Bowing to criticism across the political spectrum, President Obama will try to clarify U.S. goals in Libya tonight in a speech to the nation. Expect him to argue that, however confusing our policy may seem, it’s working.
Aided by NATO airstrikes, Libya’s rebels have resumed the offensive and are driving westwards toward Tripoli. Meanwhile, an economic embargo is making it difficult for the regime to provide people under its control food, water, gas and other necessities.
Whether the rebels can defeat Moammar Qaddafi’s better-trained security forces remains to be seen. But there’s no question that international intervention has prevented Qaddafi from quashing the rebellion, indiscriminately slaughtering civilians, and carrying out his vows to exact merciless vengeance on regime opponents.
Obama’s critics, nonetheless, have a point. He has not spelled out with precision what our ultimate goal there is, or how we will achieve it.
The reason for this seeming incoherence, however, is not as mysterious as Obama’s critics make it out to be. Put simply, U.S. aims in Libya and those of the international community are not aligned. What America wants – and no doubt France and Britain as well – is Qaddafi’s ouster. But the United Nations doesn’t do regime change. Russia and China, with long histories of autocratic and repressive rule, are adamantly opposed to political interference in the sovereign affairs of other countries.
U.N. Resolution 1973 therefore authorized only a humanitarian intervention aimed at protecting civilians from attack. The problem, of course, is that humanitarian crises invariably have political roots, and the Libyan opposition will never be safe from retaliation until Qaddafi and his henchmen and mercenaries are gone.
With NATO airstrikes clearing the way for rebel advances, it’s clear that the humanitarian mission is something of a fiction, a fig-leaf for the coalition’s real aim, which is to hasten Qaddafi’s fall. Our European allies fear that their publics have little stomach for a long engagement in Libya. So the international coalition has taken sides in the Libyan revolt, and must now confront the reality that rebel offensives in Tripoli and other regime strongholds will put civilians at risk.
This is a strategically and morally sustainable position. In the long run, it’s the best way to minimize civilian deaths and free Libya from a loathsome tyrant. Yet the Obama administration has been less than forthcoming about its true aims, for fear that absolute candor will unravel the international consensus behind the Libyan intervention.
At the same time, the White House has been eager to toss the hot potato of leading the Libyan intervention to NATO. Yet its attempts to downgrade America’s role from lead actor to stagehand have failed to answer doubts about the operation shared by liberals and conservatives. On the contrary, they’ve made the administration look both weak and furtive.
Obama needs to do a better job tonight of acknowledging the tensions between U.S. and international policy towards Libya, and reaffirm his resolve to see Qaddafi go. But his critics also need to understand that Obama can’t simply issue unilateral ukases if America is to share the burden of intervening with others.
Armchair strategists demand that Obama spell out America’s policy with Euclidean precision. Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose, in The Washington Post, offers out an eminently logical set of criteria for intervention, in which Presidents clearly define mission and goals, select means to match the ends, develop plans for what happens when the fighting ends, and have backup contingencies in place when things don’t go as expected.
But military interventions, especially multilateral ones, unfold in the context of international politics. And international politics is just as illogical, imprecise, and unscientific as domestic politics. Sometimes, candor and coherence have to be sacrificed to achieve enough consensus to get traction against big problems. That’s why humanitarian or other kinds of interventions launched in the name of collective security today are likely to be messy affairs, to have limited and even muddled aims, and be prosecuted in a spirit of continuous improvisation rather than rigid adherence to war plans.
Rigorous rules of intervention are useful intellectual and strategic exercises. But ultimately what matters to Americans are results, not theory. They support wars – yes, even wars of choice like Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, and Bosnia and Kosovo – that entail manageable costs and are over quickly. Over time, they come to oppose those that drag on, cost too many lives and too much money, and begin failing a cost-benefit test of national interest.
Whatever President Obama says tonight to rally support for his policies, he should act in ways that ensure the endgame in Libya – Qaddafi’s fall – comes sooner rather than later.
