Morality and Libya

Andrew Sullivan's response to Obama's address on Libya last night was, oddly, almost identical to my own:

Obama the Niebuhrian put the moral in realism. Yes, we could not do this everywhere all the time; but we could do this when we did; and that was good enough. There was some sleight of hand here. Citing the UN Resolution as an external reason for war - when the US lobbied hard for it - was a touch too neat. But essentially Obama was challenging those of us who opposed this decision to ask ourselves: well, what would you do? If the US had insisted on looking away, America would have seemed morally callous, even compared with the French. The mass graves of Benghazi would take their place alongside the horrors of Srebrenica. [...]

Was I persuaded? Not completely. The major objection - what happens now? - was not answered affirmatively by the president. It was answered negatively: there would be no military effort at regime change, as in Iraq; NATO, not the US, would soon be leading the mission; and, er, it may last a while. It is way too soon to celebrate a new model of international cooperation; but it seems striking to me that the rationale Obama invoked was very much GHW Bush in Kuwait rather than GW Bush in Iraq. That left Saddam in power for more than a decade. And yet Obama spoke as if Qaddafi's days were obviously numbered. I sure hope they are.

But at the same time I suspect they're not. I'm very worried. Very, very worried. But (troublingly for a Quaker) I'm not sure I would have done it any differently.

Libya and ambivalence

It's not often that I agree with Boris Johnson, but his column this week on Libya makes some very strong points. This feeling, in particular, echoes my own:

I must confess that when I saw that Tomahawk firecracker rise on Saturday evening from that American ship, I did not feel any propane blast of neo-con enthusiasm. I did not cry yee-hah or pound my sofa. I emitted a long, deep groan of apprehension. The cause is noble and right, and we are surely bound by our common humanity to help the people of Benghazi. But if we are to make a success of this mission, it is vital that we learn from the past and understand the risks.

The main risks, he says, are the Qaddafi will hang on, tempting the West to send in ground troops and embark on another Iraq/Afghanistan-style boondoggle, and that the if Qaddafi eventually does fall, he will be replaced with either a military or Islamic dictatorship that hardly qualifies as a step forward. He continues:

This is not an argument for inertia; I am simply saying that we should beware of the law of unintended consequences, and to minimise those risks we should lay down some basic conditions for success in Libya. The first and most important is that we do not repeat the appalling mistakes of Iraq. We must not lie or misrepresent what we are doing. We must not glory in Call Of Duty-style Pentagon footage of Western weapons being used to blitz Gaddafi's forces. We must not talk of "victory" or "mission accomplished". We cannot allow Gaddafi or anyone else to present this as a crusade. [...]
This is a UN mission that has the overwhelming support of the Arab League countries. But it is absolutely vital that we maintain that support, and that at every stage we take account of sentiment in the Arab world.

 Hear, hear.

From Our Own Correspondent: Kate Adie in Libya

Kate Adie, former BBC reporter and new presenter of From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4 (which, incidentally, is some of the best radio you'll hear), has a great essay in today's Guardian about her experiences reporting on Libya for many years. She focuses on how the regime functions on the inside, emphasizing the total dependence on Qaddafi and the chaos of the country's administration:

At the Interior Ministry I asked the man in the biggest office (with a broken fax machine and no working telephone) if he were the minister.
"Maybe," he replied, adding that he had been last year, then someone else had been appointed while he was still in post, but had subsequently . . . er . . . left town . . . "So, maybe I'm the minister," he added helpfully.

And Qaddafi himself doesn't come across as especially reliable or stable either:

Gaddafi called himself Colonel occasionally and refused to acknowledge the phrase President, preferring the term Leader. He was costumed theatrically – admiral, desert Bedouin, Italian lounge-lizard. He occasionally used the trappings of conventional power – long motorcades – or the occasional white horse. However, he was just as likely to turn up driving a battered small Peugeot with the bumpers missing. I know, because he nearly ran me over one morning trying to park the wreck very inexpertly outside my hotel.

 But don't let the humor fool you. She talks about people so scared of him that they physically shook in his presence; about people disappearing and human limbs showing up in dumpsters. "Farce mingled with fear," she writes, "That is how the country ran. At the very heart of the mysterious administration was a clutch of men loyal to – but still very scared of – the Colonel himself."

It's not reassuring. The regime's short-sightedness has left no natural power structure to take over after Qaddafi goes. Adie even talks about how this was clear to people within the regime - there was no succession plan, and no one knew what would happen when he finally died. Now the problem is even more acute, and it is not at all clear how it should be overcome.

