Libya: Seriously, where is this going?

[Verbose]

IMHO NATO/The West in going to war over Libya while taking a much softer stance against other regimes (Syria, Yemen, Egypt) or even tacitly supporting suppression (Bahrain, Algeria) is being quite hypocritical. Just my personal view though.

Well, the speed with which NATO jumped in was weird, as in uncharacteristic. Ghaddaffi didn't have time to more than talk tough, and suddenly the French strike aircraft were on their way, before he had time to really make good on the threatening talk. And that was unexpected.

The crass side of this of course says that to be real sure, everyone should have cooled their heels to a point where enough people had uncontrovertially been done in by the Libyan govt forces, and then acted on humanitarian grounds. The situation has the same problem as some forms of crime prevention. You might actually want to wait until the dirty deed is done. It clears things up in the next phase.

Afaict the speed of the NATO reaction this time does seem to be down to Sarkozy personally. The French govt. had been made to look reaaally bad over the regime change in Tunisia, and was psyched up to try to salvage something here. It also helps that a French president gets to do pretty much everything a US president does, with a fraction of the international scrutiny. (Reports have come out of the Elysée Palace in Paris that Sarko had big maps of Libya and Tripoli mounted, spent quite some time sticking needles into them, and he learned the names of the suburbs of Tripoli even.)

And in the bigger picture, it actually is a factor that at other times, when humanitarian grounds for intevening have been presented (Bosnia, Rwanda), the efforts were so half-assed and late they hurt the standing of NATO.

Anyway, at this juncture, I do think the speed of the intervention was actually decided by the French govt. Politics of Saving Face Today, based on dropping the ball yesterday.

 

[Ayatollah So]

Were not Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan resounding successes where democracy and prosperity flourished?

You forgot Kuwait.

The most disturbing thing about the Libya intervention is that other dissenters might also try armed rebellion in the hope of NATO or Western support. Some Syrians have used violence to oppose the regime - only a few, but of course the regime tars all opponents with this brush. Were the armed rebels inspired by Libya? I have no idea; it seems unlikely. Hopefully most Syrians can figure out that they don't have significant oil, so they shouldn't expect any help.

 

[Winner]

You forgot Kuwait.

The most disturbing thing about the Libya intervention is that other dissenters might also try armed rebellion in the hope of NATO or Western support. Some Syrians have used violence to oppose the regime - only a few, but of course the regime tars all opponents with this brush. Were the armed rebels inspired by Libya? I have no idea; it seems unlikely. Hopefully most Syrians can figure out that they don't have significant oil, so they shouldn't expect any help.

Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil, but somehow I doubt NATO would intervene in support of rebels trying to overthrow the (extremely oppressive) Saudi government.

It's not just about strategic energy resources, it's about the size of the country, the capability of the country's military to strike back, about a cost-benefit analysis, and yes, about logistics too. Libya is small, it's military was shambles, Western oil interests were threatened, the local dictator was clearly borderline insane (and thus capable of great cruelty), Europe was threaten by migration waves unleashed from Libya, and the country is in range of aircraft operating from bases in southern Europe. Also, the UN and the Arab world was uncharacteristically on the West's side.

When taken together, these (and other) factors created a perfect storm against Gaddafi.

 

[Camikaze]

IMHO NATO/The West in going to war over Libya while taking a much softer stance against other regimes (Syria, Yemen, Egypt) or even tacitly supporting suppression (Bahrain, Algeria) is being quite hypocritical. Just my personal view though.

I think there's a key difference between hypocrisy and a double standard. NATO might be guilty of the latter, but I don't think the former. And given we all know states are going to have a whole heap of double standards anyway, I reckon it's better that they at least deal with one situation even if they aren't going to get both, than not dealing with either in an attempt to avoid that double standard.

It depends whether you think any short- or medium-term humanitarian benefits are outweighed by the consequences of war (death, destruction and social and economic disruption in the short-term, cost of rebuilding, shortage of skills, increased instability, social unrest and/or civil war in the long term) plus the consequences of a country coming under the negative influence or exploitation of a foreign power or megacorporations.

