R2P Or Picking Sides: A Dangerous Libyan Precedent

By Steve Hynd

Washington's foreign policy elite are beside themselves with glee right now at the belated success of the Libya policy they advocated so hard for. It's a modified version of the original Afghan invasion whereby the locals get to play the role of the "poor bloody infantry" and NATO provides airpower, with the US as hands-off as possible. All so as to prevent the "Pottery Barn scenario" of "you broke it, you're responsible for fixing it" that enmired the West in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems to have worked, although in months not days. I wonder if the US Army is watching events unfold and thinking "Ruh-roh, there goes our future budget"?

However, amongst the euphoria I'd like to be a wet blanket and recommend an excellent post by my friend, James Joyner, which brings up some needed questions. Questions like: but should we have intervened in the first place, even if the intervention seems successful?

while I'm thrilled at Gaddafi's ouster, none of my earlier views were rendered obsolete by yesterday's happy events.

First, I predicted that the arguments proffered for intervening would spawn calls for intervening in similar, if not more dire, circumstances. Anyone following the debate over the horrendous conduct of the Syrian regime knows that has happened.

Second, I predicted that the thin "population protection" mandate would soon be subject to mission creep, with regime change an obvious war aim and follow-on rebuilding and reconstruction likely ones. That's happened.

Third�and here I was at least partially wrong�I argued that, having undertaken the mission, we had an obligation to do more than hope for the best. Specifically, given weeks of indications that the rebel forces were not up to the fight even with the awesome backing of NATO air power and support, I argued that we needed a Plan B. Juan Cole argues, persuasively in hindsight, that the rebels were actually making much more steady progress than it appeared from a Western vantagepoint, which was overly focused on Benghazi and environs. Regardless, it certainly seems, as my colleague Barry Pavel argues, that "strategic patience, and persistence, pays off" and that some of us were lacking that quality. (A peril, perhaps, of living on Twitter Standard Time.)

Fourth, I warned that toppling Gaddafi would not end the struggle and that we needed to have a plan for what military planners call Phase IV: the handover and post-conflict management. This continues to be my chief concern.

Fifth, in terms of domestic politics, I argued that Obama's pretense that the United States was not involved in hostile activities and that the War Powers Act was therefore not operative was a dangerous precedent. While I'm not sure we'll ever go back to the days, as Leslie Gelb and Anne-Marie Slaughter recommended years ago, where Congress will actively declare wars and thereby take full responsibility for them, I nonetheless believe that perpetual war on the say-so of the president alone is undemocratic.

All that said, that Gaddafi is apparently no longer in power in Libya is a great thing, indeed.

I agree with most everything James writes, but would take issue with his third, and by extension fourth, points. Instead, I always felt that "Plan B" should have been to default back to non-intervention. The West called for this "right to protect" (R2P) war on the basis that there was a real and present danger of hundreds of thousands of civilians being massacred by pro-Gaddafi troops if it didn't. Yet in every case where Gaddafi loyalists retook a town from the rebels in the early days of the uprising, when the rebels were largely just unarmed protesters and before it had developed into two armed camps, mass reprisals and massacres singularly failed to happen. In later phases, it seems as though the rebel militias have been just as culpable for civilian deaths due to fighting to capture urban areas - and just as guilty of reprisals ( albeit both sides have done so on a far lower scale than we were led to expect). Non-intervention, even by withdrawing, would not have led to a massive humanitarian catastrophe, it seems.

Non-intervention or later withdrawal would have led to Gaddafi keeping power, yes, but would perhaps in time have led to peaceful regime change without bloodshed too. Not all revolutions have to happen now - the phrase about "strategic patience, and persistence" should be just as applicable before the bombing starts. It should also apply after the bombing stops. Libya's future should be for Libyans to decide upon.

But more crucially, it shouldn't be any part of an R2P mission to reduce civilian casualties by picking sides and thus hopefully shorten a war - as the original UN resolution made clear only to be ignored by NATO as it began "openly functioning as the air force of the opposition army." That logic leads to aggressive madness, where any war at all becomes an R2P excuse for armed medddling on behalf of a favored side. Yet that is the logic the US and its NATO allies have embraced and given precedent to. We should hope other nations - Russia, for example - don't embrace it too.

The success of this intervention, in terms of using it as aprecedent to justify future R2P wars, future mission creep and future lack of democratic accountability, may be a success we in the West could have done without. Libyans may be jubilant, and rightly so, but they'll never know how many lives could have been saved by waiting and taking a quieter, longer-term approach to revolution - and as James and many others are at pains to point out, we don't yet know how well that revolutions aftermath will turn out.