Libya after Qaddafi

Slate does a pretty good job of laying out the challenges in a post-Qaddafi Libya (if we ever get there - which is no sure thing).

Unlike in Egypt, "the army" is not a coherent institution. Qaddafi took care to politicize the military and divide its commanders in order to prevent a coup or other challenges to his rule. Moreover, the army was involved in interventions, such as a disastrous war in Chad, that tarnished its credibility—its battlefield record is not a source of pride. So the military is less able to lead the country out of the mess.
Nor is there a bureaucratic structure that can simply resume basic government functions under new leaders. Qaddafi created one of the world's most bizarre governments, with "people's committees" playing important roles at the local level. Indeed, Qaddafi himself did not hold a government position in any formal sense, even though he was clearly recognized as "the leader." This personalized and politicized system is part of what Libyans hate; it should not survive its creator. But removing Qaddafi's regime demands more than just change at the top.

My suspicion right now is we're looking at a Romania-type scenario in Libya - Qaddafi is gone (in my view he'll probably get the Ceauşescu treatment), but all the old stalwarts of the regime are still in power. That's the game I see them playing with all of these resignations - people like the ex-Interior Minister can claim to have been opposed to Qaddafi all along and introduce a kind of pseudo-democratic one-party rule. But who knows at this stage - almost anything could happen.

On Egypt (and Tunisia and Libya)

Kai Bird has a good piece in Slate today on Obama's stance regarding the Egyptian protests. He makes (admittedly in passing) a point that I think is an important one:

This must be the Obama administration's fear: that after Mubarak an anti-Western, Islamist regime will come to power, most probably through the popular election of the Muslim Brotherhood. If elections are held, this outcome is not merely a probability; it is a near certainty. After decades of repressing the secular opposition, the Brotherhood remains the only political movement with an organized membership capable of providing nongovernmental charitable services. This gives it a reliable political base in the slums of Cairo and Alexandria.

This is the same point that Slavoj Žižek has made numerous times: that the Capitalist world's fear of the secular Left (which is probably what Bird means) outweighs their fear of the religious Right (in the form of the Muslim brotherhood). There has therefore for many decades been a concerted attempt to suppress the secular Left in, just to cite one example, the Arab world, leaving the Islamists as the only opposition movement with the organizational capacity to actually effectively oppose. In this sense we, the Capitalist West, have made our bed and now must lie in it.

But there is a broader point to be made here about the importance of civil society in the fostering of effective political opposition. Bird attributes the Brotherhood's power to being "the only political movement with an organized membership capable of providing nongovernmental charitable services." In other words, he's talking about the Muslim Brotherhood basically in terms of a civil society group. The admirable Anne Applebaum (incidentally the wife of Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski) makes the point in her own piece in Slate this week:

The benign dictators we have supported, or anyway tolerated—the Zine al-Abidine Ben Alis, the Hosni Mubaraks, the various kings and princes—have stayed in power by preventing economic development, clamping down on free speech, keeping tight control of education, and above all by stamping down hard on anything resembling civil society. Every year, more books are translated into Greek—a language spoken by 11 million people—than into Arabic, a language spoken by more than 220 million. Independent organizations of all kinds, from political parties and private businesses to women's groups and academic societies have been watched, harassed, or banned altogether.

Civil society can play a role as an alternate power structure to the political hierarchy in any given country - in dictatorships, then, civil society can be a potentially large threat to the government. The effective repression of civil society in a country like North Korea, for example, is the reason why any kind of opposition movement in that country is not only nonexistent, but practically unthinkable.

Curiously, this is one thing that Applebaum gets rather wrong. Hisham Matar, writing ten days ago in The Guardian, discussed the probability of the Tunisian uprising spreading to his native Libya. He notes that Tunisia's elite had long been pro-civil society, while Libya's has been anti. He says, furthermore:

One of the main reasons Tunisians were able to rid themselves of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali [...] was less because of the claim, endlessly repeated in the western media, that Tunisia is more European in its thinking than its neighbours, and more because of the extent to which Tunisian civil society and state bureaucracy have been allowed to develop since independence.

We Libyans are just as hungry for a just and accountable government as our Tunisian brothers and sisters. The lack of resilient institutions will make our task more difficult.

The point that Applebaum misses is that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were only possible because these are relatively well-developed countries with a fairly robust tradition of civil society. This is good, as it means the countries have a power structure to fall back on if and when the government falls. But Matar's distinction may become the relevant one when it comes to these uprisings spreading - organizing revolution in a country without an existing alternate power structure is likely much harder, and in some cases impossible.