Exit the Colonel (48 page)

In part because of the mystery surrounding Libya and its leader, the rapprochement, and the complexity of the regional environment during the Arab Spring, it is tempting to ask a series of “what ifs?”

What if Gaddafi had taken a different tack once the protests started, that is, following the actions of Jordan and Morocco by committing to specific reforms by specific dates? After all, the 17th February Coalition initially called for specific reforms, not for Gaddafi's removal. If Gaddafi had agreed to promulgate a new constitution and hold a referendum on that document, as Mohammed VI of Morocco did on December 25, 2011, or to specific economic and political reforms, as King Abdullah II of Jordan did in mid-January, would the revolution have been contained? While the rapprochement may have primed the ground for upheaval, in the near term, it is very likely that the Gaddafi clan could have controlled the chaos, with a few bold actions—had, for example, Saif delivered the alternate speech drafted by Al Houni (an apology, promises of immediate reforms, standing down of troops), rather than ad-libbed a rambling series of threats.
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Certainly the odds of NATO intervention would have been far lower had Gaddafi not credibly threatened to flatten Benghazi.

What if Syria had erupted in revolt a few weeks before it did, or if Gaddafi had been successful in controlling the revolt, either through repression or accommodation, until Syria blew up? The standard wisdom on this score is that the addition of new and more complex variables in the Arab Spring would have strengthened the hand of those who felt the US simply could not afford to get involved on multiple “hot” fronts in the Arab Spring.

What was really going on in Saif 's head in February 2011? Was his fate sealed the moment he decided to return to Libya from London at the start of the conflict—i.e., he did not have the power to resist the forces aligned against him—or was he, as many Libyans insist, simply “his father's son, no more, no less?” Regardless, it is fascinating to watch Saif 's public transformation taking place just as his father looked most vulnerable and alone—delivering his “zenga zenga” speech to an empty courtyard, looking forlorn sitting on a go-cart in light rain, holding up an oversize umbrella. It was as if the magnetic charges were reversed: those factors which impeded his decision-making abilities and led some to call him soft were no longer relevant.

Some choices are indeed too large for one person—many Libyans see Saif as indistinct from the mafia apparatus run by his father, and object to any additional attention given him over the thousands of martyrs. Others give him a bit more credit, empathizing with his situation, but expressing their view that, regardless of his personal views, resistance was futile. Yet others say that Saif was, to borrow the phrasing of Sawani, just too close to the fire—Saif 's apolitical older half-brother Mohammed was a far less polarizing figure. While Saif 's February 20th speech sent his erstwhile supporters running for cover, did the West cut itself off from him too soon, or did he perceive that the US was determined to see him pay? (Recall Lévy's interaction with Saif 's emissary in Paris in mid-April 2011, who pointed to Egyptian President Mubarak's fate as an anti-inducement to Saif 's believing he might be accorded safe passage.)
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The number of unanswered questions, the tortuous psychodrama with the father, the good Saif–bad Saif dichotomy illustrated in the piece of Benghazi graffito, the charisma and the anti-charisma, the questions about his relationship with his current “jailers,” and his ultimate fate, these make Saif's story a tantalizing psychodrama, but in a way detract from two far more interesting, and significant, issues: The role of “a Saif ” (a person playing his role, vis-à-vis the West) in creating conditions that helped launch the revolution; and the even larger question of what might have happened had the US (and the West in general) exercised its influence in a more systematic, intelligent manner, starting with the initial negotiations around converting a rogue state.

What if, instead of letting external policy issues drive Libya policy, the US had paid more attention to the terms under which Gaddafi was let out of the “sanctions jail”—with advances tied not to reparation payments and counterterror compacts, but to substantive, verifiable improvements in
human rights, political reform, and, yes, WMD (in which context Libyan reparations to victims of past terror might have been a side product of policy, and not a driver)? After all, counter to the post-9/11 US narrative, Gaddafi was well-documented to have been desperate for a solution, and, as former Assistant Secretary Indyk mentioned, the attitude of the Libyans in the early negotiations was one of high willingness to accommodate.

