Raining fire

In the name of humanitarian intervention to protect civilians, France and the U.S. take the military route.

ON February 17, 2006, the regime of Muammar Qaddafi put down a rebellion in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Unrest in the region has a long history that goes back to the time of Ottoman rule. Led by Omar Mukhtar, the eastern province of what was once Cyrenaica provided the core of the resistance to Italian colonialism. Qaddafi's regime, from 1969, neglected the region, and its people remained restive. Political Islam made its impact here and its young fighters went off to join the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is also from this part of Libya that periodic armed rebellions emerged, as in the 1980s with the Libyan National Salvation Front, and as in the 1990s with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Out of this history, powered by grievances that mounted over the decades, and inspired by the Arab Spring, Benghazi's people rose against Qaddafi on February 17, 2011 (smaller protests broke out two days earlier).

The response from Tripoli was swift and brutal. The Qaddafi regime declared all forms of protest a threat to it and sent in troops and security forces to use unsheathed force. In the east, parts of the regime defected to the rebellion and so too did Ministers from his government. Benghazi departed from Qaddafi's control and a city council and a Provincial National Council (PNC) were formed. The PNC placed a bland former Justice Minister, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, at its chair, with a former government planner, Mahmoud Jibril, at his side as Prime Minister. Rebel soldiers barricaded the city and awaited a siege. Jibril, one of Qaddafi's main neoliberal advisers, is the brains behind the PNC. As the head of the National Economic Development Board (NEDB), he had played a crucial role in the entry of firms from the U.S., the United Kingdom and France into Libya as it privatised its economy.

A WikiLeaks cable (09TRIPOLI386) from May 11, 2009, offers the most comprehensive look at Mahmoud Jibril. Here is the summary of the conversation between Jibril and U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz: The NEDB's role is to pave the way' for private sector development, and to create a strategic partnership between private companies and the government. There is still a gap of distrust' dividing the two. As to whether Libya has a Master Plan that includes all the 11,000 projects, Jibril admitted that in the past two years Libya had started executing projects without such a plan. However, the NEDB has been working with experts from Ernst and Young, the Oxford Group, and lately with five consultants from UNDP to advise the Prime Minister on the best sequencing and pacing of the projects in order to decrease poverty and unemployment. With a PhD in strategic planning from the University of Pittsburgh, Jibril is a serious interlocutor who gets' the U.S. perspective. He is also not shy about sharing his views of U.S. foreign policy, for example, opining that the U.S. spoiled a golden opportunity to capitalise on its soft power' (McDonald's, etc.) after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 by putting boots on the ground' in the Middle East [West Asia]. At the same time, his organisation has a daunting task to tackle, in terms of rationalising 11,000 development projects in the chaotic Libyan government bureaucracy and also to train Libyans to work in new sectors outside of the hydrocarbons industry. Jibril has stated American companies and universities are welcome to join him in this endeavour and we should take him up on his offer.

The defection of arms to the side of the Benghazi council threatened Qaddafi's regime, now isolated in Tripoli. Zintan was the first city in the west to join the rebellion of the east. It was, therefore, in the gun-sights of the Qaddafi regime. Violence in mid-March paralysed Misrata, Zintan, Ajdabia and other cities. Qaddafi called for a ceasefire but then promptly broke it. His troops took control of many of the cities of the west, but the east remained in the hands of the Benghazi council. Qaddafi's troops moved eastward, towards Benghazi. It was at this point that the United Nations resolved to create a no-fly zone and take other measures. The air attacks from France and the U.S. came even as the ink dried on U.N. Resolution 1973, and they momentarily broke the momentum of Qaddafi's armies.

Making of the Resolution

By early March, uprisings from Bahrain to Libya continued the dynamic that opened up in Tunisia and Egypt. Differences in the local character of the grievances and the movements set these uprisings apart. From Kuwait to Muscat, anger and despair among the working-class Shia population characterises the rebellions, with Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia as the epicentre. In Libya, civil war between provinces in the west and the east defined the conflict. Certainly, the uprising in the east had been joined by sporadic working-class outbursts inside Tripoli and in cities such as Zintan. But the main divide in Libya remains that between east and west, and it is along that meridian that the armed conflict is focussed (the rebels advanced out of Benghazi to Ajdabia and toward Ras Lanuf, only to be repulsed, and so on).

