- Good morning, everybody. So today's lecture is called The Denouement of
Humanitarian Intervention, and it's mainly gonna be focused on Libya, though we'll see, we'll look elsewhere in the Arab Spring as well. Let's start at the end, though. This is Libya late last year. - So that was the situation in late 2018. If anything, it's worse today. There was supposed to be elections held which couldn't be held
because of the fighting and Haftar has mounted
successive assaults on Tripoli, and so the country is in a continuing stalemate failed state. So that tells you what happened, it didn't tell you anything
about why it happened and what we should infer from
why it happened, and that's, the way into today's agenda. We're gonna ask how and why it happened, and then we're gonna
look at the implications for the prospects for
humanitarian intervention efforts going forward, the
stability and future shape of the Middle East, and
the ability of the US to be a force for good internationally and how that has been impacted by this, what's happened over the last nine years since we begun that action. But let's begin by picking up
the thread of responsibility to protect that I lectured
about a couple of weeks ago. And you'll remember that this was all in the shadow of Rwanda, and then Kosovo. The NATO forces had
gone into Kosovo in 1999 without UN authorization when no NATO country had been threatened, and this has produced
a lot of hand-wringing in the international community that led the Prime Minister of Sweden, don't know by what
legitimacy he had to do this, but he appointed an
international commission which concluded that the NATO action had been illegal but legitimate. We had considerable debate
about what that might mean, and they did at the time as well. It was eventually
followed in 2005 at the UN by the adoption of something called the UN World Summit Outcome Document where they famously announced
that each individual state has a responsibility to
protect its populations from genocide, war
crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. They took it upon the UN
to be the enforcer of this and said, "We are prepared
to take collective action "in a timely and decisive manner "through the Security Council
on a case-by-case basis, "and in cooperation with
relevant regional organizations "should other means be inadequate." And I pointed out that R2P had
a number of notable features, one that it was binding
not only on signatories, but on non-signatories
as well, unlike the ICC. It's restricted to severe
human rights abuses, genocide, crimes against
humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing even though
others had pushed for more. It was a big departure for the UN because its focus on what
was going on within countries seemed to live in considerable
tension, to put it mildly, with the UN's hardboiled
recognition of the independence of countries and a remit
that was only about in maintaining international
peace and security and not being concerned with
what went on within countries. I pointed out that it was not binding on the Security Council. The responsibility to protect is the responsibility of
governments to protect populations under their control, but it's not a responsibility
of the social security necessarily to intervene. It gives wide latitude in a case-by-case, case-by-case basis, and
that the early opposition of the non-aligned movement
and the grumbling in the African Union was a
portent of things to come. And the things to come are what we're gonna
be talking about today. I also mentioned some early tests in Sudan and Kenya and Guinea, once the idea of R2P had been adopted, and also in Libya, in February of 2011, February 26th in particular, this is after the outbreak
of the Arab Spring, and once the conflict
in Libya was under way, that first of all unanimously
referred Gaddafi to the ICC, the first time a Security
Council had done that, somewhat hypocritically as I said because countries like the US don't
recognize its jurisdiction over their own nationals, but they were happy to
refer Gaddafi there. And they also mentioned the notion of responsibility to protect. And they imposed an arms embargo sanctions and urged that he'd be subject
to criminal prosecution, but the first real test was
actually the following month, when the UN substituted Security Council Resolution 1970 with Security Council Resolution 1973, which we're gonna spend a
considerable bit of time on. But first, it's very
important to get some grip of what was actually going
on in the Arab Spring, because it was widely
misinterpreted at the time particularly in major countries, and the conventional wisdom
about what was going on turned out to be wildly wrong. So let me just give you a snippet
of the conventional wisdom and then we'll see what
was really going on. - While the uprising across the
Middle East and North Africa did not take place during
a specific calendar season, they were commonly referred
to as the Arab Spring, an allusion to the so
called Prague Spring, a 1968 democratic revolution
in Czechoslovakia. (uptempo drum music) The Arab Spring timeline began in Tunisia, a country that had been
under the allegedly corrupt and authoritarian rule of
President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali for more than two decades. On December 17th, 2010,
a working class vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi was approached by Tunisian authorities
about his unlicensed cart. He offered to pay a fine, but instead, his vegetables
were confiscated, and he was publicly
humiliated by the police. In a short protest,
Bouazizi stood in front of the local governor's office
and set himself on fire. He died from his injuries on January 4th. (dramatic music) Bouazizi became a martyr
who inspired others who were suffering from unemployment at the hands of a corrupt government. His death sparked a Tunisian revolution in which protesters armed
themselves not only with signs, but with cell phones,
allowing the protests to spread at social media speed. On January 11th, the week
after Bouazizi's death, Tunisia's government fell apart, and the disgraced President
Ben Ali fled the country. The videos of the successful uprising shared via social media
raise global awareness of the protests themselves. State-run news organizations
were barely able to keep up. The speed and success of the protests inspired others across the region. Throughout January,
protests erupted in Algeria, Jordan and Oman. By January 25th, the
