Libya: The Limits of Physical Power

Yesterday (April 18), Jonathan Marcus, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, wrote:

“The Libyan operation has already gone on for longer than many of its instigators probably imagined. At the outset the skids appeared to be under Colonel Gaddafi and his regime and one more push looked set to topple him.

“That is not how things have turned out, raising questions about what exactly was known at the outset.

“How resilient did people think the Gaddafi regime really was? How effective were his forces? And how much or how little was known about the rebel side’s capacities?”

On April 16, The New York Times’ Roger Cohen wrote:

“If the U.N.’s “responsibility to protect” means anything, it must be when an Arab tyrant promises to slaughter his people.

“We stand at a high point in French postwar diplomacy and a nadir in German. There were strong arguments on either side of a Libyan intervention, but with a massacre looming in Benghazi, Germany had to stand with its allies. Angela Merkel has proved herself more a maneuverer than a leader. Germany often conveys the sense that it now resents the agents of its postwar rehabilitation – the European Union and NATO.

“I don’t think Germany believes its future lies with the BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India and China] countries, as the U.N. Libya vote suggested. I do think Germany has entered a new era of ambivalence and nationalist calculation.”

• • • • •

It was a black-and-white situation – the civilized world against Gaddafi – at a time when the Arab spring was promising liberation to many countries in the Middle East and North Africa, largely through non-violent means. And here we are, once again, at a heartbreaking moment when the rebel-held town, Misrata, is being threatened by the dictator’s forces, an evil man who seemed doomed a month ago.

To justify staying out of the intervention, many Germans say there is no military solution to the Libyan crisis, although it’s obvious that if appropriate American and German forces were mobilized and joined in the action – and if the Security Council gave the green light to invade – there would be.

But political and moral considerations are making this impossible. It is easy to say now that western intelligence agencies should have warned the great powers, before the Security Council voted for the no-fly zone, that this was not the way to get rid of Gaddafi, that there was only one way: subtle international diplomacy reflecting the position of the overwhelming majority of mankind, plus the use of special forces – i.e., cunning.

It may not be too late.