FP Talking Heads Reading List

By John Ballard

?Why the U.N. vote on Libya means almost as much for Obama as for Qaddafi
Posted By David Rothkopf -- Foreign Policy furnishes this list of commentaries on events in Libya.

?Yes. Now Let's Hope It's Not Too Late. - By Rom�Dallaire with Jeffrey Bernstein
Lt. Gen Rom�Dallaire was force commander of the U.N. peacekeeping mission for Rwanda in 1994. He is currently a senator in the Canadian Parliament and co-director of the Will to Intervene project at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. Jeffrey Bernstein is project officer for genocide prevention to Lt. Gen Dallaire.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine -- which requires the U.N. Security Council to take action when a country fails to protect its citizens and was unanimously adopted by all countries of the U.N. General Assembly in 2005 -- has clearly and unequivocally laid the problem of Libya at our feet.

[...] as we have learned tragically from past failures to respond in a timely fashion, domestic groundswell is instrumental to garnering international support to prevent mass atrocities. The world community's response to Libya has been lightning-fast when compared with past, snail-paced efforts -- laudable, no doubt, but inadequate, still. We must be quicker and more efficient in mobilizing if we are to deter leaders from even considering the use of deadly violence to cling to power.

?Not Until We Know What We're Getting Into - By Micah Zenko
Micah Zenko is fellow for conflict prevention at the Council on Foreign Relations.
(I am not persuaded by his argument, btw, which could be advanced for any and all military interventions. One never knows with any measure of certainty what lies ahead. And "winning" almost always remains an undefined term. What we are witnessing in the Libyan intervention is a truly multi-lateral effort reflecting a transnational political will not seen since WWII. Until now the term "Coalition" has meant "Ad hoc US-run Subcommittee.")

...although we are prepared to "do something" and pull out the most impressive kit in the U.S. toolbox -- military power -- we aren't actually willing to get involved at the level required to win. This minimal engagement does more harm than good. Not to mention that there are plenty of conflicts that are far more -- or at least equally -- pressing. In October and again this spring, for example, the African Union requested a no-fly zone from the U.N. Security Council to patrol Somalia. Guess how many French and British planes are flying over Mogadishu today? None.

?The U.S. Is Right Not to Own It - By Robert D. Kaplan

The very slow and seemingly lackluster American leadership that the Obama administration is being criticized for by both neoconservatives and liberal internationalists may be precisely what will keep us from owning the mission -- and that lack of ownership is an insurance policy against getting politically bogged down in Libya as the weeks drag on. I don't think Obama has been timid; I think he has been sly. It has been precisely the deep skepticism of intervention in Libya from some quarters of the administration that has forced the Arab League and the Europeans to pony up and relieve us of the political burden.

?This Could Be Obama's Defining Moment - By Shadi Hamid
Shadi Hamid is director of research at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

One hopes that military intervention in Libya (or merely the threat of it) will succeed in ending Muammar Qaddafi's brutal regime. If it does, it may convince the United States that doing the right thing is sometimes the right thing to do. After five decades of supporting repressive autocracies, Washington has a chance to align itself with Arab democratic aspirations, something it has so far failed to do three months into the uprisings. Libya, then, could prove a defining moment for the Obama administration, compelling it to embrace, however reluctantly, a policy of aggressive support for democrats and democracy in the new Middle East.

However reluctntly, indeed. It's worse than breaking an addiction, whether supporting tyrants with oil, killing non-combatants with drone strikes, sucking up to transnational corporations making campaign contributions, overlooking official torture or turning a deaf ear to the cries of the poor.

?The Security Council Has At Last Lived Up To Its Duty - By Kenneth Roth
Kenneth Roth is executive director of Human Rights Watch.

