Lessons from the Obama-Biden Administration's blundering Libyan intervention

One of the more significant foreign policy decisions of the Obama-Biden Administration was the military intervention in Libya in 2011, playing a decisive role but formally doing so in support of NATO allies France and Britain. This BBC News report has a helpful timeline of the US intervention from February 2011 to January 2015: President Obama: Libya aftermath 'worst mistake' of presidency 04/11/2016.

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.

Current international players in the Libyan civil war

Juan Cole updates us on the conflict in Libya, which has wide implications that could easily become more acute: The World War in Libya: Russo-Turkish, Turko-Egyptian Conflicts Recall Multi-Polar 19th Century Informed Comment 07/26/2020:

Libya has become a multipolar battleground unusual in the era since 1946. The UN-recognized General National Assembly (GNA) government in Tripoli is ranged against the forces of Benghazi-based Gen. Khalifa Haftar.

Haftar is supported by the Russian Federation, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and diplomatically, France.

The GNA is supported by Turkey, which has sent in a few thousand Syrian mercenaries (battle-hardened rebels who lost in their home country and who skew to the religious Right). Although ordinarily the Turkish backing would also implicate NATO, Turkey’s Libya position is opposed by Greece, Italy and France and so Ankara is isolated on this issue. Turkey in Libya helps create an Eastern Mediterranean strategic position for that country, stretching east from Tripoli to eastern (Turkish) Cyprus and thence Turkey itself. Turkey is interested in gas deposits off Cyprus that Greek Cyprus, Greece, Italy and France also have their eye on. It is also interested in Libyan oil, which is at the moment not being much pumped and is under Haftar’s control.

The two sides, the GNA and Haftar, are gearing up for a big battle over Sirte, which would be the GNA’s gateway to recovering some of the oil fields.

Of course, oil is involved! Cole notes that the policy of Bunker Boy's Administration is incoherent.

The Trump administration is largely uninterested in the substance of geopolitics, but rather is satisfied with the appearance of willingness to negotiate US demands, as with North Korea. Curbing China and strangling Iran are virtually the only actual major Trump policies toward the rest of the world.

The US turn inward and the paralysis of the country in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, has opened up new spaces for other great powers, and for regional powers, to assert themselves.

The US is irrelevant to this one at the moment.

We're at a place in the Presidential campaign were some Democrats are panicky at the thought of anything that sounds like a criticism of the Obama-Biden Administration. But they did intervene militarily in Libya in 2011. (I'll mote here that Juan Cole, who is generally critical of US interventions, supported that one at the time.)

Dominic Tierney reports in The Legacy of Obama’s ‘Worst Mistake’ The Atlantic 04/15/2020

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]

In the first bolded passage, Obama is repeating the stock excuse of the generals and the foreign policy establishment for failed military interventions: everything would have been better if we had just killed more of those foreigners and killed them faster, everything would have worked out. Even spectaular disasters like the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War haven't seemed to deterred them from using it.

The second bolded passage is a better description.

The US-NATO intervention nine years ago can't be said to have led directly to the current situations. Other international players made they own decisions in the process. But it contributed mightily to the developmentof the current situation. As the Quincy Institute's July 2020 report New U.S. Paradigm for the Middle East: Ending America’s Misguided Policy of Domination observes:

The military intervention, with U.S. support and involvement, that led to the overthrow of Muammar al–Gaddafi in 2011 has left Libya in chaos. The continuing civil war has had a destabilizing effect beyond Libya’s borders, including a notable increase in terrorist groups operating in the Sahel and West and Central Africa. Furthermore, the involvement of Turkey and European governments in support of opposed Libyan factions has deepened rifts within the E.U. and NATO. [my emphasis]

None of this means that Bunker Boy is displaying some kind of dovish inclinations in his Libya policy. Cole's analysis that he doesn't much know are care what is happening in Libya is very plausible. Not much market for new Trump Towers there at the moment. The Orange Clown in fact weighed in on Libya in 2011 in a statement that hardly sounds dovish, Donald Trump Vlog - Deleted: From the Desk of Donald Trump - Gaddafi, Libya - February 28, 2011 Factbase Videos 03/11/2018:

He is also in that video applying the same kind of deep and incisive analysis with which the world has now become so familiar.

Competence matters in foreign policy. And the US could have some actual constructive influence - without additional military interventions - in discouraging an Egyptian invasion and pressuring both Turkey and Russia to back off. Turkey is an ally of the US in the NATO mutual-defense pact, so what countries Turkey is invading is an important matter for US policy.

The EU and the members who are also NATO allies have their own responsibility in this situation. They should all be trying to de-escalate the civil war instead of fueling it. Especially since Turkey has also been escalating tensions with fellow NATO member Greece. The EU is also particularly vulnerable to blackmail by Turkey because the EU steadfastly refuses to develop a more reasonable and humane policy for housing and processing refugees. Under the 2016 Angela Merkel negotiated, the EU is paying Turkey to hold up to four million refugees. Turkey used the threat of sending refugees into the EU to pressure the Union earlier this year. (Chris Baynes, Turkey’s Erdogan threatens to send millions of refugees to Europe unless it backs Syria ‘safe zone' Independent 10/26/2019

Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 3 of 4)

The same month this book was published, the United States and Iran veered very close to immediate war over the ill-considered and likely illegal assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Obama’s drone wars and Clinton’s cavalier statement about Gaddafi’s death made it mor difficult for Democrats to make straightforward criticisms of Trump’s action – to the extent they wanted to do so at all.

The Emerald City Presidencies, continued

He also notes that the “armed intervention in Libya [was] nominally justified to prevent genocide, but actually intended to overthrow longtime Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi,” i.e., yet another regime change operation with a bad outcome.

Bacevich makes a Niebuhrian judgment on the mentality that led to the Iraq War, which could also apply to general hubris of the Emerald City US period he defines by neoliberal globalism, militarized global dominance, a privatized expansion of personal freedom, and the ever-growing significance of Presidential power:

... a conviction that God has bestowed on the United States unique prerogatives is deeply embedded in the nation's collective consciousness. Yet this particular variant of American Exceptionalism incorporated three distinctive themes: unvarnished militarism, missionary zealotry, and extreme nationalism. Prior American experience had offered glimpses of each. Distinguishing this particular recurrence [the Iraq War] was the chain reaction they produced as they came together.

Just as the neoliberal illusions crashed repeated in the 1990s and 2000s in the developing world and most spectacularly for America and Europe as well in 2008, Bacevich offers us a narrative framework to understand similar processes playing out in US foreign policy and the elevation of Donald Trump to the Presidency, which joined the most irresponsible version of narcissistic personal freedom (Trump’s general decadence and corruption) with the dangerous unilateral power of the US Presidency.

Bacevich’s political perspective

Bacevich is not a politician or an ideologue. He has a complex combination of perspectives. Although much of his analysis of the world is consistent with a progressive viewpoint, his also has perspectives that would fit into a reasoned conservative viewpoint. Though in the age of Trump and Citizens United, in practical politics such a viewpoint effectively doesn’t exist. As we see daily with the parade of Republicans and alleged conservatives cheerfully defending Trump’s violations of the Constitution, his contempt for American electoral laws, and his crass criminality.

But he definitely is not promoting some “third way” or “beyond left and right” perspective. Because people promoting those kinds of notions are most often promoting some variation of hard right politics or occasionally some feel-good fantasy that we can have democratic politics without conflict, controversy, or partisanship.

He has a forthcoming book called American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition, featuring a variety of readings from American conservatives. Reinhold Niebuhr, much of whose perspective had such an influence on him, was in the 1950s a realist Cold War liberal who became very much a critic of the Vietnam War. In Bacevich’s earlier book American Empire (2002), he draws carefully on two critics of American foreign policy, the Progressive historian Charles Beard (who sadly in his later years became a dogmatic rightwing isolationist ) and the left historian William Appleman Williams , both of whom gave particular attention to the domestic sources of American foreign policy.

A Trumpist interregnum?

This book appeared in the final month of Trump third year as President, and the text of course dates from earlier. So Bacevich is cautious in in his assessment of Trump’s work-in-process Presidency.

He believes that Trump’s election was a rejection of the Emerald City conventions across the board, even though neither Trump’s campaign messages nor his actual policies can be described as particularly coherent:

Himself a mountebank of the very first order, Trump exposed as fraudulent the triumphalism that served as a signature of the post-Cold War decades. On this score, Trump mattered and bigly.

