Questions After Qaddafi

Muammar el-Qaddafi has reportedly been killed.  In the immediate aftermath, The New Yorker's Amy Davidson, as always, asks the right questions:   "If he was killed, how?  As a prisoner or a fugitive?  Was it a NATO strike, or was he shot in a gunfight?  Was he captured alive, and then killed?  (That matters, even for him.)  Who is left in his circle, who has been captured, will they be tried, and by whom?  Most of all, what comes next?"

And we can’t forget our own role there.

Libyans seized their country with their own hands and now will build their own future. But our planes and our bombs helped; we are involved. (Though it’s worth remembering, amid talk of the vindication of that decision, that Congress was not consulted, or not adequately; we need to have a better domestic conversation about that.) We didn’t want to turn away from the people of Benghazi; what is our responsibility for the settlement after the storm? Maybe there was golden pistol: there are, in war and peace, very few silver bullets.

Every Casualty: The Human Face Of War

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The idea of recording, identifying and acknowledging each individual victim of armed conflict - and holding to account those responsible - extends the principles underlying the laws of war.

From the Soviet Union to Libya, the story of a single American submarine - the USS Florida - throws light on the transition to the post-cold-war world. The Florida was an Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarine launched in 1981, at the start of the most dangerous period of that conflict, and commissioned two years later. It was then one of the most powerful warships ever built.

At the start of its career, the Florida was equipped with twenty-four vertical missile launch-tubes, each carrying a Trident missile. Each missile was fitted with multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles (the so-called MIRVs) armed with W-87 thermonuclear warheads rated at nearly 500,000 tonnes of explosive power. The Florida, to put it bluntly, could have destroyed every city in the old Soviet Union, and with bombs to spare - such was the ludicrous overkill of those supposedly stable days.

With the end of the cold war, the Soviets and Americans began to scale down their strategic nuclear arsenals. The Ohio-class boats, however, had plenty of life left in them and the search was on to find them new roles. The Florida was one of four boats in the class that were converted into a new role - carrying conventionally-armed Tomahawk cruise-missiles. The Florida had good potential as a cruise-missile boat. Its launch-tubes were adapted to take multiple capsules for the missiles, allowing it to deploy 154 Tomahawks instead of the mere twenty-four Trident ones.

The Tomahawk missile itself has been around since the 1970s. The ground-launched nuclear-armed version was deployed in the early 1980s - amid huge political controversy and demonstrations - at European bases such as England’s Greenham Common. There were also nuclear-armed and conventionally-armed sea-launched Tomahawks carried on warships and submarines; a modern version of the latter, the UGM-109E Tomahawk land-attack missile (TLAM-Block4), is on the Florida.

The capacity of each missile in this range is immense. It can operate in all weathers, and  night or day; it has a reach of up to 2,480 kilometres; it can carry either a high-explosive “unitary” warhead or large numbers of cluster-munitions; and it has a guidance and targeting computer that is fully integrated inThis military story has an obvious strategic aspect, namely that these modified Ohio-class boats provide the United States with yet another form of global strike. But it also carries an equally obvious but far less noted consequence: that these missiles are used to kill people, and the identity and fate of those on the receiving end are no part of this military or any other story (see "The casualties of war: Libya and beyond", 7 July 2011) to the US navy's network-centric system, involving inputs from multiple sources including satellites and reconnaissance drones.

The cost

Why is all this “anorak” stuff worth mentioning? The reason is that the Florida was a few months ago nearing the end of a fifteen-month-long around-the-world patrol that kept it away from its home base in the United States. Then, in March 2011, the air-campaign against the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya was launched - and the Florida was by then near enough Libya’s coastline to be called into service. In the event, this boat alone is reported to have fired about 130 of its missiles at targets across northern Libya at the start of the war (see Christopher P Cavas, “U.S. Sub Force Sharpens its Sense of Self”, Defense News, 29 August 2011).

The Age Of High Tech War: After Libya

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

There is intense rethinking in the Pentagon about the “war on terror.”  The outcome of the Libyan conflict will reinforce its principal trends.

When Donald Rumsfeld was appointed George W Bush's defence secretary in 2001, he had the clear aim of fighting wars with minimal “boots on the ground”. From that point, the United States would fight its enemies mainly from the air and the sea.

This vision of a high-tech military age saw armies as increasingly redundant.

