Obama's Libya intervention and the "bias for action"

I always have reservations about foreign policy announcement coming from people closely associated with the libertarian Cato Institute. I'm always leery of an Old Right isolationism lying behind it.

That said, Emma Ashford's op-ed Trump’s Syria Strikes Show What’s Wrong With U.S. Foreign Policy New York Times 04/13/2018 makes an important point. We could call it the haste-makes-waste principle of foreign policy. Writing about the Obama Administration's 2011 decision in intervene in Syria at the instigation of Britain and France, she says:

Acting too quickly means that policymakers don’t have full information when making key decisions, and it prevents them from carefully considering the long-term consequences. In best-case scenarios, like Mr. Trump’s 2017 Syrian airstrikes, the harm done of rushing to action is minor. In other cases, it can be disastrous. Just look at the Obama administration’s 2011 decision to intervene in Libya.

The speed of that decision — relying on limited intelligence and questionable assumptions about impending genocide — effectively committed the United States to overthrowing Muammar Qaddafi. The result was the European refugee crisis and a civil war that scholars believe has killed more civilians than the initial intervention saved. Indeed, Mr. Obama’s own reflections on Libya (as well as Iraq) and his criticisms of the bias for action in American foreign policymaking were ultimately behind his decision to resist pressure to strike Syria in 2013. Mr. Obama came to understand that poorly thought-out military interventions can be even costlier.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was enthusiastic about the intervention. And this still strikes me as one of the more callous displays of her career. She's referring to the lynch murder of Muammar Qaddafi, which included raping him with a bayonet. Clinton on Qaddafi: We came, we saw, he died CBS News 10/20/2018. (That video does not allow embedding at this writing.)

Ashford doesn't mention it in that piece, but one of the most significant things about the Libya intervention is that it was a huge setback for the prospects of international agreements on nuclear arms control and on chemical weapons control, as well. Saddam Hussein's Iraq gave up their "WMD" programs, and the Cheney-Bush Administration invaded and overthrew him anyway. Libya announced just after the invasion that they had also given theirs up, which Bush claimed to be a sign of the positive effect of the Iraq War. Then in 2011, we overthrew Qaddafi.

You don't have to be a policy wonk to figure out the implications. If you give up your nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs, the US and NATO are willing to invade and overthrow you and put the leader to death. That surely contributed to the difficulty in working out the Iranian deal on nuclear arms development. And the Trump Administration seems to be on the verge of shredding that one and tossing the pieces to the wind. And, however paranoid the North Korean leadership may be, they aren't wrong to wonder whether giving up their nuclear weapons would be the prelude to a US invasion.

In the article linked in Ashford's piece, "A Model Humanitarian Intervention?" International Security 38:1 (Summer 2013), Alan Kuperman makes clear that the Libya intervention was actually a regime change operation, and not the humanitarian intervention it was justified as being by the US and the NATO allies:

If NATO had prioritized the protection of civilians, in accordance with its [UN Security Council] authorization, the transatlantic alliance would have enforced the no-fly zone, bombed forces that were threatening civilians, and attempted to forge a cease-fire.

Instead, NATO took actions that were unnecessary or inconsistent with protecting civilians, but which fostered regime change. Less than two weeks into the intervention, for example, NATO began attacking Libyan forces that were retreating and therefore not a threat to civilians, who were far away. the same time, NATO started bombing forces in Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, where they represented no threat to civilians because the residents supported the regime. Government officials, the New York Times reported, immediately protested that “Western powers were now attacking the Libyan Army in retreat, a far cry from the United Nations mandate to establish a no-fly zone to protect civilians.” To support this allegation, a Qaddafi spokesman noted that Libyan forces “were attacked as they were clearly moving westbound.” [my emphasis]