With Trump in the White House, claims that the fall of the Berlin Wall inaugurated an era of American political, economic, military, and cultural ascendancy became impossible to sustain. In fact, End-of History boosterism, backed by the conviction that America had perfected a system of political economy, mastered war, and discerned the true meaning of freedom, has turned out to be utterly wrongheaded, doing untold damage to Americans and others. The genius of Trump's "Make America great again" campaign slogan derived from its implicit admission that assertions of greatness made in the wake of the Cold War had turned out to be both empty and perverse. [my emphasis]

Democrats who style themselves as The Resistance critically miss the most important lesson that can be currently drawn from Trump’s Presidency. As he puts it with two of his book’s most important metaphors, “the Emerald City consensus is as defunct as the Boone City consensus that preceded it.” And, echoing the Book of Daniel (“Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting”. 5:27), he makes this Owl of Minerva judgment:

The post-Cold War recipe for renewing the American Century has been tried and found wanting. A patently amoral economic system has produced neither justice nor equality, and will not. Grotesquely expensive and incoherent national security policies have produced neither peace nor a compliant imperium, and will not. A madcap conception of freedom unmoored from any overarching moral framework has fostered neither virtue nor nobility nor contentment, and won't anytime soon. Sold by its masterminds as a formula for creating a prosperous and powerful nation in which all citizens might find opportunities to flourish, it has yielded no such thing. This, at least, describes the conclusion reached by disenchanted Americans in numbers sufficient to elect as president someone vowing to run the post-Cold War consensus through a shredder.

His “Acknowledgements” at the book’s end is dated April 2019, so he might well word some of his assessments about the Trump Presidency a bit differently in January 2020, when it was published. Not many people would be writing at the time of publication, for instance: "Despite U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran and the other signatories to the agreement remained in full compliance with its terms. If Trump's action was intended to provoke the Iranian government into some action that could be construed as a casus belli, as Iranophobes clearly hoped, it failed."

Iran just announced it will no longer abide by the terms of the JCPOA. And on the first weekend of January, war with Iran looked like a distinct and immediate possibility.

But his point in this concluding chapter where those sentences appear is that democracy in America still has a immediate fighting chance and that even a clumsy pullback from some of intrusive military policies of the Emerald City consensus is not automatically the catastrophe that military contractors and their lobbyists might want us to believe. It’s always possible that in a couple of years, that might sound like false optimism, i.e., things aren’t all that bad, perhaps the most dangerous self-reassurance for a democracy under immediate threat.

But no one reading this book will think its author imagines Trumpism to be harmless. On the contrary, he’s making a point that Bernie Sanders supporters will recognize and applaud, that Trumpism isn’t a fluke or a singular threat: it’s an understandable and undesirable result of the failures of a neoliberal order and an excessively interventionist and hubristic foreign policy, which Clintonites and Cheneyites and Obamaites were very much part of constructing. And he also takes full account of the fact that much of what Trump claims as his accomplishments are puffery, bluff, and a large quantity of hot air.

In a Niebuhrian world haunted by Original Sin, nobody gets off the hook.

Yet Bacevich isn’t looking for some alternative utopia of easy harmony. In fact, he makes an argument that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (who advocate a 21st-century version of Madison's Federalist #10 theory of democratic polöitical conflict) would appreciate:

... the immediate need is not to impose a new consensus, but to allow serious debate. In a country as deeply divided as the United States, the proximate aim should not be to obscure differences but to sharpen them further and thereby give them meaning. Americans deserve choices that go beyond Trump vs. Clinton or Republicans vs. Democrats or what currently passes for conservative vs. what gets labeled progressive.

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”

Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 2 of 4)

Bacevich implicitly uses 1991 as the end of the Cold War, a more clearly defined dividing point than the Owl of Minerva can usually identify. He takes the war that year to push Iraq out of Kuwait as the historical demarcation line, a conflict called at the time the Gulf War. (The beginning of the Cold War is conventionally dated somewhere between 1945 to 1948.)

The Emerald City Presidencies

The press and public perception of that war would prove to be a crucial element of the often miserable US experiences with wars the next three decades:

The conclusion of the Cold War showed that the U.S. military could win without fighting. The Persian Gulf War showed not only that America's armed forces could still fight, but that they were seemingly invincible.

So the nation's military narrative added a chapter: After Vietnam there now came Desert Storm. The latter did not expunge the former. Yet the military failure in Southeast Asia now lost much of its relevance. By putting a ragtag Iraqi army to flight, the United States had emphatically "kicked the Vietnam syndrome," as President George H. W. Bush put it at the time. With that, reticence about using force evaporated, especially in elite circles. In a post-Cold War world that awaited shaping, America's manifest superiority in all things military positioned it to do whatever needed to be done.