After the 9/11 atrocities this line of thinking was exemplified in the termination of the Taliban: the chief instruments were air-power, a rearming of the Northern Alliance of warlords, and the deployment of a few hundred special forces to target, coordinate and undertake some direct raids.
The vision gained further momentum in the destruction of the Saddam Hussein regime in March-April 2003: here the operation used air-power, multiple rocket-launchers, and far fewer troops than had been used to push the Iraqis out of Kuwait in 1991.

By 1 May 2003, when Bush made his famous “mission accomplished” speech on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, Rumsfeld and his associates seemed vindicated. Afghanistan and Iraq were coming under western influence, including hosting big US bases; several central Asian republics were providing facilities that would increase US capabilities in an oil- and gas-rich region; and Iran, it was believed, would be constrained by the much bigger US military footprint in the region. Perhaps most welcome of all was the conviction that Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq would establish a truly free-market economy with minimal financial regulation, a flat-rate tax system and wholesale privatisation of state assets.

It all went desperately wrong. A new report by the Oxford Research Group maps the damage (see A War Gone Badly Wrong - The War on Terror Ten Years On, September 2011). This cites the Eisenhower Research Project study that estimates the human and financial cost at 225,000 people killed, 7.8 million refugees and $4,000 billion potentially spent (see "The harvest of war: from pain to gain", 28 October 2010).

The costs and the ambitions persist: plans are reported to keep US soldiers in Afghanistan until 2024, the withdrawal from an insecure Iraq is proving problematic, and al-Qaida affiliates are active in west and east Africa as well as south Asia (see "Al-Qaida: an enduring insurgency", 1 September 2011).

Libya: A Time For Patience

By Vidar Helgesen, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The task of building a democratic and inclusive Libya with working institutions must overcome the international community’s key flaw as well as the Gaddafi regime’s legacy

In the wake of the tumultuous end-days of Muammar Gaddafi’s forty-two-year regime, Libya faces the daunting challenge of turning the private networks of loyalty he created into a democratic state-building process. To meet it, Libya and the international community must work together in an imaginative way that combines decisive short-term policy with careful longer-term vision.

The immediate priorities are to establish security, law and order, to restore basic services, and to provide humanitarian assistance. These must be followed soon by a reinvigoration of Libya’s economy, in particular oil production, which accounts for almost all of Libya’s national income. The question here is how to establish a framework for the administration and distribution of oil revenues in a post-Gaddafi Libya. This will take time and the risk of corruption is high.

This particular task indicates Libya’s longer-term strategic priority: to develop institutions in a country whose basic existence and ideology have for decades been reliant on the very absence of institutions (see Fred Halliday, "Libya's regime at 40: a state of kleptocracy", 8 September 2009).

In practice this means writing a new constitution that determines the country’s form of government, establishing political parties, and forming a parliament. In Libya, this work will be even harder than elsewhere; for its singular experience of dictatorship means that it starts from the equivalent of a blank slate (Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge and East Timor after Indonesia, different from Libya as they are, offer a point of comparison).

Libyan Buzz Kill

There is no question that Qaddafi is a very bad man and we should all rejoice at the crumbling of his regime and his imminent removal from power.  And it is hard not be moved by the genuine and justifiable joy and relief expressed by the Libyan people celebrating the demise of a despot. 

And it is endlessly amusing to watch the Republicans trying to cope with what appears for the moment to be a foreign policy success by President Obama.  Particularly noteworthy are the clownish antics of Senators McCain and Graham who have the audacity to criticize the President for not intervening sooner (conveniently ignoring their trip to Libya two years ago when they cozied up to Qaddafi). 

But it is far too early to claim vindication for Obama's strategy, and many aspects of our involvement in Libya should be deeply troubling.  To recap, authorization for action by NATO was based on a United Nations resolution with the ostensible goal to protect civilians who it was claimed, with little in the way of proof, were being massacred by Qaddafi.  This objective quickly morphed into support for the rebels and regime change, with more increasingly intensified attacks that undoubtedly killed many civilians.

Obama, with an optimism that echoed the Bush Administration contended that hostilities would last mere weeks.  More disturbing, if not illegal, was his administration's refusal to consult with Congress as required by the War Powers Act, based on a transparently untenable justification -- the lack of  any serious threat of U.S. casualties. 