movement reached Egypt, followed by Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and several other countries. On February 11th, the Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, and by the end of the year, Yemen's government was overthrown. (people chanting) As was Libya's, ending the dictatorship and the life of their
leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was captured and killed
by Libyan rebel militia. - So that's the conventional
reading of each of the Arab Spring that it erupted in Tunisia and then just basically
spread like wildfire across the Middle East and North Africa, and it's one of the reasons
there was so much enthusiasm for it in the West. But it was a fundamental misreading, and just to give you one
very important illustration that bears on what's coming next, it was a misreading of
what was going on in Egypt. Now everybody could remember
at the turn of 2011, the eruption of protests
in Tahrir Square in Cairo, millions and millions of
protesters, supporters. It started out peacefully, and then supporters of the Mubarak regime became involved in conflicts with the opponents of the regime, and they were largely
middle class secular people. We tend to, we now with hindsight, we think about Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood
government being overthrown two years later, but at
the time of the eruption, it was largely a secular
opposition movement opposed to Mubarak,
calling for regime change. And I'll just show you
a couple of videos there that start to give a hint of
how the conventional reading, conventional wisdom was was misleading. (people chanting) (men speaking in foreign language) (people speaking in foreign
language and whistling) (people chanting) (man singing in foreign language) - So what was unusual there is, and if I played more,
you'd see even more of it, is that from the beginning, the military were very supportive
of these demonstrations that were going on in Tahrir Square, and indeed as time went
on, it became clear that the military was
behind the regime change. - [Matt] President Hosni Mubarak will meet the demands of protestors, military and ruling party
officials said Thursday. It's the strongest indication yet that Egypt's longtime president may be about to give up power and that the armed forces
were seizing control. A military commander told
thousand of protestors in Central Tahrir Square, "All your demands will be met today." Some in the crowd held up their hands in V for victory signs,
shouting, "God is great." The military's supreme
council was meeting Thursday without the Commander in Chief Mubarak, and announced on state TV its support of the legitimate demands of the people. A spokesman read a
statement that the council was in permanent session to explore what measures and
arrangements could be made to safeguard the nation, its achievements, and the ambitions of its great people. The head of the ruling party
told the Associated Press that he expects Mubarak will
address the people tonight to respond to protesters' demands. Matt Friedman, The Associated Press. - Either this is the first Arab revolution of the 21st century, either this is the first Arab revolution of the 21st century, or it
will be brutally suppressed. - [Reporter] Tense new
beginnings for Tunisia, its Arab neighbors nervous
of how revolutionary feelings could spread. Mubarak's deposed,
Egypt's 18 day revolution defies all expectation. - Rarely can a military
takeover have been greeted with such enthusiasm,
as it is on the streets of Cairo tonight. - So there again, you see
this enormous enthusiasm for this military takeover, which then promised elections. And in the elections, initially, the Muslim
Brotherhood was not going to run. They said they would not run because they were the only organized
political party in Egypt, and there was a general perception it would be unfair for them to have such a big head start, but they soon changed their mind and the military allowed them
to run, and Morsi easily won. But the puzzle is why
did the Egyptian military get behind this revolution? It's not what the military typically does. Mubarak had a long history of association with the military. And so this really is a corruption story spelled out in Sarah Chayes'
book "Thieves of State: "Why Corruption Threatens
Global Security". That book is principally about Afghanistan where she spent 10 years, and for her main thesis in the book, which is sort of orthogonal to what we're doing here today,
but I'll just mention it, her main thesis is that
insurgent movements are fed by corruption,
that people on the ground, citizenrys hate corruption, and if insurgent movements
promised to get rid of corruption the people will support them. And she had been trying to
convince Petraeus, McChrystal and others that any effective
counterinsurgency movement in Afghanistan would
have to focus centrally on getting rid of corruption if it was ever gonna get
anywhere, and she eventually got, had some headway. But her chapter about Egypt
tells a somewhat different and more interesting story in some ways which is that the Egyptian military had a long history of being involved in a certain kind of
corruption with a difference. So if you go back to 1970, the 1967 and '73 wars against Israel, the Egyptian military
had been badly humiliated by being defeated by the
Israelis, and as a result of that, they partly blamed the
inept Egyptian state and its inability to deliver the things that the military needed. So they decided to essentially, you might call it, sort of go rogue, and they created their own second economy to create all of their own
supply lines for the military. And the thought was that never again was the military gonna be
under-resourced and under-prepared in a future war. But as things go, and you get mission creep
in all matters in life, they then discovered,
many of these generals, that they could actually
make a lot of money in this second economy,
and so it became a lot of essentially a kind of black market economy through which these generals became rich. However, they were
fairly discreet about it, they didn't flaunt their wealth very much and they didn't outrage
the population that much. However, what happens in
the heyday of neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus
is that other Egyptian elites also decide to get rich, and
particularly Mubarak's son, Gamal Mubarak was a sort of London playboy with lots of fancy cars,
and he and his friends came back to Egypt and they, they did flaunt their wealth, and so they had the Lamborghinis
driving around Cairo and the playboy clubs
and all the rest of this, and this partly outraged the military and also made the military worried that there was gonna be a reaction against this kind of corruption. So they got behind the coup, behind the Arab Spring
