The story of regime change Libya provides an interesting contrast with Iraq. At the risk of pushing the comparison too far, it seems as if the U.S. and NATO consciously set out to do the opposite of what had been done in Iraq.
Specifically:
The war in Iraq was an American war. The “coalition of the willing” really wasn’t. The British did send some soldiers and a few other American allies sent token forces, but almost all the roughly 600,000 soldiers and contractors were American. The fact that this was a unilateral American an adventure cost us a great deal in terms of international influence and leadership, not to mention the impact on the budget. (This was also a stark contrast to the first Gulf War that expelled Saddam’s army from Kuwait. The first President Bush did put together an international coalition.)
In contrast, the faces of the fighters on the ground are Libyan. Contrast the pictures from Tripoli of Libyans celebrating with the iconic shot of the American tank toppling the statue of Saddam in Baghdad. The NATO air strikes in Libya over the past five months have mattered but they are not the central story. The handful of western operatives on the ground have been nearly invisible. We have to assume that the intelligence services of several NATO countries were involved in getting arms into the rebels’ hands but that rates no more than a footnote in the drama. The NATO intervention itself was clearly collective operation, with France and Britain leading the way. Ironically that has led to criticism in the United States that Obama did too much by committing any U.S. forces without Congressional approval and that he did too little, by “leading from behind” and not using all the available aircraft. (That unfortunate phrase may be a symptom of how rapidly events moved and the U.S. policy evolved -- no one had second or third thoughts about how badly it would play.)
Operation Iraqi Freedom relied on American military might. It started with the “shock and awe” of the air assault and ended with almost 250,000 American troops on the ground. More importantly, the overall strategy in Iraq was conceived of in military terms. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were the chief architects, not Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. The State Department and CIA were relegated to the sidelines as the central decisions were being made. Little attention was given to post conflict issues.
In contrast, the Libyan operation seems to have been strongly focused on what happens after Gadhafi fell. For example, the military authorities running the occupation of Iraq almost immediately disbanded the army and police forces. And shortly after that, as part of the “de-Baathification” effort, essentially gutted all institutions. But even as Tripoli was under siege, the U.S. government and others were urging the Libyan rebels to maintain the few governing institutors Gadhafi had allowed to exist.
Side note: an interesting similarity between the two cases is the fact that the professional military was not very enthusiastic about either one. The objections were operational and in the Iraq case revolved around fears that we were not committing a large enough force. In the Libyan case, the concerns were not using adequate force and the inherent ambiguity in the mission. (Senator John McCain does not make things up, he frequently gives speaks for the military professionals who are constrained from speaking out.)
The U.S. was deeply involved in the organization of a new government for Iraq. The Vice President’s office, the Department of Defense, the CIA and the State Department all had their favorites among the exile community and did what they could to give them prominent roles. The interim constitution created by the Coalition Provisional Authority (i.e. the U.S. occupation) designed a political system based explicitly on ethnic and religious distinctions. That is hardly the sole cause of Iraq’s current problems but it made it nearly impossible for those politicians who sought to bridge the Shi’a-Sunni divide and the Arab-Kurd differences.
NATO and the U.S. have been scrupulous about keeping their distance from the internal workings of the National Transition Council in Libya, even though everyone has their friends among the Libyan expatriate community. The leadership has evolved largely as the result of internal Libyan politics, not the maneuvering of outside patrons. That means we know less about the key players than we did in Iraq in 2005 and that outside actors have less control over the decisions the NTC will take. But it also means the NTC does not have the albatross of foreign intervention around its neck.
A final contrast has hurt the Obama administration. The invasion of Iraq came after a prolonged campaign to justify it to the public. It was a war of choice. A variety of rationales was advanced: Weapons of Mass Destruction, complicity in 9/11, Saddam as uniquely evil, democratizing the Middle East, protecting Israel, enforcing UN Security Council resolutions. At times it almost seemed like a political campaign with a message of the week and something for everybody.
The Libyan intervention was unexpected and unplanned. The Obama administration was treating the Libyan uprising as it had treated other moments in the Arab Spring, making sympathetic noises but keeping its distance. (This, like all policies, was supported by different people for quite different reasons: avoiding the risk of having the protestors tarnished as American agents, preserving relationships and ties with incumbent regime elements, a preference for stability and the devil you know.) In general the administration was all for regime change but not via direct U.S. intervention.
I think the fears of a massacre of civilians in Benghazi created a sense of crisis and a rather hurried decision to cooperate with the French and British who were strong advocates of intervention. There was no time to lay the domestic political groundwork, no time to float various rationales to see which ones worked, no time to develop public opinion. Gadhafi the wacky goofball dictator made a far less scary villain than Saddam Hussein. The long term regime change strategy was swamped by the short term humanitarian intervention. The careful distinction between use of force to protect people and reliance on political means to support regime change is too fine a point to maintain when cruise missiles are streaking overhead and fighter planes are bombing tank columns.
The invasion of Iraq was followed by an insurgency, a near civil war, de facto separation of the Kurdish region, a large number of refugees, and an inability to resolve the most basic issues facing the country. Certainly U.S. policy was not the sole cause of all that, but it was an important contributor.
Libya faces greater challenges now than Iraq did in 2003 after the invasion. Clearly the United States, NATO and/or any other international actor are not going to step in to try to guide (or manipulate) Libya’s development. The Obama administration is hoping that a combination of humanitarian and technical aid plus coaxing and encouragement from the sidelines will be enough to help Libya avoid the doom and gloom outcomes that some analysts fear.
The long term implications for American politics are not clear. The Obama people will certainly claim this as vindication for their strategy. Rightly or wrongly, the administration will be blamed by its critics if things in Libya go badly ... with widespread bloodshed and retaliation, for example, or the emergence of a nationalist, anti-Western regime. But I am not sure this episode will make some great new departure in U.S. foreign policy, as some people have suggested. It is more likely to recede quickly into the background, much as the Clinton administration’s air war in Kosovo has been largely forgotten. Hmm ... there may be some deja vu here after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment