PRESIDENT Barack Obama assumed office on the promise of change. Experience has shown that though one man can indeed make a difference, structural change is much more difficult to accomplish of its own sake.
The situation in Libya is a classic example of expediency rather than change. In the midst of a civil war, there was a clamour for limited military intervention to rid the country of military strongman Muammar Gaddafi’s 41-year rule.
While the United States did not have a vital interest at stake there, a limited military intervention was supported solely on humanitarian grounds but needed “legal” cover to support such action.
Both the United Nations Security Council and the Arab League had called for action which provided such cover. On March 17, the Council Resolution 1973 authorized the use of “all necessary measures”, short of an invasion and occupation, “to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas”.
This was the first United Nations-sanctioned combat operations since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Resolution 1973 was passed by a ten-nil vote within 24 hours of being introduced, contrary to prevailing expectations that the world once again would watch fecklessly from the sidelines.
A Reuters/Ipsos MORI poll last week found most people in Britain, Italy and the United States felt their country could not afford military action, while a majority in all countries polled, except France, felt NATO action in Libya did not have clear objectives.
Gaddafi’s forces had already caused heavy casualties among civilians and were on the verge of capturing Benghazi, with possibly dire consequences for its inhabitants.
It is, however, reasonable to expect that every government has the right to fight an armed uprising. The dilemma was: how exactly could Resolution 1973 have been implemented to protect civilians without intervening in a civil war?
In Bosnia, it took NATO more than a year to intervene in 1999. In Libya, it took one month to mobilize a broad coalition, secure a UN mandate to protect civilians, establish and enforce no-fly and no-drive zones to stop Gaddafi’s advancing army.
The objective was clearly not to make the same mistake again. Had the UN shirked its responsibility, Libya could have been the graveyard of Resolution 1973 and inaction might as well have sounded the last post for it.
The game-changers were the juxtaposition of “responsibility to protect” as a powerful new galvanizing norm in international law, the defection of Libyan diplomats who joined the calls for action to protect civilians, and the request for a no-fly zone by the Arab League.
Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, the expediency was to go for the kill. The words of the former Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, that the UN was “not created in order to bring us to heaven, but to save us from hell” are as true today as ever.