because they really, they wanted to get rid
of the Mubarak regime. And furthermore, they
were very happy for Morsi to be elected because in their view, he would be the agent of
cleansing the old regime, and they would be able to
keep their hands clean, which he then did because Morsi ran, he played the typical
Sarah Chayes playbook, he ran as being a cleaner up of corruption who would get rid of, who would drain the swamp, so to speak. And he set about doing that,
going after the old regime, and indeed, Mubarak and his children were convicted of various corruption
charges and were in and out, and the sons were in and out of prison for many of the next several years. But once Mubarak had done, once Morsi had done that, the military had no more use for him. And so when people came
dissatisfied with him, they had no problem getting rid of him, and General Sisi took over and
recreated a military regime, and that's what we've had
for the last several years. So there was a popular uprising, but people misunderstood
what was really going on, which was essentially the
military ridding themselves of liabilities and consolidating a regime over a couple of years. And so that was one form of
misreading what was going on in the Arab Spring. Another form is what happened in Libya, as we could also tell much
of the same story for Yemen, which is that people
widely mistook a civil war for a revolution, a civil
war for a popular uprising. So the Security Council Resolution that was adopted in March, 1973, you can see it
was voted 10 yes, no no, with five abstentions, and
so nobody had opposed it whereas the one three weeks
earlier had been unanimous. And it established no-fly zones, this is when violence had erupted. It excluded the introduction
of foreign ground forces. It authorized member
states acting nationally or through regional
organizations or arrangements to take all necessary
measures to protect civilians and civilian populations
under threat of attack. And it created an exception
to the resolution it passed three weeks earlier, so that, which had imposed an arms embargo in order to enable the UN supported forces to arm the rebels. And so that was a signal
of what was to come. So here you had, in February 26, you had a resolution passed,
including an arms embargo, three weeks later, you
have a modification of that and a much more
aggressively interventionist but still containment-oriented regime. So one question is, well, what happened? Why? Why did the UN authorize these
new actions in three weeks? And here's a clue to that action. Notice the dates on these documents. The Resolution 1970 had been passed on February 26th, on March 10th, so this is a week later, a week before, two weeks
later, a week before the new resolution's gonna go ahead, you could read this in the New York Times, "Moving ahead of its
allies, France on Thursday "became the first country to recognize "Libya's rebel leadership in
the eastern city of Benghazi "and said it would soon
exchange ambassadors "with the insurgents. "The move was a victory for
the Libyan National Council "in its quest for recognition
and a setback for Gaddafi "who had been seeking
whatever international support "he could for as NATO members in Brussels "had begun debating the
possibility of imposing "a no-fly zone. "The French announcement came
as loyalist forces in Libya "claimed new successes against the rebels "west of the capital, while in the east, "loyalist forces renewed
ferocious attacks," on several towns actually. So what this paragraph is concealing or not telling you is that when the first resolution had passed, it looked like Gaddafi was basically done. It looked, he had lost
control of all of the cities, and as a result of that, it looked like his days were numbered. Most people thought the
regime was crumbling. And the French and the
British and the Italians had big oil interests and
good relations with Gaddafi. Gaddafi, we forget, in the first decade of the
21st century had sort of, internationally speaking,
come in from the cold. He had given up the
Lockerbie bombers for trial, he had agreed to dismantle
his nuclear program, which he subsequently did, he helped with intelligence
against Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11, and actually also, his domestic
atrocities had diminished. If you look at most of the
human rights violations he's accused of, they're all
before the turn of the century. Didn't mean he'd become a nice guy, but he was a pretty run-of-the-mill
Middle Eastern dictator not as nasty as he had been in the 1990s. But now it looked like he was done, and so the question is
what was gonna happen to the oil relationships? And so the French decided
they better make nice with who's gonna be the new government, and so they started conversations, and these were brokered by a
French political philosopher by the name of Bernard-Henri Levy shows you why you should never
let political philosophers have too much influence in politics, and he started brokering meetings between the opposition groups and
the French government, Sarkozy's government. He was essentially telling them, "This is the government
that's taking over," but after the first resolution had passed, the reality on the ground changed, and Gaddafi started winning again, and so they were then in
trouble because they had said on March 10th that France
recognized the Council as a sole legitimate
representative the Libyan people, it put France ahead of
other European powers that had been seeking ways
of supporting the rebels on toppling Gaddafi, normally European countries don't do that, so their aggressive
stance was seen as a way of showing commitment
to the popular uprising, so they said, but what
they were really doing was showing a commitment
to the what they thought was the emerging government of Libya. And you can see here how they spun it, the day that the resolution was passed. The resolution, allegedly
just about containment, passed a week after France
had already recognized the opposition as the
legitimate government of Libya. - [Tim] After being accused
of being slow to react to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the French president has moved quickly to silence his critics and
take the lead in reprisals against Colonel Gaddafi. Meeting representatives of the
rebels at the Elysee Palace, he promised them immediate
diplomatic recognition. (speaking foreign language) - [Interpreter] France has
expressed its satisfaction about the creation of the Libyan
National Transition Council and after this meeting