And while Obama has tried to downplay our role in Libya, as Amy Davidson states, the United States and NATO "have also increased their coordination, and quite a bit."  She notes an AP report that refers to our involvement as an “open secret”:  "Covert forces, private contractors and U.S. intelligence assets were thrown into the fight in an undercover campaign operating separately from the NATO command structure."

Even if Obama has been reluctant to admit that we have been involved in "hostilities," Davidson argues, "we have been conducting military activities that aim to overthrow a government; our troops are flying and dropping bombs that kill people—and just because they may be bad people does not make this operation something it isn’t."

And thus we have achieved what Conor Friedersdorf has called a "Pyrrhic victory" for America:

Obama has violated the Constitution; he willfully broke a law that he believes to be constitutional; he undermined his own professed beliefs about executive power, and made it more likely that future presidents will undermine convictions that he purports to hold; in all this, he undermined the rule of law and the balance of powers as set forth by the framers; and he did it all needlessly, because had he gone to Congress at the beginning and asked for permission to wage war they almost certainly would've granted it.

I agree with Glenn Greenwald who is "genuinely astounded at the pervasive willingness to view what has happened in Libya as some sort of grand triumph even though virtually none of the information needed to make that assessment is known yet, including:  how many civilians have died, how much more bloodshed will there be, what will be needed to stabilize that country and, most of all, what type of regime will replace Qadaffi?"

As Davidson concludes: 

if we are not honest about our role, then how will we assess our responsibility for whatever regime takes Qaddafi’s place? Our vagueness about what we are doing encourages a certain incuriousness about whom we are doing it for. The impolite fiction about “no hostilities” might have been sustainable, in a public-relations sense, when the Libyan war was in a stalemate. Now, with armies on the move and cities falling, it has to be reckoned with.

Lowering America's War Ceiling?

By Tom Engelhardt, cross-posted from TomDispatch.

By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time.  It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horserace, had eaten LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage before an audience of millions to enact a psychotic spectacle of American decline.

And yet, among the dramatis personae we’ve been watching, there are clearly missing actors.  They happen to be out of town, part of a traveling roadshow.  When it comes to their production, however, there has, of late, been little publicity, few reviewers, and only the most modest media attention.  Moreover, unlike the scenery-chewing divas in Washington, these actors have simply been going about their business as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

On July 25th, for instance, while John Boehner raced around the Capitol desperately pressing Republican House members for votes on a debt-ceiling bill that Harry Reid was calling dead-on-arrival in the Senate, America’s new ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, took his oath of office in distant Kabul.

According to the New York Times, he then gave a short speech “warning” that “Western powers needed to ‘proceed carefully’” and emphasized that when it came to the war, there would “be no rush for the exits.”

War Is A War Is A War

Tom Engelhardt reminds us that three reviled phrases from the Bush Adminstration -- “regime change,” “shock and awe,” and “imperial presidency.” -- are making quite a comback, as exemplified by the war in Libya.  It is obvious that Obama, with our allies in NATO, is engaged in removing  Qaddafi from power.  They are attempting to do so with what Engelhardt characterizes as a "modified version of shock and awe," with predator drones, as well as jets and helicopters.  And, as Jonathan Schell writes below, Obama is insisting on an untenable justification for refusing to consult with Congress in compliance with the War Powers Act.

The Attacking Libya -- And The Dictionary
If Americans Don’t Get Hurt, War Is No Longer War

By Jonathan Schell, originally posted at TomDispatch, June 21, 2011.

The Obama administration has come up with a remarkable justification for going to war against Libya without the congressional approval required by the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

American planes are taking off, they are entering Libyan air space, they are locating targets, they are dropping bombs, and the bombs are killing and injuring people and destroying things. It is war. Some say it is a good war and some say it is a bad war, but surely it is a war.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration insists it is not a war. Why?  Because, according to “United States Activities in Libya,” a 32-page report that the administration released last week, “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.”

In other words, the balance of forces is so lopsided in favor of the United States that no Americans are dying or are threatened with dying. War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying, when we die.  When only they, the Libyans, die, it is something else for which there is as yet apparently no name. When they attack, it is war. When we attack, it is not.

American Militarism Is Not A Fairy Tale

As Tom Engelhardt points out, "with the latest news that the U.S. has launched a significant 'intensification' of its secret air campaign against Yemeni tribesmen believed to be connected with al-Qaeda, the U.S. is now involved in no less than six wars."

