{"id":53951,"date":"2015-02-23T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T12:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=53951"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:04","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:04","slug":"hailed-as-a-model-for-successful-intervention-libya-proves-to-be-the-exact-opposite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/02\/hailed-as-a-model-for-successful-intervention-libya-proves-to-be-the-exact-opposite\/","title":{"rendered":"Hailed as a Model for Successful Intervention, Libya Proves to Be the Exact Opposite"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"AP317160352980-article-display-b<\/a>

Libyan militias from towns throughout the country\u2019s west parade through Tripoli, Libya selling arms at what once use to be a fish market, Feb. 14, 2012. Credit: Abdel Magid Al Fergany\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

16 Feb 2015 – <\/em>When Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003 by U.S. forces, Iraq War advocates boastfully celebrated the event as proof that they were right and used it to mock war opponents (Joe Lieberman and John Kerry, for instance,\u00a0gleefully exploited<\/a> the event to demand<\/a> that Howard Dean admit his war opposition was wrong). When\u00a0Muammar Gaddafi was\u00a0forced by NATO bombing in August 2011 to flee Tripoli, advocates of U.S. intervention played the same game\u00a0(ThinkProgress gleefully exploited the occasion<\/a>\u00a0to try to shame those who objected to the illegality of Obama\u2019s waging the war even after Congress voted against its authorization<\/a>: as though Gadaffi\u2019s fleeing could render legal Obama\u2019s plainly illegal intervention).<\/p>\n

\"isis-article-display-b<\/a><\/p>\n

Once Gadaffi was brutally killed by a mob, advocates of intervention threw a giddy party for themselves, celebrating their own rightness and righteousness and declaring Libya a model for future Western interventions. Upon Gadaffi\u2019s fleeing,\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>, which editorially supported the war<\/a>, published a front-page article<\/a> declaring: \u201cU.S. Tactics in Libya May be a Model for Other Efforts.\u201d While acknowledging that \u201cit would be premature to call the war in Libya\u00a0a complete success for United States interests,\u201d the paper noted that events had given \u201cObama\u2019s senior advisers a chance to claim a key victory for an Obama doctrine for the Middle East that had been roundly criticized in recent months as leading from behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"libya<\/a><\/p>\n

Leading war advocates\u00a0such as Anne-Marie Slaughter<\/a> and Nick Kristof<\/a>\u00a0celebrated themselves as humanitarian visionaries and chided war opponents for being\u00a0blinkered and overly cynical about the virtues of American force.\u00a0British and French leaders descended upon Libya to strut around<\/a> like some sort of conquering heroes, while American and Canadian officials held pompous war victory ceremonies<\/a>. Hillary Clinton was downright sociopathic, gloating and cackling<\/a> in an interview when\u00a0told about Gadaffi\u2019s death by mob: \u201cWe came, we saw, he died.\u201d Democratic partisans were drowning in similar bravado<\/a>\u00a0(\u201cUnlike the all-hat-no-cattle types we are increasingly seeing over there, [Obama]\u00a0may take his time, but he does seem to get his man\u201d).<\/p>\n

\"libya<\/a><\/p>\n

From the start, it was glaringly obvious that all of this was, at best, wildly premature. As I wrote the day after<\/a> Gadaffi fled, the Democratic claims of vindication\u00a0were redolent in all sorts of ways of\u00a0war hawk boasting after Saddam was captured, and were\u00a0just as irrational: \u201cthe real toll of this war (including the number of civilian deaths that have occurred and will occur)\u00a0is still almost entirely unknown, and none of the arguments against the war (least of all the legal ones)\u00a0are remotely resolved by yesterday\u2019s events.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since 2011, Libya has rapidly unraveled<\/a> in much the way Iraq did following that invasion:\u00a0swamped by militia rule, factional warfare, economic devastation, and complete lawlessness. And to their eternal shame, most\u00a0self-proclaimed \u201chumanitarians\u201d\u00a0who advocated the\u00a0Libya intervention completely ignored the country<\/a> once the fun parts\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the war victory dances and mocking of war opponents\u00a0\u2014\u00a0were over. The feel-good \u201chumanitarianism\u201d of war advocates, as usual, extended only to the cheering from a\u00a0safe distance as bombs dropped.<\/p>\n

The unraveling of Libya is now close to absolute. Yesterday, the same\u00a0New York Times<\/em> editorial page<\/a> that supported the intervention quoted the U.N.\u2019s Libya envoy\u00a0Bernardino Le\u00f3n as observing: \u201cLibya is falling apart. Politically, financially, the economic situation is disastrous.\u201d The NYT\u00a0<\/em>editors forgot to mention that they supported the intervention, but did note\u00a0that \u201cLibya\u2019s unraveling has received comparatively little attention over the past few months.\u201d In other words, the very same NATO\u00a0countries that dropped bombs on Libya\u00a0in order to remove\u00a0its government collectively ignored the aftermath once their self-celebrations were over.<\/p>\n

