American Middle East interventionists used to chide President Barack Obama for not doing more. Why was the US running away from Yemen, why didn’t the US go into Syria and depose President Bashar al-Assad, why did Obama pull troops out of Iraq prematurely, why didn’t he put boots on the ground in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS)? Why, in short, didn’t the US didn’t do more to use its military might to subdue the stormy parts of the Middle East?
The first answer must be that he didn’t have to be George W. Bush’s surrogate. It was Bush who triggered much of the upheavals with his invasion of Iraq (- although ex-President Jimmy Carter bears the responsibility for arming the Taliban and thus the establishment of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.) Why did Obama want to continue to try and mop up after Bush’s dirty work?
That said Obama made his own serious mistake of intervening to depose Muammar al-Qaddafi in Arab Libya. Although the UK and France led from the front the US was backing them up in every way- with intelligence and close-in naval support. While this failure is not in itself responsible for the Middle East debacles it helped spread Al Qaeda and now the Islamic State through northwest Africa.
Alan Kuperman wrote in the current affairs magazine, Foreign Affairs, “ As bad as Libya’s human rights situation was under Qaddafi, it has gotten worse since NATO ousted him. Immediately after taking power the rebels perpetuated scores of reprisal killings, in addition to torture and beating. Human Rights Watch declared that the abuses ‘appear so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity’. Although the White House justified its mission in Libya on humanitarian grounds, the intervention magnified the death toll.”
With the information we now have we know that Qaddafi’s own pre-invasion crackdown turns out to have been much less lethal than media reports indicated at the time. Human Rights Watch documented only 233 deaths in the first days of the fighting, not 10,000 as Saudi Arabia claimed. Qaddafi tried to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Only 3% of the wounded were women and children. Moreover, before the uprising Qaddafi had released nearly all his political prisoners.
By the time NATO bombers started their work Libya’s violence was winding down. The rebels were retreating. At this point the rebels issued warnings of an impending blood bath. The Western press fell for the propaganda and this helped move the US, UK and France to ask the US Security Council for authorization to intervene to protect the civilian population.
Russia and China did not veto the carefully worded resolution that authorized intervention, but which did not give NATO a carte blanche to do what it then decided to do- use massive force to overthrow the regime. No wonder the Russians felt misled. It is part of the reason why Russia has never been very helpful in bringing peace to Syria
When the UN is abused by one of the big powers it doesn’t like a rubber band spring back into shape again. The hypocrisy of the West over Crimea and Ukraine is something to behold when one considers this Western action in Libya and also the decision in 1999 to bomb Serbia on behalf of the independence-seeking Kosovo without any Security Council approval, contrary to the Charter of the UN.
Today, Qaddafi gone, the militias use force indiscriminately. Libya and its neighbour Mali have been turned into terrorist havens, whereas Qaddafi had successfully suppressed the havens. When the Tuaregs serving in Gaddafi’s security force returned home to Mali to fight their government their struggle was hijacked by the so-called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. It has provided training camps and arms to Boko Haram in Nigeria. The spillover in Libya also spurred the deadly conflict in Burkina Faso and the growth of radical Islam in Niger. France felt compelled in 2012 to intervene on the government’s side in Mali- and ended up fighting the jihadists in the north.
Weapons have leaked out of Libya to militant Islamists even further afield, to Somalia, Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq and the rebels of Syria.
Overlooked in all this is that in his later years Qaddafi had been trying to mend his fences with the West. He voluntarily halted his advanced nuclear and chemical weapons programs and surrendered them to the US. How does his overthrow look to other states, like North Korea or Iran, whom the West is trying to persuade to forgo such weapons?
Obama, the UK and France made a catastrophic mistake in the name of “humanitarian intervention”.
These mistakes still smolder on, poisoning the atmosphere throughout the Middle East. Although there is no direct link between the above and Hamas’s terrifying grand attack on Israel a year ago the atmosphere throughout the Middle East has been barely breathable the last few years. The Hamas attack was not just propelled by a hatred of Israel but by a hatred of what the US, the UK and France have wrought the last few years, including the provision of increasingly potent weapons to Israel.
If one adds it all up- Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and now Gaza and Lebanon, one military debacle after another, plus stalemate over Palestine, partly because of the US’s unwavering support for Israel- then one can easily deduce that the proverbial man in the Arab (and Iranian) street feels totally undermined and put upon. The oxygen, to quote ex-British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, has been taken out of the air.
One year after Hamas’s attack on Israel, beside the cursing and ringing of hands, all this contemporary history is something that must be reflected on, and then acted upon. Violence of this kind does not work.
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