The Unknown Unknowns of Humanitarian War

Abstract

Arab partners launched an eight-month intervention in Libya. This was said to be necessary because Mu'amar Gaddafi, Libya's longtime ruler, was responding to mass protests against his over forty-year dictatorial reign by waging war on his own people. As President Barack Obama explained, without international intervention "the calls of the Libyan people for help would go unanswered. The democratic values that we stand for would be overrun. Moreover, the words of the international community would be rendered hollow." 1 Initially, this operation was "hailed as a model intervention." 2 With minimal losses and virtually no boots on the ground, the intervention prevented what many feared would be a humanitarian catastrophe. Six years later, however, it is widely recognized that the Libyan intervention was a failure. As President Obama put it, in a model understatement, "Libya is a mess." 3 Instead of transitioning into even a semifunctioning state, Libya has devolved into a lawless vortex of terrorists, refugees, human traffickers, and arms traders. 4 This was the result of a series of political miscalculations. As a report by the British House of Commons concluded:[T]he Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element. By the summer of 2011, the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change. That policy was not underpinned by a strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya. The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa. 5

Introduction to Symposium on Unauthorized Military Interventions for the Public Good

“…For his part, Mohamed Helal suggests that the entire concept of humanitarian interventions (and, with it, the Responsibility to Protect) needs more work. 10 He says that, even when such interventions are lawful under the jus ad bellum, they can increase the overall levels of global insecurity and human victimization. He uses the 2011 intervention in Libya as his example.…”