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The Libyan Intervention
Mar 23, 2011 Editorial
As western jets pound the positions of the forces of Colonel Gaddafi, including the latter’s compound, questions about the operation are beginning to surface, even within the countries that have taken the lead to enforce UN Security Resolution 1973.
Crafted and accepted after intense debate, the resolution comes out of the still evolving R2P – “responsibility to protect”, the new international norm that supposedly prevents and stops genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The ongoing debate should be of interest to Guyanese who perennially lobby for “outside” help.
The central irony is that the Arab League, which lobbied and voted unanimously for the no-fly zone over Libya – and supposedly offers legitimacy to the de facto attack on an Arab nation – is itself stacked with countries, such as Bahrain, Yemen and even the kingpin Saudi Arabia, where citizens also need protection from their governments’ forces.
There are not completely unjustified suspicions that the Arab League’s action may be due as much to their desire to get back at Gaddafi, who has been a thorn in their side for decades, as to western pressure. For instance in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Gaddafi had publicly castigated Saudi King Abdullah of selling out the Arab world to Washington.
While there have been calls from the rebels within Libya for the no-fly zone resolution, one cannot ignore the reality that those rebels are primarily from the eastern region around Benghazi and members of the tribes loyal to King Idris, who Gaddafi deposed in 1969. The latter in turn favoured his own and other tribes of the central and western coast.
Until Gaddafi’s revolution in 1969, Libya could scarcely be considered a country, divided as it was under Idris into three separate provinces, each with myriad tribes of rural, semi-nomadic herders. Retaliatory tribal killings and violence were the main source of justice.
When the uprising came, many of the most significant defectors — including Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, the rebel army head and a former interior minister — were members of the eastern tribes. The western forces executing “Operation Odyssey Dawn” have to be careful that they do not get bogged down in a brutal and drawn out civil war. There cannot be facile assumptions that Gaddafi has no support and that he and his supporters will be vanquished in a few days. His predictions of a “long war” against what he has dubbed a “crusader aggression” cannot be dismissed lightly.
In Britain, which has taken a lead role in the operation, its military command had been at odds with its civilian directorate as to whether the mandate extends to taking out Gaddafi. Their Chief of the Defence staff, Gen Sir David Richards, was adamant in asserting bluntly, “It’s not allowed under the UN resolution.”
In this he was contradicting Liam Fox, his defence secretary, who suggested over the weekend that assassinating Gaddafi was an option. The US, which appears determined to position itself on the right side of history at least in one chapter of the great 2011 Arab revolt while keeping an eye on the oil, has also emphasised a limited view of the intervention.
The US has repeatedly declared that it will hand over the lead role it has been playing in the operation “within days”. The problem is that none of its partners are in agreement on to whom or how it should hand off responsibilities. Basically there is no consensus over whether the international coalition command should be led by NATO, or not.
In the meantime the air strikes have unveiled a fissure in the Russian leadership. Russia had abstained in the Security Council’s vote, but according to PM Putin, “The Security Council resolution is deficient and flawed; it allows everything and is reminiscent of a medieval call for a crusade. It effectively allows intervention in a sovereign state.” Without naming Putin, President Medvedev protested, “It is inadmissible to…talk of ‘crusades’ and so on.”
We should understand that in the international arena, self-interest always trumps all.
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