Civil War in Libya

[PanzerJaeger]

I read them, even though I didn't comment.

What do you think about the situation in Syria? Is there a real humanitarian crisis going on there or is it just propaganda like what happened with Libya?

I think the two situations are completely different. The rebellion in Libya was in many ways a very unique case within the greater Arab Spring movement in that it was highly orchestrated and militarized from the outset. To quote another report:

At the same time, much Western media coverage has from
the outset presented a very one-sided view of the logic of
events, portraying the protest movement as entirely peaceful
and repeatedly suggesting that the regime’s security
forces were unaccountably massacring unarmed demonstrators
who presented no real security challenge.21 This
version would appear to ignore evidence that the protest
movement exhibited a violent aspect from very early on.
While there is no doubt that many and quite probably a
large majority of the people mobilised in the early demonstrations
were indeed intent on demonstrating peacefully,
there is also evidence that, as the regime claimed,
the demonstrations were infiltrated by violent elements.22
Likewise, there are grounds for questioning the more sensational
reports that the regime was using its air force to slaughter demonstrators, let alone engaging in anything
remotely warranting use of the term “genocide”.23

The Libyan affair resembled a regional civil war far more than a genuine protest movement similar to others in the Arab Spring. Within the first few days of the protests, security forces were attacked, government buildings were razed, and arsenals were targeted, all in the absense of a true government crackdown. Small protests started on Febuary 15 and 16, with the more violent ones dealt with with water cannons, rubber bullets, and live fire into the air. On the 17th, a 'Day of Rage' was planned similar to that of other Arab Spring protests. These protests proved even more violent, and a small number of both 'protestors' and security forces were killed. The 'protestors' claim the government opened fire indiscriminantly on the protests, while the government claims armed groups deliberately targeted security and military installations. Contrary to media reports at the time that relied exclusively on rebel accounts, there is no evidence to support which side fired the first shots. The facts that strategic military installations and aresenals were immediately taken in carefully planned operations and Benghazi had completely fallen to armed groups just three days later suggests a level of organization that tends to support government assertions. CF2R found similar 'violent elements' in the protest movement from the outset as I quoted earlier:

In Benghazi, on February 12th, the people’s uprising was led and directed by a lawyer. After his arrest by Libyan police, the populace, egged on by three to four hundred activists, emerged again on the 15th February -#‐two days before the demonstrations named by social media -#‐ and started to attack the police stations, the barracks and the public buildings.

Two professors of the University of Benghazi,-#‐ met fortuitously in Djerba -#‐ told us that they saw surge out of the University ‘students’ whom they had never before seen and who led the demonstration. These ‘students’ threatened and assaulted the professors who would not take part in their actions and did not approve of their slogans.

These professors, deeply concerned for their safety, did not want to give us to publish their names.

From the start of the demonstrations, Islamists and criminals took advantage of the situation by attacking the high security prisons on the outskirts of Benghazi where their friends were locked up. After the freeing of these men, the mob attacked the police stations and the official buildings, and the inhabitants of the town woke to see the bodies of police officers hanging by the neck from bridges.

Many abuses and assaults also took place on black Africans who were all accused of being ‘mercenaries’, evictions, murders, imprisonment, and torture. These terrible actions and the fact that Gaddafi had helped their countries in the past were the reasons why many African countries strongly supported him.

During the first few days the efforts to regain control were carried out without using excess force, subsequently the forces of law and order fired over the heads of the mob and on the next day shot at them. There were some deaths and a number of wounded, as the French doctors working in the hospital there were able to confirm.

Further, the fortuitous emergence and unique make up of the NTC suggests that the rebellion was anything but a people's movement. Constituted in large part by former regime members, their media savvy propaganda campaign and business dealings betrayed a level of sophistication not seen in other Arab Spring movements. These guys were setting up a central bank and oil companies within weeks of the 'liberation' of Benghazi. They had delegations in the capitals of Europe not long after. These were hardly the 'people's councils' of Egypt and Syria.

In short, powerful elements within Eastern Libya co-opted the organic protests of February 15 and 16 to take advantage of media sympathy for the greater Arab Spring movement in order to quickly and violently attack the apparatus of the state under the facade of peaceful demonstrations while at the same time feeding the media a steady stream of manufactured propaganda to engender Western sympathy and support. The entire narrative of peaceful protestors being slaughtered by a ruthless regime using mercenaries, anti-aircraft guns, planes and helicopters, was a carefully crafted and brilliant fabrication. It is ironic and slightly suspicious that Libya is the place the West chose to actively support the Arab Spring.

