Exit the Colonel (39 page)

Gaddafi's explicit threats to make Benghazi “suffer,” seemed almost ready-made to play to the R2P case-in-waiting. “What Power and her supporters want is to solidify the principle of ‘responsibility to protect' in international law,” wrote one critic. “That requires a ‘pure' case of intervention on humanitarian grounds.”
⁷²
“In our best judgment,” Power later said (the failure to set up a no-fly zone) would have been “extremely chilling, deadly and indeed a stain on our collective conscience.”
⁷³
The latter phrase “stain on our collective conscience” is a direct and presumably deliberate reference to Obama's 2009 Cairo speech: “And when innocents in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective conscience. That is what it means to share this world in the 21st century. That is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings.”
⁷⁴

The critical policy meeting on Libya occurred on the evening of March 15, Washington time. Not all of the most interested parties were present, and the secretary of state called in from Paris. The meeting was described by various sources, including the
Washington Post
as “highly contentious.”
⁷⁵
Hillary Clinton was said to have made up her mind in favor of intervention two days before, but had not revealed which side she was leaning toward either to G8 foreign ministers or Mahmoud Jibril, whom she met on March 14, so as not to “get out ahead of US policy.”
⁷⁶
Obama made the final decision and instructed Rice to push the UN Security Council for “giving the international community broad authority to achieve Qaddafi's removal, including the use of force beyond the imposition of a no-fly zone.”
⁷⁷

On the evening of March 17, Gaddafi spoke on the radio, calling Benghaziites his “sweet people” and entreating them to “come back to him”; then vowed that those who did not (comply) would be shown no mercy. Saif derided the UN resolution, saying, “Within 48 hours it will be all over.... Whatever the decision, it will be too late.” The rebels, after earlier saying no to intervention, were now pleading with the West and NATO to establish a no-fly zone. Foreign Minister Musa Kusa,
⁷⁸
still in office, had announced unilateral truce, yet this was clearly a ruse, as Gaddafi's troops were pushing to within twenty miles of Benghazi, and regime jets bombing targets within the city. By the morning of March 16, thousands of Benghazi residents had already left, either to stay with relatives in neighboring towns or to travel by car to the Egyptian border.

An armored column had progressed from Ajdabia the previous night and was able to attack the upscale neighborhood of Tabalino just before dawn, taking Gar Younes University, where they were held loosely by a group of
shabab
(youth) and Islamist fighters.
⁷⁹
News spread quickly, “They're in the city,” people texted each other furiously. Many saw people crying openly in the streets; others tell of families boarding themselves up in their houses boiling pots of water with which to defend themselves.
⁸⁰
A former member of the monarchy parliament described how he and others “too old and too stubborn,” were more or less at peace with the notion that the end was near. Others—many who had already left for Al Beida and Derna—were said to have started preparing for a long guerrilla war, à la Omar Al Mokhtar.
⁸¹

Statements by prominent Arab bodies, most importantly, the Arab League on March 12, aligned with Clinton's and Obama's purported “list of must haves,” and galvanized a flurry of last-minute diplomacy. On March 13, Clinton met in Paris with the G8 and Gulf ministers. What the Russians would do was still a big question, but Clinton's meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov apparently secured Russia's abstention in the UN Security Council vote on Resolution 1973. France's involvement also posed issues. France had argued strongly against NATO as the implementing command authority behind the multinational operation that would ultimately be called Unified Protector, saying the international body was unprepared and member states unequipped to play substantive roles. France also wanted to leave out recalcitrant states such as Germany, Turkey, and Italy. The latter, by contrast, insisted on NATO command, proclaiming France was harboring “ulterior motives” and “hidden agendas.”