A humanitarian cost-benefit analysis is independent of a cost-benefit analysis by the intervenors (and would be why there is no intervention in Syria). So yeah, I agree that there could be a problem if the basis of intervention is the second of those, but my point is that the benefit that the intervenor derives is going to be fairly distinct from the humanitarian aspect, so is kinda irrelevant if we are assuming that that humanitarian basis is there. It doesn't matter if NATO doesn't gain any benefit, or if they're now drowning in oil, so long as the humanitarian cost-benefit analysis indicates that intervention is justified. The benefit derived by the intervenor doesn't detract from any humanitarian benefit.

This means that NATO gaining from the intervention doesn't invalidate it; you need to deal with the humanitarian aspect independently.

By framing an intervention as "humanitarian" (independent of whether the situation actually justifies such a labelling; IMHO Libya's case does), it becomes easier for a power to justify the intervention, and for the public to accept it. Hence there is a danger that the negative aspects of intervention (let's call it what it is: war) won't be thoroughly explored or scrutinised.

This is true, but I don't think it's entirely relevant to the Libyan situation. This precedent exists whether intervention occurred in Libya or not. Libya is more the result of it than a precedent-setter.

 

[innonimatu]

So, three years after the "liberation" of Libya, and with other countries still under attack, it is a good time to ask again: where is Libya going? The capital's airport and large portions of its infrastructure destroyed, the state paralyzed, militias running around kidnapping, torturing and murdering people, foreign diplomats forced to flee the country, islamism on the rise, the health care and education systems collapsed...

Mission accomplished?

And what about Libya's money? Perhaps following the money might give you all who cheered the destruction of this state a hint about what it had been all about?

The Central Bank of Libya, according to Reuters, had more than $100 billion in foreign reserves, mostly money collected from oil sales under Qaddafi. The Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), the overseas investment arm of the Qaddafi government, had about $70 billion invested with blue-chip Western companies such as Société Générale (GLE:FP) and Goldman Sachs (GS), and an additional $50 billion or more invested throughout Africa. And in Libya, every asset you could imagine was dirt-cheap. “It was a clean page,” he remembers. “You could start from scratch.”
[...]
In the last few months, the Libyans have been finding out. Warring militias have destroyed large sections of Tripoli’s international airport with mortars, shoulder-launched missiles, rockets, and tanks. The fighting made the news again in July when a rocket or shell set a large oil depot on fire, sending clouds of choking black smoke over Tripoli. Shortly thereafter, 27,000 Libyans fled the fighting on foot in a single day, arriving as refugees in neighboring African countries. In just one week in July, according to a brief issued by the Soufan Group, a consultancy specializing in the Middle East, more than 60 people were killed in Benghazi, and the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and Canada have evacuated their diplomatic personnel.

Libyan oil production has declined to about 300,000 barrels a day [from 1,300,000 bpd], and a half-dozen prominent figures on the Libyan political scene, whose names had appeared in optimistic Western newspaper articles about the brave Libyans who opposed Qaddafi and fought for a more equal and democratic future, have been murdered. Their deaths have passed without any demonstrations or other significant forms of public notice inside Libya, a measure of how irrelevant the causes for which Libyans fought three years ago have become.

The thing is, those assets invested by the former Libyan government through its sovereign fund and put under management by assorted western banks, were already being shamelessly stolen between 2008 and 2011. And the Libyans were onto it and pissed. They they got "liberated", and no one was left to worry about the vanished assets or sue the investment banks. How convenient. Sarkozy probably even expected to have the 40+ million he received also "forgotten", but the french police still eventually picked him up...