with President Sarkozy, I can say that France has recognized the Transitional National Council as the legitimate representation
of the Libyan people. - The French plan is reported to include proposing limited airstrikes
against key Gaddafi targets, such as his headquarters
and a military airbase. There was no official confirmation from President Sarkozy's office, and it's a highly controversial proposal that would meet with strong resistance from many European allies, who are also wary of giving
the rebel representatives diplomatic recognition at this stage. (speaking foreign language) - [Interpreter] That's a
decision by a single government. I think it's better for
us to listen to the stance of the entire European community. - [Tim] The Elysee Palace
says that Mr. Sarkozy is seeking legal authority to prevent the use of force by Gaddafi. It believes that jamming
his communications would be a good start. Tim Friend, Al Jazeera, Paris. - So there was, they were now, they were in a difficult spot because they had
recognized the opposition, but Gaddafi was now once
again winning the war and he was regaining
control of the cities, and he was indeed about to
regain control of Benghazi, and so what the French did was that they pushed very hard to
get a resolution passed that would allow them to depose Gaddafi because they realized that they had burned their bridges with him, and essentially, that
had become their agenda. And right after the resolution passed, they began massive bombing
almost immediately, so much so that the Arab League, you can see here, the next
day the resolution passed three days later, passed on the 17th, the Arab League was furious
as was the African Union who had gone along with this, and African Union countries
on the Security Council had even voted for it, and they saw that there was
a much more aggressive agenda going on and it was really
about getting rid of the regime. And indeed, a lot of reports, and I've given you the
jot and tittle of this in the reading for today,
a lot of the report, or the reading for two weeks ago, a lot of the reports about
imminent slaughter of civilians in Benghazi turned out to be
what we call fake news today, and there were very, first
of all, very few fatalities in the retaking of these cities, and almost no civilians were killed. Nonetheless, the hype for the
intervention was cranked up on the grounds that Gaddafi
was about to slaughter hundreds of thousands of
civilians in Benghazi. But I said at the outset that this, that everybody in the
West who was treating this as an Arab Spring
revolution were misreading that this was really a civil war. And the smoking gun comes
when you start to look at what was going on in the
Obama administration, because after all, Obama had run against, against endless wars. Obama had said that the, yes, Afghanistan had been a war of necessity, but the Iraq invasion
had been a war of choice. Unlike Hillary Clinton and unlike Kerry, he had not supported it in 2003, and he said America
should not get involved in these sorts of conflicts. And so who in the
administration was against it? Well, we'll see that in a second, but here's the smoking gun
that it was a civil war, who was leading the revolution? One is that Abdul Jalil was Gaddafi's former Justice Minister, Ali Aziz, Gaddafi's former
Ambassador to India, Mahmoud Jebril, his former
top economic advisor who was closely linked to
the oil multinationals, and the leaders of the so-called
Rebel Revolutionary Council included Abdul Younis who,
in the battle of Benghazi, had actually been on the
government's side initially and switched sides, and Omar Hariri, who had
no democratic credentials. Both of them had long
histories dating back to 1969 of repressing democratic movements. So what happened here, what happened? As I said first of all,
February and March, from February to March,
things changed on the ground, and Gaddafi now had the upper hand, and the British and especially the French persuade Hillary Clinton and then Obama to get behind the, to get behind the resolution and go in. But so who was against it? First of all, Robert Gates was against it, then Secretary of Defense,
he had been appointed by Bush Obama had kept him on. If you read Gates' autobiography, he says the only reason
he didn't resign over this was that he was about,
he was three weeks away from retirement or four
weeks away from retirement, but he said to Obama, "Why in
the world would you do this? "We're already involved in two
quagmires in the Middle East, "why get into a third one?" Joe Biden, Vice President, was against it, Mike Mullen the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs was against it, Tom Donilon, the National
Security Advisor was against it, the Chief of Staff, Bill
Daley was against it, and the Deputy National Security
Advisors were against it. Who was in favor of it? Susan Rice, the Ambassador to UN, Samantha Power, a big
advocate of responsibility to protect and print
and had been appointed as a Special Assistant for Human Rights, Bed Rhodes, a Deputy
Advisor in the White House, and Hillary Clinton as
well became convinced. And this is how we got to the
phrase leading from behind, which Obama was subsequently tied with. As best I can reconstruct, although he did go on to
the Jay Leno show later and say he never used the phrase, but basically what happened was that Hillary Clinton had been skeptical, and she was in Paris for the
G7, and the French philosopher arranged meetings between her and Jebril, and they persuaded her
that they were indeed going to overthrow the
regime and install democracy. Even though none of them
had the slightest history of democratic behavior,
and so there was no reason to believe that they
would in fact do that. So she came back from the, I guess it was the G8 at that point, and she said to Obama, "I
think we should do this," and he opposed it and
they argued about it, and eventually he said, "Well,
it's 51-49," and she said, "Well, the French really want to do this, "the Italians are on board," and so on. And he basically, he said, and this is why the French
started bombing early, he said, "Well basically, all right,
but it's got to be their show. "We're gonna be leading from behind." So what quickly happened though was that NATO expanded its remit, and the evidence of this is that once the African Union and the Arab League saw what was going on,
they said, "Now we can, "the crisis in Benghazi is over, "civilians are not being slaughtered, "we can now arrange a ceasefire
between Gaddafi's forces "and the opposition and
mediate this conflict." And instead, the NATO
