Out of the Mountains (37 page)

The Electronic Levée en Masse

In this sense, Libya was one of the earliest and clearest examples of what Audrey Kurth Cronin calls the electronic levée en masse. In 2006, she argued that digital connectivity was changing the process of mass mobilization in warfare, enabling “a mass networked mobilization that emerges from cyberspace with a direct impact on physical reality. Individually accessible, ordinary networked communications such as personal computers, DVDs, videotapes, and cell phones are altering the nature of human social interaction, thus also affecting the shape and outcome of domestic and international conflict.”
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In a prescient article, written five years before the Arab uprisings, Cronin pointed out that “modern” warfare—state-based, industrialized total war involving massive national mobilization—dates from the American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, and from the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars that followed. This was a period of mass movements, democratic uprisings, and urban insurgencies against authoritarian regimes, with strong similarities to the Arab uprisings we're examining here. The hallmark of modern warfare, in Cronin's analysis, was “a fundamental shift from dynastic warfare between kings to mass participation of the populace in national warfare.”
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Enabling this shift was a capability—pioneered by French revolutionary leaders in
1793
, exploited by Napoleon in his conquests across Europe, and later copied by others to compete with him—to mobilize, manipulate, and control an enormous population. This capability (known as the levée en masse) rested on a rapid expansion and democratization of communications technology: an analog equivalent of the democratization of digital connectivity that we're experiencing today. As Cronin argued, “the French populace was reached, radicalized, educated, and organized so as to save the revolution and participate in its wars. It is no accident that the rise of mass warfare coincided with a huge explosion in the means of communication, particularly a dramatic growth in the number of common publications such as journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and other short-lived forms of literature. No popular mobilization could have succeeded in the absence of dramatically expanding popular communications.”
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Cronin rightly predicted the profound implications of this shift, pointing to “a democratization of communications, an increase in public access, a sharp reduction in cost, a growth in frequency, and an exploitation of images to construct a mobilizing narrative” as key new elements.
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All these elements were apparent in the Arab uprisings of
2011
. Beyond its political mobilizing effect, however, as we've observed in several examples already, this enhanced connectivity is enabling an ongoing diffusion—a democratization and decentralization—of military coordination, logistics, and intelligence functions that were traditionally centralized and state-owned. This allows nonstate armed groups of all kinds, as well as noncombatant civilians, to establish distributed, remotely based command and control systems. These in turn can support self-synchronized swarming tactics (as in Mumbai or Mogadishu). Lacking a centralized “brain,” these systems are invulnerable to attacks from conventional armed forces.

The process of diffusion, enabled by globalized connectivity, is thus allowing civil society and nonstate groups to play the same game of remote warfare that developed states are playing, albeit with very different tools. It puts a sharp point on Marshall McLuhan's
1970
prediction that “World War III is a guerrilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation”
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—and, we might add, no division between domestic and international space, meaning that activists (such as Stephanie Lamy, who supported the uprising from Paris, or Steen Kirby in his high school in Georgia) were virtually in theater in Libya, much as Predator pilots are virtually in theater in Afghanistan. Increased connectivity has placed this electronic levée en masse capability directly into the hands of the ordinary citizen—provided, of course, that he or she lives in a place with access to electricity, cellphone service, and the Internet, or among a population with the technical know-how to reestablish such connectivity if interrupted (in other words, probably in a major city). In Libya's cities, the levée en masse had allowed the intifada by this time to escalate to full-scale, urban, networked insurgency, with rebels seizing several cities across the country.

