Lessons from Libya: How Not to Intervene

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Policy Brief, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

September 2013

• The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong. Libya's 2011 uprising was never peaceful, but instead was armed and violent from the start. Muammar al-Qaddafi did not target civilians or resort to indiscriminate force. Although inspired by humanitarian impulse, NATO's intervention did not aim mainly to protect civilians, but rather to overthrow Qaddafi's regime, even at the expense of increasing the harm to Libyans.

• The Intervention Backfired. NATO's action magnified the conflict's duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors. If Libya was a "model intervention," then it was a model of failure.

• Three Lessons. First, beware rebel propaganda that seeks intervention by falsely crying genocide. Second, avoid intervening on humanitarian grounds in ways that reward rebels and thus endanger civilians, unless the state is already targeting noncombatants. Third, resist the tendency of humanitarian intervention to morph into regime change, which amplifies the risk to civilians.

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23387/lessons_from_libya.html

[JayhawkSD]

1. It was based on a raving speech made by Qaddafi

He threatened to storm Benghazi and hunt down the rebels and "exterminate them like rats." It was the same kind of rabid rhetoric he had been spouting for years, but it was interpreted as a threat to commit genocide and intervention was based on the UN's "responsibility to protect" doctrine. The threat was not real, and anyone with a grain of sense knew it was not real, but it was used as a pretext to overthrow Qaddafi.

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2. Libya was just Stage 1 in serial regime change aimed at Syria and then Lebanon and Iran.

It was a strategy that partially "succeeded" (by its own terms of removing regimes deemed hostile to Israel), not a misguided experiment in humanitarian policy, as it is publicly portrayed.

[eridani]

3. In Libya, Unrest Brings Oil Industry to Standstill

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/world/africa/in-libya-unrest-brings-oil-industry-to-standstill.html


Two years after local militias overthrew the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, many of those same fighters have brought Libya’s critical oil industry to a halt, as a challenge to the latest in a series of that country’s interim governments.

Protests and strikes at several large export terminals and oil fields have throttled Libya’s daily oil production to one-tenth its capacity in recent days, jeopardizing the national economy and tightening world oil supplies at a time when unrest is spreading in the Middle East.

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4. There were more nefarious elements at play in the Libyian Intervention.

Those who have read The Shock Doctrine will understand:

” For all his dictatorial megalomania, Gaddafi is a committed pan-African - a fierce defender of African unity. Libya was not in debt to international bankers. It did not borrow cash from the International Monetary Fund for any "structural adjustment". It used oil money for social services - including the Great Man Made River project, and investment/aid to sub-Saharan countries. Its independent central bank was not manipulated by the Western financial system. All in all a very bad example for the developing world.”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD27Ak01.html