Failure. 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.”. It was wrong because the decision to intervene in the first place was not justified, being based as it was on faulty premises regarding weapons of mass destruction. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. One of the most disputed issues of foreign policy surrounds the dilemma of humanitarian intervention. The justness of military intervention in March 2011 cannot be undone or negated retroactively. His latest move with the two-year extension of Zaldívar’s term is especially worrisome. Inevitably, Europe will not be able to manage such an intervention alone and may drag the United States into the fray. The slaying of Chris Stevens and others in Benghazi ensures that this will be so. For the reasons outlined above, Libya’s descent into civil conflict—and the resulting power vacuum, which extremist groups like ISIS eagerly filled—wasn’t inevitable. The goal was not to set up a functional stable republic, it was to make the situation less bad than it would otherwise would had been and to stop the massacres. “The stars were well and truly aligned in the Libya case,” says Mr Evans. 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. After the failure to find an international consensus on NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, as well as on the 2003 Darfur crisis, the 2011 Libyan military operation was initially heralded as the start of a new age of R2P inspired humanitarian interventions. Zaldívar is also the president of the powerful Federal Judiciary Council. But let’s hypothesize for a moment that it was. Our Libya Intervention — Failure Disguised as Success. To conclude, the NATO intervention in Libya was extremely controversial due to its failure in outlining what the true objectives were. I still remember how I felt in those last days and hours as Qaddafi’s forces marched toward Benghazi. It is certainly true that the intervention didn’t produce something resembling a stable democracy. There was no end in sight. Most criticisms of the intervention, even with the benefit of hindsight, fall short. Libya is a failed state, but that does not mean intervention was wrong, argues Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, for Vox. 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. 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. Hamid argues that the United States is “expected to set the agenda, convene partners, and drive international attention” on conflicts like those in the Middle East. This is not the way choice or morality operates (imagine applying this standard to your personal life). This may suggest a broader philosophical divergence: Obama, according to one of his aides, is a “consequentialist.”. Rebuilding a civil state in Libya requires placing Libya under the UN for a transitional period — as in East Timor. To conclude, the NATO intervention in Libya was extremely controversial due to its failure in outlining what the true objectives were. NATO and UN Member States manifestly failed to assist Libya with this process in the wake of the intervention and the ensuing Libyan civil war. The president went with the latter option. Approaching the conflict in Libya after the intervention ended allows us to have a more systematic understanding of what went wrong. So any subsequent descent into conflict, presumably, says something about our failure, which is something we’d rather not think about. The NATO operation ended in October 2011. 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. The rebels quickly lost momentum, however. Humanitarian intervention, which involves the use of armed force to protect civilians at risk of mass crimes, has generated a great deal of controversy due to major For instance, after leaving the Obama administration, Philip Gordon, the most senior U.S. official on the Middle East in 2013-’15, wrote: “In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. Inaction came to be seen as a virtue. 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). 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. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross. Zenko and others never make clear how civilians could have been protected as long as Qaddafi was waging war on them. Everyone Says the Libya Intervention Was a Failure: They’re Wrong US President Obama suggested that one of his biggest regrets failure to plan for Libya after the 2011 NATO intervention. NATO and UN Member States manifestly failed to assist Libya with this process in the wake of the intervention and the ensuing Libyan civil war. The most likely outcome, then, was a Syria-like situation of indefinite, intensifying violence. Senior Advisor on Asymmetric Warfare. The intervention has had a destabilizing effect on Libya’s immediate neighbors, most significantly Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, and also helped to destabilize Mali, significantly contributing to a jihadist takeover of north Mali that would prompt another intervention, this time led by France. Of course, Libya, as anyone can see, is a mess, and Americans are reasonably asking if the intervention was a mistake. The British government has rejected criticism of its intervention in Libya, ... was blamed in the report as “ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy”. Nuruzzaman explains that after Gaddafi was killed by rebel forces, all that remained was ‘a hell of lawlessness, with 125,000 armed militias who have continued to control different parts of the country and clash against each other’ (2013, p.64). The intervention extended the war's duration about sixfold; increased its death toll approximately seven to ten times; and exacerbated human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors. 