Consideration of violence along the eastern rim of the Persian Gulf was dampened by the Western media's concern for the people of Benghazi. This was convenient for the sheikhs, whose own idea of humanitarian intervention was to send in Saudi troops to shoot at Bahraini protesters and send them home. All eyes turned to Benghazi, and from Paris and Washington pressure mounted on the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) to pass a strong resolution to constrain Qaddafi's forces.

On February 26, the U.N. unanimously passed Resolution 1970, blocking sales of arms and military equipment to the government of Libya. There was a general understanding that the situation on the ground in Libya had devolved into an asymmetrical civil war, with the Libyan army (with air support) far stronger than the rebel army. The possibility of a civilian massacre in any of the cities had not been raised. The statement by U. Joy Ogwu, Nigeria's Permanent Representative to the U.N., was typical. She expressed her concern about the inflammatory rhetoric and loss of life occurring in Libya, and hoped that the sanctions would provide for the protection of civilians and respect for international humanitarian and human rights law. The Security Council focussed on the killing of protesters in the cities and the refugee crisis that had inflicted the Tunisian-Libyan border.

By March 14, the military wing of the Benghazi rebellion had been turned over to an ex-colonel of the Libyan army, Khalifa Heftir, and to former Interior Minister General Abdel Fateh Younis. Heftir made his name in Qaddafi's war against Chad in the 1980s. At some point in that conflict, Heftir turned against Qaddafi, joined the Libyan National Salvation Front, and operated his resistance out of Chad. When the U.S.-supported government of Chad, led by Hissne Habr, fell in 1990, Heftir fled to the U.S. It is interesting that an ex-colonel of the Libyan army was so easily able to get entry into the U.S. Also of interest is the fact that Heftir took up residence in Vienna, Virginia, about 10 kilometres from the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at Langley, Virginia.

In Vienna, Heftir formed the Libyan National Army (LNA). In 1996, the LNA attempted an armed rebellion against Qaddafi in the eastern part of Libya. It failed. But that did not stop his plans. History called him back 15 years later. In March 2011, Heftir flew into Benghazi to take command of the defected troops, joining Younis whose troops had been routed from Ras Lanuf on March 12. They faced the advance of Qaddafi's forces towards Benghazi.

It was in this context, with the uprising now firmly usurped by a neoliberal political leadership and a CIA-backed military leadership, that talk of a no-fly zone emerged. Younis and others reached out to the Arab League, whose Secretary General, Amr Moussa, announced to Der Spiegel that the United Nations, the Arab League, the African Union [A.U.], the Europeans everyone should participate in the actions against Qaddafi. The Arab League was cautious but its member-states favoured some kind of action. It was not clear to them what a no-fly zone would entail. When it was finally put in place, and the bombings began, Moussa, remarkably, said the League had not assumed that a no-fly zone would entail bombings.

The A.U. was torn. It is beholden to Qaddafi, its biggest backer. Its leadership was wary of intervention. A conflict in Ivory Coast had absorbed some of its attention. Without adequate funds, the Union's peacekeepers did not have the training or weaponry to go in and enforce a ceasefire (they were barely able to act in Darfur in Sudan and in Chad). Nevertheless, on March 10, the A.U's Peace and Security Council met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and set up a High Level Ad Hoc Committee on Libya. They were to fly in to Tripoli and put pressure on Qaddafi. The committee included A.U. head Jean Ping, Mauritania's Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, Republic of Congo's Sessou Ngueso, Mali's Amadou Toumani Toure, South Africa's Jacob Zuma and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni.

The A.U's important initiative was circumvented by a hasty second resolution sent to the U.N. by the Atlantic powers. On March 17, the UNSC met again and, against warnings from Brazil, China, Germany, India and Russia, called for member-states to use all necessary measures to enforce a no-fly zone. The impetus for this decision came from Paris and Washington. In both capitals there have been concerted efforts to rehabilitate the idea of humanitarian interventionism, the notion that a Western power can go to war to protect citizens in another country (the obligation to protect, as the U.N. puts it).

The writer Bernard Henri-Levi, who telephoned President Nicolas Sarkozy from his revolutionary safari in Benghazi, put pressure on the lyse Palace. Qaddafi's chief of protocol, Nuri Mesmari, had defected to Paris in March last year and had met not only Sarkozy but also members of the February 17 movement from Benghazi on December 23 (people such as Fathi Boukhris, Farj Charrani and All Ounes Mansouri, all of whom were arrested in February in Benghazi in the run-up to the protests of February 17, 2011, and are now part of the Benghazi rebel group). The main military contact that Mesmari cultivated in Benghazi is Colonel Abdallah Gehani (of the air defence corps).