In addition to secret WMD facilities hidden in the Sahara, Qaddafi had something else of interest: billions of dollars in oil wealth that the regime was desperate to invest in banks, stocks, hedge funds, property markets, infrastructure projects, advanced fighter planes, and almost anything else that Western governments and corporations had to offer. The resulting gold rush was so wildly lucrative, and obscenely unprincipled, that it continues to reverberate at the highest levels of global finance and politics a decade later.
[...]
“Libya is a monkey box,” says Rashid when asked if the Libyan government is capable of managing what remains of its wealth. “You see the chairman of the National Council or whatever it’s called appearing on television wearing slippers and holding a Kalashnikov. They have no idea what they have, and what they have, they steal.” The game of wildly overstating the personal wealth of Middle Eastern dictators, and then stealing national assets under cover of civil conflict and social chaos, Rashid suggests, is one that Western governments and financial institutions and their co-conspirators in Arab countries play hand-in-glove. “They said Hosni Mubarak and his family were worth over $20 billion,” Rashid says. “The real number turned out to be a few tens of millions. Meanwhile, when Mubarak was removed from office, the foreign currency reserves and national investments of Egypt were $54 billion. Now they are below zero. You tell me where that money went.”
[...]
It’s hard for the West to understand the full scope of the disaster that’s befallen Libya. It’s happened, in part, because no one in or outside Libya bothered to figure out what the country might really look like after the dictator was gone. “Even after Afghanistan and Iraq, no one seems to have thought seriously about what would happen afterward,” says al-Ghwell, the World Bank economist. Al-Ghwell, one of the world’s leading experts on the development of North African economies, says Libya is well along the road to becoming something new: the world’s first failed petro state. “You can imagine Somali rebels and pirates with money to burn,” he says, when asked why the collapse of Libya should bother anyone besides the Libyans.

You see, sometimes it is a conspiracy, for the money. And the mass media just regurgitates whatever stories are necessary to arrange public support for a convenient war to hide the trails of theft and corruption.
Can the full story of the destruction of the libyan state, at it emerges years after the war, at least serve as a lesson for those who, here at the time, cheered for this "liberation" of a country?

 

[gay_Aleks]

Yay, and now I wonder if someone will provide Libya with a very fun deal, ala "food for your oils"?

 

[illram]

I was critical of this in 2011 and I remain critical of it now. This is unfortunately sort of the result I expected.

I'm not talking about military intervention to build a democracy. I am talking about people going along with a nice narrative justifying military intervention without really thinking it through and considering the consequences.

 

[Antilogic]

I didn't post in this thread back in 2011, so I don't have anything to dig up and comment on.

I was critical of this in 2011 and I remain critical of it now. This is unfortunately sort of the result I expected.

Good call on the conclusion. I suppose people got caught up in the optimism of the early Arab Spring days.

This is a pretty bad omen given the US is sending signals it is considering a major military intervention against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. If a relatively united and decent* rebel front in Libya has failed to put together a good government, can we expect anything better in Syria? Or Iraq?

*When compared to the Syrian rebels, which include ISIS and a load of other brutal terrorist organizations with much less cooperation and unity than what existed in Libya.

 

[gay_Aleks]

It seems that 11 years later, after the whole ordeal, America has learnt better:

Bombing is so much easier and cheaper than hauling several thousand soldiers and then messing up everything.

 

[Antilogic]

Given that Libya isn't exactly a Flourishing And Peaceful Middle Eastern Democracy right now, didn't we just learn that the pottery barn rule doesn't apply if you don't put boots on the ground?

 

[gay_Aleks]

Given that Libya isn't exactly a Flourishing And Peaceful Middle Eastern Democracy right now, didn't we just learn that the pottery barn rule doesn't apply if you don't put boots on the ground?

Are there any flourishing and peaceful Middle Eastern democracies at all? For that matter, are there any democracies in the Middle East?

 

[Ajidica]

Are there any flourishing and peaceful Middle Eastern democracies at all? For that matter, are there any democracies in the Middle East?

Israel, Iran (sort of), Turkey (sort of), Lebanon (sort of), Iraq (sort of, the last elections were considered valid by observers).

 

[Bootstoots]

Isn't Tunisia doing generally okay as well, at least in terms of its new democratic institutions? Of course, it's the only thing that even resembles success to come out of the whole Arab Spring.

 

[Cutlass]

I didn't post in this thread back in 2011, so I don't have anything to dig up and comment on.

Somehow I managed to not get involved in this one either.


