The final collapse of the Gaddafi regime is being hailed by Democrats as a triumph for the slowly-but-surely approach of the Obama administration, whereas it is anything but. In fact, it is further indication that we are moving towards, as the title of Fareed Zakaria’s latest book puts it, The Post-American World.
The final collapse of the Gaddafi regime is being hailed by Democrats as a triumph for the slowly-but-surely approach of the Obama administration, whereas it is anything but. In fact, it is further indication that we are moving towards, as the title of Fareed Zakaria’s latest book puts it, The Post-American World.
It was on Friday 18 February – i.e. over six months ago – that active, violent resistance against the Gaddafi regime first flared up in Benghazi, after three days of peaceful protests following the security service’s murder of 24 protesters in a funeral procession. By 20 February there were clashes in Misrata as well as mutinies in the armed forces, especially in the Libyan air force. Thereafter, events moved very, very fast, with the regime consistently missing the initiative. By 23 February it had lost control of Benghazi, there were several high-level defections, and then suddenly in only a matter of days virtually the whole of eastern Libya declared itself free of the regime that had tortured it for 42 years. Towns like Tobruk, Sorman, Al Bayda, Az Zawiyah, Sabrata and Zuwarah fell almost simultaneously, and by the end of February Gaddafi had lost his harbours and large numbers of troops, and many of his African mercenaries had been massacred. There was even the skeleton start of what was to become the National Transitional Council in place in Benghazi. Most crucially, Al Jazeera was reporting major demonstrations in Green Square in Tripoli itself. When I was there in April 2009, my main impression was of the vast billboards of Gaddafi to be seen everywhere: now these selfsame posters were being torn down and having rocks thrown at them, despite the tear gas and occasional live rounds of sniper fire.
Tripoli in the first week of March 2011 was, in retrospect, the precise time and place that military historians term the ‘point d’appui’ or the ‘Schwerpunkt’, the most vulnerable moment, at which a strong push can seize the psychological initiative and overthrow the enemy. You see it with Manstein’s ‘sickle-cut’ manoeuvre in France in 1940, in the charge of the Household and Union brigades at Waterloo, in the capture of Redoubts no. 9 and 10 at Yorktown. The regime was reeling — Gaddafi did not manage to get together a counter-offensive until the afternoon of Sunday 6 March — and the key psychological moment was there for the West to grasp. That was the moment for President Obama to unleash US Tomahawk missiles into the Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli, signalling that the time had come when justice would finally be done for the 270 Americans and Britons whom Gaddafi killed in cold blood at Lockerbie. Ronald Reagan would have done it; indeed he did bomb Tripoli in 1986 after the Berlin discothèque atrocity.
Instead, of course, as we all know, President Obama judiciously waited until the United Nations Security Council had resolved to declare a no-fly zone. It was not for America to take the lead, in the kind of gung-ho way that countries that believe in their own exceptionalism did in the bad old days of cowboy diplomacy. So instead he attended upon the Organisation of African Unity to give him diplomatic cover. He allowed, for the first time in Nato’s history, Britain and France to wag the dog’s tail, instead of taking the lead. He held back Libya’s own cash from the National Transitional Council for several more months.
Once Gaddafi loyalists recognised that they were going to be given a breathing space by the West, they regrouped, counter-attacked, nearly took Benghazi, and eventually fought a civil war that took a further five months to win and has cost tens of thousands of lives. It was not to be until late on 20 March that the US first started firing missiles at the Bab al-Aziziya compound, by which time the civil war was well underway across Libya, indeed Gaddafi’s forces were in the process of being turned back from their would-be massacre of Benghazi. Paralysed by his ideological misreading of the lessons of the Iraq and Afghan wars, President Obama allowed a civil war to develop, when all that was needed was a coup de grace at the correct psychological moment.
Instead of being commended for his statesmanship, he should be haunted by the estimated 30,000 Libyans who were killed since his abysmal failure to act decisively in early March 2011.