The Right And The Wrong Lessons To Draw From Libya's Liberation

Striking from the air while keeping western boots off the ground appeals to many. But it won't work everywhere

By Andrew Rawnsley

Libyan rebel fighters celebrate in the Bab al-Aziziya compound, the former stronghold of Muammar Gaddafi, in Tripoli, Libya. Photograph: Marco Salustro/EPA

The hunter, hunted. The predator, prey. The strutting tyrant who threatened to "cleanse" Libya "street by street, house by house" is on the run himself. For those who hold that democracies sometimes have both the right and the obligation to take up arms against dictators, the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi is a relief. After the horrors of Iraq and the agonies of Afghanistan, the ideal of liberal interventionism could probably not have survived another humiliation. A large industry of analysis is already producing "lessons from Libya". There are lessons that appear sound. There are lessons that sound attractive, but turn out on closer inspection to be dangerously wrong.

One lesson – a rather familiar tutorial this – is that conventional wisdom is often wrong. We were told that it would be impossible to get a UN resolution – and one was secured. We were told that Arab support would not stay solid – and, by and large, it did. We were told, as recently as 10 days ago, that the campaign was stuck in a stalemate which exposed the folly of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy in pursuing the enterprise, so much for the wisdom of the conventional.

Another lesson is that sometimes there really is no alternative to decisive military action by outside powers to prevent a tyrant from unleashing atrocities. Western leaders, anxious for this to be seen as a home-grown Libyan revolution rather than the result of American and European arms, have been shy of spelling this out. They have been nervous, too, of any echo of the "mission accomplished" hubris of George W Bush in the immediate aftermath of the toppling of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. So David Cameron – saying: "This has not been our revolution" – depicts the fall of Gaddafi as the work of the Libyans themselves with Britain, France and America just lending a modest helping hand. The un-triumphalist tone is well-judged. David Cameron is bound to derive considerable satisfaction from his credit-worthy role in rallying and sustaining the anti-Gaddafi international coalition, but the prime minister is sensible not to let his head swell too visibly before the cameras. It is diplomatic to suggest that the Libyans did this almost all by themselves. It is also disingenuous. I asked a member of the National Security Council whether there was any chance that the rebellion could have overthrown Gaddafi without outside assistance. He responded bluntly: "None at all. There's no chance they could have done it without us."

That sounds right. For all their flag-waving, victory signs and shooting into the sky, the ragtag rebel militiamen were never by themselves militarily strong enough to prevail against a ruthless, highly armed and well dug-in regime. The initial uprising sprang from the courage of Libyans who wanted to be free of a dictator who seized power when Richard Nixon was in the White House. But without western airpower, the rebellion would have been crushed five months ago and Gaddafi would have gone on to wreak a terrible vengeance on all who had defied him. The anti-Gaddafi forces acknowledge that they could not have done it alone. At the outset, western warplanes prevented a massacre in Benghazi. At the finale, reconnaissance units calling in Nato air strikes on Gaddafi forces played an indispensable role in the sudden liberation of Tripoli.

The danger of this lesson is that it is taken too far. Some voices are seductively suggesting that in Libya we have found a new, improved formula for armed intervention against dictatorships. After the searing experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq, there is a natural inclination to want to find a better template for future interventions and Libya seems to offer it. Not a single British pilot was killed in combat. The number of civilian casualties inflicted by the airstrikes seems to have been mercifully light. The absence of visible Nato forces on the ground is also attractive to western policy-makers because it reduces any imperialist taint to intervention. In his celebratory statement, Barack Obama said pointedly: "All this was done without putting a single US troop on the ground."

You can see why some will think that air power supporting indigenous ground forces will always be the way to go in future. Strike from the skies, but keep western boots off the ground to gain the benefits of intervention – doing the right thing and ridding the world of a horrible dictator – without having to take too much risk. You might call it intervention-lite. We should be very wary of this emerging doctrine. Just because this style of action worked in Libya is no guarantee that it will work everywhere. It is worth recalling that precisely the opposite lesson was drawn after some previous interventions. During the Kosovo confrontation in 1999, the refusal to back up Nato air power with the threat to deploy ground troops was seen as a cardinal mistake – and so it was – because it encouraged Slobodan Milosevic to believe he could prevail, thus prolonging that conflict. Iraq started its slide into bloody anarchy in the three months after the invasion not because there were too many western troops in Baghdad, but because there were too few to maintain law and order and contain insurgents and sectarian fighters before they could grow in strength. Western leaders currently sound judicious when they forswear putting any troops on the ground, even as peacekeepers. They will not be so acclaimed for their wisdom if mayhem should break out in Tripoli. Beware anyone who says we have now found a perfect formula for intervention or a magic bullet for dispatching dictators.

Another thing that Libya hasn't done is bring us any closer to a true consensus about when armed intervention in another sovereign state can be justified in the name of democracy and human rights. The Libyan example does not do much to clear up the legal confusions and moral contradictions. Time and again, David Cameron and others have stressed that this intervention was "legal" because it had the blessing of the UN Security Council. It is true that resolution 1973 robed this action with an international legitimacy that was so conspicuously lacking in the invasion of Iraq. Even so, to bring about the fall of Gaddafi, the resolution had to be stretched to the very limit of its wording. Many would contend that the allies went well beyond their original mandate as an operation to protect civilians swiftly evolved into a mission to achieve regime change. I don't have much of a problem with that. I argued from the beginning that no civilian could be said to be safe in Libya until that one-family tyranny was gone. The non-combatant members of the Security Council clearly didn't have much of a problem either because they didn't complain about the manipulation of the terms of the resolution. But let us not kid ourselves that sanctification by the Security Council is the sole arbiter of what is ethical and just.

The resolution was only passed in the first place because the Russians and the Chinese chose to abstain rather than wield the veto. On moral grounds, there are as many compelling reasons to intervene in Syria as there were in Libya. Yet the equally brutal President Assad and his cronies will not have to duck and cover as Nato warplanes scream overhead. That is, at least in part, because the Russians, sponsors of the Syrian dynastic dictatorship since the early years of the cold war, won't have it. We remain in an unhappy world where western powers may intervene in the name of humanity only if they feel inclined to do so and only if they are not opposed by autocrats in Moscow and Beijing.

And only if Washington is up for it. To an extent that hasn't been generally visible, the intervention was crucially dependent on the military muscle of the United States. It just hasn't looked that way because it has suited everyone for America to appear to take a backseat. It has suited the uprising. It has suited David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy who have been able to claim a leadership role. It has suited the Americans to have had a low profile in a third conflict in a Muslim state.

The truth is that none of this would have happened without the Americans. The UN resolution would almost certainly not have been passed without strenuous US diplomatic activity. It was US cruise missiles striking radar and anti-aircraft installations which initially made the air safe for British, French and allied warplanes. Eleven weeks into the campaign, the Europeans were running out of munitions and had to go to the Americans for replenishment. US surveillance aircraft, intelligence satellites and mid-air refuelling tanker planes were vital. One senior adviser to David Cameron says candidly: "We simply couldn't have done it without American support."

Libyans now have a chance to take the path of freedom, peace and prosperity, a chance they would have been denied were we to have walked on by when Muammar Gaddafi was planning his rivers of blood. Britain and her allies broadly got it right in Libya. That won't make it any easier to get it right in other places at other times.

-This commentary was published in The Observer on 28/08/2011
-Andrew Rawnsley is the Observer's award-winning chief political commentator. He is also a critically acclaimed broadcaster and author