The Obama administration wants to go with the tide of history, but there is no certain shore. Our allegiance is with democracy. Our allegiance is with stability. We were born of revolution and tempered by civil war. But interventions abroad have sobered our ambitions. Between these opposing pulls, we flail about in the Libya crisis.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is dispatched to Europe to meet with Libya's rebels. Yet, even as she does so, the administration provides no clear endorsement of their primal request: imposition of a no-fly zone. We seek to hedge our bets as if this is a stock portfolio that can be diversified, when in fact we are left with few choices except to pick one side or another, or abstain for the time being.
Repeatedly it is said on both sides of the aisle that Gaddafi is a born killer: witness his downing of Pan Am 103, his support of terrorist activities worldwide, and his proclivity to decimating his own nationals. Yet, until very recently, there has been bipartisan support in heralding him as an example of how a rogue state can be turned around, citing his compliance with UN Security Council resolutions in renouncing terrorism and compensating the families of the victims of Pan Am 103, and his surrender of weapons of mass destruction. Once this was done, Gadhafi was greeted with outstretched arms, proclaimed rehabilitated, and ready for resumption of normal diplomatic and economic relations.
Now that cozying up has come to an abrupt end. Indeed, prominent voices on both sides of the political spectrum urge not only intervention for humanitarian relief, but for regime change. Often the two goals are treated as interchangeable. The underlying mantra is: "It is better to deal with the devil that we do not know than the devil we know."
This is an astounding expression of intellectual abdication of the experience of our times in favor of the triumph of hope. Have we not learned that the devil that we do not know can be far worse than the "devil" that we know? Indeed, a new devil may incorporate the worst of Gaddafi, leading to a dysfunctional Somalia-like anarchic entity on the shores of the Mediterranean. This is not to say that this will happen should the rebels succeed. Everyone would hope that the end result would be a marvelous mix of pluralism, democracy, allegiance to the rule of law, and economic prosperity. But it is to acknowledge that prudence dictates that we not easily rest with the unknown.
In navigating through this morass, it would be useful to look to the guidelines that international law provides. Strangely, other than reference to UN Security Council pronouncements and the suggestion that Gaddafi be referred to the ICC (to which the United States does not belong), the proponents of intervention in Libya have been silent on the requirements of the UN Charter and generally accepted international law.
Here's what such a review of international law would tell us:
The reality of the UN system is that whatever the UN Security Council deems permissible is deemed legitimate. Thus, were the UN Security Council to explicitly permit military intervention -- presumably on strictly humanitarian grounds, all other international law constraints would fall by the wayside. At present it seems that neither Russia nor China would provide the consensus needed for such a green light.
Does this mean that the United States or other countries are powerless to act to prevent an impending humanitarian disaster in Libya? No. As the struggle for civil rights in the United States demonstrates, the black-letter law can give way to the moral imperatives of the moment. The United States is not compelled to stand by with its hands folded behind its back. But, as a nation dedicated to the rule of law (so what we do in Libya is not simply the flavor of the month), it is obligated to explain why it was compelled to disregard norms of the UN Charter which would apply in less exigent circumstances. Here we should be careful not to cloud humanitarian intervention with regime change, unless we are prepared to argue that the two are one and the same: that only regime change can halt the looming humanitarian crisis.
Allan Gerson, a Washington, DC lawyer, was Counsel to the US Delegation to the United Nations in the Reagan Administration. He instituted the initial lawsuit against Libya for the bombing of Pan Am 103. This article is written in his personal capacity.
What an outright silly, if not failed philosophy. If we all followed this advice, nothing would ever change in our world. We would never progress, for fear that our attempts to acheive progress will end up worse than where we started. This is the kind of thing said by someone who is afraid to walk out of his house to go to the corner store. For fear of the risk of something happening that shatters his comfortable existence.
If Gaddafi is allowed to massacre all opposition that sends a green light to all the other dictators in the region that were until now hesitating about using brutal force.
