Exit the Colonel (40 page)

Two days later, the French jumped the gun. At 5:45 p.m. on March 19, Sarkozy launched Operation L'Harmattan (desert wind)—the French analogue to the American Operation Odyssey Dawn—several hours before the official start of the operation. The strikes, launched by eight Rafale jets, blew up one or more tanks (different French sources give different accounts) on the edge of Benghazi. Subsequent air raids flown by mixed-nationality fighters destroyed sections at the front and middle of the convoy, effectively immobilizing the bulk of the force moving east.
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According to one French military analyst, the Americans, accustomed to orderly campaigns, were “stunned” at France's forwardness, because for them, it was simply “out of the question” that NATO enter into the fray without first having “softened the opposing side (Gaddafi's) defensive forces”—despite the fact that, at this point, every hour was critical.
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Presumably the Americans knew of the French intentions and gave their tacit assent, so that it would not seem to be obviously controlling the operation (which, of course, it was). All Benghazi knew was that French planes had come to the rescue. In response to the French action, Italy's Berlusconi immediately threatened to pull the country's bases for NATO use.
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The French attacks were immediately followed by more than a hundred US Tomahawk missiles, which in a matter of hours turned the remnants of Gaddafi's coastal forces into cinder.

True to form, as soon as plans for intervention began to crystallize, Gaddafi switched gears, promptly announcing he was willing to talk about a ceasefire. Just as quickly, the fresh Arab resolve abruptly began to dissipate,
as Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League, announced he had misgivings about NATO strikes.
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Several Arab states, hitherto supportive of NATO action, began to balk, fearing high numbers of casualties and an increased likelihood of a ground campaign. Secretary Clinton again jumped into the diplomatic fray, speaking with a series of Arab ministers, including Hamad bin Jasim al Thani, the Qatari foreign minister; the UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan; and King Abdullah II in Jordan, collectively concerned about US criticism of Saudi Arabia's intervention in Bahrain. The Western press echoed these sentiments: in a March 21 editorial, the
Financial Times
urged Arab leaders to stay the course behind military action.
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On the sidelines, Gaddafi tried desperately to threaten former supporters. To sway French resolve, he promised to publish documents proving that Libyan contributions to Sarkozy's presidential campaign had been “decisive.”

The UN resolution and subsequent NATO actions provoked a short-lived rally among anti-Gaddafi elements within Tripoli: after three days of strikes, residents renewed protests, and were emboldened to speak with foreign press. Shopkeepers and restaurateurs in the Old City seemed to be of one mind, that Gaddafi must go. But the regime tightened its grip, putting down the new outbursts, including one in the Souk Al Jumaa area within two weeks of the start of the NATO strikes, and reinforcing its actions with a relentless propaganda campaign via state television.
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Following this, there appeared to be renewed efforts to try to unhinge Gaddafi from power, even as some of his strongest allies melted away.
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On March 31, Musa Kusa, long suspected of having a hand in the Lockerbie bombing, left Libya on the pretext of illness for the Tunisian island of Djerba, where British Intelligence spirited him to London for debriefing. Many in the Western political and intelligence circles hoped that Kusa's defection would bring about a quick collapse of those around Gaddafi and/or create the conditions for someone with access to the Leader to assassinate him. It was not to be.

The members of the Arab league continued to work against Gaddafi, largely behind the scenes. The Saudis, while still demonstrably upset with Obama for “forsaking” longtime ally Hosni Mubarak, were said to have supplied the rebels with arms, at American request, all the while working to avert regional or domestic “contagion.”
¹⁰³
Meanwhile, the UAE, though quick to express solidarity with the rebels at a national level, could be seen to be hedging its bets behind the scenes. The UAE had made significant
progress in the previous year with the Gaddafi regime, signing a number of high-level trade agreements.

The Saudi-financed
Asharq Al Awsat
claimed in summer 2011, that the Algerians had helped smuggle arms to loyalist forces through the port of Djen Djen, 267 kilometers east of Algiers (run by Dubai port operator Dubai World). Loyalists and rebels, were known to be using the Emirate as a center for the transfer of weapons, money, and humanitarian supplies, via Dubai. A ranking Libyan businessman and diplomat both maintained that Dubai authorities either did know about these shipments, or “chose to look the other way”
¹⁰⁴
(the ship in question was Libyan-flagged and arrived July 19
¹⁰⁵
).

The Omanis, while experiencing an unprecedented level of domestic protest, condemned Gaddafi's actions against his own people. The Egyptians and the Tunisians offered some of the most direct assistance of the war to the Libyan people, mainly on a grassroots level (though the Egyptian government is strongly suspected of having helped funnel arms to the rebels).

“Success has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan,” goes the saying. Since no one in the US administration was fully confident how things would turn out in Libya, there was naturally an escalating procession of fathers. For all France's (and Sarkozy's) plausible ulterior motives, the French and Sarkozy personally deserve a good deal of credit for galvanizing the campaign. On the French side, much credit was given initially to Bernard-Henry Lévy for convincing Sarkozy of the moral imperative to act in Libya. In the US, early public credit for articulating the same “moral imperative” was given to NSC director Samantha Power.
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It seems the formation of US policy toward Libya as a whole was a more frenzied process, in which no clear direction was evident until the last minute. While Power and Susan Rice appear to have done much to lobby the UN and NATO for an implementation of an infrequently evoked Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine (according to which the international community has a responsibility to intervene to protect civilians when their own government either fails to, or is the perpetrator of atrocities, like genocide), Secretary of State Clinton, by dint of her position and external investigation, seems to have played the most substantive role
in shifting Obama to yes on the issue of intervention or the no-fly zone, with the R2P doctrine becoming a convenient, necessary, and sincerely assembled “casing” for a more complex set of rationales.