That would be Iraq ("dregs of a counterinsurgency operation" which will morph into "a gargantuan, increasingly militarized State Department “mission”); Afghanistan ("full-scale U.S. Army-run counterinsurgency war, backed by a major special operations/CIA counterterror war"); Pakistan ("full-scale CIA-run drone war in the Pakistani borderlands is actually expanding"); Yemen (“covert air war, being run by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, closely coordinated with the CIA"); Libya ("officially a NATO air war, this one is nonetheless partially run by the Pentagon with targeting assistance from various U.S. intelligence agencies"); and what used to be called the Global War on Terror ("U.S. special operations forces now pursue war-on-terror tasks in at least 75 countries").

At his great website TomDispatch (which he allows me to cross-post here on Fair and Unbalanced), Engelhardt writes the following in his preface to William Astore's piece, also cross-posted below:

Think of all this as a kind of mix-and-match version of war that increasingly integrates civilian branches of the government like the State Department, an ever more warlike CIA (once known as “the president’s private army”), the regular Army, Marines, and Air Force, ever-growing drone air power (split between an officially civilian intelligence agency and the military), and a secret combined military force of perhaps 20,000 special operatives.

Siamese Twins Sharing the Same Brain
How the Military and the Civilian Are Blurring In Washington

By William J. Astore, originally published at TomDispatch, June 14, 2011.

I have a fairy tale for you.  Once upon a time, a representative democracy was established with a constitution that distilled the wisdom of the ages.  Its foundational principles included civilian control of the military and a system of checks and balances that encouraged vigorous public debate as a basis for effective policy-making.

The Wild West v. International Justice

After 9/11, any suggestion that terror suspects could be questioned, arrested and tried as criminals in the United States was widely ridiculed.  President Bush said he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," setting a tone for the war on terror which eschewed law and justice for extraordinary rendition, torture, wiretapping and, finally, assassination.

Bin Laden was hunted down by Navy SEALS, reportedly shot in the eye, and unceremoniously dumped into the sea.  What a stark and ignoble contrast to the arrest by Serbian police of Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military leader was also allegedly responsible for the killing thousands.  Mladic is believed to have overseen the worst massacre of civilians in Europe since the Second World War.  But instead of targeting him for assassination, the Serbs adhered to international standards of justice and had him extradited to the Hague to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes.

As John Feffer wrote in Huffington Post, "the peaceful arrest of Mladic, which signaled that Serbia is ready to become embedded in the web of rules and regulations of the EU, was a rite of passage. In contrast, the United States got its man, but demonstrated that it still hasn't grown out of its comic-book phase."

President Obama hailed Mladic's arrest as an "important day" for "international justice," and declared that: "From Nuremberg to the present, the United States has long viewed justice for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide as both a moral imperative and an essential element of stability and peace."  This raises the question that Glenn Greenwald asks, "if 'justice' demands that this heinous Serbian war criminal be arrested and tried before being punished, why was the same not true for bin Laden?"

Another disturbing question concerns the attitude of the United States towards international law.  With Mladic's arrest, Obama and other U.S. officials paid lip service to the international system of justice, avoiding the awkward reality that this country is not a member of the International Criminal Court, which was established in 2002, to "bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind - war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide."  Martin Shaw writes, in the article below, originally published at openDemocracy, about the precariousness of international order in light of the refusal of the United States to meaningfully participate. 

International Justice, Wild West v. ICC:  A Coming Crisis

By Martin Shaw, originally published at OpenDemocracy, on May 31, 2011.

Two of the world’s most notorious mass murderers and fugitives from justice, Osama bin Laden and Ratko Mladic, have been apprehended in a single month. This should be cause for great celebration, but instead the contrasting outcomes of these events only underline the precariousness of international order and international law.

Welcome To Post-Legal America

Everyone knows that in the United States if you’re a robber caught breaking into someone’s house, you’ll be brought to trial, but if you’re caught breaking into someone else’s country, you’ll be free to take to the lecture circuit, write your memoirs, or become a university professor. -- Tom Engelhardt

I have written before about the Obama Adminstration's refusal to hold accountable those in the Bush Administration who authorized torture and how damaging it is to not have a true reckoning that confirms once and for all not just the immorality, but the illegality of torture.  (See, e.g., Pitfalls of Only Looking Forward, Tortured Logic.)  As I previously stated, "if we are to remain a nation of laws then when high government officials break the law or cynically bend the law to justify human rights violations there needs to be consequences."  (No Spain, No Gain.)  As Tom Engelhardt explains, in a great new piece on TomDispatch, which he kindly allows me to re-post here, by failing to bring wrongdoers to justice while instead prosecuting whistle blowers, we are indeed becoming a country that is no longer governed by the rule of law.

Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal? 

Post-Legal America and the National Security Complex

By Tom Engelhardt, originally posted at TomDispatch, on May 30, 2011.

Is the Libyan war legal?  Was Bin Laden’s killing legal?  Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination?  Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks.  Each seems to call out for debate, for answers.  Or does it?
Now, you couldn’t call me a legal scholar.  I’ve never set foot inside a law school, and in 66 years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial when the civil suit was settled out of court).  Still, I feel at least as capable as any constitutional law professor of answering such questions.

My answer is this: they are irrelevant.  Think of them as twentieth-century questions that don't begin to come to grips with twenty-first century American realities.  In fact, think of them, and the very idea of a nation based on the rule of law, as a reflection of nostalgia for, or sentimentality about, a long-lost republic.  At least in terms of what used to be called “foreign policy,” and more recently “national security,” the United States is now a post-legal society.  (And you could certainly include in this mix the too-big-to-jail financial and corporate elite.)

It’s easy enough to explain what I mean. If, in a country theoretically organized under the rule of law, wrongdoers are never brought to justice and nobody is held accountable for possibly serious crimes, then you don’t have to be a constitutional law professor to know that its citizens actually exist in a post-legal state.  If so, “Is it legal?” is the wrong question to be asking, even if we have yet to discover the right one.

Libya: The Costs Of Stalemate

By Paul Rogers, originally posted at openDemocracy, May 19, 2011

http://seheho.blogspot.com/

The course of the war in Libya was set on 14 April 2011, when a joint statement from three western leaders (Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Nicolas Sarkozy) made it clear that the core aim of the NATO operation launched almost a month earlier was regime termination. The protection of civilians remained the formal objective enshrined in United Nations Security Resolution 1973, but the unequivocal view that Gaddafi had to go was revealing of the real intention of the most powerful combatant states (see “Libya: the view from the bunker”, 21 April 2011).

Since then, as the air-strike campaign begun in the late evening of 19 March reaches its two-month mark, the war has turned into a stalemate. On the ground, the anti-Gaddafi rebels make occasional progress (as in Misrata during the past week), but they do not pretend to any ability to unseat the regime.

As the conflict has developed NATO has intensified its air-assaults, with more focused targeting on core regime command-and-control sites in Tripoli. In the four weeks to 26 April, for example, Nato’s 3,981 air-sorties included 1,658 strike-sorties (see Tom Kington, “Managing Limited Assets”, Defense News, 2 May 2011). Yet the British armed-forces chief, General David Richards, acknowledges that the effort so far is insufficient: Nato must upgrade its operations even further to achieve its objectives in the war.

America's Military: Failures Of Success

By Paul Rogers, originally published at openDemocracy , May 12, 2011.

The afterglow of Osama bin Laden’s killing fuels the United States’ confidence in its shift towards integration of military and security policy.  But it is another grand illusion and missed opportunity.

 Three actions undertaken by western forces in three different countries in the second week of May 2011 are connected by a single feature:  the “transnationalisation” of warfare, whereby national boundaries and sovereignty count for less and less:

* In Pakistan early on May 2nd, a United States “Seal” team killed Osama bin Laden
* In Libya, a NATO air-raid on May 1st that hit Muammar Gaddafi’s compound came close to the leader, instead killing one of his sons and two grandchildren
* In Yemen on May 6th, an armed-drone attack that targeted the radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki killed two people.

The pursuit by states of enemies across frontiers is not new. The approach was practised by European powers in the colonial era; by the United States (for example in Latin America) and the Soviet Union (for example in Afghanistan) during the cold war; and since the 1980s most intensively by Israel.

The above cases of military action by western forces suggest that, within this overall context, a redirection of this trend may be developing. Some changes in US security policy and personnel provide further evidence of this.

Al-Qaida And The Arab Spring After Bin Laden

By Paul Rogers, originally posted at openDemocracy, May 5, 2011.

