The "Fall" Of Tripoli And Other Polite Fictions

You will recall no doubt that NATO air forces have been operating under the authority of a UN Security Council resolution to "protect" civilians caught in the crossfire between rebels and troops loyal to noted humanitarian,  African "King of Kings," and Brother Leader, Muammar al-Gaddafi.  To some of the NATO countries such as Germany and Turkey, even this limited mission was unacceptably broad and all too fraught with the possibility that someone, somewhere, somehow might kill someone else.  To other members, the US, the UK, and France come to mind, the only way to accomplish the prescribed action was through the removal of Gaddafi.

Since all NATO decisions must be made by consensus, it was inevitable that the actual campaign would be fragmented, relatively ineffective, and of dubious utility in gaining an end to the obnoxious regime.  When President Obama ended the active American combat role in Operation Unified Protector and handed the task over to NATO so as to adopt the policy of "leading from behind," the already lurching effort shambled ever closer to the ditch of failure.  It was no surprise that the combination of NATO fecklessness and rebel ineptitude in the arts and crafts of war not only made the loyalist forces appear downright competent in comparison but moved the war to the dead waters of stalemate.

In the past few weeks, the rebels gained new strength, new courage, new competence and went from a stance of barely held defense to one of successful offensive, particularly in the Berber inhabited mountains of the west.  The mainstream media seemed more than a bit shocked by the sudden transformation.  Many attempts at explanation were offered, but only one seemed to gain traction.

The explanation which stood head and shoulders above all others was the redeployment of NATO aircraft from whatever they had been doing to direct, close, tactical air support of the rebel ground forces.  Whenever and wherever the rebels sought to advance they were preceded by (to  use the most common term employed by the amateur fighters of the rebels) "Mr NATO."  Airstrikes preceded and ran in parallel with rebel attacks such that the rebels were always successful at a surprisingly low cost in lives.

The reports from journalists in the field made it abundantly clear that the rebels had not turned into super-troops during the weeks of stalemate.  Often the advances were held up and even routed by a handful of snipers moving from roof top to roof top or apartment block to apartment block. The engagements were almost risible in their small size.  The associated body counts were equally small.  In short, no evidence of either side having fought with skill or mass was evident in all the myriad accounts coming from the frontlines.

As the NATO air attacks grew in number, there was no significant increase in collateral civilian casualties.  That should have raised flags with all observers.  There were darn few dots to connect.  The rebels were suddenly more effective.  "Mr NATO was always there, on time with hot metal on target.  There was no ramp up in the collateral deaths and damage.

Putting together the dots confirms one conclusion: The more robust proponents of getting rid of the obstreperous Leader had authorized the deployment of special forces personnel or operations officers of the clandestine service to provide training, advise, and, most decisively, forward air control.  In the past couple of days, due  in probability to the euphoria of achieving seeming success, the British and French governments have allowed that special forces personnel both active duty and retired had been and continued to be present in Libya.

The Americans have not been so forthcoming--yet.  In a sense there is no real reason.  After all who but Americans would have been driving black SUVs in conjunction with the advancing Berbers and others from the Western mountains?  Who but Americans wearing jeans and bush shirts would have been encountered standing next to the quite atypical for Libya black Suburbans?  Who but Americans would have been using very advanced commo gear and laser designators while parked on a convenient hilltop watching the rebels mount out as "Mr NATO" circled nearby?

Positing for the moment that the jeans wearing dudes glazing Qaddafi tanks and missile launching trucks were either Agency operations officers or sheepdipped special forces members, then Mr Obama has been telling the truth when denying the presence of American military personnel in Libya.  A narrow, technical truth is nonetheless a truth.  The combination of the primarily Berber forces (recall that the Berbers were never well and truly subjugated by the Italians or the monarchy and steamed hot under the heavy oppression of Qaddafi) are made up of men with many generations of guerrilla warfare in their blood and American directed air delivered firepower was highly effective.

The close cooperation of the Americans with the Western mountaineers also had the advantage of putting some blue sky between Washington and the forces controlled (if that is the correct term) by the Transitional National Council in Benghazi.  The conflicting agendas and presence of advocates of violent political Islam in the TNC makes the development of an alternative locus of political authority desirable.  The Western towns and tribes are under represented in the TNC which makes an alternative locus not only desirable but necessary.  The key role played to date by the Western mountaineers in the "conquest" of Tripoli assures that the future government of Libya will be more inclusive--a key American policy goal.