NATO had its own set of informal criteria for implementing military action under R2P, including seriousness of risk; whether the action is primarily meant to neutralize the threat (as opposed to something else “like bananas or oil”); whether this is truly a last resort action; proportionality of response; and balance of consequences, or how likely are the people in question to be better off as a result of the action than inaction. Gareth Evans, former Australian Foreign Minister, in an October 6, 2011, speech at Chatham House on NATO and RPT, said he felt “If you apply those tests to the Libya case back in March when the Resolution (UN Resolution 1973) was passed, I don't think you have any difficulty at all about ticking every one of those boxes.”
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While many took issue with NATO's evaluation of these kinds of criteria (while not about oil or bananas, it is not realistic to say that NATO intervention was
solely
about protection of civilians—certainly not after Benghazi had been secured and the campaign went into multiple months), it is curious to see the large number of books that emerged in the wake of the Libyan revolution condemning NATO action in strident terms—and in the process, effectively passing over the all-important, and morally complex, context of the intervention.

In the case of France, it is likely that Sarkozy took an altogether more opportunistic approach to Lévy's call, based on a prior sense of how he wanted to play Libya. Sarkozy had a firm reputation for going it alone and circumventing institutions of state. As one pundit put it, “In France today, there are no conventional politics. There is only Sarkozy.”
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According to this narrative, once the decision to intervene had been made—for which the R2P doctrine would be a supporting pillar—the US administration had two critical tasks. First, the building of support for the no-fly zone itself (largely within the ranks of the US cabinet, and against Secretary of Defense Gates's views), partly on the grounds that it would increase US standing on the Arab Street. Clinton was said to have put in multiple hours of damage control with NATO allies to ensure the mission proceeded as planned.
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Critically, she successfully lobbied Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and Chinese diplomats for an abstention on the UN vote authorizing the no-fly zone, even though both repeatedly called upon NATO to exercise restraint. She calmed Berlusconi and Italian
Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, who had been seeking a German-Italian compromise behind the scenes.

Sarkozy had clearly made up his mind about the Libyan crisis, while Obama allowed those around him to make their respective cases before agreeing to the United States' military contribution to the allied Libya campaign, code-named Unified Protector. In both France and the US, the view of the military establishment was not heeded. One can also exaggerate the influence of the “humanitarians,” however useful and relevant their views. This makes sense, in many ways, because the military looked at the conflict in terms of how it would affect active commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan (with the specter of a hot conflict with Iran very much in mind). At the same time, Clinton and Obama appeared, to their credit, to be looking at Libya as a key piece in convincing the Arab Street that the US interests and commitments, while rooted in security and economics, also included a moral dimension—that, in fact, US ability to influence events in the region as a whole would be seriously compromised if the Obama administration could not establish credibility with the Arab people.

In Obama's March 28 speech to the American people explaining US action in Libya, the linkage to his 2009 Cairo speech was clear:

CHAPTER 11

Stalemate Looms

I
n the first few weeks after the start of the NATO campaign, the rebels were understandably elated. After Friday prayers, Libyans held placards aloft expressing appreciation for the West in general and specific people they felt had been critical in marshaling support for the rebel cause. Just weeks before, Gaddafi's forces had recovered from their initial disarray and seemed likely to crush the revolt and exact their revenge. Now the rebels had a new chance to end Gaddafi's reign.

The rebels did their best to put on a good show for foreign observers. Signs posted around the country read:
“Libya: la sharquiyya la gharbiyya”
(“Libya: No Easterners, No Westerners”), and
la lilqabaliyya
(“no to tribalism”).
¹
Regional, religious, tribal, or ideological differences within the rebel camp were neatly papered over.

Yet by mid-April, as Hillary Clinton admitted later, a bit of “buyer's remorse” began to seep in.
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Though John McCain visited Benghazi and called the rebels “my heroes,” the cautions of the naysayers already appeared to be becoming reality. Words like “quagmire” or “stalemate” were entering the discourse, to the distress of the sitting politicians. Meanwhile, many within and outside the anti-Gaddafi coalition began to assert that the NATO actions had surpassed the R2P mandate and taken sides in what looked increasingly like an all-out civil war.
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President Obama caused a ruckus within Congress by not consulting the body formally and directly before engaging in military support for UN Resolutions 1970 and 1973.
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According to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a federal law, “The President may not introduce US Armed Forces into hostilities for periods exceeding sixty days without Congressional authorization.” Against the advice of White House counsel, Obama chose to read US actions as not falling within the definition of hostilities, as intervention was framed as a defensive not an offensive operation. This situation had obvious parallels in the Barbary wars, in which President Jefferson set the precedent for nonhostile hostilities, for which he felt Congress's assent was not required.