Only a few have actually named it the Iraq syndrome, after the Vietnam syndrome that defined an anti-interventionist US foreign policy in the wake of that war. But it exists and, to my mind, seems less of a syndrome than a simple statement of sanity.
As Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, said the other day, anyone who wants to send another military force into a Muslim country that has no working institutions or polity and is in the middle of a brutal internal conflict needs to have his head examined.
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In the case of Libya, the American public largely agrees. The polling outfit Rasmussen, which tends to focus on white, older Americans, found 63% favouring no intervention, down slightly from 67% last month. Washington operates by its own rules. The debate here has been real and oddly reminiscent of the Iraq discussion.
Neoconservatives and their allies want intervention in Libya. Two weeks ago Paul Wolfowitz, George W Bush’s influential deputy secretary of defence, called for the urgent imposition of a no-fly zone, recognition of the provisional government in the east and arming of insurgents. He made no reference to his role in the Iraq war and his assurances back then that the war would be swift, decisive and not too expensive.
Nobody ever seems to take responsibility for what they have said and done in the past; they just pontificate That’s the strange thing about Washington. Nobody ever seems to take responsibility for what they have said and done in the past; they just pontificate on as if they remain the unsullied heroes of Mesopotamia.
You might think another strong voice for the Iraq war, Bill Kristol, the neocon editor of The Weekly Standard, might be cautious about wading into these waters.
But no, we had an Olympic dive. “Is it too much to hope that President Obama might embody a little of that ‘fierce urgency of now’, not on behalf of his own campaign for political office but on behalf of the people of Libya?” he pleaded.
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Among the liberal interventionists, Senator John Kerry stood out. “What haunts me,” he explained, “is the spectre of Iraq 1991.” He was referring to the period after the first Gulf war, when the first President Bush called on the Shi’ites in Iraq to take a stand against Saddam Hussein. They were subsequently slaughtered in the same appalling manner as is now occurring in Libya. Kerry also cited Rwanda and Bosnia — events of such cruelty that it was simply impossible for decent people to stand by and watch.
Those sentiments are genuine and deeply persuasive on a human level. Every day innocents are being killed by mercenaries and paramilitaries. Colonel Muammar Gadaffi’s brutality against his own people is hard to watch. But statecraft is not the same as moral empathy. And if you examine the arguments of the neocons and liberal interventionists, they fail certain core national security tests.
The US has no serious national interests at stake in Libya, and even after Gadaffi’s co-operation in getting rid of his weapons of mass destruction, Washington kept him at arm’s length. The opposition is an assortment of tribes whose only real unity comes from their mutual loathing of Gadaffi. We have no idea whether, in power, they would be better than what preceded them.
By its very nature, military intervention can have unintended consequences. Among the most obvious is that if we arm the rebels, we have no guarantees of where the weapons will end up. Yes, funnelling Stinger missiles to the Afghan resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s was very successful. It also gave us a political vacuum into which came the Taliban and eventually Al-Qaeda.
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A no-fly zone is also not an antiseptic endeavour. It requires a thorough campaign of bombing aerial defences, even as Gadaffi is primarily using tanks and ground forces to murder, terrorise and torture. There was a no-fly zone in Bosnia when the Srebrenica massacre took place. There’s no guarantee it would stop Gadaffi’s onslaught; it could even help him if he used it to play — yet again — the anti-imperialist and anti-American card.
Practically speaking, for the intervention to be free of the stigma of a third US war against a Muslim country, the United Nations would have to give cover. It won’t. Nato could do it, but the stigma of colonialism would attach itself again — especially given France’s and Italy’s close relationship with Gadaffi over the years.
And so the more traditionally conservative analysts — Gates chief among them — have insisted there is nothing we can do to change the course of the conflict. We can help with food and humanitarian supplies; we can ensure that Gadaffi and his thugs know that the international community will hold them fully accountable for war crimes in due course; assets can and have been frozen. But any deeper intervention could alter the dynamic of the Arab spring.
Its key component has been that the Arab people have seized their liberty for themselves; and they have refused to believe the arguments of their dictators that the only alternative is Al-Qaeda. This self-empowerment has enabled the region to regain pride in itself, to embrace human rights not as western ideas but as global ideals that belong to them too. This de-fangs the narrative of Al-Qaeda and jihadism. It puts the distraction of Israel in its place. It has critically shifted the paradigm to the West’s advantage. Why on earth would we seek to stymie this gain by sending aeroplanes and bombs?
And yet these facts seem to leave many in Washington cold. What they are really grappling with, I think, is the fact that even though US military power remains supreme, it has been dealt some hard blows in Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is that in the wake of George W Bush, America’s military reputation and its soft power as a moral exemplar have been degraded. The world has changed, and American hubris cannot continue. Obama knows this, even if his elders, such as Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, cannot handle that truth; he was elected in part to manage it.
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He was also elected to transform the relationship between the US and the Muslim world. This he has done in part and can still do more. But the place to do this is not Libya but the far more important and promising experiment in Egypt. The US should be focusing on an array of measures: civilian advice on democratic institutions, close military co-operation, engagement with emerging democratic forces. And, in the wake of a political transition, a second Marshall plan to rebuild Egypt’s economy would be money far better spent than on an unknowable, chaotic war in Libya.
Obama knows that to govern is to choose the least worst option. And sometimes choosing not to do something is the hardest but wisest choice of them all. This isn’t weakness. It is restraint and realism. And it is no less deeply distressing for being the best we can realistically do.
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