“Open the Arsenals”

The first and largest of these was Benghazi. The first Western journalist to reach the city, Martin Chulov of the
Guardian
, found scenes of utter carnage and chaos when he arrived on February 22. Chulov reported that (just as in Tunisia, and later in Syria) the regime's control had begun to collapse when soldiers fired on mourners at a funeral close to the main military base. “The people were leading a funeral march past the big roundabout and people from inside the base opened fire,” one protestor told Chulov. “They went home, gathered themselves and came back. This is what happened.”
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What happened was a full-scale urban battle. Seizing earthmoving equipment from nearby construction sites, and armed with AK-
47
s and RPGs captured from security forces during the past week's fighting, enraged protestors mounted a direct assault on the base, using bulldozers to create breaches in the perimeter walls, through which they streamed into the compound. Other protestors, alerted by social media, cellphone calls, or text messages, grabbed weapons and moved to the sound of the guns, joining the battle in a continuous flow of ad hoc reinforcements coming in from all directions. Regime troops set up a Soviet-made
23
mm anti-aircraft gun in ground defense mode and poured hundreds of explosive shells into the crowd of attackers, killing many, but to no avail—people were soon inside the base, seizing weapons, setting fire to the barracks, and slaughtering troops and police in a frenzy of retaliatory bloodletting. They soon moved on to the Mukhabarat headquarters, killing many secret police on the spot, arresting some, and beating others to death; a few members of the Mukhabarat tried—usually unsuccessfully—to save their skins by defecting.

In the ground war, the Ultras were playing their familiar role as hard-core shock troops of the street protests, but this time many other groups of young men, organized by tribe or district, were swarming to join the intifada. There was also a regional twist, with Benghazi soccer fans avenging themselves for years of abuse at the hands of the regime. Gaddafi had tried to associate himself with Libyan soccer, despite little real interest in sports. He emblazoned quotes from his Green Book on stadiums across the country, “including the notion that both weapons and sports belong to the people. He appointed his son [Al-Saadi] head of the Libyan Football Federation. Al-Saadi placed himself in the starting lineup of the Ahly club of Tripoli and pursued a stormy rivalry with the Ahly club of Benghazi.”
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In
2000
, Al-Saadi blatantly rigged several soccer matches to favor his own team; when Benghazi officials protested, he imprisoned them, relegated Benghazi to the Libyan league's second division, and burned the club's headquarters to the ground.
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This mirrored, on the sports field, the injustice Cyrenaicans felt in political and economic life. A decade later, it was payback time: as in Tunisia and Egypt, Ultras became the vanguard of the street fighting, and contributed to several of the ad hoc militias that emerged as the uprising continued.
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As mentioned earlier, the presence of black African mercenaries working for the regime, hundreds of whom had been flown into an air base outside the city over the preceding two weeks, provided a further, racially tinged source of irritation for the rebels. Gaddafi had always thought and spoken of himself as an African (not solely Arab) leader and supported revolutionaries across the continent, but many Libyans from the heavily populated, predominantly Arab coastal areas found this offensive, looking to the Arab world for their identity.
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Many mercenaries were found dead inside the barracks when the fighting ended, and others were arrested. Gaddafi's “use of mercenaries appears to have tipped the hand of many protestors and [defecting] armed forces. ‘That is why we turned against the government,' said Air Force major Rajib Feytouni. ‘That and the fact that there was an order to use planes to attack the people.”
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By the time Chulov arrived two days after the fall of the base, the city was firmly in rebel hands:

Residents who would not have dared to approach the town's main military base without an invitation were doing victory laps around it in their cars. Every barrack block inside had been torched and looted. . . . All day defecting troops and officers were lugging in thousands of pounds of ammunition to a courtyard inside the secret police headquarters on Benghazi's waterfront. By the day's end an arsenal that could easily supply an army brigade was piled up. There were plastic explosives, rockets, machine guns and even the anti-aircraft weapon that was used to mow down demonstrators as they assaulted the military base on Sunday. Evidence of the carnage it caused was clear on the walls of nearby buildings and in the mortuaries. . . . This was a savage rampage on both sides, a blood and guts revolution, fuelled by decades of repression, neglect and rage. Neighbourhood Watch–like groups, all armed with AK-47s, manned checkpoints in and out of all the towns. But every military and police post for 360 miles had been abandoned. The scattering of the police was leading to claims of victory and the feeling of triumphalism among many of the city's young people.
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But Gaddafi had no plans to accept the loss of Benghazi (and with it, control over 25 percent of Libya's population and much of its oil revenue): he began to gather forces, including tanks, outside the city for a counterattack. This was no surprise for the rebels. A twenty-four-year-old student told Martin Chulov: “If [Gaddafi] feels he is cornered he will come for us. Those roads you came in on may be clear, but you did not see who is hiding over the hills?”
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Gaddafi's intent wasn't just to recapture Benghazi. He also planned to make an example of the city, to cow the rest of Libya's population and teach Cyrenaicans a lesson in brutality they would never forget. This counterattack—or, more accurately, its effect on international opinion via social media—would be the turning point of the war.