Lévy had assisted in bringing Mahmoud Jibril to meet with Clinton in London on March 14. He recalled that Jibril was “furious”—at himself—when he left that meeting for having ostensibly failed to move Clinton. In fact, he had done the opposite “A ‘source' in Hillary's entourage told me that Jibril hadn't understood,” Lévy wrote, “that the esteemed diplomat [Jibril] was somehow a bit out of touch with the situation he had helped create, that he had reached Hillary on a very fundamental level; that he had caught the attention of Clinton the political animal, but also, very simply, the female instinct within her”
⁸²
(a loaded statement, certainly).

Many Libyans steadfastly refuse to give Jibril any credit on this score, believing in effect that the situation sold itself. This may have been a function of the persistent ambivalence about former Saif associates now advocating for the transitional government. Yet Jibril's lobbying may have been necessary even at that. Many in the administration at this point were in fact not convinced that a major massacre in Benghazi was either inevitable or a casus belli.

If there was to be a Libya intervention, or so the Western nations reasoned, they needed cover from the Arab governments. On February 24, the foreign ministry of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), part of the GCC, issued an uncharacteristically strong statement, condemning violence against the Libyan people:
⁸³
“[We are] following with concern the developments in Libya . . . [and are] shocked at the suffering of the Libyan people and strongly condemn the violence, the killing of the Libyan people and the damage to Libya's infrastructure.”
⁸⁴
This was followed the next day by the politically even
more significant development, when the Arab League took the (also unprecedented) step on March 8 of endorsing the imposition of a no-fly zone and calling for the setup of safe areas in places being shelled by government forces. Syria and Algeria were the two Arab League countries to vote against the Arab League resolution urging the UN to impose a no-fly zone. On March 12, the GCC took the striking initiative to urge Arab League foreign ministers “to shoulder their responsibilities in taking necessary measures to stop the bloodshed.” Several Arab states floated the possibility of an Arab–African Union coalition to provide the Libyan rebels air cover as a means of averting a politically undesirable American intervention.
⁸⁵

Part of the strength of the Arab reaction to the Libya crisis came from the fact that Gaddafi, while tolerated, was widely loathed, particularly in the Gulf, whose leaders were a favorite target of Gaddafi's ridicule (covered with glee by Qatar's Al Jazeera channel). However much they would have loved to be rid of Gaddafi, most of the Gulf countries were constrained in their actions for fear of encouraging incipient protests in their own backyard. Oman, which historically played the role of mediator within the GCC, might have preferred to sit out the debate over Libya, given its own (highly rare) internal unrest, but nevertheless lobbied the Arab League and the GCC to urge the UN to take action against Libya. Iran, somewhat comically, given its own successful crackdown on the Green Revolution two years earlier, attempted to take the high road, condemning Gaddafi for subjecting his people to a “shower of machine-guns, tanks and bombs.”
⁸⁶
With the passage of the UN Resolution 1973 on March 17,
⁸⁷
Saif allegedly turned to a group of confidantes and said, “We gave up our nukes, and they screwed us.”
⁸⁸

Because of its complex and extremely bloody recent history, Algeria was something of a missing actor in the Arab Spring—the only North African state in which the earthquake had not had serious, immediate reverberations. Algeria's position is a function of its own brief experiment with democracy, in which a predicted Islamist victory at the polls in 1991 was headed off by a last-minute military “countercoup” that plunged the country into a ten-year bloodbath, which killed at least 100,000 people. The populace largely supported the military junta against depredations committed by Islamist extremists (though the government was far from innocent). While
Algeria's relations with Gaddafi were never perfect, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's government clearly was interested, if not in keeping Gaddafi in power (the Algerians were also not tremendous fans of Gaddafi), then neighboring Islamist influence at bay. Thus Algeria funneled supplies and arms to the loyalists and provided safe haven to Gaddafi family members, who would use the country as a base for loyalist propaganda. From late 2010 to the present, Algeria's principal role has been to serve as something of a ghost of Christmas past and future rolled into one: it is an example of what could happen if the Islamists are denied their say and of what might happen if extremist Islam is allowed to spread unchecked.