forces said, "No, no, no, "we're gonna knock off Gaddafi." Now they couldn't put in ground troops, but they massively supplied the rebels until they were successful. It took about eight months until Gaddafi was finally killed and captured. The death toll was somewhere
between 2,500 and 25,000, I've seen estimates, probably about 8,000. And they nakedly pursued
regime change, and that, but nobody was portraying this
at the time as a civil war, they were still arguing that
this was a popular uprising and there was a democratic opposition and this was all gonna be great. So again, you can see the hype. - The Libyans I met didn't believe it. They said, "No, it can't be true." Many of them said, "This is something we
have been dreaming of." - [Reporter] As he's aged,
Muammar Gaddafi's style and his rhetoric had looked
more and more anachronistic. His a Theater of the Absurd,
punctuated by violent acts from a dangerously eccentric
showman, a murderous clown. - [Reporter] The Libyan revolution of 2011 was about one thing above all else: Removing Colonel Gaddafi from power. Today concludes that revolution. - But of course, it was not, it was the beginning of
eight years of civil war. So they pursued successful regime change, and peace-building turned
out not to be possible. It turned out not to be possible
for a number of reasons. First of all, there was
nobody that had the capacity to run the country, as we saw. We were not putting in forces, we were prohibited from
putting in boots on the ground, and essentially you had rival militias controlling different
parts of the country, and as the summary video I
showed you at the beginning made clear, every effort to
create a national government with legitimacy soon fell apart. But, that's not all. So it was obviously a huge
catastrophe for Libya, and the country has just
more or less disintegrated over the past eight years, and it doesn't show any
signs of turning around, but there was huge
fallout across the region. First of all, even as far
away as West Africa and Mali, it turned out a lot of
Gaddafi's principle guard, his elite troops were from
Mali, and they went back to Mali and ended up fomenting conflict in Mali, which led to the downfall of what had been the most stable democratic
regime in West Africa, but more important, across
the Middle East, first of all, the failed state in Libya
created a massive arms bazaar, so weapons and rockets and
tanks even started showing up all over the place, feeding the
conflicts in other countries and indeed, Libyan rockets
started showing up in Gaza in 2014 in the conflict there with Israel. But the most disastrous
fallout was in Syria, and the most disastrous
fallout was in Syria exemplifying what international
relations theorists referred to as the moral
hazard of intervention, and this is the moral
hazard of intervention. The idea is if people
think that if we revolt, somebody will intervene and help us, they will revolt, all right? So if you look at what
had been going on in Syria before this episode in Libya, what had been going on in Syria was several years of catastrophic
drought starting in 2007, and this had meant that
hundreds of thousands of farmers had lost everything, their crops had died,
their animals had died, just catastrophic droughts. And so what did they do? They went to the cities,
looking for non-existent work. And the Assad regime came to USAID, they came to the US saying, "We need help, we need assistance," and we basically blew them off. Even when it reached the
point when it's hard to square with our current perception of Assad, but this is more than a decade ago now, he said he's not gonna be
able to maintain control of the country if he doesn't get aid. Nonetheless he didn't get it, and so when the Arab Spring
erupted in Tunisia and in Egypt, there were a lot of these
protests were going on in Syria of these destitute farmers,
but it was completely peaceful. There was no, there was no violent uprising in Syria until the uprising in Libya and the 1973 and the intervention of NATO forces. So that's why, our scholars call it the moral hazard of intervention, they looked at at Libya and
said, "Well, if we revolt, "NATO will come and help us too." And so they, so they ramped up the, ramped up the opposition
into violent conflict and Assad came down on them
with a hammer, of course, and we it turned into, very
rapidly the Syrian crisis turned into the worst
humanitarian catastrophe of the new century. So Obama was then in a very
difficult position because he, you might say well, why didn't he, why didn't he stick to this? This a French-led operation,
we were leading from behind. That's not how command
and control works in NATO, the American generals run the whole, if NATO does an operation, the US runs it, that's just the way the
force structures work. So the Americans were
deeply involved in this, and so as things deteriorated in Syria, he was in a very difficult spot, even though particularly when Assad started doing things like
using chemical weapons, he began calling for regime change, so you'd see just a few clips here. - President Assad had lost credibility that he attacked his own people, has killed his own people, unleashed a military
against innocent civilians, and that the only way to bring
stability and peace to Syria is gonna be for Assad to step down and to move forward on
a political transition. We're gonna keep increasing the
pressure on the Assad regime and working with the Syrian opposition. Assad needs to go. He needs to transfer power
to a transitional body, that is the only way that we're
gonna resolve this crisis. The only way that the civil war will end and in a way so that the Syrian people can unite against ISIL is an
inclusive political transition to a new government without Bashar Assad, a government that serves all Syrians. I discussed this with our
Gulf Cooperation Council partners at Camp David,
and during my recent call with President Putin. - So, "Assad must go, Assad must go, "and I'm even telling
Putin Assad must go," but the truth is, Obama was
completely hamstrung in Syria. He was hamstrung, first of
all, there was no possibility of Security Council
authorization to go into Libya after there was this
widespread perception at the UN that NATO had completely
violated the containment language and remit of 1973 and
basically underwritten the overthrow of Gaddafi. So secondly, Obama's very shrewd
political instincts knew that in getting involved
in a civil war in Syria would be a domestic political
catastrophe for him, so he couldn't possibly
actually make it happen, so but then you're in this position of demonstrating weakness, for which the Republicans
