Beneath the Libyan Intervention

Behind the show of force, there are political considerations that do not necessarily follow the rules of the great game of foreign policy.

The first images of the attack on Libya call to mind the start of the Gulf War 20 year ago, or the U.S. attack on Gadhafi five years earlier in retaliation for a terrorist bombing in Berlin. But the establishment of a no-fly zone in Libya only came about following a long delay by Western capitals and a series of contentious diplomatic battles.

One month of dilatory tactics have already cost precious time, allowing Gadhafi to regain the initiative over the rebels holed up in Benghazi, spreading the specter of genocide over the country. The delay is already complicating the strategy of the coming weeks and interfering with the overthrow of the Libyan regime.

However, if governments are deliberately targeting the rogue leader of the Arab world, it is because there are also political considerations behind the show of force that do not necessarily follow the rules in the great game of foreign policy.

Strategic Considerations

The collective attack against Libya is an illustration of the implementation of coercive diplomacy, a middle ground between peacefully resolving a crisis and conducting a full-blown war, with all of the risks of error contained therein, as illustrated by the experiments of the 1990s.

Indeed, in Iraq and Bosnia the no-fly zone operations were failures. In both cases the allies had to use other forms of intervention. In Bosnia, coercive diplomacy was successful and led to the Dayton Peace Accords, which prescribed a ground operation with the goal of establishing a peacekeeping mission. In Iraq, on the other hand, coercive diplomacy composed of sanctions and no-fly zones did not even shake Saddam Hussein’s regime, legitimizing the ground intervention of 2003 in the eyes of American war hawks.

The Libyan operation lies on the Kosovo end of the spectrum: When Clinton launched air strikes in the Balkans in 1999, he excluded all ground deployment. Nevertheless, NATO finally chose the land option to protect the people of Kosovo. Thus, there is no reason to assert at this stage, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has, that there will be no ground operation in Libya. Because in coercive diplomacy, we know where it starts, but not where it will end.

The Ghost of Failure in Rwanda

Why did the Obama administration choose to intervene, but only timidly and belatedly by limiting its operations only to airspace, and only for a short time? The disagreements within the administration since the beginning of the “Arab Spring” are telling. The Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon, and chief counterterrorism advisor to the president John Brennan, fearing a new American quagmire in the Arab world and the presence of elements of AQIM (al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) in eastern Libya, were fiercely — and at times, publicly — opposed.

Their “defeat” was due to the dramatic reversal of Hillary Clinton, persuaded by the arguments of Samantha Power, who sits on the National Security Council, and Susan Rice, ambassador to the United Nations. These two had the Rwandan genocide in mind when speaking in favor of an intervention in Libya: The first conducted research on the failure of American foreign policy in Rwanda, published under the title “A Problem from Hell,” while the second was a witness to the events there as President Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.

It is undoubtedly this analogy, along with the intensification of Gadhafi’s offensive, which led Clinton to take the side of intervention and to convince President Obama in only a few hours. By getting the participation of the Arab States in support of the Security Council, and by obtaining the more or less active participation of a coalition of a dozen states, including the champions of peace missions such as Norway, Hillary Clinton has thus secured the limited agreement of the president.

And regardless of whether the United States tries to limit its role and convey the impression that it is only playing second fiddle, nothing would have been done, or could be done, without U.S. consent and firepower. Therefore, this decision is significant because it is truly Barack Obama’s first as commander in chief of the armed forces, and it could have a decisive impact on his presidency.

It could give him the confidence in foreign policy that has been noticeably lacking since the beginning of his term, and could bring him dividends at little cost. Indeed, if “Operation Odyssey Dawn” has any chance of leading to the rapid overthrow of the Gadhafi regime, the target was one of careful choice. In choosing to take on the pariah of the Arab world, geopolitical dilemmas were lessened.

Of course, countries that depend heavily on Libyan oil, like Italy, will have to readjust. But behind these purely strategic aspects reside political considerations that certain Western heads of state have chosen to exploit.

Political Considerations

Obviously, the Syrian, Jordanian, Yemeni and Bahraini revolutions will continue to unfold behind closed doors, a point for Western intervention, particularly in the Arabian Peninsula. That is not to say that the ongoing military operation will not end up having an impact. But the cost of an intervention would be politically much higher, in that Libya was a necessary but easy target.

In the U.S., where the Obama administration’s decision was divided between protecting national interests and defending democracy, the inconsistency of a policy turned firm, cautious or silent has fueled criticism more from the left (John Kerry) than from the right (John McCain).

In fewer than nine months from the beginning of the election year, while Republicans are starting to look for a leader, President Obama can no longer afford the luxury of appearing weak in foreign policy.

In France, it was against the advice of his prime minister and a part of the defense ministry that President Sarkozy, with the support of his foreign minister (and Bernard-Henri Levy!), put France on the front lines at the risk of offending its allies. It was the French government that, according to American diplomats, delayed the operation’s implementation by insisting on holding the summit in Paris and by opposing NATO’s participation, while triggering the first strikes before the 12 states gathered in the French capital had reached a conclusion.

With his poll numbers at their lowest, and with the full cantonal elections and the upcoming presidential election in one year, Sarkozy was hurt by his mistakes in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts, as well as the connections of his ministers with Arab despots. He set himself up a bit late as the defender of a besieged Benghazi, perhaps writing a hexagonal version of “Wag the Dog.”

Even in Britain, the Libyan affair is not bad for Prime Minister Cameron, who has been lambasted for his amateurism in foreign policy. Caught between the vote on an austerity budget and a controversial referendum on electoral reform, he has to win in this new position. For him, however, the instrumentalization of the Libyan situation could be costly.

Diplomacy

To be too cautious by intervening too little, too late, too selectively, by taking out one weak link of the Arab despots, or too cowardly by establishing a status quo without truly pushing for Gadhafi’s departure, the heads of the coalition could be entangling themselves in the Libyan question more than they had ever imagined. The scenario of this policy’s possible boomerang effect in turn evokes Libyan terrorism, the “Somaliazation” of Libya, and the discrediting of Western governments at the altar of the rule of double standards.

Ultimately, the key to the operation’s strategic success rests on the preservation of the Benghazi region and on the influence of the flight ban on the allegiance of the Libyan military. However, if coercive diplomacy fails to halt the exacerbation of repression and the commission of crimes against humanity, the coalition may be forced to implement a ground intervention that it will seriously regret, and that it had done everything it could to avoid.

Charles-Philippe David, Professor, Department of Political Science at UQAM, holds the Raoul Dandurand Chair in Strategic and Diplomatic Studies; Élisabeth Vallet, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at UQAM, and Director of Research at the geopolitical Raoul-Dandurand