Exit the Colonel (37 page)

The International Crisis Group (ICG), a nongovernmental research organization based in Brussels, published a statement on March 10, 2011, calling for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations toward transition to a post-Qaddafi, legitimate and representative government. “Military intervention,” the statement continued, “should be viewed as a last resort, with the goal of protecting civilians at risk, and nothing should be allowed to preempt or preclude the urgent search for a political solution.”
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The statement did not specify how these negotiations would proceed. Indeed, it was highly unclear whether Gaddafi was in any mind to accede to such negotiations, or would respect whatever agreements issued from them. The ICG report neatly summarized underlying fears:

As of March 10, neither the US or NATO seemed any closer to a decision on what to do about Libya, despite the fact that on March 8, the Gulf Cooperation Council took the bold step of calling specifically on the UN Security Council to implement a no-fly zone:
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“The White House remains locked in talks with its European allies over potential action against Libya amid divisions in Congress and in the US national security establishment about how to respond to the violence.”
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Some members of Congress, including Senator John Kerry, challenged Defense Secretary Robert Gates's bleak assessment of the desirability of US intervention and called for broader and more active intervention. Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and John McCain (R-AZ) also lent their support to the concept of a no-fly zone.
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Meanwhile the White House appeared to be groping for a coherent explanation as to what the US was doing with respect to Libya. Chief of Staff Bill Daley, when pressed by the moderator of Meet the Press on March 6 to explain whether US intervention in Libya and Gaddafi's departure were in the United States' national interest, was reduced to saying that intervention was “in our interest as human beings.”
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All of which was consistent with Clinton's own statements at the time that the US was “far from deciding” what to do about a no-fly zone. Benghazi-based Internet sites such as Feb17.info proclaimed themselves appalled at the lack of external support from the US and the West.
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The split over Libya policy crossed partisan lines. Democrats such as Virginia Senator Jim Webb warned against “giving weapons to people we know nothing about,” while McCain was one of the first to advocate for American intervention in Libya. Onetime Democrat, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) spoke of a basic decision between casting support for the rebels or watching them be destroyed: “We are not talking about large-scale military action—we are talking about giving the opposition to Gaddafi a fighting chance of unseating him.”
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Many in the Republican Party were quick to seize on Libya as falling clearly outside the range of US interests. Sensing a vulnerability, Tea Party members like Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney included, argued that Obama was doing the opposite of his campaign promises, i.e, getting the US into another costly war (but without the “strategic interests” of Iraq).
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During an October presidential debate, Bachmann famously said, “Now with the president, he put us in Libya. He is now putting us in Africa. We already were stretched too thin, and
he put our special operations forces in Africa.”
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Another Republican contender, Herman Cain, demonstrated how little he knew about Libya: “I do not agree with the way he [Obama] handled it for the following reason,” Cain told the
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
, before cutting himself off. “Nope, that's a different one.... I got all this stuff twirling around in my head.”
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Mitt Romney, who ultimately became the Republican nominee, was “wildly difficult to pin down on Libya,” but accused Obama in an interview with the
National Review Online
, of creating “another example of mission creep and mission muddle.”
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It is interesting to note the strong consistency of Bush-era positions and the divisions between the Bush “moderates” (those both for the Iraq War and in favor of engaging Libya) and the neocons (who were consistently against engaging Libya, on the grounds that, if anything, the regime should be removed in the same manner as that in Iraq). While Tea Party supporters were eager to criticize Obama for violating his antiwar stance (in effect, replicating Bush's mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan), Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams “sharply criticized” Obama for being “too slow” to condemn Muammar Gaddafi.
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In late March, Ex-Vice President Dick Cheney's former national security adviser, John Hannah, urged Obama to act fast:

Musing about the Libyan Spring and Gaddafi's end, Condoleezza Rice said, in her memoir, “I was very, very glad that we had disarmed him of his most dangerous weapons of mass destruction. There in his bunker, making his last stand, I have no doubt he would have used them.”
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Secretary Gates came out early and strongly against US support for a no-fly zone, arguing before Congress that this would require taking out Libya's air defenses and would be a “big operation in a big country.”
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Such a no-fly-zone argument would presumably not have gone far at all if Gaddafi had not shown signs of resiliency, defying numerous predictions from those on the inside and out that he would be gone within days.
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As of early March, Secretary Clinton said the US was “far from deciding” what to do about a no-fly zone, as Libyan opposition elements proclaimed they were “disgusted at the perceived lack of external support from the US and the West.”
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Even as the Washington policy apparatus continued to squabble internally for a consistent view, quasi-mainstream voices started to suggest that Libya was all part of some precooked American plan, as unlikely and unmotivated as that would be. A good portion of this emerged from a
New York Times
piece claiming that “clandestine operatives (were sent) into Libya (early in the conflict) to gather intelligence for military air strikes, and make contact with rebels.”
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A Yale literature professor extrapolated from this article in the widely read online
Huffington Post
that the Obama administration “had in fact precipitated the rebellion by providing expertise and human intelligence around the time that the rebellion was getting started,” citing as further evidence stories that Obama had signed a presidential finding, authorizing covert assistance to the rebels.
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While the date of the finding was not publicized, secondhand reports suggested it was “immediately” after hostilities broke out (news reports were vague about the exact date, but placed it two to three weeks before, or the first week of March).
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The
New York Times
quoted a US military official indicating that “small groups of CIA operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help bleed Colonel Gaddafi's military.”
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According to a respected French military digest, the US and UK were engaged in cyberpropaganda campaigns in the early days of the NATO campaign, broadcasting messages by SMS to Libyan naval commanders, for example, to stay in port.
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None of this is particularly surprising—and appears to ramp up sufficiently slowly that it contradicts the above insinuations that the US somehow knew what was coming, or somehow incited it.

