Exit the Colonel (38 page)

Of course, Somalia, like Bosnia and Rwanda, was a loaded word for the Americans, and for Democrats, in particular. It was Bill Clinton's ill-fated humanitarian and military campaign in Somalia in the early 1990s—dramatized in the film
Black Hawk Down
with the spectacle of fallen US marines dragged through the streets of Mogadishu—that put Somalia on the map.
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In a March 2 speech, Gaddafi added the threat of piracy into the mix, evoking a return of the days of the Barbary pirates: “In the Mediterranean Sea there will be piracy, like in Somalia. . . . They will say that the ships of the Christians are infidel ships, and cannot sail in the Mediterranean unless they pay. This is what will happen if Libya is not stable.”
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The Western foreign policy establishment, still unsure what was happening on the ground, appeared to take the bait. On March 2, Secretary Clinton, speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, “[O]ne of our biggest concerns is Libya descending into chaos and becoming a giant Somalia.” Clinton, no doubt heavily briefed on the Islamist opposition in Libya, relied on the Sinjar records (documents found in Iraq with demographics of foreign fighters) to question whether Al Qaeda and other groups might exploit a power vacuum to establish a new foothold in the region, such as happened in Somalia.
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Saif and his father amplified these points further in speeches on March 8,
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Foreign Minister Musa Kusa—less than two weeks after his defection March 31—cautioned that Libya was headed for civil war and could turn into a “new Somalia.”
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At this time, the Libyan rebels, Al Qaeda, a range of Islamist organizations, and the West formed an odd collection of cheerleaders for Gaddafi's removal. On February 21, the Egyptian-born, “celebrity” Al Jazeera Islamic affairs commentator Yusuf Qaradawi, issued a fatwa (religious enjoinder) to “All Libyans, to shoot a bullet at Gadhafi if they could do so.” The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, not to be outdone, issued this statement:

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) posted on one of its websites: “[It] is time for the ‘imposter, sinful, hard-hearted bastard Kaddafi [sic]) to meet the same end [as Ben Ali and Mubarak].' . . . We declare our support and aid to the Libyan revolution in its legitimate demands, and we assure our people in Libya that we are with you and will not let you down.”
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Gaddafi's deputy foreign minister countered by claiming that jihadists had proclaimed Derna an Islamic emirate (which never actually happened).

On February 28, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy jointly floated the idea of a no-fly zone–exclusion zone to stop attacks by mercenaries and Gaddafi's warplanes against civilian targets within Libya. While the French papers were lambasting Sarkozy for allowing his foreign minister to offer advice to the “soon to be deposed” Tunisian dictator Ben Ali, Britain's
Financial Times
was questioning whether the prime minister—who had studiously distanced himself from Tony Blair's joint ventures with the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, highly unpopular with the British public—was set to take the UK down another risky and potentially expensive path at the height of a global economic downturn.
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For Cameron, however, Libya had since become a matter of personal contention with his predecessor, whose government he excoriated for “appallingly dodgy dealings with Libya.”
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While 10 Downing Street weighed Britain's response to the unfolding events, Sarkozy made the first move, suspending diplomatic relations with Gaddafi's government on February 26.
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Two days later, France sent two cargo planes filled with medical supplies to Benghazi.
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French participation dated effectively from March 9, with the deployment of AWACs aircraft to monitor events in Libya.
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Saif lashed out at Sarkozy personally for these actions, threatening to expose the extent to which Libya had financed Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign.

Meanwhile, in one of the more astounding diplomatic interludes of the conflict, flamboyant French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, while visiting Egypt in early March was following events in Libya. He said he felt compelled, watching the revolution unfold there, to travel overland to the rebel capital: “It was an accident of history,” he wrote.

Lévy requested and was granted an interview with Mustafa Abdeljalil, in which he offered to use his good offices with the Élysée Palace to request an audience for a National Transitional Council delegation. Lévy described in his Benghazi memoir published in November 2011 how, with essentially no plan and without prior authorization from any French government officials, he found himself speaking by satellite telephone with a president he didn't vote for and with whom he had been on “fragile” terms for several years, requesting him to meet a delegation from the newly formed “Benghazi Commune.”

