It is, by now, quite clear that the ultimate responsibility for the military intervention in Libya lay with the Obama administration. The White House was instrumental not only in passing, but also
in drafting the authorizing UNSC Resolution 1973. US forces have, so far, carried out
the overwhelming bulk of combat actions. What has led to these momentous developments? Thirteen days after the decision to intervene was taken (on
March 15th), the President
gave a speech in which he indicated the following motivation:
"Qaddafi declared he would show 'no mercy' to his own people. [...] In the past, we have seen him [...] kill over a thousand people in a single day. Now we saw regime forces on the outskirts of [Benghazi]. We knew that, if we waited one more day, Benghazi [...] could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. [...] And so nine days ago [...] I authorized military action to stop the killing"
The crucial intervention decision is therefore based on the following points:
- Qaddafi has a history of committing massacre, having killed over a thousand people in one day.
- Qaddafi declared that he would have no mercy for the citizens of Benghazi.
- Therefore, the military intervention has prevented this massacre from happening and is justified on humanitarian grounds.
This chain of reasoning is further confirmed by other statements. President Obama
declared on March 19th, when the air strikes began, that "we cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy". Samantha Power, his Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs, who was reportedly
the principal advocate for military intervention, confirmed in a
speech on March 28th (video; quoted remarks at 1:04:25) that
"In the case of Benghazi, the track record that Moammar Qaddafi had amassed both over the last four decades, in which on a single day he killed, executed 1200 people simply on suspicion of disloyalty, and the reports that we've gotten from the towns that he's overrun [...] and the special importance of Benghazi in the rebellion, I think that our best judgment was that what would have happened, had that town been overrun, would have been extremely chilling, deadly, and indeed again a stain on our collective conscience."
This is very strong rhetoric. Unfortunately, the cited facts do not stand the most basic scrutiny. The President's reasoning sadly proves to be based on nothing more than misremembered reports and twisted words. To put it shortly: the supposed mass killing was the consequence of a prison riot fifteen years ago; the reports from towns recaptured by Qaddafi indicate no massacres of civilian population; and the "no mercy" line was clearly only meant for armed rebels. Let us examine each point in turn.
First, the killing of "over one thousand in one day" cannot refer to recent events, since the total death toll for the Libyan civil war, over the last month and a half, is estimated (by the British government)
at about one thousand. Examining
Qaddafi's human rights record, there is only one event that can possibly fit the bill: the
1996 Abu Salim prison riot. Deplorably, even liberal democracies like the US have to use
lethal force
against prison riots
sometimes. Such an event does not qualify as "execut[ing] 1200 people simply on suspicion of disloyalty", and so it is quite obvious that Ms. Power must have based her crucial argument for intervention upon nothing more than a misremembered report. (Also, unsubstantiated: close reading of the report indicates that Human Rights Watch principally based this allegation upon the problematic testimony of an asylum-seeking former inmate, collected eight years after the event.)
Second, regarding the situation in cities captured by loyalist forces, there is no significant indication of civilian massacres. Conclusive proof for this occurred several days before President Obama and Ms. Power's speeches, with the rebels' recapture of the town of Ajdabiya. One of Libya's larger cities, it had revolted at the same time as Benghazi, was captured by loyalists a few days before the US intervention, and was
held by them for over a week. None of the "slaughter and mass graves" dramatically conjured by the President have occurred; the gravest irregularities reported from this city involve nothing more than
the looting of abandoned stores. In fact, the
detailed list of casualties from the Libyan conflict is perfectly consistent with a civil war in which loyalist forces are attacking rebels who
armed themselves and used violence from the start, with casualties in inverse proportion to each side's equipment and organization.
Finally, the infamous "no mercy" Qaddafi speech has been grossly misinterpreted. Upon considering the entire speech, the "no mercy" threat is clearly addressed to armed rebels. Not only did the same speech state that "soldiers would search every house in the city and
people who had no arms had no reason to fear", but Qaddafi simultaneously ordered his troops "not to pursue any protesters who drop their guns and flee when government forces reach the city". Did President Obama draw his information about this repeatedly cited speech from a single out-of-context line, or did he knowingly obfuscate the truth?
Because the truth is that, even on March 15th when the decision was taken, there was absolutely no indication that massacre was impending in Benghazi. On the contrary. Qaddafi had no history of massacre or genocide; in the one prison riot cited against him, the use of force was probably justified, and the number of fatalities highly uncertain. There existed no indication of massacres from cities retaken by loyalist forces, or of any systematic killings besides those incidental to urban firefights against armed rebels. Furthermore, Qaddafi had clearly stated that the unarmed citizens of Benghazi had nothing to fear, and that rebels who dropped their weapons would not be pursued.
The senior US government official who declared anonymously on March 20th that "the effort to
shoe-horn this into an imminent genocide model is strained" is thus proven correct. Absent the supposedly impending massacre in Benghazi, the President's entire elaborate justification for this unnecessary war falls apart. Libya is indeed not a liberal democracy; but only
85 out of the 192 countries of the world are "free and respectful of basic human rights and the rule of law", and a state of continuous, armed hostility towards the remaining 107, containing 62% of world population, is simply neither sustainable nor a practical tenet of foreign policy. The misguided commitment of military assets and political capital for the Libyan adventure will turn out, in the end, to be quite costly for the United States, and not just financially. The conflict has been artificially prolonged, with dozens of additional deaths each day. The cause of humanitarian intervention will be discredited by this intervention in support of armed,
religiously extremist rebels, instead of
unarmed civilians who are, in fact, routinely massacred by government airplanes. And, because of this attack based on flimsy evidence, upon one of the few countries that have
given up their nuclear weapons program, nuclear non-proliferation
has suffered a huge setback that will shape international relations for decades to come.
Thus, in retrospect, President Obama's fateful and poorly informed March 15th decision will most likely come to be regarded as nothing but a terrible blunder. The damage will be somewhat mitigated by the apparently imminent withdrawal of US combat troops, but most of it has been inflicted already.
