While the tenth anniversary last month of Washington’s invasion of
Iraq provoked overwhelmingly negative reviews of the adventure except
among its most die-hard neo-conservative proponents, a more recent –
albeit far less dramatic and costly – intervention has faded almost
completely from public notice.
Nonetheless, nearly 18 months after Western-backed rebels killed
Moammar Gaddafi in the city of Sirte, the intervention by the U.S. and
its NATO allies in the civil war in Libya appears increasingly costly on
several levels.
That assessment applies not only to Libya and its North African
neighbours, especially Mali, but also to relations among the great
powers – most immediately with respect to Syria, where Russia and China
have firmly resisted any western effort in the U.N. Security Council to
undermine the government of President Bashar al-Assad or support the
insurgency against him.
While the decision of China’s new president, Xi Jinping, to make his
first overseas visit to Russia last month was by no means attributable
only – or even primarily – to Western intervention in Libya, their
strong objections to the way NATO interpreted a Security Council
resolution to protect civilian lives as licence for “regime change” in
Tripoli certainly contributed to a renewed sense of solidarity between
the two former Communist rivals.
“We are living through an era of flux and change,” Xi told a
university audience in Moscow in a thinly veiled reference to the West.
“No country or bloc of countries can again single-handedly dominate
world affairs.” For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin praised
the two countries’ “strategic partnership” on the Security Council.
Indeed, the Libya precedent was even evoked during this week’s crisis on the Korean Peninsula.
“This land is neither the Balkans nor Iraq and Libya,” boasted the
official North Korean news agency in a reference to three other recent
U.S. interventions against countries that, unlike Pyongyang, either
lacked or, like Gaddafi, abandoned their efforts to obtain nuclear
weapons that could presumably have been used to deter external attack.
Acting on a verbal threat by Gaddafi to exterminate rebels in their
stronghold of Benghazi in the early stages of the civil war, the U.N.
Security Council approved Resolution 1973 by a vote of 10-0 with five
abstentions – Russia, China, Germany, Brazil, and India – on Mar. 17,
2011.
Pursuant to the emerging “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) legal
doctrine, the resolution authorised member nations to take “all
necessary measures” to protect civilians under threat of attack,
including by creating a “no-fly zone” over the country’s air space.
As the civil war intensified – albeit inconclusively – over the
following months, however, some Arab and key Western governments,
notably Britain, France, and the U.S., took more aggressive measures in
support of the rebels. These ranged from on-the-ground training to
supplying arms and providing real-time tactical intelligence, until
Tripoli fell in late August and Gaddafi was killed two months later.
Thus, an operation undertaken purely for humanitarian reasons eventually became one dedicated to regime change.
While a comprehensive assessment of the costs and benefits is
premature, an initial balance sheet would appear to confirm the notion
that military intervention often reaps unintended – and negative –
consequences.
On the positive side with respect to Libya itself, a long-ruling and
ruthless dictator is no longer in power, and the country’s oil
production has bounced back with surprising speed.
On the other hand, the central government has proved unable to
reassert its control over much of the nation, leaving a huge security
vacuum filled by a multitude of militias – including radical Islamists
who may have been responsible for the killing of the U.S. ambassador and
two of his staff in Benghazi last September.
“Libya has gone from being a tyrannical state to being barely a state
at all,” according to Robert Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for a
New American Security (CNAS) in an article published Thursday “…(A)
descent into worse chaos cannot be ruled out.”
That vacuum also permitted the wholesale looting of Gaddafi’s massive
arsenals. “The weapons proliferation that we saw coming out of the
Libyan conflict was of a scale greater than any previous conflict –
probably ten times more weapons than we saw going on the loose in places
like Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan,” Peter Bouckhert of Human Rights
Watch told the Washington Post earlier this year.
That looting resulted in the first instance in the destabilisation of
Mali where Tuareg mercenaries previously employed by Gaddafi returned
home to northern Mali, quickly evicted the army, which, in turn,
overthrew Bamako’s democratically elected government.
With the intervention of French and Chadian military forces earlier
this year, Bamako has since retaken control of the more populous parts
of northern Mali. But the region, now being patrolled by U.S. drones, is
still subject to attack by Islamist forces aligned with Al-Qaeda, and
the country’s future and unity remain uncertain at best.
Nor has Mali and other Sahelian countries been the only destination for Gaddafi’s former arsenal.
Substantial amounts of Libyan weapons have been traced to Syria,
fuelling that civil war, and to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where Bedouin
tribes – some with ties to radical Islamists – have defied local
authorities and occasionally even challenged the army in the tumultuous
post-Mubarak period.
But the Libyan intervention may have wrought its most consequential
damage on great-power relations, particularly with respect to the
prospects for future agreement among the five veto-wielding permanent
members of the U.N. Security Council to authorise military intervention
in civil wars, even for humanitarian purposes.
“The operation took place under the auspices of the Responsibility to
Protect,” noted Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on
Foreign Relations, “but it turned into a mission of regime change, and
that has made the Russians and Chinese feel that they were deceived.
“And that perception in Moscow and Beijing has fed into their
position on Syria and makes it unlikely that China and Russia will
anytime soon again approve a humanitarian intervention,” he told IPS.
And just as North Korea feels Gaddafi’s fate vindicated its decision
to risk international isolation by building a nuclear weapon,
hard-liners in Iran, who are convinced that Washington also seeks to
overthrow the Islamic Republic, have been citing the Libya precedent in
the run-up to this week’s talks in Almaty, Kazakhstan, with the five
permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany, to argue against
any concessions on the fate of its nuclear programme.
According to former top CIA Middle East analyst Paul Pillar, Iranian
leaders have only to look at Washington’s intervention in Libya “…that
overthrew a Middle Eastern regime after it had reached an agreement with
the United States to give up all its nuclear and other unconventional
weapons program.
“In hindsight, the intervention in Libya makes clear that even
interventions that appear successful in the short term can have negative
knock-on effects that call into question their value,” according to
Kupchan.
original.antiwar.com
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مصادر إعلامية أن مجموعة مكونة من ليبيين ومصريين قامت ليلة البارحة
بمحاولة اغتيال الناشط السياسي الليبي إدريس لاغا في القاهرة، وأصيب إدريس
لاغا بعدة طعنات أسفل البطن، وهو الآن في مستشفى القصر العيني وبحالة
مستقرة. ويربط المراقبون بين الهجوم على لاغا ومشاركته في
القبض ومساعدة السلطات المصرية في تحديد أماكن علي ماريا وإمحمد القذافي،
وترحيلهما إلى ليبيا والمشاركة في ملاحقة أحمد قذاف الدم.