Don’t Repeat The Mistakes Of Iraq In Libya

By Sean Kane
This commentary was published in The Foreign Policy on 27/04/2011

The no-fly zone in Libya began with an urgent need to protect civilians, but in common with many past international humanitarian interventions, is inevitably expanding to clear space for a new political order. Barack Obama, Nikolas Sarkozy and David Cameron have now made the case in "Libya's Pathway to Peace" that "it is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Qaddafi in power." So far though, the U.S. and its allies seem less prepared for the political, social and economic reconstruction dynamics likely to be unleashed by the eventual ouster of Qaddafi than they were for the military mechanics of establishing a no-fly zone. The Libya intervention has little in common with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite the oft-heard criticisms. But there are some generic lessons on post-authoritarian transitions in conflict devastated societies that were acquired at great cost in Iraq. These should now be heeded if the administration and its international partners' initial humanitarian impulse is to translate into a lasting contribution to Libya's stability. 

President Obama is correct that the difficulties of intervening militarily everywhere do not mean that we should not intervene anywhere. But past experience should be a bright, blinking reminder that military interventions to avert immediate humanitarian crises are not one-off, pinprick operations. In Libya, a possible humanitarian disaster in Benghazi was averted through the international intervention last month, but only weeks later Misurata faces an equally grave moment of reckoning. This underscores the reality that the immediate threats to the civilian population in rebel-held cities are only symptoms of deeper underlying political failings, which a no-fly zone is unable to address by itself. 

Iraq is the touchstone for failing to think about the day after military operations. However one may feel about the decision to invade, it was not preordained that the post-war period had to be as bloody and chaotic as it was, nor the consequences for regional stability as severe. Despite the incredible daily press of current events in the Middle East, it would be tragic to repeat this history in Libya. We and the Iraqis have painful experience with the path dependency that can result from initial mistakes. In Libya, this argues for giving ourselves the space to understand the local context better before making future reconstruction allocation decisions, prioritizing the development of incipient governing and civil capacity, and understanding that rushed transition benchmarks are unlikely to be inclusive and can do more harm than good.   

This is not an intervention President Obama wanted. He campaigned on bringing a responsible end to the war in Iraq and has sought to set a timeline to drawdown in Afghanistan. He was clearly reluctant to launch a third military campaign in a Muslim country, but he did so to avert a possible humanitarian emergency. Such unanticipated interventions are the rule, not the exception, of recent presidencies. George W. Bush came into office vowing to end Clinton-era "nation-building." Nevertheless, his presidency was defined by two of America's longest wars and most complex nation-building enterprises. President Clinton faced choices of intervention in Somalia, Rwanda, and the Balkans. The elder President Bush set up no-fly zones in Iraq after what many saw as American-inspired 1991 uprisings in northern and southern Iraq failed. All of these cases, and more, should teach us that there are certain types of strategic dilemmas that will be faced in post-authoritarian, post-conflict transitions.

First, avoid over-personalizing the conflict and focusing only on the removal of Qaddafi. Americans tend to personalize our conflict with foreign despots. Think Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il ("loathed" by George W. Bush) and Muammar Qaddafi (Reagan's "mad dog of the Middle East"). To some extent, this is an outgrowth of the concentration of power around these leaders making it impossible to separate the state from the regime, like Saddam in Iraq or Qaddafi in Libya.

But this personalization can create dangerous blindspots in planning for what happens after they go. In fact, the basic laws of international relations and communal rivalries do not cease to exist even as they are obscured by cults of personality. Inside of Iraq, the vacuum following Saddam's ouster led to a bloody sectarian power struggle. Meanwhile, freed from the military and diplomatic burden required to balance Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Iran has tried to use the new Iraq as an opportunity to re-order political and security relationships in the Persian Gulf and broader Middle East.

The lesson here is to avoid the temptation to fixate on the removal of an odious leader. Rather we need to actively map out how the fall of the regime relates to the self-interests of groups inside the country, how it may ripple through regional dynamics, and to have contingency strategies to address unintended consequences.

Second, don't underestimate the long-term impact of deep societal devastation. The American general who perhaps knows Iraq the best, Raymond Odierno, has emphasized that Americans underestimated the "societal devastation" in Iraq in 2003 and what the impact of military intervention would be in this context. This devastation across Iraq's physical and social infrastructure was the cumulative result of decades of dictatorship, sanctions and damage from previous wars. In 2003, additional damage and authority vacuums were the tipping point for catastrophic breakdowns in basic services and law and order. Odierno points to the fall-out from these breakdowns as one reason why the Iraq war has been so difficult and lasted so long.

Libya currently faces new sanctions, is sustaining significant damage in ongoing fighting, and will likely confront an authority vacuum given Qadaffi's systematic subversion of Libyan institutions. American involvement and resources in the Maghreb will be an order of magnitude less than Iraq, but steps can be taken to make whatever aid commitments that follow military action more effective in addressing societal trauma. In Iraq, generals and aid workers alike lament that the time when they had the greatest level of resources, the early days, were also the point at which they knew the least about the country and its leaders. It was also before the Iraqi structures necessary to enable productive use of foreign aid had been rebuilt.

American politics being what they are, the lion's share of any U.S. contribution to an international aid package for Libya will be allocated while it is the hot topic of the day. Like Iraq, this will likely be when we know little about Libyan rebels and their leadership structures remain nascent. In this context, the administration should be up front about the long-term societal challenges of a post-conflict, post-authoritarian setting and make the case that any aid package be multi-year to maximize our ability to make best use of it. It also suggests that while there is active debate about arming Libyan rebels, a discussion of how to build the capacity of entities like the Interim Transitional Governing Council should be front and center.

Third, don't be in a rush to fail. Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker has pointed to the perils of our nation's short collective attention span when it comes to complex foreign interventions. An important consequence of this mentality is an inclination to rush fraught post-conflict transitions. This is germane in Libya given NATO leaders' description of the country's path to peace involving a "genuine transition from dictatorship to an inclusive constitutional process."

One of the original sins in Iraq was to rush the 2005 drafting of the constitution despite ongoing sectarian violence and the challenge this posed for broad participation in the process. The result was a flawed charter that locked into place a growing sense of alienation that had begun to take hold among the former regime's mostly Sunni Arab elite following the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and De-Ba'athification of the civil service. This provided the political grievance that helped fuel a deadly and vicious insurgency. Averting lingering civil strife in Libya will require a political transition that strikes a careful balance between justice and reconciliation. Impunity should be avoided, but so should a harsh victor's justice if a particular communal group, in Libya's case the tribes that occupy senior positions in the government and security apparatus, are not to become implacable and violent opponents to any new order. 

What this means is that a genuine process of national dialogue may need to precede or accompany any Constitution drafting exercise, and this cannot be accomplished via short cuts. There may also be parallel requirement for a comprehensive transitional justice strategy based on individual accountability for crimes committed rather than the type of sweeping vetting done in Iraq (cashiering all Ba'ath party members above a certain rank).

America may find it easier to extract itself from direct military involvement in Libya than was the case in Iraq, but we should still not launch such military operations without a concrete vision for what comes next. As a superpower with strategic interests in the region and which bases its appeal on universal ideals and values, we will find it difficult to escape the consequences of an intervention in Libya that goes bad. After Iraq, our eyes should be wide open to the fact that between the U.S. and our international partners, significant resources, time and skill are required for the phrase "mission accomplished" not to remain a punch line.

Sean Kane is the Program Officer for Iraq at the United States Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded organization which works on international conflict.  The views in this article are his own.