This is key to understanding Bacevich’s understanding of what the book’s subtitle describes as the US squandering its Cold War victory and the destructive hubris that was integral to it. Freed from the balance-of-power considerations of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the policy limits imposed by the negative public view of the Vietnam War, the US could now indulge in war after war without the prospect of a major domestic political backlash.

Bacevich quotes a prime example of the American Exceptionalist rhetoric characteristic of the Emerald City era, this one from Colin Powell in 1992:

No other nation on earth has the power we possess. More important, no other nation on earth has the trusted power that we possess. We are obligated to lead. If the free world is to harvest the hope and fulfill the promise that our great victory in the Cold War has offered us, America must shoulder the responsibility of its power. The last best hope of earth has no other choice. We must lead.

In reality, the enormous popularity that President G.W. Bush enjoyed in 1991 after the successful conclusion of the war with Iraq did not prove sufficient to get him re-elected against Bill Clinton in 1992.

As the Owl of Minerva can now clearly see, the “successful” conclusion of the First Gulf War actually meant continuing low-level air war of the US against Iraq, punctuated by the big escalation of the very unfortunately named Operation Desert Fox in 1998. (See: Andrew Corseman, The Military Effectiveness Of Desert Fox: A Warning About the Limits of the Revolution in Military Affairs and Joint Vision 2010 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 02/16/1999)

It led further – by the conscious decision of the Cheney-Bush Administration with the explicit support of leading Democratic Senators including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry – to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, whose very deadly consequences are still playing out in 2020. The Iraq War also dramatically increased the regional power of Iran by removing the balancing power of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Iraq. And, of course, at the time Bacevich’s book appeared in January 2020, the US was on the verge of war with Iran.

Bacevich traces the broad path of US wars and assertions of military dominance through the Clinton Administration and its interventions in the Balkan Wars:

In the ceaselessly updated chronicle of the American military experience, the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns - Operation Deliberate Force, lasting just three weeks in the late summer of 1995, and Operation Allied Force, spread across seventy-eight days in the spring of 1999-have long since been crowded out. Both featured what military theorists were then calling "precision bombing." In both cases, American air forces operated at high altitudes and faced negligible resistance, with U.S. losses all but nonexistent.

... during Clinton's eight-year tenure as commander in chief, these were the only victories the U.S. military was able to claim. As such, at least for a time, they shaped American expectations regarding the use of force. Here, it seemed, was evidence that the United States had solved the riddle of making armed might politically purposeful. [The military idea of] Full-Spectrum Dominance was no longer a theory. Bosnia and Kosovo made it fact.

While stressing this feature of the Clinton Administration that continued the hubristic direction of Emerald City, he makes it clear that the Bush-Cheney Administration took a qualitative (and bad) next step:

The central theme of Bill Clinton's tenure in office had been globalization. The central theme of George W. Bush's tenure became war, which some in his administration conceived as a sort of complement to globalization - another approach to bringing the world into conformity with American preferences. While Clinton had dabbled in war, the events of September 11 prompted Bush to embrace it wholeheartedly. Wars that still today follow their meandering course ultimately consumed his presidency.

The name devised to justify those conflicts-the Global War on Terrorism - amounted to an exercise in misdirection. … As an explanation for U.S. policy after 9/11, terrorism comes nowhere near to being adequate. Indeed, much like the shelling of Fort Sumter in 1861 or the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon served less as a proximate cause for war than as a catalyst. [my emphasis]

And he describes the various arrogant assumptions that flourished in the Bush-Cheney foreign policy that “went altogether off the rails”, a task which Bacevich was diligently performing in real time during that Presidency in his published work and public appearances:

The Bush Eschatology struck me even then as vainglorious, if not altogether blasphemous. Yet by no means did it signify a fundamental change in the trajectory of post-Cold War American statecraft. On the contrary, it reaffirmed in the strongest possible terms the premises underlying those policies. [my emphasis]

Noting that he himself voted twice for Obama as President, he carefully points out what he sees as Obama’s positive accomplishment. But Obama did not break from the four elements that Bacevich identifies as characterizing the Emerald City era, despite the symbolically transformative nature of the election of the first African-American President.