Among the reactions of the Arab states with respect to the Libyan revolution, the actions of the Qataris appeared for a time—and perhaps still—impenetrable. As we have seen, Qatar's Al Jazeera was in effect the only foreign media presence in Libya in the early weeks of the conflict, and was critical in building international awareness of what was happening on the ground. In sum, the Gulf emirate provided over $2 billion worth of assistance, including on-the-ground training (to cite one example, Qatar created a task force to provide technical and logistical assistance to rebels in the East at Tubruk, Benghazi, and Al Beida, and in the West in Zintan),
⁸⁹
munitions, humanitarian aid, and, perhaps most importantly, helping the rebels market eastern oil when there was no other source of income—all of which garnered the Emirate tremendous support in-country. Subsequently, Qatar was responsible for helping build Libya's postrevolutionary television media, which had an unmistakable Qatari imprimatur.
⁹⁰
Many believe the emirate's contributions to the Arab Spring countries—and Libya in particular—were simply an extension of a policy of opportunism, a desire to be punching in foreign affairs at a level commensurate with the country's financial weight, a strategy Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani had been pursuing since deposing his father in June 1985. Since then, the Al Thanis had been mediating—with less than stunning success—in Yemen in the Houthi rebellion; in territorial disputes linking Djibouti, Eritrea, and Yemen; in the Palestinian-Israeli question, and so on. The Qataris had even offered to mediate in the Bulgarian nurses' case in 2007.
⁹¹

Looking around at all the Arab Spring movements, Qatar presumably saw and continues to see an opportunity to project regional leadership and
influence, consistent with its attempts to mediate various Middle Eastern and African conflicts over the previous decade.
⁹²
The differences in this case were that, first and foremost, the gambit worked; second, Qatar put its military jets, not just its money and diplomats on the table; and third, while it chose to spread its funds, on-site military training, and humanitarian assistance liberally amongst the opposition—Islamist, traditional, and liberal—it unequivocally backed the rebels. While the Emirates received much credit in Libya for its early support of the rebel cause, the fact that Dubai was a base for both powerful pro- and anti-Gaddafi elements made the net impact less clear.

Others attributed at least part of Qatar's position vis-à-vis the Libyan revolution to its animus toward its direct neighbor, Saudi Arabia, which had been trying to undermine Qatar's position in the Gulf for decades. According to this hypothesis, by supporting the Libyan rebels, Qatar could not take the moral high ground over Saudi Arabia (vis-à–vis its support for crackdown against Shiite protestors in Bahrain) while hedging its bets in any future conflict between the Saudi leadership and its home-grown extremists. Others opined that Qatar's motives were primarily economic, and designed to obtain some degree of future influence over Libyan gas, which competed with Qatar's primary resource. Indeed, Qatar Gas and Qatar Oil were expected to profit handsomely in future contracts with Libya.
⁹³
In any case, Qatar's small population and massive wealth gave it a strong measure of immunity in the Arab Spring. Whatever the exact mix of motives, Qatar would top, by a large margin, the list of countries with which Libyans felt they had the best relations, in an October 2011 poll.
⁹⁴

On the night of March 17, the UN Security Council was set to vote, based on a very shaky consensus, for implementation of the resolution authorizing a no-fly zone. Ten countries voted in favor of UN Resolution 1973. Brazil, Russia, India, and China abstained, along with Germany. The proceedings at the UN were broadcast live to multitudes near Maidan Al Shajarah and the Benghazi courthouse. As it was clear the resolution would pass, cameras caught people weeping with relief and joy. The joy quickly turned to increased angst, as nothing had yet changed on the ground; the resolution had passed, but had not translated into necessary relief. Indeed, the resolution only increased Gaddafi's determination to beat NATO to Benghazi.

The March 19, 2011, issue of
The Economist
, changing its own tack, published a strongly worded editorial under the title “No Illusions,” exhorting the West to act before it was too late: