I admit it: I supported the bombing of Libya. Mostly on the basis of an interview with Middle East scholar and longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy Gilbert Achcar, I was persuaded that the massacre of tens of thousands of people in rebel-held Bengazi was imminent if the international community did not act, and that military force -- delivered primarily by the United States -- was the only viable option. As Achcar wrote: "You can't in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians."
The humanitarian argument presented so convincingly by Achcar was essential to the U.S. and its allies as they went before the U.N. Security Council seeking approval for a military campaign aimed at Libya. And the U.N. responded quickly, with Security Council Resolution 1973, authorizing "Member States... to take all necessary measures... to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack."
Now, two weeks after the passage of a U.N. resolution focused on the narrowly defined mission of protecting civilians "under threat of attack", it's clear that the U.S. and its allies are embarked on a much broader mission: a nationwide bombing campaign aimed at regime change, and military engagement in support of one side in a civil war. It's now time for those of us who favored military action two weeks ago to acknowledge that we've been had.
Right from the outset, it was clear that the U.S. had something much larger in mind than the mere protection of civilians, when more than a hundred cruise missiles slammed into the Libyan capital of Tripoli. Why Tripoli? Military spokesmen explained that their first task must be the complete destruction of all Libyan air defenses in order to protect U.S. and NATO pilots enforcing the no-fly zone ordered by the U.N. , even though air defense batteries in Tripoli would have posed no threat to pilots if they had confined their flights to Bengazi and other eastern cities facing attack by pro-Gaddafi forces more than 600 miles away from the capital.
To see how far this mission has come from the protection of civilians, consider what's happening now in Sirte, a city about halfway between Tripoli and Bengazi. Sirte is Gaddhafi's hometown and was firmly in the control of the Libyan government and was not the site of fighting on March 17, when U.N. Resolution 1973 was passed. But then, emboldened by their new-found air support, Libyan rebels launched an offensive aimed at taking Sirte, where they were quickly repelled by Libyan government forces. NATO jets responded with a bombing campaign aimed at the city. A Vatican official in the city reported civilian deaths as a result of the bombing.
As Libyan rebels and government forces continue their see-saw battle across the country's northern tier, the rebels taking some towns and losing others, and then retaking towns that were lost the day before and losing towns that had been gained the day before, each battle is now accompanied by NATO airstrikes in support of the rebels. What NATO's airpower has allowed, above all, is an expansion of the Libyan civil war, with the civilian population caught between the rebels and the government on the ground, and a rain of bombs from the air.
Since the U.S. and NATO launched this operation under the guise of peacekeeping, it's worth remembering what real peacekeepers do during a civil war. Above all, the goal of a true peacekeeping force is to separate the warring forces and establish a clear line of demarcation between them. In Libya, this would have meant protecting rebel-held cities in the east from attack by government forces, but it would have also meant ceding control to the Libyan government in those cities that it held on the date of the passage of U.N. resolution 1973. Civilians suffer the most when cities change hands, as those who are suspected of supporting the losing side face retribution from the winning side. And we should have no illusions about the Libyan rebels, or assume that they won't take revenge against civilians that they suspect of loyalty to the Gaddafi regime (the U.N. takes the threat to civilians by rebel forces seriously enough that it has issued a warning to the rebels against taking reprisals against civilians in the cities they have captured.)
Do real peacekeepers announce that the leadership of one side of the conflict "must go"? Or provide arms to one side? Or send in military advisers to train one side? Of course not. These things are done by participants in a war, and the U.S. and NATO have now made clear that they are full participants in the Libyan civil war. That's not what U.N. resolution 1973 calls for, it's certainly not what I signed on for when I reluctantly supported the use of force in Libya, and it's time for anyone who might have been persuaded by the humanitarian case for this war to rethink their position.
And yet... none of what I've written above negates the real possibility that there was a genuine humanitarian crisis in the making on March 17, when the U.N. Security Council passed its resolution. The immediate effect of Resolution 1973 was to halt a Libyan government advance that threatened Bengazi and other rebel-held cities, and the Gaddafi regime's immediate response was to call for an immediate cease-fire (a cease-fire it did not honor.) As much as I'm opposed to what the U.S. and NATO are doing in Libya today, I can't dismiss the possibility that, in the first days, thousands of lives might have been saved by their quick action. Whether those lives saved will be balanced out by the lives lost in a now-expanded Libyan civil war is anyone's guess.
Steve Burns is Program Director of Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice
3 comments:
Thanks for this BLOG post, Steve....As a pacifist, however, this was an easier call for me, even though I was worried about civilian massacres, too. Each theft of bread, of freedom, encourages the next theft. Each killing generates energy for the next killings. If we want the chain to end we must stop it now....The morning the missiles fired and the reports said "Shock and Awe" and I learned it was called Operation 'Odyssey Dawn' and they fired 110 Tomahawk missiles, with 20 targets being hit. (some say a "1 in 5 accuracy rate") for missiles that cost $569,000 each - about $63 million spent with $11.38 million being effective, while the other $50+ million went up in smoke!
....my rationale for pacifism views was reconfirmed! No more war $$'s = we have to come up with better ways to settle differences!
Someone wrote on Facebook: The U.S.and NATO are not humanitarian. They have engaged in no humanitarian wars. .... this aggression will lead to more deaths, more oppression, more militarism and a quashing of democracy not only in Libya but in much of the world, including the U.S. The misleaders of our country, of NATO, of the military and the media give us no serious discussion of alternatives to the use of military - in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Iraq. Each aggression encourages the next. from Judy Miner - at the Network
Steve, here's a quote from Dwight Eisenhower that seems apt at this point: Every gun that's made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, and those who are cold but not clothed.
Tt all comes down to which yardstick you use to make decisions: the yardstick of nonviolence is the only one that causes no harm. Gandhi said that in his daily experience, every problem lends itself to solution, if we are determined to make the law of truth and nonviolence the law of life.
I appreciate your candor, Steve. Mary Jo Berner, Many Ways of Peace, Eagle River
Steve, I read your blog with interest because the "humanitarian intervention" school of thought is gaining momentum. Within the UN it's being called R2P or the Responsibility to Protect.
I think human rights trump national sovereignity so I have no problem with an international response to human rights violations inside a country, but it is a sign or our militarism that the only kind of intervention we can imagine is to send bombers and put CIA "assets" on the ground with the rebels.
We desperately need to create trained, unarmed teams of people who can go into situations of conflict and work out nonviolent solutions and have humanitarian workers ready to go at a moments notice with the necessary resources to take care of civilians in harm's way.
But most of all we need to end the corporate globalization that has resulted in a "race to the bottom" for both people and the planet. The systemic poverty of the many alongside the billions stolen by the few causes despair and makes for dictatorships to control the people's natural outrage against such injustice.
Reigning in corporate abuse; small scale, long term, grassroots-led development aid; micro loan programs; NGO programs to build civil society; people to people diplomacy; debt forgiveness and an end to the US being the arms dealer for the world are far better responses in my opinion.
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