Within days of the liberation of Benghazi, the intifada had spread across the country. All of Cyrenaica was lost to the regime, the important harbor cities of Ra's Lanuf and Brega had fallen to the uprising, western towns such as az-Zawiya were in revolt, and Berber-majority cities including Yefren, Zintan, and Jadu were in rebel hands. By February
25
the uprising was in full swing in Tripoli itself, with violence in many urban districts, regime gunmen in unmarked cars shooting protestors, corpses and burned-out vehicles littering the streets, and unarmed demonstrations giving way to street battles with rifles, RPGs, and grenades. President Gaddafi appeared in Green Square to taunt the protestors and threatened to “open the arsenals.”
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In reality, the dictator had bunkered down in his compound at Bab al-Azizya, emerging only occasionally to make bizarrely unrealistic speeches to a group of Western journalists held under tight regime control in Tripoli. More military officers and some whole units had defected, and intense fighting had broken out in Misurata, Libya's third-largest city and business capital, a hundred miles east of Tripoli along the coast road. Libya's diplomats at the UN in Geneva and envoys in France, Australia and Bangladesh had defected, and now claimed to represent the rebels. Perhaps the most important defection was that of the entire Libyan delegation to the Arab League, members of whom—like other defectors—called for international intervention to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.
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This defection, alongside Gaddafi's loss of control over at least half the country, encouraged the Arab League and the United Nations to support military intervention, while the United States and others froze Libya's financial assets and the International Criminal Court announced it would investigate the regime's crimes.
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These diplomatic moves eventually resulted in the adoption of Security Council Resolution
1973
on March
17
,
2011
. The resolution, under Chapter
7
of the UN charter—the authority that allows the United Nations to conduct armed, coercive peace enforcement operations, rather than “blue helmet”–style peacekeeping—called for an immediate cease-fire and authorized the international community to establish a no-fly zone and use “all means necessary short of foreign occupation” to protect civilians.
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This, along with pressure from Australia, France, Great Britain, and the United States, cleared the way for intervention by NATO.

Two days later, Gaddafi's troops moved on Benghazi. After protesting the UN resolution as a “crusader” and “colonial” intrusion into Libya's sovereignty, Gaddafi declared a cease-fire and claimed he was halting his troops, who had been making steady progress toward Benghazi in a series of bloody battles in towns along the coast road. But then on the morning of March
19
, his forces began bombarding Benghazi and moved into the outskirts of the city from the west, with armor and infantry columns supported by air strikes.

Western media and NGOs had set themselves up in the city over the previous month but now fled in large numbers toward the Egyptian border, as did many Benghazi residents, who rightly expected a bloodbath when the assault reached the city center. One member of the rebel council, who returned from the diaspora when the uprising began, told me that she stood at the entrance to the rebel headquarters, in tears, as the foreigners left. Many had become her friends over past weeks and were reluctant to go; several asked her, “What can we do to help you?” Fully expecting to die, knowing that the departure of foreign observers would give the regime space for unrestrained vengeance once the city fell, she told them: “Tell our story. Tell what happened here, so people will know that someone dared to stand up to Gaddafi.”
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For her, it felt like the end of the world.