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Christie and the “Inaction” Canard

Libya and Iraq are in their current state largely thanks to the decisions to "act" by pursuing regime change.
chris christie

Chris Christie’s candidacy is a non-factor in the Republican nomination contest, but his foreign policy rhetoric is unfortunately all too representative of the GOP right now:

[Obama] doesn’t understand the world is literally on fire because of his inaction. Libya is on fire. Syria is on fire. Iraq is on fire.

Christie is wrong about this in several ways. For one thing, the instability and conflicts in these countries don’t tell us about conditions in the rest of the world. The reality is that “the world” isn’t “on fire,” and in fact the world is generally suffering from fewer armed conflicts than in previous decades. These places are not at all representative of the state of most of the world, and it is only because of the obsession with the Near East and North Africa in our foreign policy debate that a candidate gets away with making a generalization like this.

Christie is also wrong about the reasons for the instability and conflict in these places. Libya and Iraq are in their current state largely thanks to the decisions to “act” by pursuing regime change. In the absence of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is very unlikely that there would have been an opportunity for jihadists to flourish in Iraq, and in that case the organization we know today as ISIS might never have existed. The choice that the U.S. and some of its allies made to topple the Libyan government was a major factor in making the country what it is today.

In his U.N. speech, Obama lamely tried to spin the problems in post-intervention Libya as a result of not doing enough to follow up that regime change with even more outside intervention, which just shows how oblivious he remains to the original error of taking sides in Libya’s civil war. The revisionist idea that the U.S. and NATO could have stabilized the country after the regime was destroyed leaves out that the Libyan transitional government at the time wanted no part of an outside force, and no other government was prepared to commit to providing one. The lack of any follow-up effort was not really an oversight of the governments that intervened in Libya. On the contrary, it was one of the intervention’s original selling points.

The Libyan war was a “model” for regime change and “humanitarian” intervention on the cheap. Had any of them ever thought it involved a longer-term commitment, no government would have endorsed it. Had the U.S. been less inclined to “act” by attacking other governments and throwing their countries into chaos, it is very likely that much of the instability and violence currently plaguing the region would not be happening or at least would not be as bad as it is. If Republican hawks were capable of acknowledging that U.S. intervention in Libya was a horrible error, they would have a field day criticizing Obama and Clinton, but they are so wedded to meddling in foreign conflicts that they can’t ever make this argument.

Syria is suffering terribly because of the actions of the Syrian government, its domestic opponents, and the interference of outside governments. All of these are far more responsible for what has happened in Syria than U.S. “inaction.” To pin Syria’s problems on U.S. or Western “inaction” is to let the people responsible for destroying the country off the hook and to presume that Western military intervention in the region is capable of improving conditions there. To believe that U.S. “inaction” is to blame for Syria’s plight, one would also have to ignore the backing for anti-regime forces by the U.S. and its allies and clients, and more important one would have to believe in a fantasy in which a more activist and aggressive U.S. policy would not have exacerbated the conflict even more. If one wants to fault the administration for the meddling that it and U.S. allies and clients have actually engaged in over the last four years, that would be more than fair, but trying to blame the awful consequences of a foreign conflict on U.S. “inaction” is absurd.

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