Obama “saved globalized neoliberalism”, he writes, but did not substantively transform it. “Sadly, the mendacity and malfeasance that had paved the way for the Great Recession went essentially unpunished.” Through policies like his escalation in the Afghanistan War, the failure to fully extricate American troops from Iraq, his extensive use of drone attacks, and the 2011 intervention in Libya, Obama modified but did not fundamentally alter the kind of militarized global dominance approach of the post-1989 era.

He has a particular criticism of this moment in the Libya intervention when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about the torture-murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi by rebels:

On March 19, Western air attacks on the Gaddafi regime commenced. By October, the regime had collapsed and Gaddafi himself was dead. On national TV, a laughing Clinton bragged, "We came, we saw, he died."

Yet liquidating Gaddafi no more settled the matter than the fall of Baghdad ended the Iraq War. His ouster merely paved the way for a years-long civil war. As Libya descended into anarchy, the United States largely washed its hands of further responsibility. Years later, Clinton was still insisting that the intervention she had done so much to promote exemplified "smart power at its best," the apparent measure of merit being not the results achieved but the dearth of U.S. combat casualties.

... I also found her premature and unseemly victory dance regarding Libya indicative of someone possessed of a dangerously deficient understanding of war. [my emphasis]

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”

Turkey and the Libyan civil war

Giorgio Cafiero provides an update on the regional power considerations involved in Turkey's threat to militarily intervene in Libya: Why Turkey is Sending Troops to Libya Responsible Statecraft 01/02/2019.

Libya, of course, was the target of a successful regime change operation in which President Barack Obama and Foreign Minister Hillary Clinton intervened militarily along with NATO members France and Britain. A civil war has been raging there since 2014.

... with Russia aligning itself more closely with the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia in supporting Haftar’s side, Turkey’s bold moves will add further complications to Turkish-Russian relations. Against the backdrop of the dire crisis in Idlib, which is testing the Astana Process’s sustainability, the extent to which Ankara and Moscow will be able to find common ground vis-à-vis Libya will heavily impact bilateral affairs between Turkey and Russia at a sensitive time. Of course the U.S. and Russia are the main countries that could likely contain Turkish actions in Libya, and if either attempts to do so in any meaningful or decisive way, Turkey will almost inevitably continue trying to capitalize on Washington and Moscow’s geopolitical competition in the Middle East and Africa to suit Ankara’s own interests and agendas. [my emphasis]

As Cafiero explains, the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) is a military offensive by the opposition Libyan National Army (LNA) headed by Gen. Khalifa Haftar, with Turkey being "the one power that is truly helping the GNA survive."

The Libyan intervention of 2011 and the ongoing results

Andreas Baumer in Business Insider Deutschland provides a good recap of the US-British-French NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, which failed to win a UN Security Council endorsement due to vetos by Russia and China, Wankelmütiger Riese: Die Libyen-Krise offenbart das ganze Dilemma Deutschlands 08.04.2019:

Was danach passierte, ist schnell erzählt. Die Nato griff tatsächlich in den libyschen Bürgerkrieg ein und zwar weitaus entschiedener, als Russland und China das wollten. Statt nur eine Flugverbotszone einzurichten, bombardierten Nato-Flieger Gaddafis Truppen. Auch mit Nato-Hilfe stürzten die Rebellen den Diktator und töteten ihn grausam.

Der Wiederaufbau des Landes ging danach gründlich schief, auch weil USA und Europa zunehmend das Interesse am Land verloren. Eine stabile nationale Regierung hat Libyen seitdem nie wieder bekommen. Im Osten des Landes ist General [Chalifa] Haftar der starke Mann. Im Westen hatte bislang die international anerkannte Regierung um Sarradsch das Sagen. Zwischendrin kämpfen lokale Milizen um Macht und Pfründe. Libyen ist das Sorgenkind in Nordafrika.

My translation:

What happened after that [the Security Council vote] is quickly told. NATO actually intervened in the Libyan civil war, and far more decisively than Russia and China wanted. Instead of just establishing a oo-fly  zone, NATO planes bombed Gaddafi's forces. And with NATO help, the rebels overthrew the dictator and cruelly killed him.

