Hayes Brown wrote a good post a few days ago about Libya and how Westerners both for and against NATO’s intervention have been in far too much of a hurry to declare themselves vindicated:
I’m not an expert in democratization, but I do believe that these things take time. Tripoli fell just shy of six months ago; Qaddafi was killed four months ago. Going by the standards that many seem to arbitrarily set on either completely new political entities like South Sudan or new regimes such as the one in Libya, the United States itself was an abject failure for the first several years of its existence. Soldiers went unpaid and over-armed, the central government wasn’t sure how to enforce its will on new territory, the original system set up to govern was found to be completely unworkable, there were questions on how to handle loyalists who still lived in the new country. The list goes on. Two centuries of practice exist between now and then, leading many to believe that the country sprung forth in its current form. The basic principles remain the same, so far as state-building goes, and those two-hundred years of practice aren’t easily transferred.
It’s a pretty nuanced and I’d say fair assessment of the current situation, and the excerpted above is probably the most enticing bit for those who were in favor of intervening. Here’s the take-away for those who were opposed:
It’s in this light I came across an article in the Washington Post, helpfully posted by Daniel Solomon, describing a new challenge faced by the NTC:
Representatives of about 100 militias from western Libya said Monday they had formed a new federation to prevent infighting and allow them to press the country’s new government for further reform.
The move was a blow to the National Transitional Council, which helped lead the eight-month uprising against longtime ruler Moammar Gadhafi that ended with his capture and death in October. The NTC has struggled for months to stamp its authority on the country, and has largely failed to decommission or bring under its control the hundreds of militias that fought in the war.
There is an initial, visceral reaction to this news, one that speaks to many of the fears that go hand-in-hand with the Arab Spring writ large. The fear that for all our best hopes, this will end in a new enemy to the United States. I think that there’s reason behind this reaction, but I do think that there’s also room for cautious optimism. This development could go one of two ways, by my seeing. The first, far preferable way to outside observers, is that the militias in the new Federation accept the results of future elections and continue the development of a political wing to their machinations. Members of this Federation could contest seats in the National Parliament elections this summer against those backed by the NTC. They could then go on to become either a loyal opposition to the members of the NTC, or the leaders of the government in their own right. Or, given the difficulties that the NTC has in unifying command under the Defense Ministry, the Federation could face the same problems and lose control of its groups, furthering violence as they turn on each other.
As I’ve said one billion times, I would have preferred that NATO simply do what was necessary to forestall the Benghazi massacre as well as potential equivalent atrocities from anti-Gaddafi forces. I yearned for a fantasyland where the billions of dollars of killing power the UNSC unleashed acted as something like a souped-up referee at an MMA fight — letting things get ugly, but keeping them from turning obscene. That’s the ideal, I think, between balancing the global community’s responsibility and right to stop crimes against nature alongside every nation’s right to self-determination.
But considering the relatively brief duration of the conflict alongside the lack of Western troops in the arena, I’ve tentatively been of the mind that the West made the right call. To some degree, this is contingent upon how things turn out in Libya, so it makes sense that people on both sides of the political argument are so furiously jockeying with one another to declare the character of post-Gaddafi Libya revealed. But to another degree, even if things in Libya end up pretty poorly — but not if they end up worse than they were under Gaddafi, mind you — that doesn’t render the action a failure or a mistake.
There’s a realpolitik defense of treating human rights as a major criterion of geopolitics, I believe; but it’s not the only justification. Nor, in my opinion, need it be. There was a real opportunity to do something that would stop untold numbers of innocent people being murdered, and to do it within a political context that was just about as favorable toward such an action is it possibly could be. Just look to Syria today to see how grisly things can become without compelling various actors to shuck their material interests and petty rivalries in service of doing the right thing.