“I would find it extraordinary if France would be the first to take action,” Lévy claims to have asked Sarkozy. “Absolutely,” Sarkozy responded, “as if [in Lévy's words] he found it perfectly natural to receive a proposal for the official recognition of a newly formed power of which nothing, to date, was known other than it was rebelling against the all-powerful government in Tripoli.”
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Lévy claims he advised Sarkozy to keep Alain Juppé, the French foreign minister, out of the loop, since he was hostile to the idea of intervention in Libya: “One is reminded,” Lévy recounts, “of the manner in which he [Juppé] conducted himself during the crisis of Bosnia, and then Rwanda. He will be absolutely against intervention in Libya. He would not be Juppé if he were not against.” The French media had a field day with Juppé's sidelining by the philosopher-statesman, and Juppé's understandably nonplussed response.
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Adbul Jalil selected Ali Essaoui, Gaddafi's ex-finance minister, and Mahmoud Jibril, the former head of the National Economic Development Board, to travel immediately to Paris to meet with Sarkozy—with the condition that France commit to a formal recognition of the council as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people, which it did, in a statement on March 10. There would be obvious parallels between the French and US decision-making processes, at least to the degree key individuals were pitted against the defense establishment. According to
Le Nouvel Observateur
, the “Élysée and the ministry of defense are split over the way forward after four months of bombing efforts.” According to the
same article, Defense Minister Gerard Longuet objected to the lack of an exit strategy and was “in favor of allowing Gaddafi to stay if [he] gave up civilian and military responsibilities.”
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Lest anyone had forgotten, Sarkozy was second only to Tony Blair and perhaps Italy's Berlusconi in his contributions to Gaddafi's rehabilitation. As we saw, he participated in the dramatic photo-op end of the Bulgarian nurses' case, to the point of being accused of rewarding Gaddafi with promises of future diplomatic receptions in Europe in a way that undermined EU efforts to keep Gaddafi within bounds. One of those quid pro quos was an agreement to host a lavish reception at l'hotel de Marigny, the official residence of guests of the French government, from December 10 to 16 2007, just after the nurses' release.
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Sarkozy's volte face was presumably far less blasé and unplanned than Lévy intimates in his description of his conversation with the president from the Tibesti Hotel in Benghazi. Sarkozy, far more than Obama, had been accused early on—while the Tunisia crisis was unfolding—of taking a regressive stance on the Arab Spring. The fact that France's foreign minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, was discovered in Tunis offering soon-to-be deposed Tunisian leader Ben Ali intelligence assistance proved a major embarrassment to the French government.
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The French press raised the possibility that Sarkozy was in danger of losing French policy leadership over the Arab revolutions, which until then had been “dubious if not catastrophic.”
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Other prospective motives floated were the need to demonstrate leadership within NATO and the Euro-Mediterranean partnership, as well as to show that its armaments were working.
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Sarkozy, moreover, was facing record low opinion ratings in the early stages of the run-up to the 2012 French presidential election, in which polls had him behind even Marine Le Pen of the Far-Right National Front. This was also before the spectacular meltdown of the former head of the International Monetary Fund and French Socialist Party Candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn on May 15 (the expected winner). As several commentators suggested that the Libyan crisis offered Sarkozy the perfect opportunity to regain the initiative, despite the fact that his actions appeared highly hypocritical and given his eagerness to cozy up to Gaddafi in 2007 by intervening in the Bulgarian nurses' case, the subsequent hosting of Gaddafi at the Élysée, and the fact that France was the first European country to sign an agreement to supply Libya with arms the same year.
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Several sources suggest that Sarkozy met with Gaddafi in Tripoli while he was Interior Minister
in 2005 specifically to discuss a 50-million euro contribution to Sarkozy's upcoming presidential campaign.
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All of this would be forgiven, as the French warmed to the idea of an activist France, leading EU policy under a decisive leader. As one French blogger framed it:

Sarkozy's intentions aside, France could be credited with taking the first tangible, decisive steps toward isolating Gaddafi and creating an actionable international consensus.

By early to mid-March, the Middle East was metaphorically and, in many cases, literally on fire. The timing of the subsequent revolts had no little bearing on international actions in and attitudes toward what was happening in Libya. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States sent troops into Bahrain to quell a Shi'a-led uprising against the Al Khalifa dynasty there on March 14, and on March 18, protests turned deadly in Syria. The arc of rebellions was unfortunate for Gaddafi. Had Syria exploded sooner, or so conventional wisdom holds, attention would likely have been deflected from Libya, and the question of “why Libya and not Syria” would have proven far more prickly. Bahrain was the main concern of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular. The Bahrain event and possibilities of local infection clearly conditioned both the Saudi and Qatari actions in Libya, in ways that are still being sorted out.

Foreshadowing her key role in defining US policy on the Libya conflict, Hillary Clinton told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on February 28 that it was time for Gaddafi to go: “Through their actions, they have lost the legitimacy to govern. And the people of Libya have made themselves clear: It is time for Gaddafi to go—now, without further violence
or delay.”
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In the same speech, she hinted that exile might be an option for Gaddafi, but that he must still be held accountable for his actions—a potentially mixed message for Gaddafi, who, according to those in his circle at this time, suggested that he was convinced the US was “out to get him,” no matter what.
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President Obama weighed in publicly for the first time on the Libya conflict on March 3 during a White House press conference with Mexican president Felipe Calderón, saying that Muammar Gaddafi had “lost legitimacy to lead, and he must leave.”
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A critical step in the formation of US policy toward the evolving situation in Libya was the articulation of a set of specific criteria in support of intervention, including legitimate local leadership that could convincingly articulate their needs; strong regional (Arab) support; and a clear legal mandate, i.e., a UN resolution supporting external action. Sources close to President Obama say the Secretary played a key role in formulating and selling these criteria to the President.
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In
A Problem from Hell
, Power described the tendency of government bureaucracies (here, she takes direct aim at the State Department) to dilute the messages and warning of lower-level analysts, and to refer to past intractable situations (“quagmires”) as an excuse for inaction. She also said she believes such crises typically come with warning and that the perpetrator(s) always counted on the inaction of the outsiders. While some diplomats with past Libya experience complained they had not been consulted by the Department or the Administration, Clinton appeared to have reached deep enough into the bureaucracy, and outside of it, to understand that nonintervention in Libya specifically was not an option if the US wanted to preserve credibility in the region.