The Arab League also played an essential role by easing its usual opposition to Security Council action against its members. The league had watched silently as Sudan's Omar al-Bashir committed crimes against humanity in Darfur -- or, less recently, as Iraq's Saddam Hussein massacred Shia and Kurds, and Syria's Hafez al-Asad destroyed the town of Hama. But the league apparently sensed the winds of change wafting through the Middle East and North Africa, and felt compelled to respond. The Egyptian presidential aspirations of the leagues' secretary-general, Amr Moussa, certainly helped as well.

?How to Save Benghazi - By Robert Pape

...sustain the people of eastern Libya without imposing regime change on Tripoli, invading Libya, or seizing its oil. It will also provide the core framework for a political transformation of Libya over time, with the West and the Arab world on the right side of history.

(Huh? I may be misreading what's happening, but this seems a bit off the mark.)

?A Day to Celebrate, But Hard Work Ahead - By Anne-Marie Slaughter
A Princeton professor and former State Department policy planner cites five "takeaways" including this interesting observation of the UN resolution which

"Decides that all States shall deny permission to any aircraft registered in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya or owned or operated by Libyan nationals or companies to take off from, land in or overfly their territory" with various enumerated exceptions like emergency landings and flights specifically approved by a U.N. appointed committee. This provision effectively prevents Qaddafi's sons or other relatives and high-level supporters from bailing out, leaving him to fight to the death. They cannot flee, and thus must live or die with him. As the military noose tightens, they are less and less likely to want to share his professed desire for martyrdom on Libyan soil, increasing the pressure on him to go.

This observation of nations abstaining from the UN resolution is good.

What do Brazil, Germany, and India -- each of which abstained alongside Russia and China -- have in common? Their protestations of concern for the general principal of non-intervention ring hollow...

...Abstention was first-class pandering. That might not seem so bad -- after all, the resolution passed. But this resolution is one of the first to authorize the use of force with an explicit reference to the responsibility to protect. In 2006 the Security Council passed a resolution, which was also endorsed by the U.N. General Assembly, accepting that all governments have a responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and grave and systematic war crimes and that if they fail in that responsibility the international community has the right to intervene. This was an enormous normative step forward, akin to an international Magna Carta, even if it will take decades to elaborate and implement. It is the state corollary to the recognition of individual human rights with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1949 and subsequent more specific treaties. For would-be members of the Security Council, a willingness to stand up for this principle is a true test of leadership, the kind of leadership that a great power must be willing to exercise. By that metric, Germany, Brazil, and India just failed.

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Plus, from FP's blogs:

?The World, Yes -- The U.S., Maybe Less So - By Steven M. Walt

?The U.S. Even More So - By Kori Schake

?As Quickly As Possible - By Thomas E. Ricks

?With Fingers Crossed - By Peter Feaver

?Yes or No, It's About Obama - By David Rothkopf

?The Real Question Is, How Will the World Get Out? - By Marc Lynch
Lynch expresses serious misgivings, concerned about what might happen if Operation Odysset Dawn slides into the quagmire stage.

...Despite the bracing scenes of Benghazi erupting into cheers at the news of the Resolution, Arab support for the intervention is not nearly as deep as it seems and will not likely survive an extended war. If Libyan civilians are killed in airstrikes, and especially if foreign troops enter Libyan territory, and images of Arabs killed by U.S. forces replace images of brave protestors battered by Qaddafi's forces on al-Jazeera, the narrative could change quickly into an Iraq-like rage against Western imperialism. What began as an indigenous peaceful Arab uprising against authoritarian rule could collapse into a spectacle of war and intervention.

[...]  War advocates prefer to focus on the urgency of action, usually minimizing the likely risks and costs of war, exaggerating the likely benefits, and discounting the viability of all non-military courses of action -- exactly the script on Libya the last few weeks. Thinking about the messy endgame would only complicate such advocacy, and so it gets set aside.

My own view is somewhat jaundiced.
Operation Odyssey Dawn is hardly Operation Overlord but the dynamic is not all that different.
A rogue in a pack of fellow-rogues finally went too far and the pack is eating him alive.