Contrast that to Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, where the disparate protest movements were far more organic and disorganized and far less violent than those in Libya. Each of those nascent movements, barring Tunisia iirc, endured prolonged periods of government repression while remaining largely peaceful. I am sure there is propaganda coming out of Syria, but simply by virtue of the length of the protests there is a far more substantial case for a real and carefully orchestrated government crackdown as opposed to Libya where genuine protests, if they ever existed, lasted nary a day before they militarized.

That being said, I think the recent move to embrace violence in Syria, while understandable, was a serious mistake. The unique power of peaceful protests is that they deny repressive governments their traditional means of asserting control. Violence against such protests creates negative externalities that far exceed any temporary gains. Engaging in armed revolt legitimizes the regime's use of force and puts the movement in a position it cannot win without outside intervention. In Syria, though, it can at least be said that they gave peaceful protest an earnest try.

[Fragony]

'I forgot nothing at all, you are setting up strawmen. I suggest that you read what you quoted again.'

Oh really. I suggest you reread the thread and kindly admit I was right about just about everything from the start

[Viking]

We must have very different conceptions of what responsibility entails. I would submit that the Gadaffi regime was actually moderating and that the level of violence, especially towards non-political and immigrant communities, was nothing like what has been documented by human rights groups in today's Libya. But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the level of violence before and after the intervention is exactly the same - that we traded torture for torture, that no real difference was made.

What was going on in Libya before the intervention was the responsibility of the Gaddafi regime and the Gaddafi regime alone. What is going on today in Libya is the responsibility of the direct perpetrators and their enablers - the NATO nations that pushed for and executed the regime change. Libyan blood spilled before the intervention was on Gaddafi's hands, and now it is on ours.

I would not think that that is a particularly difficult concept to grasp, but I'll use a recent example to make it crystal clear. As an American, can I use Iraq's pre-war situation to absolve myself and my government of any responsibility for the suffering of the Iraqi people after the 2003 intervention? Can I credibly wash my hands of the Iraqi blood spilt during that period because things were nasty in Iraq before the war - because American intervention simply made no net difference in the people's suffering? 'Oh well, that didn't quite work out, but life sucked for the Iraqis anyway so no harm, no foul.'

There is little to indicate that the NATO intervention has led to more torture. NATO has never encouraged torture in Libya, nor inteniontally enabling it.

But that is just the start. The people with the blood on their hands are always the ones carrying out the misdeeds, those enabling them as well as those supporting them. Trying to blame NATO for it is to place moral blame where it is the most convenient for you, and it is to dillute moral responsibility.

If rescuing your best friend would lead a guy to shoot 10 other people instead, some people would put blame on you; but all of the real blame rests with the shooter.

'I forgot nothing at all, you are setting up strawmen. I suggest that you read what you quoted again.'

Oh really. I suggest you reread the thread and kindly admit I was right about just about everything from the start

Quite the opposite. A couple of pages back you promised us a new civil war within a week or two of Gaddafi's death. We're still waiting.

[PanzerJaeger]

There is little to indicate that the NATO intervention has led to more torture. NATO has never encouraged torture in Libya, nor inteniontally enabling it.

That is a rather dubious statement. Analysts were predicting reprisals and sectarian violence well before the intervention began. And NATO's silence on the matter speaks volumes. There is not much that can be done at this point, but the virtually nonexistent response certainly allows the NTC to ignore the human rights groups and is especially hypocritical considering the alliance's hyperbolic reaction to a bunch of made up atrocities when the Gaddafi regime was purportedly committing them.

But that is just the start. The people with the blood on their hands are always the ones carrying out the misdeeds, those enabling them as well as those supporting them. Trying to blame NATO for it is to place moral blame where it is the most convenient for you, and it is to dillute moral responsibility.

It is not at all convenient for me, which is kind of the point. It would be much more convenient for me to regret this violence without feeling a shared responsibility for it.

I do not mean to drag the discussion off topic, but that is quite an extraordinary line of reasoning and I would like to explore it a bit further. It may help to explain some of the differences expressed in this thread.

If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that NATO (or really any democratic nation or group of nations) can remove a non-democratic foreign government from power and take no responsibility for any of the fallout from such an intervention aside from its direct actions. That NATO can select a winning faction, arm it, supply it, fight for it, and place it in power and then completely disassociate itself from any of the actions that faction takes? We are not talking about some bad thing some future leader does ten or fifteen years down the road, but the direct consequences of such an action. If a black immigrant family is dragged out of their home, beaten, raped, and strung up from the nearest tree by forces that NATO ushered into power, forces that were only able to take such actions directly and solely because of NATO, as long as it was not NATO soldiers carrying them out, the alliance has no responsibility?