attacked him relentlessly, drawing lines in the sand, Assad must go, not making it happen. But of course, it was bait for him, as far as they were
concerned because they knew it would be a political disaster
for him if he got involved. And he realized by then that
he'd been suckered into Libya. He'd been suckered, I
should have just given you one more wrinkle about how
Hillary got turned around on this because it's quite remarkable. The Select Committee on Benghazi
that was going after her because of the death of four
consular officials in Benghazi, as you might recall, unearthed
documents which showed her personal friend and
advisor, Sydney Blumenthal, who had no role in the government, sending endless numbers
of emails telling Hillary that the US needed to get
involved in the Libya, in the Libyan operation, why? It turned out because he, Blumenthal, wanted to get into the, he had interests in Libyan oil and he was, there are emails from
him to Hillary saying that the French are grabbing
all the oil concessions. And so again, we might
think of this about ideals and humanitarian intervention, but there's this material
a story of people with real interests at stake
pushing this agenda. So I think, and by then, Obama
realized that to some extent he had been suckered by her, if not her intentionality,
certainly by her gullibility. And so he was very unlikely to
succumb to going into Syria. Syria moreover was, Afghanistan and and Libya had
been two-sided civil wars, Syria was a three-sided
civil war because by then, ISIS had emerged and there was
the various opposition groups to the regime, and then
there was the Assad regime. And if we couldn't prevail
in a two-sided civil war supporting one side, how
were we gonna be effective in a three-sided civil war? Because one of the ugly truths
of the post Cold War-era is that my enemy's enemy
might turn out to be my enemy. In the Cold War, there's two sides and you know who's on which
side, and so on and so forth, one of the reasons by the
way there's the Libyan thing is ongoing is that the
Trump administration is now supporting the other side, because the Saudis are
supporting the other side from the UN and this side that the US has traditionally supported. So it was a three-sided, and then former Ambassador Polk
has done an exhaustive study of the opposition groups,
and there were no, it was again like Libya, there was no Democratic
opposition in Syria. And then finally, the
Democrats had no alternative to the Bush Doctrine. I said this last time when we
talked about the deficiencies of the Bush Doctrine, but what was the democratic alternative? They had no well articulated
conception of containment. And indeed, that I mentioned that talk I gave at the University
at the Yale Club of Tokyo, that eventually became the little book I wrote about containment, arguing that if the Democrats
went back into office without a national security strategy, they were gonna be pushed around, as Obama was indeed pushed around in Libya because not having a
strategy and doing things like triangulation leads
you to be manipulated by people who have a clear
sense of what they want to do. And indeed, the Russians, when they went finally
into the Syrian conflict, Obama yelled had screamed
and stamped his feet but he couldn't do anything
about it, and unlike us, they had a clear strategy. Their strategy was to help
Assad win the civil war, which they then did. And so now Assad basically
has won the civil war. So we on the other hand have
no strategy in the Middle East, and this is continuing to play out today as we are watching in real-time that whatever you say about Trump's
abandonment of the Kurds, it completely, his entry
into that whole conflict is the correct observation
that the US doesn't have a strategy there and there
is no democratic regime that's being supported. The Kurds, supporting the Kurds, supporting the Kurds is
a bit like supporting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. The Kurds are scattered through a number of Middle Eastern countries, the Kurdistan that they
would like to build, it would involve going to
war with several of them. Turkey, for all of its appalling
behavior, is a NATO ally, the Kurds are not. As I said, one's enemy's
enemy can turn out very easily to be one's enemy. And so we have throughout the rest of the Obama administration but
really starting in 2003 have had no coherent
strategy of what it is that we're actually trying to
achieve in these conflicts. And so Trump took advantage
of that and ran with it. And that's not the only fallout
from the Libyan conflict. It's quite a lot, but there's more. - As we return now to the attack on a migrant detention center in Libya, as John yang tells us
eight years of conflict and instability there are
now enmeshed with the migrant and refugee crisis. - [John] Bags of clothing
and abandoned shoes. Remnants of life strewn
throughout the blood-soaked debris of death. The early morning air strike hit the Tajoura Migrant
Detention Center in Tripoli housing some 600 people,
mostly North Africans. Emergency crews struggled
to carry away body bags through the wreckage. Survivors said they had no
warning and no protection. - [John] Libya's government
of national accord recognized by the United
Nations blamed the so-called Libyan National Army, or LNA, which is trying to seize Tripoli. The LNA acknowledged carrying
out attacks in the area but denied targeting the migrants. The LNA under the command
of General Khalifa Haftar is supported by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. It controls southern and eastern Libya, but has met heavy resistance from militias defending Tripoli. Yesterday, an LNA commander
warned of intensified assaults. This is the latest calamity in eight years of chaos in Libya. Fighting has also made an
already desperate journey for migrants trying to reach Europe even more dangerous and deadly. An estimated 6,000 languish
in Libyan detention, at least half close to the
front lines of conflict. - In the last three months, Tripoli and the neighboring
areas around Tripoli have become an active war zone. So now we have migrants who
are in abysmal conditions in detention, but on top of that, they can't flee to
safer areas of the city. - [John] Many of the
migrants were rounded up by Libya's Coast Guard, trained and funded by the European Union, to prevent their crossing
the Mediterranean. - Several member states
of the EU have effectively begun criminalizing aid agencies who were providing such
and rescue services in the Mediterranean Sea. And in the absence of those
search and rescue operations, people who continue to try to flee Libya and cross the Mediterranean Sea are intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard and returned to Libya