The euphoria in the United States that greeted Osama bin Laden's death in Pakistan early on 2 May 2011 reflects how far he had been the focus for the “war on terror” declared by George W Bush in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The al-Qaida leader's actual role in the movement may have diminished in recent years, but his mere existence was an enduring source of American dismay: a living symbol of Washington’s inability to kill or capture its chief global adversary (see "America vs al-Qaida: the widening war", 11 November 2010).

This national wound was revealed by President Obama’s differential arguments over Iraq and Afghanistan: the former was a bad war (of choice) which now demanded the withdrawal of US forces, whereas the latter was a good war (of necessity) because it connected directly with 9/11 through the continuing presence of al-Qaida.

Osama bin Laden’s active leadership al-Qaida had long receded, though he remained an iconic figure during a decade of the movement’s dispersal (see Omar al-Qattan, "Disneyland Islam", 17 October 2001). There is now too little residual connection between the Taliban and al-Qaida. The Obama administration’s signals of willingness to negotiate a progressive withdrawal from Afghanistan too, even if it involves talking to the Taliban, may reflect its understanding of this reality.

The administration's problem in pursuing this strategy has been that the Republican right - sharing and (via the media) amplifying the view of many Americans that the Taliban and al-Qaida are interchangeable - would depict any lessening of military commitment in Afghanistan as a sign of presidential weakness. Bin Laden’s death, in removing al-Qaida’s figurehead and breaking the Afghanistan-9/11 connection, partially resolves that problem: Obama now has an opportunity to speed up the withdrawal before the presidential-election campaign for 2012 gets underway (see "Afghanistan: between war and politics", 28 April 2011).

Slippery Slope

Tom Tomorrow captures the slippery nature of the "humanitarian" intervention in Libya. Scroll down and click on the Tom Tomorrow image on the right hand panel for a link to the full comic.

The Cost Of Error

Paul Rogers wrote the following piece in openDemocracy, about an incident in the Libyan conflict which may turn out to be "pivotal in shaping the fate both of the anti-Gaddafi effort and of western military intervention."

Libya, And The Decisive Moment

by Paul Rogers, April 14, 2011

The Saddam Hussein regime was terminated in three weeks in 2003, but the war in Iraq that followed lasted seven years. The Taliban were gone in eight weeks in 2001, but the war in Afghanistan will soon enter its second decade. In each case, an early incident gave some idea of what was to come, even if its significance was appreciated only later. In Libya, four weeks into the war, one such incident has occurred which may prove to be a similar marker (see “Libya and a decade’s war”.)

In Iraq, it came five months into the war: the bombing in August 2003 of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. The twenty-two people killed included the gifted diplomat and head of mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello, as well as the openDemocracy columnist Arthur C Helton. The assault demonstrated the ruthlessness of the incipient insurgency, a point accentuated by the fact that the building’s canteen had already acquired the reputation as a rare “safe space” in Baghdad where people of diverse opinions and factions could meet (see "America's entrapment," and "A hard road in Iraq.").

In Afghanistan, it came at a slightly later stage, six months into the conflict: an engagement in March 2002 by United States forces in the mountains near Gardez, around 150 kilometres south of Kabul. The prevailing assumption of the time was that the Taliban and their al-Qaida associates were in full retreat, yet they were capable of launching a sustained attack that killed or injured forty American troops (see "The spiral of war."). It took four more years before the United States and its NATO partners became fully apprised of the security vacuum that they had created, by which time the Taliban had retaken control of much of Afghanistan.

In Libya, a less high-profile incident scarcely three weeks into the war may yet acquire comparable significance. The international intervention began on 19-20 March with intensive French and American air-raids on Muammar Gaddafi's armoured columns as the latter headed for the eastern, rebel-held city of Benghazi. The raids are likely to have prevented the deaths of many civilians in the city, yet they also left a trail of dead and wounded soldiers in their wrecked vehicles on a littered road.

The retreat of Gaddafi’s forces allowed the rebels to advance rapidly along the coast towards the key regime stronghold of Sirte and to seize the oil-and-gas terminals at Brega and Ras Lanuf; they thereby gained control of most of Libya's oil-and-gas export capacity. This progress did not last. The Tripoli regime’s forces reorganised themselves into small mobile units that were almost impossible to disrupt from the air. By the end of the first week of April 2011, the rebels - ill-trained, under-armed and lacking coherence as a fighting force - were pushed back towards Benghazi.