I can understand your position much better now. In your eyes, NATO has done a great thing by removing a dictator. Whatever negative externalities that are caused by that action have absolutely nothing to do with the alliance. Wash, rinse, repeat in Syria or wherever else.

I have a difficult time wrapping my head around that. To return to my previous example, I do not regret the Iraqi intervention because no WMDs were found. If America had replaced a dictator with a representative government in a smooth, relatively bloodless transition than I would have little concern about them. What I regret, and feel a shared responsibility for, was the resulting vicious sectarian war that US forces were not prepared to contain. Life is rarely pleasant under an autocratic government, but thousands of Iraqi civilians lost their lives directly due to American intervention. Even if that violence was not our government's intent, it was still directly linked to it. I cannot come away from that conflict feeling good about what was done in Iraq simply because a dictator was removed because the responsibility for those lives lost hangs heavy over it. Had America chosen some Shiite faction and ushered it into power while taking down the Iraqi government, the shared responsibility for their immediate actions would carry no less weight.

What made NATO's actions particularly egregious in my eyes was the clear example Iraq presented to the West. The violence that has clearly been document in post-Gaddafi Libya should have been no surprise to anyone with any understanding of the region. But it seemed that all the wrong lessons were learned. At least in Iraq, there were American soldiers on the ground actively trying to protect the civilian population from the various violent factions. Thousands lost their lives trying to contain that violence. The new model for Western intervention seems to be to support a faction, destroy the sitting government from the air, and let that chosen faction commit any manner of abuse while Western leaders celebrate the end of a dictator and the press moves on to the next big thing.

I cannot separate the fall of the Iraqi government from the resultant sectarian war that took place, just as I cannot mentally separate NATO's removal of Gaddafi from the resultant atrocities being committed by our chosen faction going on in Libya as I type this response. It just seems morally bankrupt in the extreme.

If rescuing your best friend would lead a guy to shoot 10 other people instead, some people would put blame on you; but all of the real blame rests with the shooter.

This would be more like giving a gun to a complete stranger and then claiming no responsibility when he shoots a bunch of people.

[Fragony]

Quite the opposite. A couple of pages back you promised us a new civil war within a week or two of Gaddafi's death. We're still waiting.

Just about everything isn't everything, never called it civil war as far as I remember, said this is far from over. And it isn't.

[Kralizec]

Russia and China did not want Gaddafi gone. Considering the fact that their official positions were against intervention, I'm not sure how plausible it is that they believed or cared that civilian reprisals were imminent. Russia and especially China have a long history of absention. It can be interpreted as principled opposition and practical acquiescence, due to an interest in avoiding a diplomatic row, geopolitical horse trading, avoiding public outcry, or some combination of the three. A concern for human rights does not factor into that equation. Considering both nations had not insignificant interests in Libya, I would hazard a guess that assurances were made that they would be put in a better position after Gaddafi's ouster. Remember that what is said and done in public often has very little to do with the actual motivations of the council members.

I would be extremely skeptical of the notion that Putin's Russia and a nation with China's human rights record felt genuine compassion for the Libyan people and an urgent need to avoid imminent slaughter. Instead, it is far more plausible that they calculated that allowing the Western coalition a free hand would benefit them in some way or at least avoid world condemnation, a calculation they clearly did not make in the Syrian situation.

There is not much that can be read into Russia and China's abstention, as it was fairly common practice. What was more telling, though, were the abstentions of Brazil and India. If there was a genuine belief that slaughter was imminent in the capitals of the world (instead of an obvious power play by Europe), why did those two modern, liberal democracies abstain instead of throw their full support behind the measure?

I'm not suggesting that they felt compassion for the Libyan people, but that they believed that the western SC members wanted to intervene for this reason. If Russia and China believed that the resolution's actual aim was to advance western geopolitical interests by invading an independent country, they'd have vetoed it in a heartbeat.

We must have very different conceptions of what responsibility entails. I would submit that the Gadaffi regime was actually moderating and that the level of violence, especially towards non-political and immigrant communities, was nothing like what has been documented by human rights groups in today's Libya. But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the level of violence before and after the intervention is exactly the same - that we traded torture for torture, that no real difference was made.