and are sent directly into the detention centers. - So in addition to everything else, this has fed the refugee
problem in Europe, which has fed the rise of
anti-system parties in Europe and countries like Germany. People like Angela Merkel were initially open arms for these refugees, but as we know from earlier lectures, that soon turned into
political catastrophe for her. And so this ongoing, the
externalities of this as an economist would
put it are just stunning. So those are the sort of
local and then regional and even international costs
of this, toppling this regime. So we've done a big, a deep dive into some micro stories here, things
are often not what they seem but let's now step back
a little and think about what does this mean for the
doctrine of responsibility to protect, and what are its implications for other forms of
humanitarian intervention? So thinking back to the earlier
lecture on responsibility to protect, we now have to recognize that the Kosovo operation
was misleadingly benign. It gave people much too much confidence in what can be achieved
by forcible intervention in these types of situations. First of all, in 1999, Kosovo
was already in the middle a, it was in the middle of a
civil war in a failed state, so the idea that one might
be creating a failed state by intervening was not on the table. Secondly, unlike the story in Benghazi that was mostly hype and
widely discredited at the time, if you go back and look
at the news coverage, it was undeniable that there
was ongoing ethnic cleansing and gross human rights
abuses going on in Kosovo. Third, the intervention was
brief and it seemed to work, and that led to enormous
hubris about the effectiveness of surgical power in
rearranging the furniture in the targeted regime. Another feature of it
was that NATO and the US plausibly had clean hands in Kosovo. There was nothing really
strategic at stake for them. I said it violated the NATO charter that they got involved because they were, none of them was threatened, but really, they didn't have anything
to gain out of this. So the notion that there was
some surreptitious agenda, as we've now seen there
was surreptitious agenda going on in Libya wasn't there, and it wasn't there for good reasons. Also, the Kosovo operation was before the US-led invasion of Iraq had sullied our international image. Think again to the story about Abu Ghraib that we ended with last time. We were perceived very differently in 1999 across the Middle East than
we were perceived after 2003. And just to add to that,
the intervention in Kosovo had been on behalf of Muslims, so that muted criticism in the Middle East and the global south, even
though there was some, but we were, it was the Americans and NATO intervening to protect Muslims in Kosovo. So for all of those reasons,
there was much more confidence in the ability to implement R2P than we now see was warranted, but people like Samantha Power
and Susan Rice and others therefore were far too optimistic. And when we take stock,
there are really three, three big challenges
one has to think about when we're talking about
humanitarian intervention. One is big principal-agent challenges. So if you're thinking
about somebody going in to intervene in a country,
who is the right principal? Who should go in? Who should make the decision
to go in, I should say? And then who's the right agent? During the Cold War, the
sort of agreement was that the US and the Soviets
would not send people in, that's why in the Middle East, you'd get sort of Norwegian
blue hats or whatever because if you have an obvious
interest, there's a problem. But most importantly,
how does the principal control the agent? Once the UN Security Council
has authorized NATO to act and they're acting, it's
very difficult to reconvene and reverse those decisions because any one of the permanent
members can veto efforts, efforts to do that. So Brazil has been
pushing something called the Doctrine of Responsibility
while protecting, trying to create monitoring ongoing, monitoring device of interventions, but I think good luck with that. Then there are questions
about effectiveness. Peace-building is very
difficult after an intervention. If you look at the literature
that's been published by, the empirical literature
on peace-building, some of which I will post
if people are interested, it's extremely difficult to
do after an intervention. I talked about this some
in relation to Germany, West Germany and Japan after World War II, but particularly when you
go in during a civil war, again, we went in supporting
what turned out to be the losing side in a civil war and then we we basically knocked off the regime that
that had very little legitimacy, but neither did anyone else. And so peace-building operations
are extremely expensive, extremely slow, and don't work very well. Civil wars are, one of the main factors the scholarly literature shows, one of the main factors
that lengthens civil wars is often external involvement. If you look now at the civil war in Yemen, it's becoming a proxy
conflict between the Saudis and the Iranians. And so once you start supporting
one side in a civil war, the chances are, if I just come
in and support other sides, the conflict's just gonna go on, whereas if nobody gets
involved from the outside, most civil wars eventually end
in about five years or less. But they're gonna also be
huge legitimacy challenges. There's no obligation to
intervene, I've said this earlier, so it's a case-by-case discretion
for the Security Council, but that effectively creates immunity for the Security Council
members and their allies. In 2014, when Israel went into Gaza, there were widespread
allegations of R2P violations on both sides by Hamas
and by the Israeli troops, but the idea that there was gonna be some kind of humanitarian intervention of course is unthinkable when you consider the alliances of people
on the Security Council. So this doctrine is
gonna be perceived to be an instrument by which
the countries that are in the driver's seat in the Security Council are going to protect
themselves and not others. So what are the lessons? Well, one is that R2P
should remain exceptional. As I said when we were
talking about this idea of illegal but legitimate,
it's a bit like asking for forgiveness rather than permission, but you can't institutionalize that, so it should be exceptional, it should be very, very difficult to do. You need exceedingly high
thresholds for intervention, because if you intervene, if you take on a government