The results to date make manifest the effectiveness of the direct training, command, and control as well as forward fire direction services provided by British and French military personnel.  Without these critical components as well as the equally important intelligence and targeting assistance coming from the Europeans, the rebels would still be dithering around many, many klicks to the east of Tripoli.  In short, the discrete assistance made the rebels something more like a fighting force and much less of a source of comedic relief.

The important take away is the "victory" to date of the rebels is not a credit to NATO per se but rather to the decisions taken by three major members of the alliance. NATO has not come back from the graveyard of obsolete political assemblies.  Rather the effectiveness of "Mr NATO" and the rebels came despite the alliance not because of it.  On the ground, under the pressure of real world events, what started as a purported out-of-theater operation by NATO became a "coalition of the willing" in the same model as that patented back in 1990 by George H.W. Bush.  But, as a polite fiction the credit will be given to NATO.

A second, parallel polite fiction is already being written by the Obama administration and its supporters in congress and among We the People.  That fiction holds Mr Obama as a pillar of triumphant diplomatic policy and his "leading from behind" policy paradigm as the most important new foreign policy development since the Marshall Plan.  Hooey!  Obama did what he did in the way he did for domestic political reasons alone.  He attended closely to the polls which showed We the People had no inclination for one more war in a Muslim majority country.  This political reality was reinforced strongly by the simple fact that the US had no definite, marketable national interest in play in Libya other than a vague, emotional commitment to the ideal of democracy and a strong distaste for Qaddafi.  There was neither reason nor way in which even the most limited of wars could be sold to We the People and congress--and Obama did the only thing he could do other than abandon the UK and France as well as the Arab League to their own devices with the result that US influence would go even deeper in the tank than it is now.

There is a final polite fiction.  That is the tale of the "fall" of Tripoli.  Leaving aside the tragi-comic features of the last twenty-four hours, the fact remains that Tripoli is not under any sort of rebel control, military or governmental.  The companion fact is that even if Tripoli becomes fully under TNC authority, it does not mean the war is over let alone that a new Libya is well under construction.  The simple, ground truth, the brute fact of life in Libya is that the Libyans will have to be very, very lucky and careful in order to prevent the start of a long, bloody, and destructive set of internal wars.  Beyond that, a successful outcome (defined as a stable Libya with some plausible semblance of democracy) will depend upon the outsiders--the British, the French, the Americans, the UN, the brigades of ever ready NGOs-- to do very little.

The danger from outside Libya is that the well-intentioned foreigners both governmental and NGO will try to do too much rather than too little.  Particularly if there is a period of settling scores, of payback violence, of armed quest for political authority, there will be an almost irresistible temptation to interfere, to impose and keep the peace, to "teach the Libyans to elect good men."  No matter what happens, no matter how much blood might flow, no matter how loud and obnoxious the rhetoric might become, it is critical, utterly central, that the outsiders keep their hands off.  For Libya to emerge eventually as a stable, peaceful, hopefully democratic society and polity, it is imperative that the processes leading to that end state be organic to Libya and the Libyan people.

A new polite fiction is emerging to the effect that we, particularly the British but also the Americans, have learned the big lesson of the dreadful and avoidable experiences in Iraq.  That may be true in an abstract, academic way, but down deep in the emotional brain which drives the really big decisions, it is not.  Should Libya enter a period of adjustment marked with retribution and revenge, it is doubtful that the Deep Thinkers in government and media throughout the US, the UK, France, and elsewhere will be able to kick back and remind the critics, inform the anguished humanitarians, chastise the eager to intervene, that this time the mistakes of Iraq will not be repeated.

The biggest challenge ahead for Libya and its people will not be the capture or killing of Qaddafi.  It will not be which way should the TNC go in preparing for its eventual demise.  It will not be transforming the fighters of the deserts and mountains into a professional constabulary capable of keeping the internal peace.  It will not be who will try the criminals of the former regime.  None of these begins to match the really, really big challenge.

That challenge?

