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War in Libya
Norrie MacQueen
The first phase of the west’s latest Arab war is now well under way. And be under no illusion, a war by the West is exactly what this is. The Security Council resolution that legitimised it is already being stretched beyond any reasonable interpretation.
The reference to ‘all necessary measures’ is familiar enough UN code for enforcement by military action, but the mandate ‘to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack’ has been used to justify a strategy which seems to have more in common with the beginning of the Iraq war than any ‘neutral’ peacekeeping intervention undertaken or authorised by the Security Council in the past.
The Gulf War in 1991 is perhaps the closest the UN has come to this before, but the purpose of that was to end the occupation of one UN member by another. This time it’s a direct intervention in, to use the language of peacekeeping planners, an intra-state conflict – or a civil war to the rest of us.
Yet the NATO-dominated attack is already being advertised as the first genuine intervention under the emerging doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (or ‘R2P’ in the inevitable textspeak that attaches itself to these things). Does it truly justify that billing? With the British government at odds with its allies and its own military over whether the resolution allows the targeting of Gaddafi himself (it doesn’t), and with an action underway which is ominously reminiscent of the softening up of Baghdad in the first phase of the 2003 invasion, this is a perhaps reasonable point at which to ask just how humanitarian this supposed humanitarian intervention is.
Putting my own cards on the table, I’m a critical friend of armed humanitarian intervention. I deplored the failure to carry it through in Bosnia until far too late; supported it in Kosovo; and marched against the bare-faced corruption of the principle in Iraq. But I have a lingering anxiety about what the West is doing under the UN flag in Libya. Is this simply post-Iraq squeamishness on my part? Or are there more specific reasons for misgivings about the undertaking?
The starting point for getting to grips with this is the starting point of the doctrine itself. ‘The Responsibility to Protect’: the report of the International Commission on Intervention and Sovereignty appeared at the end of 2001. (You can download the entire report from: www.iciss.ca/report-en.asp.) This was not in fact an official United Nations project but an initiative by the Canadian government. The formal legal status of the commission’s recommendations is questionable therefore. The doctrine certainly hasn’t found its way into the UN charter and it isn’t embodied in any comprehensive international convention. But that hasn’t stopped an assumption developing, encouraged by well-meaning interventionists, that it’s somehow now ‘international law’.
The commission, composed of a cross-section of the international great and good, was chaired jointly by former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans and a veteran Algerian international civil servant, Mohamed Sahnoun. It emerged from the pall of guilt that had lingered from the mid-1990s over memories of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and the Rwandan genocide. How then does the Libyan intervention shape up against the terms of the report?
The ‘just cause’ for intervention established by the commission is based on quite specific circumstances: large-scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing. It’s not, in other words, a blanket justification for attacking unpleasant regimes. Apartheid-era South Africa wouldn’t have been under threat; neither more recently would the regime in Burma. Arguably, though, the potential for high civilian casualties in Gaddafi’s threatened assault on the rebel cities of eastern Libya ticks the necessary box here. But even with just cause established, the commission insisted on key ‘precautionary principles’ being followed. It’s with these that discomfort with the Libyan venture begins.
The military means used in a humanitarian intervention must be ‘proportionate’, the report pronounced. The tactics of shock and awe, so utterly discredited in Iraq, are specifically off-limits. But in Libya domestic pressures on the intervening countries complicate matters. There must be no Western boots on the ground – after Iraq that’s simply out of the question. But the alternative to invasion – massive air-power and bombardment from beyond Libya’s borders – is difficult to square with proportionality.
For one thing, the most advanced weaponry (over a hundred Tomahawk missiles fired off in the first hours) is being deployed against an army with weapons systems which would already have looked old and tired in the 1970s. And bombing from 30,000 feet, however allegedly ‘smart’ the bombs might be, will unavoidably bring on that dreadful strategists’ euphemism for civilian dead: collateral damage. Unsurprisingly, the regime has already sought to exploit this, just as it did to great effect when American bombs were launched against it in 1986.
The responsibility to protect report also insisted on what it described as ‘right intention’ as a strict requirement for intervention. How far can this be truly discerned in the tangle of historical baggage that the West brings to Libya? Humanitarianism is no doubt somewhere in the recipe, but is it the main ingredient? There is so much else in there, from payback for Lockerbie to WPC Yvonne Fletcher to arms for the IRA, and that’s just in Britain’s mixing bowl.
Doubts about intention have led to the now familiar question: if Libya why not the West’s allies in Yemen and Bahrain being repeatedly posed. The stock response is that just because humanitarian intervention isn’t universal it shouldn’t be ruled it out everywhere. Yet there is a duty to explain the rationale for the selection. No convincing justification has yet been offered by the governments involved.
The peculiar belligerence of Nicholas Sarkozy, who appeared at the outset to lead where the other countries of the coalition followed, needs to be questioned here as well. With his personal poll ratings bumping along the ground and his ham-fisted backing for the Tunisian regime at the beginning of this remarkable sequence of revolts to overcome, the French president’s intentions don’t seem so obviously ‘right’.
And all this without even mentioning the ‘o’ word in respect of one of the world’s biggest producers and exporters of the stuff. The glow of humanitarian virtue may be a fine thing in itself, but the indebtedness of whoever emerges to control of the wells and refineries is money in the bank.
The commission set out a final precautionary principle: ‘reasonable prospects’ for the success of any intervention contemplated. In Libya we simply don’t know what the ‘success’ being pursued is supposed to look like. If it’s to be a quick peace followed by national reconciliation and a democratic future, the prospects at the outset certainly wouldn’t meet the criteria required for action.
In Libya as in Iraq there is a danger of misperceiving the situation as simply a country in bondage to an irrational tyrant which is just waiting for a nudge from outside to seize its own liberation. Yet do we actually know what genuine support – ideological, regional, tribal – Muammar Gaddafi may have? If the intervention succeeds in overthrowing him – and regime change is clearly to subtext to the intervention, regardless of any official denial – how would a violent insurgency by his supporters against the new government figure in assessments of success? Or, alternatively, would the partition of the country on Korean lines constitute success or failure? We simply can’t judge because we have no clear indication of the West’s war aims and how they are to be achieved.
This problem of outcomes, and the inability of the intervening powers to control them, brings us to the last major element in the report: what it described as post-intervention obligations. ‘The responsibility to protect’, the commission insisted, ‘implies the responsibility not just to prevent and react, but to follow through and rebuild. This means that if military intervention action is taken…there should be a genuine commitment to helping to build a durable peace…’. Is this really part of the script that the NATO countries leading the intervention wish to follow? What post-conflict planning, if any, has been undertaken? It’s surely inconceivable that the governments involved haven’t worked out with extreme care the scenarios they will face when they’ve fired their last cruise missile and flown their last sortie. Isn’t it?
Here too the experience of Iraq, which each and every government involved in the Libyan intervention has protested (too much?) is irrelevant, may prove to be a depressingly sound guide. Post-conflict peace-building is a hideously difficult but absolutely essential part of the process of armed humanitarian intervention. Boots on the ground there will inevitably be if this principle of post-conflict obligation is to be honoured. They might not be worn by combat troops, but that may have little effect on the weight of the burden or the dangers involved.
Whether properly planned for or not, the war in Libya most likely has a long way to run and a number of twists and turns to follow. Nothing in the issues just explored clinches the argument for or against the intervention. But these are questions that we all have ‘a responsibility to ask’ as what promises to be a long, fraught intervention gets underway.
Norrie MacQueen teaches politics at Dundee University. His latest book, ‘Humanitarian Intervention and the United Nations’, is published by Edinburgh University Press this month.
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