I would not think that that is a particularly difficult concept to grasp, but I'll use a recent example to make it crystal clear. As an American, can I use Iraq's pre-war situation to absolve myself and my government of any responsibility for the suffering of the Iraqi people after the 2003 intervention? Can I credibly wash my hands of the Iraqi blood spilt during that period because things were nasty in Iraq before the war - because American intervention simply made no net difference in the people's suffering? 'Oh well, that didn't quite work out, but life sucked for the Iraqis anyway so no harm, no foul.'

With some qualifiers, I'd agree to this line of reasoning. Provided that the military intervention itself is for a valid reason (1), attempts are made to improve the human rights situation (2) and at the very least, the human rights situation does not deteriorate despite this (3) I'd say that you can't consider the abuses to be the moral responsibility of the intervening power.

IMO it would be absurd to blame the US or NATO for most of the stuff that goes on in Afghanistan. The case of Iraq would already fail on account of (1), while (2) is also dubious because of how poorly the occupation was handled initially.

[Viking]

That is a rather dubious statement. Analysts were predicting reprisals and sectarian violence well before the intervention began. And NATO's silence on the matter speaks volumes. There is not much that can be done at this point, but the virtually nonexistent response certainly allows the NTC to ignore the human rights groups and is especially hypocritical considering the alliance's hyperbolic reaction to a bunch of made up atrocities when the Gaddafi regime was purportedly committing them.

You expect retribution from the fallout of any conflict. Sectarian violence in Libya is not that very likely considering how religiously homogeneous the country is compared to other countries in the region.

If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that NATO (or really any democratic nation or group of nations) can remove a non-democratic foreign government from power and take no responsibility for any of the fallout from such an intervention aside from its direct actions. That NATO can select a winning faction, arm it, supply it, fight for it, and place it in power and then completely disassociate itself from any of the actions that faction takes?

No. The crucial thing is that not only must the motive be good, but there must also be a reasonable probabilty that the mission must be a success more or less overall. Supporting a true faction can be troublesome, but when one "faction" seems to generally consist of the general population, the choice is much easier.

Moral judgement must not be passed on the result, but what the intent was and how the actor weighed the probabilities of the different outcomes, etc.

I can understand your position much better now. In your eyes, NATO has done a great thing by removing a dictator. Whatever negative externalities that are caused by that action have absolutely nothing to do with the alliance. Wash, rinse, repeat in Syria or wherever else.

We did not just remove a dictator, we supported a popular armed revolt. Sure, not every city was equally eager, but most of the major ones were (and as long they would not expect to be massacred or anything like that, saying "screw them" can be most appropriate). Syria is a more complicated case; sectarian violence akin to what we see in Iraq is considerably more likely to happen in Syria.

This would be more like giving a gun to a complete stranger and then claiming no responsibility when he shoots a bunch of people.

You did something good (rescuing your friend), but you knew something bad would come out of it (random people would be shot instead). But there was no true physical connection between you the murders; they only came about because the shooter wanted it that way. He never had to shoot anyone, yet he did. That way, he is the only one carrying moral responsibility. If you gave a stranger a gun for no reason, you would have a physical connection to any murder in the sense that you provided the murder weapon; and you never had to give him a gun.

[InsaneApache]

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present our glorious Libyan allies....



That is all.

[rvg]

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present our glorious Libyan allies....
That is all.

Brave warriors of Allah have dealt a crushing defeat to infidel gravestones!

[Sarmatian]

C'mon NATO, send these democratic forces some steel plated shoes so they can finish the job and bomb the dictatorial graves...

[gaelic cowboy]

Summit to do with this book burning fiasco apparently, as usual a bunch of idiots are incapable or prevented from using rational thought.

[Vladimir]

Huh. Evidence of a breakdown of law and order following a revolution. I'm sure this is just an Islamic thing.

[rory_20_uk]

Erm, they're destroying Christian and Jewish graves, apparently. They're not destroying all graves.

And seeing as they're desecrating the dead, which I find far more offensive than burning any number of books, can we all go and firebomb some Muslim related stuff, to show how annoyed we are?

[Vladimir]

Yea, they're desecrating graveyards. Kinda normal during a breakdown in law and order. If they're still doing it in a year I'll be concerned. Right now I just see a bunch of ignorant people making an ass out of themselves. I'll see something similar on my drive home today.

Not trying to slight you, of course. It's sad to see.

[Brenus]

Erm, that is the Graves of the Commonwealth Soldiers fallen during WW2. I am sure that the actual SAS who help them are happy of this.