Today, nearly 10 years after the Obama-Biden "humanitarian" military strikes began in March 2011, Libya is widely regarded as a failed state or something close to it. We're coming off a year in which conflicting involvements in Libya's internal military and political power struggles by Egypt, Russia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Turkey, Qatar and Abu Dhabi have caused diplomatic complications well beyond Libya's borders.
Earlier this month, "At least 20,000 foreign fighters and mercenaries are in Libya causing a “serious crisis” as weapons continue pouring into the war-ravaged North African nation, a United Nations official warned on Wednesday." (‘Serious crisis’: 20,000 foreign fighters in Libya, UN says Aljazeera 12/02/2020) That is from a report on the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum, "part of UN efforts to end the chaos in Libya, a major oil producer, which has been gripped by violence since a NATO-backed uprising in 2011 overthrew and killed veteran leader Muammar Gaddafi."
Akram Kharief reported in Libya’s proxy war (Le Monde Diplomatique English Sept 2020):
Libya has been torn by conflict ever since 2011, when a rebel coalition with NATO air support began a civil war against the Gaddafi regime. Since 2014, the country has been split between forces loyal to the Government of National Accord (GNA) based in Tripoli and the self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) led by Benghazi-based Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. This has grown into a proxy conflict between Haftar’s allies — Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Russia — and Turkey and Qatar, who support the GNA. It has also become a battleground for international mercenaries. [my emphasis]Turkey's involvement has been a topic of significant problems within NATO, as Ali Bakeer and Dylan Yachyshen discuss in France and Turkey: When NATO allies collide Responsible Statecraft 10/15/2020. France has been a partisan of Haftar's LNA faction.
Sociologist Amitai Etzioni, an advocate of what is known as "communitarian" political theory, wrote a analysis of that intervention in the Jan-Feb 2012 issue of the US Army's Military Review, The Lessons of Libya.
The 2012 piece is fascinating in that Etzioni argues that the action showed the military effectiveness of a limited external intervention into an outgoing internal clash between contending parties in a country, which can be achieved with minimal immediate risks to the intervening external powers. But he also identifies how strong the pressure can be for mission creep, including obvious problems that were already apparent in the Libyan situation. But he seems to imply that the US/NATO intervention should have been more intensive. We also from his account that the US/French/British intervention rapidly expanded its goal from Obama's original public justification of preventing an immediate humanitarian crisis from an alleged impending massacre of rebel forces in the Benghazi area by government troops.
Four and a half years later, Etzioni wrote about the Libyan intervention, arguing against deeper involvement then being advocated by neocons and by "humanitarian" interventionists, The Illusion That America Can Fix Libya The National Interest 08/29/2016.
Today, this from the 2012 article has special relevance:
The Libya campaign showed that a strategy previously advocated for other countries, particularly Afghanistan, could work effectively. The strategy, advocated by Vice President Joe Biden and John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, entails using airpower, drones, Special Forces, the CIA, and, crucially, working with native forces rather than committing American and allied conventional ground forces. It is sometimes referred to as “offshoring,” although calling it “boots off the ground” may better capture its essence. [my emphasis]In the later piece, he is specifically arguing against increased US involvement in Libya in 2016, drawing on the lessons of the failed "nation-building" attempts in Afghanistan and Iraq:
The notion that the United States can engage in nation building in the Middle East is a sociological illusion. The United States sank half a trillion dollars into nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq over fifteen years. In Afghanistan, it “succeeded” in transforming the country from one of the most corrupt nationsin the world to the most corrupt. It has become the leading producer of opiates, which are flooding Europe. And it has a regime that cannot protect itself or pay for itself. In Iraq, since it was liberated by the United States, at least three hundred thousand civilians have been killed, many more maimed, and still more forced out of their homes. The military and the police trained and advised by the United States for over fifteen years are often used by the Shia government to kill and harass Sunnis. [my emphasis in bold]One important conclusion we can take from the 2012 analysis is that a US/NATO intervention that involves tipping a military situation toward one side in a conflict can seemingly impressive results in the short term. But war is always about political results on the other end. Obama himself recognized that the outcome of the Biden-recommended approach in Libya was not a desirable one for the US. Dominic Tierney reported in The Legacy of Obama’s ‘Worst Mistake’ The Atlantic 04/15/2016:
In a Fox News interview last Sunday, Obama was asked about his “worst mistake.” It’s a classic gotcha question, but he had an answer ready. “Probably failing to plan for the day after, what I think was the right thing to do, in intervening in Libya.” This was yet another act of presidential contrition for the NATO operation in 2011 that helped to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi but left the country deeply unstable. In 2014, Obama said: “[W]e [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this. Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions.” In recent interviews with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on the “Obama Doctrine,” the president bluntly said the mission in Libya “didn’t work.” Behind closed doors, according to Goldberg, he calls the situation there a “shit show.” [my emphasis]Part of this strikes me as a classic Mugwump position by Obama, when he admits that the assumptions behind his Libya decision turned out to be disastrously wrong but still doesn't want to state that his intervention was a mistake. To his credit, he did resist the pressure that Etzioni describes in his 2016 piece that was brought to bear on him to compound the mistake by getting more and more deeply involved.
In the absence of a major peace movement, the press gives pitifully little attention to predictable difficulties. Etzioni's observation in the quotation above, for instance, that US intervention had transformed Afghanistan "from one of the most corrupt nations in the world to the most corrupt" was not surprising to people familiar with the Vietnam War or with the war in Iraq. But the mainstream press and TV pundits didn't put much emphasis on pointing out those lessons.
Yes, when the US pours in military personnel and massive resources into a much poorer country in pursuit of an urgent military mission, massive corruption in the local institutions is one of the extremely likely results. Practically inevitable, when there is an immediate military mission to be achieved whose practical considerations require working with whatever institutions are available, "corrupt" or not, or even deliberately corrupting them if it helps the immediate military objective.
The problem for any citizens who want to take a critical and responsible view of proposed military interventions is that the Pentagon and the State Department and various other government agencies will always have a superficially plausible claim that US security is at stake, they will always offer humanitarian reasons for the intervention, they will always claim that US power will make the war quick and easy, they will always claim that some brad spanking new technology makes it easier than ever before, and will always try to make critics sound like they are sympathizing with evil people.
The validity of the claims will vary from case to case. But without informed critics to address them and with a press that is more eager for the drama of the conflict and the glamour of the heroic Pentagon presentations of its goals than for parsing the facts for citizens to make well-informed decisions, it will be way too easy to blunder into more misguided military interventions.
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