The President’s Libya Speech, Part I: A Problem for Him
What is the American national interest in military intervention in Libya? What is our military objective and how do we plan to achieve it? If it wasn’t clear before yesterday, it was no clearer after the President spoke.
What is the American national interest in military intervention in Libya? What is our military objective and how do we plan to achieve it? If it wasn’t clear before yesterday, it was no clearer after the President spoke.
After denouncing the Iraq war “bluntly,” as he said, President Obama hailed the “core principles that have guided us through many storms: our opposition to violence directed against one’s own citizens; our support for a set of universal rights, including the freedom for people to express themselves and choose their leaders; our support for governments that are ultimately responsive to the aspirations of the people.”
This poses two problems – one for him and one for us. For him the problem is that the U.S. decision to remove Saddam Hussein met all of President Obama’s conditions: Saddam killed more than 400,000 of his own citizens – a figure Gaddafi will have to work long and hard to match – including poison gas attacks on the Kurds of the north and the Shiite Marsh Arabs, and damming the rivers to dry up the southern marshes, decimating the population and turning tens of thousands of people into refugees. Iraq now has a government that, while not perfect, does permit people to express themselves and choose their leaders; it is perhaps the freest government in the Arab Middle East.
But that wasn’t the reason for the war.
President Obama wrongly said “regime change” in Iraq took eight years – it took 12 years from the end of the first Gulf War to oust Saddam, and it has been eight years since then. The coalition went to war in 1991 when Saddam invaded Kuwait (after the Iraqi-initiated 8-year war against Iran, which included bombing cities). The carnage in Kuwait justified international action, but although the coalition removed Saddam’s army from Kuwait, regime change was not on the agenda.
The United Nations Security Council initiated the “no fly zone” after Saddam’s depredations against his own people and for 12 years we (and the British) enforced it plus the economic sanctions the UN also initiated. Regime change became U.S. policy in 1998 during the Clinton administration after the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja. In the post-9/11 atmosphere, there was a strong international coalition in 2003 for American-led action against Saddam. There had, after all, been 17 UN Security Council resolutions.
Despite the fact that France, Germany and Russia opposed military action because they were benefitting from the UN Oil for Food Program, 27 countries provided some form of support and there was a resolution of the Congress. (One reason we were so quick in Libya is that the President skipped Congress. “Consulting the bipartisan leadership” isn’t the same thing.) In addition, there was the belief in Western intelligence agencies, including Israel’s, that Saddam maintained chemical and biological weapons.
The one point Mr. Obama could have made and didn’t was that the Bush administration thought it knew the nature of the Iraqi opposition and that the opposition was on our side.
The reason to review the facts on the Iraq war is neither to rehash history nor to “prove” that President Bush was right. It is to remind ourselves, and our government, that no war is pristine, no war is sui generis, and most American presidents follow the same principles in defending our interests.