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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Open-Ended War in Libya

The U.S. and allied military campaign in Libya is an embarassment. From the very beginning, U.S. and allied political and strategic objectives have been unclear, and thus U.S. and allied military forces have been asked to carry out military operations without a clear commander’s intent or end state. Out of all the operations orders that […]

The U.S. and allied military campaign in Libya is an embarassment. From the very beginning, U.S. and allied political and strategic objectives have been unclear, and thus U.S. and allied military forces have been asked to carry out military operations without a clear commander’s intent or end state. Out of all the operations orders that have been issued by the U.S. military for operations in Libya, in fact, only one — the order to carry out the evacuation of non-combatants — included an end state. None of the other orders issued to and by the U.S. military included an end state, in large part because senior military and civilian leaders either could not or chose not to explicitly articulate what the end state might be. The U.S. and allied military intervention is thus the very definition of an open-ended military intervention — the kind in which most U.S. decision-makers swore we would never again engage after Iraq and Afghanistan. ~Andrew Exum

Via Greg Scoblete

Like Greg, I am puzzled by the last sentence. Greg asked, “Which decision makers “swore we would never again” engage in an open-ended military intervention?” Perhaps Exum means that senior officers in the military wished that the U.S. would never engage in another open-ended military intervention, and possibly Secretary Gates put up some resistance to intervening in Libya because of this, but what evidence is there that “most U.S. decision-makers” made such a vow? U.S. forces have not yet left Iraq, to say nothing of Afghanistan, but that didn’t stop most of the decision-makers from plunging into a new open-ended intervention or acquiescing in the decision when it was made. Some of the people responsible for involving the U.S. in Libya’s civil war were opponents of the invasion of Iraq, but they and their supporters have been so eager to distinguish this blunder from the Iraq blunder that they seem to have learned very little from the last eight years.

The open-ended nature of the war received another boost today as NATO approved an extension of its mission for an additional 90 days beyond the end of the first 90-day period on June 27. In a few days, the Libyan war will have been going on longer than the 1999 war against Yugoslavia, and it has already dragged on quite a lot longer than any of the intervening governments and the war’s supporters believed. By my count, today is day 75. Gaddafi remains defiant and has once again rejected calls to step down, and why wouldn’t he? Unlike Milosevic, he has nothing to lose by continuing to resist. He has been given no incentive to give up, and instead the U.S. and NATO have given him every incentive to fight to the bitter end. Russia has strangely decided to wreck whatever chance it had of being an effective mediator by siding with the other members of the G-8 in calling for Gaddafi to depart, which makes it that much less likely that Moscow will be able to use diplomacy to help bring the conflict to an end as it did in 1999. There is still the possibility of a negotiated settlement. This would appear to be the most plausible way of halting the fighting for now to make it possible to provide relief supplies to the civilian population in all parts of the country, but this is something that NATO and rebel leaders have repeatedly refused to consider. The humanitarian intervention in Libya is creating a humanitarian disaster, and the longer that it drags on the worse conditions are going to become.

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