Yet rebel sources had at this point managed to assemble a number of tanks, artillery-pieces and large transporters to spearhead a counter-attack. They expected that Nato would provide air-cover to allow them unhindered use of these weapons, while using air-attack to deny Gaddafi's troops the chance to deploy tanks and artillery in countering their advance. This might even become the conflict’s turning-point (see "Libya's war, history's shadow.")

Libya: War Or Peacekeeping?

Professor Paul Rogers, in a new column in openDemocracy, notes the "uncomfortable parallels" between Afghanistan-Iraq and what is happening in Libya - including the prospect of an extended, complex and costly war."  Rogers points out the surprising resilience of Gaddafi's forces, which have "sufficient numbers of reliable soldiers to be able to face down the lightly armed rebels."  He also asserts that NATO/American "extensive use of airpower has not yet decisively aided the rebels."  As a result, "a growing element of 'mission creep'" is becoming more likely, with more intensive air power, the deployment of British and French special forces and American CIA operatives, and the possible arming of the rebels.  At the same time, there is "palpable unease in the region and beyond about the expanding NATO operation. (Libyan Intervention In Context.)

Are there any alternatives to another long and costly war?  Mary Kaldor, Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance and a Professor of Global Governance at the London School of Economics, argues for utilizing a peacekeeping force in eastern Libya followed by an attempt at a negotiated settlement, and a political process aimed at demilitarization.  Her article, originally published in openDemocracy is set forth below:

Libya:  War Or Humanitarian Intervention?

Mary Kaldor, March 29, 2011

In the end the prospects for democracy depend on whether the rebels can mobilise support politically throughout Libya. The problem with the military approach is that it entrenches division. Our preoccupation with classic military means is undermining our capacity to address growing insecurity.

There is a difference between war and humanitarian intervention, or as I prefer to call it, a human security intervention. The current attacks on Libya, like the NATO air strikes over Yugoslavia in 1999, are intended for humanitarian ends, the protection of civilians but the means are those of war. Certainly the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 was a huge achievement just in time to prevent Gaddafi forces from overrunning Benghazi. The resolution called on member states and regional organizations to ‘take all necessary measures... to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory’.

But are military attacks from the air an appropriate means?  As Amr Moussa, Secretary General of the Arab League and potential candidate for Egyptian President, put it (even though he later retracted):  ‘What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of a no-fly zone. What we want is the protection of civilians not the bombardment of more civilians.’

Libyan Intervention In Context

The following post, originally published in openDemocracy, makes the key point that intervention in Libya should not be considered in isolation and emphasizes the importance of considering how such actions are viewed by Arab countries.  As the author, Professor Paul Rogers puts it, while "the diplomatic context of the anti-Gaddafi war is different from that of earlier western military interventions in the Arab world, its motives, methods, silences, and falsities are all too familiar."

Libya's War, History's Shadow

By Paul Rogers, March 24, 2011

The Libya war is shifting from the status of an internal to an international conflict, as western forces degrade Libya’s air-defences and general ability to deliver air-power. A campaign that started with French air-raids against troops and armour of the Muammar Gaddafi regime advancing on the eastern city of Benghazi on 19 March 2011 has continued with air- and missile-attacks against a wider set of Libyan naval and army targets.
These vigorous attacks from the three leading members of the coalition - France, the United States, and Britain - have not yet disabled the Gaddafi regime or prevented it from threatening some of the rebel areas, notably the town of Misrata to the east of Tripoli.

The coalition forces have now begun the more complex task of trying to target regime forces operating in urban areas. The likely pattern is that loyalist soldiers will quickly learn how to avoid exposure to attack, with many potential operations against them curtailed to avoid civilian casualties.

It is already apparent that early expectations of sudden regime collapse among some western analysts have proved unfounded. This outcome - one that Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron and Barack Obama must devoutly wish for - is still possible. But it is safer to assume that Gaddafi will survive for some weeks and possibly much longer.

Moreover, even the leader’s flight into exile (a possibility floated both by Britain’s foreign secretary on 21 February, and by the US secretary of state on 23 March) may not lead to wholesale regime implosion: the rebel forces are quite weak, and tens of thousands of Libyans have a vested interest in defending a system built on autocracy and largesse over four decades.

The coalition’s problems

The unusually robust United Nations Security Council mandate for the coalition’s operation means that the Libya war differs greatly from that against Iraq in 2003. But even in these early days the multiple problems facing the coalition are evident.