Into the void of Libya\u2019s predictable disintegration has stepped ISIS, among other groups. ISIS\u00a0yesterday released a new video<\/a> showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, which they carried out in Libya. This, in turn, led to all sorts of dire warnings about how close ISIS now is to Europe\u00a0\u2014 it \u201cestablished a direct affiliate less than 500 miles (800 kilometers) from the southern tip of Italy,\u201d warned AP<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 which in turn has produced calls for re-intervention in Libya.<\/p>\n

\"telegraph1-540x435<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday, the U.S.-supported Egyptian regime bombed targets in Libya<\/a>. Meanwhile<\/a>, \u201cItaly warned that ISIS is at Europe\u2019s doorstep as France and Egypt called for the United Nations Security Council to meet over the spiraling crisis in Libya.\u201d It\u2019s only a matter of time before another Western \u201cintervention\u201d in Libya becomes conventional wisdom, with those opposed being accused of harboring sympathy for ISIS (just as opponents of Libya intervention the first time around were accused<\/a> of being indifferent to\u00a0Gadaffi\u2019s repression<\/a>).<\/p>\n

What we see here is what we\u2019ve seen over and over: the West\u2019s wars creating and empowering\u00a0an endless supply of enemies, which in turn justify endless war by the West. It was the invasion of Iraq that ushered in \u201cAl Qaeda in Iraq\u201d and ultimately ISIS. It has been the brutal, civilian-slaughtering drone bombing<\/a> of Yemen which spawned<\/a> Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in that country<\/a>. As Hillary Clinton herself acknowledged<\/a>, the U.S. helped create\u00a0Al Qaeda itself by arming, recruiting and funding foreign \u201cMujahideen\u201d to fight\u00a0the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (\u201cthe people we are fighting today, we funded 20 years ago\u201d). And now it is the NATO intervention in\u00a0Libya which has laid the groundwork for further intervention.<\/p>\n

That the U.S. would end up intervening in Libya again as a result of the first intervention was painfully obvious. A primary argument of\u00a0intervention opponents was that the same destruction sown in Iraq from \u201cregime change\u201d would be sown in Libya, and that the U.S. would end up empowering factions that it would later claim it was \u201cobligated\u201d to fight.\u00a0In October 2012, as Libya was disintegrating, I wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Rather obviously, this was yet another example of the \u201cMission Accomplished\u201d banner being waved quite prematurely. How many times does it need be proven that merely killing a dictator does not remotely guarantee an improvement from either the perspective of US interests or the people in the country being invaded? And how many more examples do we need where the US funds and arms a fighting force to do its bidding, only to turn around and find that it now must fight that same force?<\/em><\/p>\n

One can debate whether all of this is done by design or by \u201caccident\u201d: if you<\/em> realize that U.S. actions create further pretexts for war, then those who do this for a living must realize it, too (their own studies say this<\/a>); and how many times does something have to happen before\u00a0\u201caccident\u201d is no longer a viable explanation (as in: oops, our bombing policies keep killing large numbers of civilians<\/a>, but we keep doing it anyway, and keep\u00a0claiming it\u2019s all just a terrible \u201caccident\u201d)? But whatever else is true about motive, there is no question that U.S. militarism constantly strengthens exactly that which it is pitched as trying to prevent, and ensures that the U.S. government never loses its supply of reasons to continue its endless war.<\/p>\n

Far from serving as a model, this Libya intervention should severely discredit the core selling point of so-called \u201chumanitarian wars.\u201d Some non-governmental advocates of \u201chumanitarian war\u201d may be motivated by the noble aims they invoke, but humanitarianism is simply not why governments fight wars; that is just the pretty wrapping used to sell them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Finally, Democrats (with validity) love to demand that Iraq War advocates acknowledge their errors and be discredited for their position (unless those advocates happen to be Obama\u2019s Vice President, his two Secretaries of State, his Pentagon chiefs, etc.). We are rapidly approaching the point, if we are not there already, where advocates of \u201cintervention\u201d in Libya should do\u00a0the same.<\/p>\n

_________________________<\/p>\n

Email the author: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since 2011, Libya has rapidly unraveled in much the way Iraq did following that invasion: swamped by militia rule, factional warfare, economic devastation, and complete lawlessness. And to their eternal shame, most self-proclaimed \u201chumanitarians\u201d who advocated the Libya intervention completely ignored the country once the fun parts \u2014 the war victory dances and mocking of war opponents \u2014 were over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east-north-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}