on its own territory, you are almost by definition gonna take, you're courting the possibility
of creating a failed state. It's important therefore
to keep force proportional to the problem. And as as within days
of 1973 being adopted by the Security Council, it was clear that the potential humanitarian
catastrophe in Benghazi was over, Gaddafi's Air Force
had been destroyed as well, and the overtures being
made by the African Union and the Arab League should
have been listened to, to negotiate some sort of ceasefire. Regime change should always
be the last and final resort. Interested players are very bad agents, but the UN doesn't have a military, so who are gonna be the agents? Peace-building, as I said, it's essential, but very difficult to do. You might say a better focus rather than responsibility to protect would be, or responsibility while protecting would be responsibility to prevent. I said to you earlier
that the crisis in Syria really starts ramping up
in 2007 and eight and nine because of the droughts. That would have been
the time to intervene. Look at a country today like Chad. It's a landlocked country
surrounded on all sides by failed states. It's oil-dependent, that makes it a prime
target, a prime candidate for this sort of collapse and
humanitarian catastrophe that we have seen in Libya and Syria. But what is anybody doing about Chad? Very little. So just to sum up, I think that, if you think over
the course of these lectures on resisting aggression across borders, it is possible to come up
with an integrated account that builds off of Kennan's insights for a post-Cold War world. And I take the three
elements of his view to be economize on the use of force, keep it sufficient but proportional. Don't destroy the village
in order to save it, the famous line from Vietnam. Always remember that
the biggest challenge is and the most important battle to win is the battle for hearts and minds, not the military confrontation, that is not gonna create
a governable country. And stop the bully without becoming one. This idea to prevent domination, but without yourselves dominating. Machiavelli says at the
outset of the discourses, he says the reason he favors democracy is that the elites want to dominate, and the common people
want not to be dominated. So this is the idea of prevent domination without becoming a dominator. And if you wanted to sort of
draw a conceptual map here of resisting aggression across borders, you could do something like this. You could say, well think about domination that crosses borders. First, there's self-defense,
if a country attacks you, that's the strongest case. Classic containment, you want to prevent, you want to head that off, a country that's in the
position to do that. So I think Kennedy during
the Cuban Missile Crisis gradually ramping up enough, the embargo and so on, that is the way to, to prevent threats to the
homeland, if you like. Make war a strategy of last resort, and ramp it up, ramp up
hostility proportionately. If you're going in to
defend a third party, as we did in Kuwait, in Iraq, when Iraq went
into Kuwait in 1991, then we should be thinking
about containment again first of all authorization,
there needs to be authorization. That could be invitation
from a legitimate government, as was the case in Kuwait, or it could be external authorization through something like the UN. When we're thinking about crossing borders to resist domination, there's got to be a higher threshold, because the stakes are so much higher because once you're a crossing
border in order to resist or to prevent domination, that might be better to
say than resist there, you're inevitably courting the possibility of creating a failed state. So with responsibility to protect, there must be the imminent danger of human rights violations, there must be external authorization, there must be a diverse coalition, there must be a limited mandate
which it should be observed as was done in 1991 in
Iraq, but not in 2003, and regime change should be
the absolute final resort. What about intervening
to install democracy? This is the most ambitious of all. We're not intervening, this
is a neoconservative dream, not just to stop particular
human rights violations, but actually to produce regime change. And there, first of all, there's no point in trying
to install democracy in a country where the
plausible economic conditions don't exist, we know what they are, per capita income of about $14,000, a diverse economy being
the two most important. There must be an opposition that is predominantly indigenous. Part of the problem with Ahmed Chalabi, he had been living in London for decades, and when things didn't work out in Iraq, he could go back to London. But he did go back and forth to London when things got bad for him. You really want the indigenous
opposition because they have, it's like you want the pilot on the plane. You want people for
whom if this goes badly, they're gonna pay the
price before you go in and help them, or try to help them. You must have some credible conviction that they're capable of governing, and some credible conviction that they're likely to be democratic. So even if and when one side
wins in this Libyan civil war, there's no guarantee that
it's going to be democratic. Indeed, it seems vanishingly unlikely that that would be the case. So I think, if you want to
sort of think conceptually about what should be
guiding policy thinking about humanitarian and
other forms of intervention, it would look something like
that in a post-Cold War, which would ramp up the
stakes appropriately as the risks and costs
of failure accelerate. But the big problem we now face in addition to all the others is that the catastrophe in Libya
has more or less left R2P in tatters internationally. It'd be very difficult to do this again. And America has greatly
diminished its capacity to act throughout the Middle East. I'm seeing Russia has
expanded to fill the vacuum, and that is the sort of big
geopolitical story is that capacity to be influential in the region is much less than it was the
day before George W. Bush intervened in Iraq in March of 2003. So it's in that sense a
big withdrawal by the US, and Russia filling the void. We will see on Tuesday
another kind of withdrawal by the US that has been, had other forms of void being filled, particularly with China's
involvement in Africa. We'll see you then. (soft music)
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While the lecturer seems to be more or less a liberal, this lecture does a fairly good job in showing the depths to which the current fiasco in Libya is a result of rather inept French meddling.