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. Critics further assert that the intervention caused, created, or somehow led to civil war. John Glaser Posted on March 18, 2014. We may not like it—and Obama certainly doesn’t—but even when the U.S. 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. This essay examines the roots to the Libyan migration crisis and European culpability for documented human rights abuses. Did it constitute the beginning of a new era, or the destruction of a nation state? Libya is a failed state, but that does not mean intervention was wrong, argues Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, for Vox. In a Foreign Affairs article, Alan Kuperman wrote that “Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. The NATO intervention was completely justified and it was carried out to stop the massacre. 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. Oil exports were set to resume from the Zuetina port after rebels … It may be that in some circumstances, the scope of a mission should be defined more broadly, rather than narrowly. The attorney general’s office has proven weak, unwilling to take up key cases such as against the suspects in the brazen attack on Mexico City’s security minister, Omar García Harfuch—an event that symbolized the impunity with which Mexican criminal groups operate. Americans are probably more likely to consider the Libya intervention a failure because the U.S. was at the forefront of the NATO operation. 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”). In the face of humanitarian crises, leaders must respond to a broad spectrum of voices urging action to prevent mass atrocities and minimize the loss of life. A CLOSE CALL. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed … A failure to understand R2P and the events which occurred in Libya might lead some to believe that Libya proves the concept of R2P to be a failed one; however, that is simply not correct. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross. American intervention in Libya; Part of the International campaign against ISIL and the Second Libyan Civil War: An AV-8B Harrier assigned to the 22nd MEU aboard USS Wasp taking part in Operation Odyssey Lightning on 11 August 2016. After early rebel gains, Qaddafi had seized the advantage. Libya Is a Failed State (and It's America's Fault) Proponents of U.S.-led regime-change wars have yet another catastrophic failure on their record. To think that Libya wouldn’t have encountered at least some major instability over the course of transition from one-person rule to an uncertain “something else” is to have a view of political development completely detached from both history and reality. Was the rightness of stopping the Rwandan genocide dependent on whether Rwanda could realistically become a stable democracy after the genocide was stopped? Shadi Hamid, a well-respected analyst with the Brookings Institution thinktank, recently published an article titled ‘Everyone says the Libya intervention was a failure. If Libya was a “model intervention,” then it was a model of failure.” The author continues to dispel the mainstream narratives on the war by documenting that the Libyan government did not “initiate Libya’s violence”, but instead “responded” to violence perpetuated by the protestors: Zenko may be right, but he asserts rather than explains why mission creep is always a bad thing. Americans are probably more likely to consider the Libya intervention a failure because the U.S. was at the forefront of the NATO operation. It argues that failed efforts to rebuild Libya following the 2011 humanitarian intervention combined with recent European policies to outsource responsibility for the migration crisis to Libya have created a perfect storm of exploitation, predation, and abuse. While perhaps less sexy, the U.S. 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. In a quite literal sense, every moment mattered, and the longer we waited, the greater the cost. Thus: Hooray for Intervention! Writing in Vox, Shadi Hamid attacks the “prevailing wisdom” that Libya’s chaos means that the 2011 U.S. military intervention there failed. The Intervention in Libya After the failure to find an international consensus on NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, as well as on the 2003 Darfur crisis, the 2011 Libyan military operation was initially heralded as the start of a new age of R2P inspired humanitarian interventions. His other moves to bend the justice system to his will include a reform that lowered the salary of judges but did not improve the quality of prosecutors and his unwillingness to allow an independent selection of the attorney general, with López Obrador himself retaining the power of appointment. 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. Almost four years after the intervention it will be argued here that such optimistic claims were premature. Still, he was not in a position to deal a decisive blow to the opposition. 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