Lecture 16: Denouement of Humanitarian Intervention

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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.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 2 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/Comrade_BobAvakyan ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Dec 21 2020 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies
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- 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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Channel: YaleCourses
Views: 51,553
Rating: 4.8118811 out of 5
Keywords: Yale, Ian Shapiro, Power and Politics, global order, collapse of communism, politics, insecurity, end of history, Yale Broadcast Studio, Middle East issues
Id: IBASYxz1aSk
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 77min 48sec (4668 seconds)
Published: Mon Nov 18 2019
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