A better structured deal might have been a better deal for Gaddafi as well, to the degree it gave him the political cover against those who had, literally, done his dirty work for the previous decades and would never feel safe in a kinder, friendlier Libya. This construct, combined with some far better outcome in Iraq (i.e., no war, or a war that was prosecuted with a far greater degree of competence), might have served as a bona fide model for Iran, to the extent that the rewards to both sides (Libyan and American) were real and lasting. Most discussions regarding the failings or benefits of sanctions are framed in terms of WMD, not political reform or human rights. Most of the formal conclusions regarding sanctions are that they failed in Libya, and at the same time, they might have worked better had there been a road map, had advances in the relationship been more closely linked to verifiable moves. Several analysts, and the former head of the IAEA, Mohammed El Baradei, argued strenuously that the West did not take yes for an answer. As far as bringing Gaddafi to the negotiating table, the UN, EU, and unilateral US sanctions may be said to have worked brilliantly—it did not take long at all for Gaddafi to sue for peace (Gaddafi's first diplomatic approaches date to 1992, the same year UN sanctions were imposed). The failure was not in the sanctions regime, per se, but the overall strategy regarding how to convert sanctions to a stable equilibrium in West-Libya relations. This may have been impossible, as long as Gaddafi was in power.

The real problem, of course, comes back to the fact that Libya, and Libya's internal situation, were not the primary motivator behind the relationship—Iraq, the War on Terror, the need for a nonproliferation success, European pressure, access to oil, Israel-Palestinian relations—all of these elements had a role to play. Looked at from 2012, however, the most stark evidence of failure was the sheer amount of weaponry that the US consented to be sold to Libya. Since the US normalized relations with Libya, and the EU arms embargo was lifted in 2004, Libya purchased enormous amounts of riot control gear, small arms, ammunition, electronic surveillance equipment, military planes, and helicopters (documented to have been used on demonstrators). Russia concluded a $1.8 billion arms deal
in 2010 that included “tanks, fighter jets, and air defense networks.”
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Italy exported UK£276 million worth of military equipment between 2006 and 2009. Belarus served as a “one-stop arms, banking, and transportation hub for Libya's dictator,”
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and even sent mercenaries during the early days of the revolution. Much of these munitions were used fruitlessly in the end to try to repel the rebels.

While the US did not become a major supplier of weapons to Libya either before or after the lifting of the arms embargo in 2004, it appears this was mostly a matter of timing, as a number of US munitions and IT surveillance companies were discussing sales with the Libyans just before February 15.
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US companies had already sold armored vehicles, later modified by Gaddafi loyalists to carry antiaircraft guns and other matériel.
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An order for fifty US-made personnel carriers was in the works, part of a $77 million, Pentagon-approved transaction completed in late 2010, which allegedly included a contract to provide counterterrorism training for Libyan officers, as the British were doing.
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The link between sanctions and arms sales is quite clear: In the early 1980s, Gaddafi regularly imported billions of dollars in arms.
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By one estimate, after the UN arms embargo went into effect in 1992 and until 2003, Gaddafi was able to import no more than $10 million in arms per year from EU countries.
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One has to assume that the Libyan revolution would have been much less bloody, and likely shorter, had this equipment not been present in country.

The Arab Spring presented the US with a number of related, stark dilemmas. The president had promised in 2009 a new beginning with the people of the Arab world, support against tyrants, and a return to “American values.” The administration clearly (to all but the most ardent conspiracy theorists, most of whom reside in the Middle East) was not expecting
to be called upon to redeem its commitments immediately—but that was what happened. The US was caught hesitating on the issue of support for the Egyptian protestors versus standard assumptions of what was best for the number one ally in the region, Israel, and worst for the number one enemy, Iran. What would life without Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Syria's Bashar al Assad look like? As the Arab Spring unfolded, the US, along with most of the world, waited on the sidelines, presumably hoping the anchor allies in the region—Egypt and Saudi Arabia, principally—would reassert control with as little bloodshed as possible, leaving the status quo intact.

