Exit the Colonel (47 page)

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the amount and quality of information the US and other Western governments had on events in Libya were poor at best. While much more information was forthcoming in the years 2004–2008, the inner workings of the Libyan regime were still largely a mystery, as various Wikileaks cables demonstrate. Once the extremist-oriented intelligence-gathering collaborations between the US and UK clandestine services were underway, there appeared to be an added incentive not to know exactly what was happening within the country. Even before the release of Wikileaks cables on Libya in 2010, relations between Libya and the US appeared to be declining rapidly, which also clearly had an effect on the quality of information available to senior US policymakers. As General Carter Ham, who oversaw initial operations against Libya in the campaign Odyssey Dawn, said: “We didn't have great data.... Libya hasn't been a country we focused on a lot over the last few years.”
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Further, “As Colonel Qaddafi [sic] began his recent crackdown on the rebel groups, the American spy agencies have worked to rekindle ties to Libyan informants and to learn more about the country's military leaders.”
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As much as the West wanted to believe its own narrative about Gaddafi's potential conversion, those academics and policy experts who knew Libya best were, to varying degrees, highly skeptical. Many believed that
ultimately—and as long as Gaddafi was at the helm—Libya would fall apart, and when it did, it would likely be messy. As Lisa Anderson commented:

On the whole, most academics focused on the Middle East were too far afield of Libya to offer much insight.

The broader, regional indicators of the effects of high and chronic unemployment, corruption, and poor educational and medical infrastructures were obvious. Both the World Bank and the United Nations had produced dire reports concerning the demographic-reform crisis facing the Middle East. A 1999 report pointed out that employment specifically in North Africa, but also throughout the Middle East as a whole, needed to grow by 3.6 percent to 5 percent in order to provide sufficient jobs for young people—a much higher rate than that in the Asian and Latin American powerhouses.
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The National Economic Strategy and a host of other documents related to Libya stressed the need for both reform and creation of a robust social safety net to protect, engage, and educate the youth and the most vulnerable elements of the population.

On May 24, 2011, several hundred people demonstrated outside Buckingham Palace, where President Obama was meeting with Queen Elizabeth. Placards carried familiar slogans: “No War for Oil,” “Stop Bombing Libya Now.” Bumper stickers started showing up in Liberal strongholds reading “US out of Libya Now” and “No War for Libyan Oil.” Many assumed, and have argued vociferously, that US intervention in Libya was really about access to the oil and not much else.

This argument makes little sense. The US was not keen to get involved in the Libyan conflict directly, as evidenced by the multiplicity of views within the US government regarding intervention. Many of the US oil
companies were, as of late 2010, indeed, fed up with Libya. US and Western companies and bureaucracies had invested much time and effort in reestablishing access to Libyan energy, and the financial terms offered by the Libyans continued to compromise the viability of a number of previous EPSA concessions. That said, even as some companies neglected to renew concessions, at least two US companies remained very bullish on Libya exploration prospects.
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Edward Morse, Managing Director, Global Head of Commodity Research at Citi Group notes, “With respect to Libya, the calculations of one company often varied tremendously from those of another,” depending on a variety of factors, from technology, to records of past finds in-country, to their global portfolio.
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The political volatility surrounding Libya in 2009/2010 (including the rapid freeze in relations with the US post-Wikileaks, and other strange events described above) very likely fed into some of the oil companies' reticence to proceed with, or negotiate, new contracts with, Libya—how much, future studies may reveal. Gaddafi's expressed admiration for Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his efforts to renationalize Venezuelan oil and ports were certainly not well received in the industry, or the State Department.

Moncef Djaziri, a seasoned Libya analyst, speculates that the West was becoming increasingly nervous in 2010, not so much about the fate of Libyan oil and gas resources as about the degree to which Gaddafi was courting the BRIC countries to invest in Libya and to block Western access to mineral- and oil-rich countries in Africa.
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According to Djaziri's thesis the Arab Spring provided the Western allies the perfect excuse to upend Gaddafi, while benefiting from a more malleable National Transitional Council, “obligated” by Western intervention to favor Western companies with new contracts. This argument was presumably endorsed by those who thought Obama's presidential finding with respect to covert operations in Libya suspicious. Djaziri suggests that Germany's underwhelming support for Resolution 1973 was related to the fact that German firms had already begun negotiations with the Libyans to create a vast solar power array in the Libyan desert capable of supplying up to 20 percent of Europe's industrial energy needs.
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With deference to Djaziri's excellent previous studies on Libyan state and society, just as much broader perceived interests had motivated the US rapprochement with Gaddafi several years earlier, the same was likely true in 2011; Western actions in Libya would never be wholly about Libya.

The fact that the UN, the United States, the UK, France, Italy, and others (including various Arab states) were ostensibly galvanized to intervene in Libya in a mission to protect Libyan civilians from human rights violations at the hand of Gaddafi must be one of the largest ironies of the Libyan revolution, given how low such considerations had been on the list of priorities in dealing with Libya over the previous seven years. Yet Gaddafi provided an almost perfect proving ground for Western leaders who had promised to change business as usual and side with the people against tyrants. Additionally, a group within the White House and National Security Council had been waiting for a suitable opportunity in which to develop the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, in part based on previous objections to US inaction in the face of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and so on. Regardless, Gaddafi's epic miscalculation of the international community's willingness to respond to a threatened leveling of Benghazi provided a clear situation for humanitarian-based intervention.