On March 15, in the White House, President Barack Obama's inner circle sat and made its own plans. At the centre of it are people who believe that George W. Bush's adventure in Iraq in 2003 destroyed the will among Northern states for intervention. Libya provided the opportunity to reconstruct that will. A senior administration official told Time's Massimo Calabresi, The effort to shoe-horn [the Libyan events] into an imminent genocide model is strained.

Nevertheless, as early as February, the supporters of humanitarian intervention were laying the predicate for military force. Among them were Samantha Power and Jeremy Weinstein (National Security Council), Susan Rice (U.N. Ambassador) and Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State). Obama had a harder time with his military commanders, who were loathe to enter another conflict on pragmatic grounds: they simply did not have the troops needed if the conflict escalated. But Obama got their support, and on March 16 announced that if Qaddafi was not stopped the words of the international community would be rendered hollow. This was the same argument George W. Bush used against Saddam Hussein.

In the UNSC, the U.S. and France pushed for the no-fly zone, and when the draft came back, the U.S. insisted on adding a crucial phrase: the Council authorised members to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of 1970, to protect civilians and civilian populated areas.

Paragraph 9 of the February 26 resolution established the arms embargo. The new resolution upheld the embargo, but then this curious phrase with notwithstanding at its core seemed to circumvent the strict embargo. On March 26, White House spokesperson Jay Carney told the media that the resolution provided the U.S. with flexibility within that to take that action [supply military equipment] if we thought that were the right way to go. In other words, the arms embargo is flexible. On March 27, U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates told NBC's David Gregory on the question of arms supply:, No decision has been made about that at this point.

Air Support for Rebels

When the French began the air assault, the U.S. hastily joined with a barrage of tomahawk cruise missiles. These were aimed at a variety of targets, including Qaddafi's home, ammunition dumps, troops stationed outside Benghazi and troop centres in western Libya. The UNSC prevented the A.U's delegation from leaving for Tripoli. All peace initiatives had to be blocked. The bombardment ended the possibility of dialogue. The Arab League balked, not having thought through the implications of its support for the no-fly zone. Moussa's cagey disavowal of the bombardment was corrected hastily as he appeared beside U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the League's headquarters in Cairo. Everyone had to stand together, even when it appeared that the French and the U.S. were going to overstep the spirit of the resolution.

Problems with the resolution's vagueness became clear during the first days of the bombing. The spirit of the resolution was that the members of the U.N. had an obligation to protect unarmed civilians. It did not have an obligation to protect armed rebels. If that were the case, the resolution would have authorised the members to become a party to a civil war. Would the no-fly zone give the rebels an advantage and so violate the mandate? We do not provide close air support for the opposition forces, noted General Carter Ham of the U.S. African Command. We protect civilians. However, he added, It's a very problematic situation. Sometimes these are situations that brief better at the headquarters than in the cockpit of an aircraft. If Qaddafi's forces engage the rebels, the planes and cruise missiles technically cannot interfere. In which case, the call made by the rebels for air support cannot be met by Resolution 1973.

Technology has rendered the idea of ground forces redundant. The U.S. brought its AC130 gunships and A10 Thunderbolt II aircraft into operation over the skies of Libya. These are not designed to help patrol the sky, but are capable of hovering in the sky and firing at ground troops and at heavy machinery with its cannons (including a 40-mm Bofors cannon) and machine guns. The AC130 is essentially boots in the air, and its presence shows that the U.S. arsenal (even under NATO command) is no longer patrolling the skies but is actively engaged against the Qaddafi forces on the ground.

The troops of Qaddafi and of the rebels swing back and forth between Ras Lanuf and Ajdabia like a pendulum. U.S. and French air strikes have degraded the forces of the regime but have not yet destroyed them. The civil war continues. If the West starts to supply the rebels, it is likely that in the long haul Qaddafi's troops will lose their will to fight. In which case, Libya is likely to enter a protracted period of deep instability. The figures in place in Benghazi from the political and military side would hope to ride into Tripoli on their own tanks, but under NATO air cover. They have many to whom they owe much. People like Mahmoud Jibril and Khalifa Heftir will be more accountable to their patrons in Paris and Washington than to the people of Libya, whose blood is being spilled on both sides of the country for an outcome that is unlikely to benefit them.