The group that was credited with having the most impact on evolving Libya policy, other than the president, was, in addition to Hillary Clinton, National Security Council (NSC) directors Samantha Power, who covered multilateral engagement, and Gayle Smith, global development; and Susan Rice, the UN ambassador, on one hand, and on the other, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Mike McFaul, who covered Russia at the NSC. The three at NSC were in favor of intervention, specifically the establishment of a no-fly zone. Against were Gates, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough, and Obama's chief of counterterrorism John Brennan, who argued against a “vital interest” and cited the very real possibility of “mission creep.”
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A major factor governing debate over Libyan intervention was the domestic economic situation and severe budgetary pressures on the military, still recovering from a more than $1 trillion campaign in Iraq and an expanding effort in Afghanistan. It was widely felt within the defense establishment that the US simply did not have the wherewithal to wage another major campaign in the region or, more precisely, to put itself in the position where this might become be a possibility. (It is perhaps interesting to recall that the US was unwilling to take on the Barbary pirates at the turn of the nineteenth century, for very similar reasons.)

A few in the pro-intervention camp expressed concerns that intervention would fuel “conspiracy theories” that the US somehow had a hand in either sparking or stoking the Arab Spring.
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The Nation
referred to the four female members of the group as “Warrior Women”
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styling them as a somewhat self-contained advocacy group that stood up to their male counterparts, including the commander in chief, to define a set of working conditions for intervention, and “collected the information to make their case and persuade the President to take military action.”
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While an appealing image, this does not appear to be a completely accurate characterization of the dynamic.

Certainly, those who worked on Libya policy were an odd mix of people who had all worked in some way with (or in some cases against) one another previously. Samantha Power had built a reputation as an uncompromising defender of humanitarian intervention in cases where genocide was a possibility, elaborating her thoughts in a Pulitzer Prize–winning book
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
, which was extremely
critical of both the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations for what she saw as “sitting on their hands for years” while massacres of Muslims in Bosnia continued. Power argued that recent American history was marked by intervention in favor of “promoting a narrowly defined set of US economic and security interests, expanding American markets, curbing nuclear proliferation, and maintaining military readiness, not ‘squishy humanitarian' social work.”
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Susan Rice had been an adviser to President Clinton on Africa during the Rwanda genocide (she joined the Obama campaign early, with Gayle Smith moving over from the Clinton camp subsequently). Despite their crossover loyalties to the Clinton and Obama administrations, these women worked together in different ways to understand action on Libya and were “adamant and public supporters of the implementation of the third pillar of the Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, which includes the use of military force, if necessary. Rice, Power, and Smith had other ties in common: in addition to being senior NSC hands, they all had advised Obama on Darfur-related issues, while he was still a senator, and then a presidential candidate.
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Hillary Clinton and Power were said to have mended fences reasonably early in the Obama administration, thanks in part to the intervention of senior diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who had also been a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
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Smith had worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and then “defected” to the Obama camp. Clinton in the past had often been in agreement with Robert Gates on other defense issues. According to one correspondent: “Obama's Tuesday night decision to push for armed intervention was not only a defining moment in his ever-evolving foreign policy, but also may have marked the end of the alliance between Clinton and Gates—an alliance that has successfully influenced administration foreign policy decisions dating back to the 2009 Afghanistan strategy review.”
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While his subsequent media efforts left much to be desired, Gaddafi had been quick to play on Western fears that Libyan instability would lead, as it had in Iraq, to uncontrolled chaos. His and Saif 's early speeches were littered with references to the archetypal failed state: Somalia. On February 22, Gaddafi asked the international community, “Do you want Libya to be like Somalia? It [intervention] will lead to civil war.”
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In a statement on
February 26, Saif said Libya “risks becoming like Somalia
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and warned, subsequently, that Libya without Gaddafi would be, again, “a new Somalia,” splintering into tribes and clans.