Were humanitarian grounds a pretext, a fig leaf, to cover other agendas? Certainly many in Benghazi felt so: one elder resident said in July, four months after the city's liberation, “We appreciate what the Americans have done. We would have been killed here without their help, and that of the French. But we also appreciate that America has interests, and must stay true to those interests. We do not expect they will solve our problems—even though many feel they should do more.”
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Lurking behind the 2003 WMD deal and rhetorical rapprochement with Gaddafi was always the notion that a reformed Libya would lead Iran to follow suit and abandon its nuclear ambitions. Iran would be comforted by the US demonstrating the capability to take regime change off the table, so long as the other side was willing to make compromises as well.

In the wake of UN Resolution 1973 authorizing the use of force to protect Libyan civilians, almost all the architects of the West-Libya rapprochement insisted that Western foreign support for NATO intervention in Libya would have the greatest (negative) impact on US-Iran relations, and at a critical time. In other words, Iran would observe how quickly the US and its allies abandoned Gaddafi and conclude that it was right to have resisted
dialogue about its nuclear weapons program. Another argument against intervention post-Revolution expressed in a May/June 2012
Foreign Policy
piece evaluating Obama's foreign policy to date: the idea that by stretching the limits of the original UN mandate (Resolution 1973) to include, de facto, regime change, “We the West and the Arab world lost the support of the BRIC countries to do much about Syria.” Accordingly, “Libya was always a strategic sideshow Obama helped achieve the relatively low-cost overthrow of a brutal dictator there . . . by repeatedly calling for Muammar al-Qaddafi's (sic) overthrow when UN Resolution 1973 provided for no such thing.”
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Obama confirmed Chinese and Russian charges that the West would distort the intention of UN resolutions on the matter for its own purposes.”
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The authors (among them Martin Indyk) argue that the “unintended consequence” of the NATO operation against Libya was that the BRIC countries, plus South Africa, would not support future UN resolutions to intervene in Arab Spring countries, thus has “made it more difficult for Obama to isolate the Assad regime.”
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Take Iran: popular as it was, the argument that Libya's conversation would have a major impact on US-Iran relations was dubious from the beginning. Iran presumably knew just as well as did the US that Libya's nuclear program was far inferior to its own, and that the WMD story was “overcooked” for political purposes. Further, rather than seeing itself as another Libya, Iran would instead see that the US was willing to gamble that a partnership with someone as unreliable as Gaddafi would produce a major policy success. Khameini would say of the partnership that Gaddafi was like a child, whom the US had pacified with a lollipop.
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Whether the US-Libya relationship succeeded or failed had little to do with Iran, where the stakes were much higher and the incentives to negotiate far less obvious.

Besides, at the time of the first stirrings of the Arab Spring, the Obama administration had already pursued a range of policies that Iran had interpreted as hostile—most notably, the ever-increasing and targeted sanctions, and harsh condemnation of Iran's crackdowns during its own Green Revolution in 2009. As Hossein Mousavian wrote in an April 2012
Foreign Policy
article, “The Obama Administration has done more to undermine Iran over the past three years than any US presidency in the 33 years since the Iranian Revolution. Under the shadow of a policy of ‘engagement,' the United States and Israel have led a campaign of economic, cyber, and covert war against Iran.”
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Further, the Iranians were certainly not blind to the fact that the US-Libya relationship had been going downhill long before the Arab Spring. Gaddafi had after all complained vigorously that he was not sufficiently rewarded for his actions, and that Libya “would not be a model for Iran.”
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Things might have been different, had the intervention in Iraq gone significantly better. As Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment noted: “[T]he situation might have been different vis à vis Libya, had the U.S. made a stunning success in Iraq, and Iran not been able to acquire leverage there.”
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As we have seen, the Libya rapprochement emerged in large part from failed policies in Iraq; thus the Iranian regime would tend to see it, again, as a move taken from a position of weakness rather than strength. In any event, the parties that were most incensed by US intervention in Libya were a different lot altogether: “frequent statements from both President Barack Obama and the US State Department angered . . . America's allies in the region, who saw in the US failure to support a staunch ally and long-time recipient of US aid a sign that the superpower was not to be trusted.”
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Mousavian's notion of an increasingly hostile US approach to Iran was supported by policy experts who argued informally that Libya was now most useful, not as an inducement to better behavior by Iran, but as an implicit threat, and an opportunity to signal that any further crackdown on its homegrown opposition was unacceptable. Ayatollah Khameini, for his part, countered by exhorting the rebels not to trust their Western “friends”: they were the same, he said, as those who used to “sit and drink with those who once suppressed the Libyan nation,” and were now looking to “take advantage of the situation.”
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It was not an argument that would have gone over well with a mass audience, for it would open up too many other prickly questions—but there was a moral argument for intervention that never made it into the Western press; i.e., the fact that Gaddafi could avail himself of large amounts of weaponry, much of which can be traced directly to the US's assent to, and participation in, the 2003 rapprochement. If a minority can overpower a majority with the help of weapons provided by a third party, does that third party then have a moral obligation to intervene to “even the playing field?” If the first problem did not occupy the minds of Western policymakers,
another certainly did: Did the US and the West want these weapons seeping out into the hands of extremists and revolutionaries around the world, or did we prefer them to be left in the hands of a victorious or wounded Gaddafi (and we have a good sense of what that might engender—perhaps a slew of Pan Am 103s). Gaddafi may be gone, but his weapons and money are clearly still funding spoilers within Libya, and there are somewhere between $200 and $800 billion in state assets unaccounted for (Libya has engaged a series of forensic accountants to try to locate this money, but one can surmise that ultimately only a fraction of this money will be found, let alone recovered).
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