Still, while France appeared to be actively supporting its client Ben Ali in Tunisia, the US did little for its own friends in the region. Tunisia, despite its deplorable human rights record, had been an ally in the war on terror. As late as January 7, 2011, the US was still urging all parties to resolve their disputes amicably.
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The Egyptian uprising, officially dated to the January 25 Day of Rage, was under way for a week before the US administration finally tepidly called for Mubarak to leave office. This was preceded by calls for an “orderly transition,” which assumed Mubarak as the steward of that process.
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While the decision to let go of its former allies (of which Egypt was unquestionably one) and friends of convenience took some time to make, it was nevertheless a momentous move, as it no doubt played into the (largely self-interested or self-defensive) resolve of countries like France and the UK, which almost certainly would not have acted alone.

In the final calculation, the US (and more broadly, key members of the EU and the Arab League) intervened in Libya not for pure humanitarian reasons, although these were a factor. They intervened because Libya was one of the few Arab Spring countries in which the US had freedom to act without upending long-standing and economically and politically valuable relationships. At the time of the 2011 Benghazi uprising, the notion of Revolution was still more an idea than a reality in Syria, whose internal structure and sectarian divisions were far more analogous to Iraq than Libya—and thus far more concerning. Furthermore, Syria had been for decades at the core of some crucial US policy interests in the Middle East: the Arab-Israeli conflict for one, and the relations with Iran, via support for the Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In effect, Libya's famous “irrelevance” to US policy became the greatest impetus for action. As of mid-March, the Western leaders had the choice either of allowing Gaddafi to crush the uprising or of appearing impotent
in front of the Arab Street and Arab leaders who had never understood why the US had ever taken Gaddafi seriously. The riposte was clear, as President Obama told the nation (and the world) after the start of the US-backed NATO campaign: “So for those who doubted our capacity to carry out this operation, I want to be clear: The United States of America has done what we said we would do.”
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Not surprisingly, those who advocated US intervention in the Libyan conflict attempted to make that exercise a model for helping other Arab states caught in the throes of the Arab Spring. The most notable example was Syria, where the conflict grew for months in the shadows of Libya's uprising (and taking no little inspiration from it; there were even Libyan fighters who travelled to Syria—again, to assist). The West, and the Arab World as a whole did not respond as they did in Libya, despite the fact that the Syrian regime was clearly killing its own people on a massive scale. The main problem, of course, was that the consequences of a disintegrating Syria were potentially far higher than was the case with Libya (speaking to Gareth Evan's “proportional consequences” criterion for an R2P implementation, mentioned in chapter 10). Syria, unlike Libya, is made up of a patchwork of minorities and sects, all of whom have internal and external patrons. Further, there were no obvious internal mediators in the Syrian context, no cohesive reformist camp, no coherent statement of intentions.

Less than three months after Libya's liberation, Secretary Clinton told the UN Security Council that the world needed to stand with the Syrian people or be “complicit” in a crackdown.
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Sarkozy echoed Clinton, proclaiming, “[W]e will not be silent at the Syrian opening.”
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This was in January. At the time of writing, in late June 2012, the crisis in Syria continued to take up the first pages of the Arab dailies and appeared to be no closer to resolution. The Russians were still backing Assad, while the US, EU, and Turkey were still talking about various ways of assisting Syrian rebels, literally at the margins, through establishing safe havens along the border with Turkey, for example, and military training. With Yemen rapidly descending into a no-man's land and Libya under Western cover, the Alawite regime represents Russia's last true client in the region (and, not insignificantly, its last unfettered access to the Mediterranean). The situation will undoubtedly evolve, as the US elections pass and the Russians and
Chinese likely realize they cannot prop Bashar al Assad's regime up indefinitely. The much talked about “Yemen solution,” after the exit deal struck by Yemen's former President Ali Abdullah Saleh (according to which Assad might be granted safe passage to Moscow in exchange for a pro-Russian transitional government) might ultimately become viable, but likely not before many more are killed. Ten years hence, the Libyan revolution will likely be seen to have been an anomaly of sorts, not only with respect to its proximate causes, but also—hopefully—its success, in evolving Libya.