Simple, bucko, the make-or-break of Libya's future is found in a short and easy question: Can the High Minded and Lofty Thinking of the West keep their hands off and their mouths shut.

If the past is any guide, the answer is short and bitter: No.

Well,Golly, Really, Someone Ought To Do Something

De facto, Libya has fissioned.  There is no longer one Libya other than within the lines on a map.  In the real world there is now an East Libya centered on Benghazi and Tobruk (or Tobruq, if you insist on current spelling) and a West Libya comprised of Tripoli and the oilfields to its south.  It merits mention that East Libya also has its own oilfields and loading facilities.

The residual government of Brother Leader and associates has no sway over any of East Libya which is now an independent if not yet sovereign entity.  The tribes of East Libya have withdrawn all allegiance to the Gaddafi regime while the armed forces have defected in wholesale lots to the insurrectionists.  The latter occurred because the attraction of region, of tribe, of clan outweighs all the artifices of Gaddafi's view of socialism, Libyan style.

In West Libya, the man who identified himself as "history," as "revolution," and other abstracts, is having more than a few problems killing enough and terrorizing enough to keep even the semblance of power in the capital and its environs.  The mercenary and militia forces currently loyal to the one time strongman have demonstrated a capacity and taste for killing people.  This has not yet translated into security for Brother Leader.

The greatest advantage Gaddafi has in West Libya is the absence of a coherent resistance.  The uprising in Tripoli unlike that in East Libya has been inchoate from the beginning.  While the leaderless uprising has some advantages--it is uniquely invulnerable to decapitation strikes by the status quo--it lacks the organizational and structural integrity which can  assure the survival of a resistance movement even under heavy and deadly pressure.

A critical question therefore is why the difference between East Libya, the home of an organized, long standing anti-government movement, and West Libya, the site of a genuine leaderless movement?  In a major way the difference between what happened in Benghazi or Tobruk on the one hand and Tripoli on the other is a reflection, even a consequence of Libyan history.

Prior to the forced unification of Libya by Italy in 1931 at the end of a twenty year campaign, Libya had been three quasi-states: Tripolitania, Fezzan, and Cyrenaica.  Cyrenaica is East Libya.  Tripolitania is West Libya--absent its oilfields.  These are found to the south in old Fezzan.  The three divisions are ancient, dating back to the days of Rome and Carthage.  The divisions are not simply geographic.  Nor are they simply lines on old maps.

The divisions run more across the human terrain than the merely physical.  They coincide with tribal and clan homelands, homelands which have existed since the mythic dawn of time.  As the Italians discovered when they embarked on their great adventure in imitating Rome, the differences between the three regions were starkest when expressed in the degree of opposition to the new colonials.  While none of the three were easy nuts to crack, Cyrenaica was the hardest by far.

The New Rome of Mussolini determined to erase the existence of the historical consciousness of the tribesmen of the newly conquered provinces and for that reason decreed the new "state" of Libya into existence.  Decreeing is easy, doing much harder.  The Italians were never able to create a unified Libyan state, and their efforts not only were unsuccessful, they became counterproductive.

The Anglo-American forces which occupied Libya from 1943 to the end of the war contented themselves with administering the territory for the convenience of the war effort.  This approach, which paid utterly no attention to the nature of the human terrain, continued into the post-war period with the creation of a monarchy far more artificial than organic.  The not made in Libya monarchy lasted until it fell to Gaddafi's 1969 coup having been kept alive until then by the Cold War needs of the US and its NATO partners as well as the development of the domestic oilfields.  The important fact to keep in mind is that at no time during the quarter century of its existence did the monarchy, the foreign supporters of the monarchy, or anyone else attempt to create a unified national identity for Libya.

At the time King Idris left to nobody's real sorrow, the old divisions continued to exist with some small changes.  Due to the development of the oilfields of West Libya there had been a degree of integration between Fezzan and Tripolitania.  There had been no such process with regard to Cyrenaica, the population centers of which were separated from Tripoli by some five or six hundred kilometers of sand crossed by a single all weather road and a number of ancient caravan tracks.

The proving of oilfields in Cyrenaica during the early Gaddafi years served to reinforce the separate identities of East and West Libya, or, to use the old terms, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania/Fezzan.  Then as a matter of policy driven by a deep fear of military coup, Colonel Gaddafi reinforced the ancient divisions by not only refusing to integrate tribes and regions in national institutions including the army, but by deepening and widening the divisions.