The reconstruction of the country went fundamentally wrong afterwards, partly because the United States and Europe increasingly lost interest in the country. Since then, Libya has never regained since then. In the east of the country, General [Chalifa] Haftar is the strongman. In the West, the internationally recognized government around Sarradsch has been in charge up until now. In between, local Militias are fighting for power and sinecures. Libya is the problem child in North Africa.

It's worth recalling how Obama's Secretary of State celebrating the seeming victory in Libya at the time, Clinton on Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died CBS News 10/20/2011:

Not the most distinguished moment of the Obama Administration.

Prominent German historian Heinrich August Winkler takes a surprisingly shallow position on immigration in "Der Spiegel"

Heinrich August Winkler is one of Germany's best-known and highly respected historians. The author description Der Spiegel attaches to his article, "Der Westen erodiert" (4:2018 06/10/2018) calls him the most influential German historian.

That makes the section of his article on immigration all the more suprising. A new book by Winkler was just published, Zerbricht der Westen?. The article doesn't indicate whether it's excerpted from the book, and the book may present a more nuanced view of the issue.

But what made it into the Spiegel article can be generously described as frivolous. It could also be read as a concern-troll advocacy of the anti-immigration position nominally pretending to express sympathetic concern.

Labels for current issues change, sometimes quickly. The large influx of refugees in 2015 was certainly a crisis, and everyone recognized it as such. The solution that the EU found for it was the deal that Angela Merkel negotiated with Turkey's authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in early 2016. The deal was essentially that Turkey would hold refugees that reach Turkey in exchange for payments from the EU. The EU outsourced the problem to Turkey, in other words. Turkey now is holding something like three million refugees. My understanding is that a large majority of them live outside of refugee centers. The European press as well as politicians don't seem to feel a lot of impetus to report in great detail on their condition.

There has been a very visible increase in the number of immigrants from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Northern Africa at least since 2011. That date corresponds with the US-French-British military intervention that ended with the outster of Muammar Gaddafi's government and his lynch-murder of Gaddafit himself. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (in)famously celebrated Gaddafi's murder (after first being anally raped with a bayonet) as a delightful thing (Clinton on Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died CBS 10/20/2011):

This delightful moment for the Secretary of State meant that Libya would then descend into failed-state conditions. (Ted Galen Carpenter, Libya Is a Failed State (and It's America's Fault) The National Interest 11/24/2017; Giorgio Cafiero and Daniel Wagner, Four Years After Gaddafi, Libya Is a Failed State FPIP 04/06/2015)

Qaddafi's regime was a brutal one. But the removal of his government had various baleful effects, including facilitating arms trafficking and attracting Islamist fighters from other countries. And it meant that Libya was no longer employing the large numbers of immigrant workers from nearby countries that they had been under Qaddafi. And we would probably shudder to think of the ways in which Qaddifi's government blocked irregular immigrantion out of the country and restrained the human smugglers ("coyotes" in American English, Schleppers in German) who were willing to provide passage to Europe. But after Qaddafi's overthrow in 2011, those factors no longer functioned with the same effectiveness.

After 2015-16, thanks primarily to the Turkey deal, refugee flows declined radically in 2017 and 2018. If the large influx of 2015-16 put real strains on the emergency services of EU countries, it would be pure demogoguery to make the same claim for 2017 and 2018. Since there's no shortage of xenophobic demagoguery, advocates for immigration sanity now tend to refer to 2015-16 as a "crisis" but stress that what the EU is facing directly right now can't be described as a crisis. And I try to be mindful of that important distinction.

But looking at the future, I tend to think it would be more accurate to describe the ongoing refugee flows as a long-term crisis that has acute and less acute phases. If Turkey changes its mind about continuing with the 2016 agreement, a new acute phase would follow.

Winkler's argument

Winkler begins the immigration section of his Spiegel article this way:

Deutschland ist am krisenhaften Zustand der Europäischen Union nicht unschuldig. Der deutsche (oder, was die Sache nicht besser macht, deutsch-öterreichische) Alleingang in der Flüchtlings- oder besser Migrationskrise im September 2015 konnte nicht ohne Auswirkungen auf die europäischen Nachbarn bleiben.