I think the takeaway here is that democracy is hard. And it is not inevitable, even among a people who go through the motions.

Ultimately, I think what makes democracy work is having the majority of the populace understand that they can have much, but not all, of what they want, if they are willing to allow others to have much, but not all, of what they want. As soon as one group decides it can have everything it wants at the expense of the others getting none of what they want, then democracy really can't take root.

And it's not that the people are uneducated, or not 'Western', but rather that they have no experience living in a system of peacefully competing and coexisting interests. The deposing of a dictator doesn't leave that in its wake.

 

[Antilogic]

Israel, Iran (sort of), Turkey (sort of), Lebanon (sort of), Iraq (sort of, the last elections were considered valid by observers).

Mayyy have missed the word peaceful there.

Isn't Tunisia doing generally okay as well, at least in terms of its new democratic institutions? Of course, it's the only thing that even resembles success to come out of the whole Arab Spring.

I haven't heard anything about it, so I'm assuming they are either succeeding or not failing hard enough to warrant attention.

I think the takeaway here is that democracy is hard. And it is not inevitable, even among a people who go through the motions.

Ultimately, I think what makes democracy work is having the majority of the populace understand that they can have much, but not all, of what they want, if they are willing to allow others to have much, but not all, of what they want. As soon as one group decides it can have everything it wants at the expense of the others getting none of what they want, then democracy really can't take root.

And it's not that the people are uneducated, or not 'Western', but rather that they have no experience living in a system of peacefully competing and coexisting interests. The deposing of a dictator doesn't leave that in its wake.

Yes. There is some internal switch that must be set (or reset? ) for a society to transition to a democratic model. And bombing the hell out of the country doesn't do it.

 

[illram]

Isn't Tunisia doing generally okay as well, at least in terms of its new democratic institutions? Of course, it's the only thing that even resembles success to come out of the whole Arab Spring.

Tunisia is functional and relatively peaceful, although its borders are problematic due to refugee problems in Libya and Algeria. Radicals are slipping through and Tunisia had to tread extremely lightly during its elections to create a peaceful coalition between the Islamists and the non-Islamists (for lack of a better word, can't really say "secular").

It worked, so far, because the Islamist party there was by far the most liberal of all the Arab Spring Islamist political parties. Tunisia has always been more "westernized" culturally I guess you could say than its fellow Arab countries, even in North Africa. I mean that literally, as in women are more free there, alcohol is accepted, French and Italian TV is watched, and so on. It's sort of the Turkey of North Africa minus that level of economic success. Ben Ali was a very "iron fist in a velvet glove" kind of dictator, pushing secularism, education, bilingualism (French and Arabic) etc., modeled on Ataturk's reforms, while also ruthlessly squashing anything that threatened his rule.

Tunisia is current on a precipice as it is struggling to contain Islamists, who are becoming more popular in local government and in the courts despite the efforts of the government to sort of placate them with a coalition government and token reforms. It is mostly poor, rural and religiously conservative outside of the urban areas and does not have much to go on other tourism,which is currently suffering badly, so it could very well slide backwards.

 

[Gucumatz]

So apparently the UAE decided to bomb some militant strongholds in Libya. Is that the first such independent reaction of the UAE (outside of the UAE) to militancy?

http://www.dw.de/an-unpleasant-surprise-for-the-us-in-libya/a-17880855

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Has it been 3 years already? And they still haven't got their act together? What a bunch of amateurs.

 

[brennan]

IMHO NATO/The West in going to war over Libya while taking a much softer stance against other regimes (Syria, Yemen, Egypt) or even tacitly supporting suppression (Bahrain, Algeria) is being quite hypocritical.

I think that encapsulates the problem.

At a push I can kind of sympathise with the support of dictators during the cold war. but after the Berlin Wall came down 'The West' should have turned straight round to all of these guys and said "right, the game's over. We're not tolerating any more of your crap".

 

[Gucumatz]

And the makeshift Libyan government appears to have resigned to try and form a new coalition in the face of an emerging rival, but unrecognized, Islamist government within Libya