The uprising will then be forced underground and become a long running guerilla war. The opposition currently relatively moderate will be radicalised and brutalised. In the wings Al Quaida is watching; it has fed off discontent with autocratic regimes, promoting extreme violence as the only answer. Egypt showed that there is another path.
Gaddafi's victory could embolden those brutal elements in Tunisia and Egypt that have been pushed out to fight back and cause the fragile peaceful situation to become more violent. Thus creating more regional instability.
International law is supposed to capture the moral high ground and form a reliable consensual basis for intervention. When it fails to do so because its is myopically unable to foresee or forestall the implications then we must turn to bilateral diplomacy to forge consensus - which is surely the basis for interenational law.
Or human enlightenment, in regard to reality in Libya?
The ruler claims that his people want him as their leader. A declaration that could hardly be more simple to test. If he will permit a free UN monitored referendum, the matter could be peacefully settled in months. However, a refusal to undertake such a experiment makes clear two things.
1.He himself knows that the outcome would contradict his claim.
2.Although clinically insane. He is not nearly as crazy as some people think.
“Our allegiance is with democracy”
Then fealty to a form that is so fraught with fraud, is as facile as a federation of fools.
“we are left with few choices except to pick one side or another”
Isn’t that because, Barack cannot preach from some mythical high ground? That the referendum, which should be the subject of his sermon, has not yet reached.
“his surrender of weapons of mass destruction”.
Show me the centrifuge.
“Libya continues to be a member in good standing of the United Nations”
And what does that say about any club, that would have him as a member?
“The reality of the UN system is that whatever the UN Security Council deems permissible is deemed legitimate”.
Then would it not have been legitimate to deploy a tiny number of UN troops, equipped with infantry carried anti-aircraft missiles? Purely to act in a defensive capacity, as a deterrent against the use of airpower.
The Obama Administration is all lawyered up, and has shot itself in the foot trying to dance around Libya.
Although not as surrealistic as the Bush Administration, this government has yet to truly grasp a textural understanding of foreign policy, military affairs, and the tremendous change both traditional state endeavors have undergone in terms of operational landscape. They lack a cohesive progressive foreign policy and a incomplete understanding of what military resources are available to them. Lawyering only addresses one dimension. International law by many standards is still a moot court.
I may be mistaken, but I fear they will add to a sorrowful litany: Budapest November 1956, Basra March 1991, Benghazi March 2011.
I has a passing discussion with a neighbor from Hungary this afternoon and it was inevitable that his country's 1956 uprising, encouraged by Radio Free Europe, which promised help was imminent came up. He looked at me with a stricken face and said, "I don't even want to think about it. Many people will die", indicating what Benghazi was facing as he turned away, the memory too haunting.
http://www.straight.com/article-381425/vancouver/gwynne-dyer-where-are-egyptians-when-libya-needs-them
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/africa/16libya.html?_r=3&pagewanted=2&hp
Reformed interventionist David Rieff, who wrote the book “At the Point of a Gun,” which criticizes “the messianic dream of remaking the world in either the image of American democracy or of the legal utopias of international human rights law,” told me that after Iraq: “America doesn’t have the credibility to make war in the Arab world. Our touch in this is actually counterproductive.”
He continued: “Qaddafi is a terrible man, but I don’t think it’s the business of the United States to overthrow him. Those who want America to support democratic movements and insurrections by force if necessary wherever there’s a chance of them succeeding are committing the United States to endless wars of altruism. And that’s folly.”
However, the above is useless as it applies to those who want to abide by the UN rules. The UN Koffi Annan clearly stated the US war against Iraq was illegal. The US did not abide by these rules or even the rules of war particularly in Fallujah.
In the case of Gaddafi, his security forces are bombing Libyan cities as we speak. We have refugees streaming and dead bodies strewn about in these cities.
Any intervention would be popular with everyone except with the family regime in Libya.