NATO risks becoming a paper tiger
By
LINDA HEARD
The international community’s military intervention in Libya is a giant failure. Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague may characterize it as a success on the grounds that NATO airstrikes “saved many thousands of lives and stopped the destabilization of Egypt and Tunisia,” but that sounds to me like a politician trying to save face.
The consensus is that the Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi must go because not only does he have little regard for the lives of Libyan civilians that he once vowed to sacrifice until the last drop of blood, he has also threatened to launch terrorist attacks on Europe. However, the revolutionary warhorse has spurned several diplomatic efforts to end the conflict peacefully and has successfully evaded numerous strikes on his compound.
Frankly, I used to believe Qaddafi who travels around with female bodyguards and a luxurious tent, launches flowery insults in the direction of his fellow Arab leaders and makes rambling speeches while waving his incomprehensible Green Book, had morphed into a harmless eccentric once he had decided “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” in relation to formerly hostile Western powers.
I also thought Qaddafi’s son Saif Al-Islam was a modernist eager to make democratic reforms and bring his country into the 21st century. I was wrong in both cases; it seems the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Their sole priority is to hang on to privilege and power even if that means they will be the last men standing and until now they’ve proved to be more resilient than their protagonists.
The UN-backed intervention that was supported by the Arab League was wrong-footed from the start. In the first place, several NATO member states, such as Turkey and Italy, were unenthusiastic while the US, still entrenched in Iraq and Afghanistan during a period of economic turmoil, would have preferred to leave Libya in the lap of its European allies.
NATO’s efforts began with in-fighting and since have been largely half-hearted. Worse, UN Security Council Resolution 1973, passed to implement a “no-fly zone,” the freezing of the regime’s assets and a ban on weapons imports, has tied NATO’s hands. It does not allow for ground troops and has led to arms being delivered to the opposition via the backdoor.
It has also led to a situation whereby if rebel forces were to attack a town known to be a Qaddafi stronghold, such as Sirte or, perhaps Tripoli where the volume of support for the leadership is unknowable, in the strictest sense, NATO would be obliged to turn its guns on the rebels to protect the civilians there. Unfortunately, the asset freeze has resulted in the opposition being deprived of funds alone with the regime they are attempting to topple. A new and broader UNSC resolution is required but cannot be obtained due to the obduracy of Russia and China, which feel NATO has already exceeded its mandate.
Another mistake was the UNSC’s rush to send the Libyan leader to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity. The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Qaddafi, his son Saif and his brother-in-law Intelligence Chief Abdullah Sanussi prompting complaints that the court is pursuing selective justice leaving other oppressive dictators free to do their worst. It has also further highlighted that until now the ICC’s warrant have been limited to Africans, which undermines the court’s credibility.
The UNSC’s aim was to further isolate regime heads but, in reality, it has had unintended consequences by closing the door shut on the leadership’s negotiated exile to a country willing to accept them. Of course, Qaddafi will dig in when there’s nowhere else to go without fear of being turned over to The Hague.
Now, as the New York Times reports, Britain, France and the US seem ready to throw up their hands in defeat by handing Qaddafi “a get out of jail card” that would sideline the ICC by allowing Qaddafi and his buddies to remain in Libya provided they agree to step down. This would not only an insult to all those who have lost their lives to get rid of them, it illustrates just how impotent NATO is given the constraints of Resolution 1973 and the reluctance of Western publics to approve their governments going full throttle to achieve their aims. Furthermore, what message would this send to others suspected of war crimes? It’s nothing less than an immoral compromise.
In any case, such a deal leaving Qaddafi in place even if he hauls his tent to the desert won’t work. As the man himself says, he has no official position to step down from. He’s not a president or a prime minister, rather an ideological leader who retains admirers throughout the west of the country as well as the backing of certain tribes. Who’s to say he would stick to an agreement with NATO once it’s signed and even if he did, on paper at least, who’s to know that he wouldn’t continue pulling strings from his armchair retirement?
Moreover, he’s known to be a revengeful individual who has already threatened Europe with terrorist attacks. Warning Europe to retreat “before you face a catastrophe,” he said his supporters could take the fight “to Europe, to target your homes, offices, families, which would become legitimate military targets, like you have targeted our homes,” adding, Libyans can move around “Europe like locusts, like bees.”
It seems that those countries that led the charge from the get-go have succumbed to a bad case of cold feet four months into the costly bombing campaign that has achieved little because they entered the ring with blindfolds. The ragtag rebel army may have the resolve to finish the job but aren’t sufficiently trained or equipped to do so and is currently experiencing feuds between Islamists and secularists.
If NATO doesn’t have the patience or the cash to complete what it set out to do and accedes to Qaddafi escaping the ICC’s clutches and being permitted an honorable retirement in his homeland, it will be seen as a paper tiger in the face of a robed desert lion, who despite his ruthlessness, has more guts than the lot of them.
(sierra12th@yahoo.co.uk)
Courtesy: Arab News