Colin Steele on US Foreign Policy and Intervention in Libya

By: Colin Steele

March 30, 2011

For this post, I’ll step back briefly into a former major (IPOL/Security) and a former life (last semester in Turkey) to offer a few comments on the situation unfolding in the Middle East today, specifically in Libya. In a previous article, I argued that the “Jasmine Revolution” then happening in Tunisia and Egypt was something that should be cheered and encouraged by the United States. President Obama did eventually come out in support of the Egyptian people and demanded Hosni Mubarak step down, which I believe was the right message to send, but now the president has committed US forces to some kind of conflict/intervention/action-that-looks-a-lot-like-war in Libya. Was that also the right call?

The short answer is, yes, it was. What is happening in the Arab world right now is a truly momentous upheaval in which peoples are throwing off stifling old regimes that seemed implacable as ever as recently as December. That deserves the support and guidance of America, one of the greatest and certainly the most influential democracy in the world.

The most oft-cited reason for the NATO-led, French-driven, US-orchestrated, UN-blessed (sort of) intervention was to prevent the mass killings of Libyan rebels by forces loyal to Col. Muammar Qaddafi, the country’s eccentric and iron-fisted leader. This is indeed a valid and noble goal. But the intervention also had everything to do with three important theories of international affairs, of which it upheld two and abrogated the third.

The first concept is that of American exceptionalism. This notion holds that America is a “City on the Hill” or “Light unto the Nations,” biblically-worded assertions that, in short, we’re something special. More specifically, this idea holds that American democracy is and of right ought to be the model democracy in the world; the connotations often attached to this vision include the ascription of a unique moral rightness to United States motives and an obligation to be at the forefront in spreading and defending democracy around the world. Whether or not the exceptionalist narrative and its attendant assumptions of obligation and morality are correct, they still inform the national discourse and leave us feeling that it is in our national interest to prevent slaughter in Libya. By intervening, the United States has upheld the exceptionalist view and perpetuated our de facto role as world policeman. No matter how much we complain about always spending the most time, energy, and money on world policing, as long as exceptionalism maintains its currency, we are agreeing to our moral culpability for the world’s problems and imposing a moral duty on ourselves to be the exemplary democracy we think or say we are.

The second concept, much more consequential from the point of view of developing standards within the international community, is the so-called "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P). This doctrine was developed in the wake of the Rwandan genocide of 1993, after which the world vowed (again): “never again.” President Obama himself linked the exceptionalist and R2P rationales for intervention in his official speech on United States actions in Libya: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And, as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

Facing its first serious test as a guiding principle of international intervention, R2P has been robustly upheld in Libya, but it remains to be seen how far or how often we—the United States, NATO, the United Nations—are willing to invoke this supposedly binding doctrine. Will R2P still be in play if and when the oil-rich countries revolt?

Finally, the concept abrogated by the Libyan intervention was the “Bush Doctrine” of unilateral, pre-emptive war. With the United States and the international community tripping over themselves to appear deliberate, multilateral, and acting in the interests and with the blessing of all concerned international organizations, President Obama’s first military action was an exercise in repudiating Iraq. But instead of fighting the last war, we are now fighting against the last war, and there are dangers in that, too. For all the proclamations of a new, righteous, Obama-esque theory of intervention now splashed across the op-ed pages, we are really back to the future: the “Obama Doctrine” is really a Clintonian redux, and we would do well to recall the weaknesses and difficulties that bedeviled military action during the Clinton years. It was Clinton’s inaction on Rwanda that produced R2P, after all; other low-commitment, low-risk, multilateral adventures included Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

The bottom line is, we are now involved in Libya, for better or worse. No matter who is in command of the operation or whose flag is on Western pilots’ orders, we have decided that R2P really is a value worth fighting for and that preventing mass casualties in other countries is integral to American interests—at least for now.

On balance, I think that President Obama has done a remarkably dexterous job of negotiating one of the toughest policy challenges of the post-Cold War era. If the events in the Arab world today really are the revolution that drags that region back into connection with the outside world, it will have vast consequences for Arabs, Americans, and everyone else. The United States, by virtue of its unilateral dealings with each of the Arab nations before the uprisings broke out, had set itself up to be tied in knots if and when Arab political forces started to pull strongly in different directions, as is happening now.

Unfortunately, the knot we currently find ourselves in is a product of being pulled between exceptionalist ideals and realist concerns. Whether this is the crisis that finally convinces us that oil reliance might not be the best or easiest policy to maintain anymore remains to be seen; in the short run, it is inconceivable that the United States will do the truly exceptional and push wholeheartedly for Arab democracy in cases where our oil interests would be at risk (starting with Saudi Arabia).

That said, we can and should hope that President Obama and others at the top of the American policy planning chain recognize and capitalize on the golden opportunity presented by the “Jasmine Revolutions”: to simultaneously bring freedom to the Arab world and an end to the United States’ and the world’s dependence on oil.

It is cruel and unusual to expect that the Arabs should continue to mire in the world’s most backward societies, and it is time we developed the same conscience about oil that we have about coffee—paying $10 per gallon of “fair trade” gasoline would bring about the alternative energy future in a hurry. Now that we have involved ourselves in the Libyan revolution, it is time to determine a desired outcome there and elsewhere that will actually bring about Arab democracy. As the saying goes, “you can’t get a little bit pregnant.” Preventing a mass slaughter of the rebels by Qaddafi was only the first step—now it is time to carry this intervention to term and help give birth to a new, modern and democratic Arabia.

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