[Germany is not innocent in the crisis-like condition of the European Union. The German (or German-Austrian, which didn't make things better) go-it-alone path in the refugee, or better put, migration crisis in September 2015 could not help but have effects on the European neighbors.}

I'm not going to try to deconstruct every sentence of Winkler's argument. But these first two sentences unfortunately telegraph the rest of it pretty well. "Migration" versus "refugees" has become a political slogan. The anti-immigration politicians and publicists prefer to call the people desperate enough to take the high-risk, deadly smuggler routes to get to Europe "migrants", which makes them sound like seasonal workers following the harvests year after year. Refugee is both a discription and a legal category grounded in international law: people who flee their countries due to political persecution or massive violence, like that in civil wars. The latter kind of refugee is entitled to asylum in safe countries, which grants them legal residence, the legal right to work and other advantages. The xenophobes prefer to brand refugees as "economic migrants" who are just looking for a better job or to take advantage of European taxpayers living it up in the "hammock" of the host countries' social systems.

The "German-Austrian go-it-alone path" is a head-scratcher, at best a very clumsy description of the immigrantion crisis events of 2015-16.

He goes on to say that the big problem for the EU in 2015-16 was that Germany tried to tell all the other contries what to do in the crisis. And he says that the other EU countries should have made it very clear that they weren't going to take direction from Germany. He also criticizes the position of Germany, identified with Merkel's stand on the refugee crisis, of presenting itself as "the leading moral nation of Europe." And thus he blames Germany (and Merkel) for mismanaging the refugee crisis and therefore causing the increased political success of the extreme right since then.

How this differs from the simplistic sloganeering of the anti-immigrant right is unclear to me.

If we rewind to 2015, the crisis began with the influx of large numbers of refugees into Hungary through what became known as the "Balkan route." Germany pushed for a "European solution" in which each EU country would agree to take contingents of specified numbers of refugees. This was not only reasonable and practical proposal then. It's still a part of what would be a longterm solution to the chronic refugee crisis.

Hungary's Viktor Orbán, egged on by Vladimir Putin's government in Moscow in pursuit of its longer-term strategy to disrupt the EU, saw an opportunity to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment politically. So once Germany had announced its willingness to accept refugees as part of an EU solution, Orbán's government brought thousands of refugees to the Austrian border, telling them they were being welcomed in Germany. Austria then had an immediate decision: repel the refugees by force or let them through.

The upshot was that Germany agreed to accept large numbers of refugees to solve the immediate crisis and their EU partners for the most part refused to participate. The two most notable exceptions were Sweden and Austria. Evenually, Sweden accepted the largest number of refugees in that wave relative to the country's population. Austria was second, Germany third. But Germany accepted by far the largest number of refugees.

Sweden at some point stopped accepting further refugees. There is an unavoidable chain-reaction effect in such a situation. Once a country shuts its borders to further refugees, the next country in the chain has to decide whether they will accept more or also further limit immigration. The solution, an inherently unstable one, because became the 2016 deal with Turkey.

From the reporting on the 2015-16 crisis, there seems to be real reason to believe that Merkel was motivated by humanitarian concerns in her initial decision to accept large numbers of refugees. But she was also motivated by very practical concerns in dealing with a real problem. Germany, Sweden, and Austria provided a three-country interim solution to a European problem. The picture of Merkel as some kind of self-righteous moralist is a propaganda concoction of the far right. (Well, mostly.) Her deal with Turkey isn't one that Mother Teresa would have likely approved.

Winkler's Spiegel article seems to assume that the right solution for EU countries to the very real and ongoing immigration problem is to imitate the appproach of demogogic politicians like Austria's Sebastian Kurz or Hungary's Viktor Orbán by symbolically pounding their chests, shouting "Close the borders!", and trying to dump the problem onto some other country.

Immigration is a huge and comlex problem for the EU that can be temporarily mitigated by close-the-border chain reactions. But the refugee issue doesn't exist in a vaccum. The EU countries have to decide whether they want an optimal solution to the problem or prefer to lurch from crisis to crisis with all the risks and limitations that go with the current approach, i.e., dump the problem onto Turkey. (And, to a significant but lesser extent, onto the EU outer-border Italy and Greece.)

I doubt that advocates of practical solutions can ever communicate their message in as simplistic slogans as those the fear-mongers use: We're being overrun by foreigners! Political Islam! They're all rapists and murderers! Lazy bums trying to sponge off our tax euros!

But the radical right's simplistic solutions depend on creating phony problems. ("Little girls with hijabs, aaa-iii-eeee!!")

The people trying to find practical longterm adjustments have reality on their side. That always counts for something.

[04/16/2018: Corrected for clarity of wording and typographical errors.]