Many Questions; War Is Not The Answer

There are many questions about the parameters of the broadly worded U.N. Security Council resolution to take “all necessary measures” to “protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” in Libya and about our country's role.  And, so far, there are not nearly enough answers to justify U.S. involvement.

First, the resolution portends a far greater commitment than a no fly zone, which was already problematic.  As the Times reports, the language "was written in sweeping terms to allow for a wide range of actions, including strikes on air-defense systems and missile attacks from ships."  According to defense expert Robert Chesney, it is not only air power that has been authorized.  “Foreign occupation forces” are barred, but, as Chesney points out, this prohibition does not include all ground forces, only "occupation" forces.

Given this broad mandate for action, what happens next?  While Qaddafi has announced a cease fire in response to the U.N. resolution, it is hard to imagine that he is simply going to abide by it or allow the rebels to keep the land they currently control.  As Steve Benen says:  "Even if a cease-fire holds, it's unclear what kind of agreement would (or could) be reached between Qaddafi and the rest of the country that no longer intends to live under his rule. Does the West intend to allow Qaddafi to stay in power . . . and what happens if/when he resists?"

Spencer Ackerman quotes defense expert Andrew Exum, who questions whether there is authorization to continue to "press the advantage of the rebels until [Qaddafi's] government falls?"  Exum also wonders whether there will  be a long civil war, and if we will take sides.  As Adam Serwer asks, do we really know who the rebels are and what they ultimately want?  Massimo Calabresi at Time asserts that while it is possible rebel leaders could align themselves with us, "there has never been a powerful central state in Libya, and the country is split along tribal lines. There is little of the civil society or established middle class . . .  of more developed countries that have peacefully made the transition to democracy from authoritarianism."  In addition, part of the country that has fueled the uprising is where "much of Libya's Islamic radicalism" has been harbored.  The bottom line is that no one can predict what will emerge from a regime change.

A more fundamental question is whether we should be intervening at all?  Is Qaddafi actually committing war crimes with widespread atrocities and mass killing of innocent civilians?  While that would constitute humanitarian grounds for intervention, as Massimo Calabresi states, the Administration has so far refused to provide such evidence and "most of the reports coming out of Libya appear to indicate that the violence is between armed rebels and forces loyal to Qaddafi." 

And, finally, there is that old thorny question of separation of powers. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power "to declare war."  While the president does have the power to act in self-defense, Qaddafi's use of force is not a domestic threat to the United States.  So, isn't President Obama required to get explicit authorization from Congress before instituting military action?

With so many unanswered questions it is deeply troubling that the United States is about to embark on yet another military action.  "All we really know right now," as Adam Serwer concludes, "is that America is destined to own the outcome in Libya."

[Related posts:  Libyan Intervention Won't Fly]

Libyan Intervention Won't Fly

President Obama should be a lot more aggressive in pushing his domestic agenda and challenging the Republicans on budget issues and union busting, for example.  But I appreciate his careful approach in foreign affairs.  Thus, as intervention in Libya is being pushed by a wide swath of political leaders, from Bill Clinton to Bill Kristol, it seems to me that Obama is taking an appropriately prudent approach.

Undoubtedly, watching Muammar el-Qaddafi attack his own people while we doing nothing is painfully hard.  At the same time, it is pretty easy to throw around terms like "no fly zone" as if it were some kind of easy, cost-free solution.  But what would be required to institute a no fly zone, what would it really accomplish, and if it didn't work, what would we do next?  And, more fundamentally, should our country be acting alone without support not just of our European allies but the governments in the region?

On Sunday, Gen.Wesley Clark, writing in the Washington Post, answered these questions.  He contended that "before we aid the Libyan rebels or establish a no-fly zone," we should review what we have leaned "about intervening since we pulled out of Vietnam."  And after doing so, Clark concluded as follows:

To me, it seems we have no clear basis for action. Whatever resources we dedicate for a no-fly zone would probably be too little, too late. We would once again be committing our military to force regime change in a Muslim land, even though we can't quite bring ourselves to say it. So let's recognize that the basic requirements for successful intervention simply don't exist, at least not yet: We don't have a clearly stated objective, legal authority, committed international support or adequate on-the-scene military capabilities, and Libya's politics hardly foreshadow a clear outcome.

As Kevin Drum put it in a post last week, while we would all like to see the end of Qaddafi's rule, "Americans really need to get over the idea that we're the ones who control the fate of every hot spot in the world."