His version of divide and conquer may have been successful in precluding a military coup but did so at the price of assuring profound disaffiliation in Cyrenaica.  For at least the last quarter century there has been a palpable and growing sense of "Cyrenaica for the Cyrenaicians."  When Gaddafi ordered the prison massacre in Benghazi in 1996 he gave this growing movement a shot of growth hormone.

Since 1996 the anti-government sentiment in Cyrenaica has developed silently but profoundly with results which were stunningly obvious in the first seventy-two hours of the insurrection.  Bluntly put, the Gaddafi regime lost Benghazi and Tobruk and the other towns of East Libya almost instantly.  Local army units changed sides in a heartbeat and took their weapons with them.  Air force and navy units did something similar, at least defecting to foreign shores rather than shoot on fellow tribe and clan members.  Cyrenaica for the Cyrenaicians!

The fact that Gaddafi moved in foreign mercenaries from Chad and sub-Saharan Africa shows he well understood that the loyalties of tribe and clan would trump any appeal held by his "revolution."  He knew and knows that his heavy heel has an Achilles tendon.  The foreigners were the splint for this potentially fatal weakness.

Whether the Rent-A-Killer forces will prove sufficient along with those Libyans who have a vested or visceral interest in the status quo to keep Brother Leader in power in West Libya remains to be seen.  One can be more certain about Gaddafi;s political will.  If nothing else he both believes his own propaganda and understands that he has no retirement haven waiting for him.  He has to stay and fight it out, to die in place if that is the way it plays out.  The same applies to his two most visible sons.

The dissidents of Cyrenaica have the political will as well.  They well understand the price of failure and the Egyptian border may prove to be a line in the sand too far should the Colonel and his killers gain the upper hand.  The so far successful insurrectionists of East Libya (Cyrenaica) also have both the organizational and material means to wage prolonged defensive war.  In addition, the majority of the population is with them.

This implies the war within the borders of Libya could continue for a long and bloody time absent sufficient outside pressure to end it.  East and West Libya could exchange inconclusive blows for weeks, months, even years if the oil continues to flow in sufficient amounts and can be exchanged for the necessities of life and war. It would not be pretty.

It is this far from unlikely eventuality which makes the insipid reactions of the Obama administration and other governments so disheartening.  The Security Council limiting itself to a "press statement" would be risible were it not both tragic and, given the long standing policies of China and Russia, predictable.  Far more disturbing was the absence of UN Ambassador Susan Rice from the Security Council vote.

Ms Rice who has worked herself into an excellent imitation of war fever over the plight of people in Darfur was off to South Africa for a confab on "global sustainability" and thus too preoccupied to consider the situation in Libya.  Her boss, President Obama, is also absent.  Sure, his press flack assures us the Clueless Guy in the Oval will have something to say apropos Libya today or tomorrow, but that is scarcely the sort of laid back approach the situation demands.

Gaddafi has to be forced out quickly.  He has to be made to go--alive or dead--before the cycles of killing reach the point that Bosnia will look like a Baptist Sunday Social in comparison.  The US and other civilized states such as the UK and Italy can freeze bank accounts, impose travel bans, put sanctions in place, prohibit arms sales, order their national corporate citizens to halt all activity, even use NATO assets to impose naval and air blockades.  None of these require a great deal of head scratching, consultations, joint communiques, but all demand action.

Somebody really, really has to do something.  All the somethings are well understood.  All are easy to do.  None require the UN do anything.  All demand the civilized states including the US put pens on paper, sign the required orders, and apply the pressure.

Even symbolic actions, the freezing of funds for example, would undercut the willingness of the mercenaries to stay in Libya and embolden even the leaderless movement in West Libya to keep on keeping on.  If, at the same time, the civilized states would make the right sort of noises exempting low ranking trigger pullers from prosecution, the pro-Gaddifi forces would be weakened even more.  There are other easy to take and quick to operate measures as well, but this roster gives some indications of the great number of tools available to assist in the ending of the Gaddafi madness.

But, someone has to go first.  That is what the US formerly did.  What is wrong now, Mr Obama?