Military Intervention in the Middle East and North Africa: The Case of NATO in Libya

195 Pages·2018·5.28 MB·English

by  Susannah O’Sullivan

Military Intervention in the
Middle East and North Africa
This book contributes to an increasingly important branch of critical security studies
that combines insights from critical geopolitics and postcolonial critique by making
an argument about the geographies of violence and their differential impact in
contemporary security practices, including but not limited to military intervention.
The book explores military intervention in Libya through the categories of space
and time, to provide a robust ethico-political critique of the intervention.
Much of the mainstream international relations scholarship on humanitarian
intervention frames the ethical, moral and legal debate over intervention in terms
of a binary, between human rights and state sovereignty. In response, O’Sullivan
questions the ways in which military violence was produced as a rational and
reasonable response to the crisis in Libya, outlining and destabilising this false
binary between the human and the state. The book offers methodological tools for
questioning the violent institutions at the heart of humanitarian intervention and
asking how intervention has been produced as a rational response to crisis.
Contributing to the ongoing academic conversation in the critical literature on
spatiality, militarism and resistance, the book draws upon postcolonial and
poststructural approaches to critical security studies, and will be of great interest
to scholars and graduates of critical security studies and international relations.
Susannah O’Sullivan teaches International Relations at the University of Bristol
and University of Leicester, UK. She received her PhD from the University of
Manchester in 2015.
Interventions
Edited by:
Jenny Edkins
Aberystwyth University
Nick Vaughan-Williams
University of Warwick
The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with
alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural
approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first 5 years we have published
60 volumes.
We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within
broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to
present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical
thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated
historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics.
We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just contact us for
advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted directly to the Series Editors:
● Jenny Edkins ([email protected]) and
● Nick Vaughan-Williams ([email protected]).
‘As Michel Foucault has famously stated, “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is
made for cutting”. In this spirit the Edkins – Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits
cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international
relations. It is the best place to contribute post-disciplinary works that think rather than
merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.’
Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA
For a full list of available titles please visit www.routledge.com/series/INT
Politics of Visibility and Belonging
From Russia’s “Homosexual Propaganda” Laws to the Ukraine War
Emil Edenborg
Military Intervention in the Middle East and North Africa
The Case of NATO in Libya
Susannah O’Sullivan
The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism
Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden
Military Intervention in the
Middle East and North Africa
The Case of NATO in Libya
Susannah O’Sullivan
First published 2018
by Routledge
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© 2018 Susannah O’Sullivan
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ISBN: 978-1-138-66975-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-31561-801-2 (ebk)
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Contents
Introduction: Libya’s ‘model intervention’ 1
The death of a dictator 1
Concepts 5
Chapter outline 8
1 Humanitarian intervention and R2P in critical perspective 14
Introduction 14
From humanitarian intervention to R2P 15
The critique of intervention and R2P: a view from where? 23
Conclusion 31
2 Space, time and insecurity: challenge hegemonic liberal
space-time 41
Introduction 41
Outlining a critical spatio-temporal methodology 42
Challenging progressive liberal time 49
Conclusion 55
3 Their history, our speed: precision and speed in virtuous war
in Libya 60
Introduction 60
The need for speed in military intervention 62
Humanitarianism from a great height: grey battle lines in the
virtuous war 70
Conclusion 76
vi Contents
4 Bombs, torture and migrants: the colonial present in Libya 82
Introduction 82
Colonial entanglements and the making of the Libyan state 83
Arms, torture and migration: a two-dimensional ‘Gaddafi’s Libya’
and multidimensional geographies of violence 88
Coming in from the cold: arms, torture and migration in the deal
with Gaddafi 90
Conclusion 103
5 Geographies of the uprising: rag-tag rebels and military
deficiencies 112
Introduction 112
Imaginative geographies of the Libya conflict 113
‘Rag-tag rebels’: juvenility, fear and threat 116
Libya’s political space post-Gaddafi 125
Coda: contestation and disorder 128
Conclusion 129
6 Voices of resistance 138
Writing the ‘Arab Spring’ in Libya: key narratives 140
Voices of the uprising, rebuilding the state 148
Conclusion 156
Conclusion: when a war is not a war, and resisting
humanitarian intervention 167
The intervention that wasn’t in Syria, and the Iraq War Part III 171
Meanwhile, in Libya 173
Resistance to humanitarian violence 176
Index 181
Introduction
Libya’s ‘model intervention’
The death of a dictator
In December 2010 Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi1 set himself on fire
in a protest against police harassment, setting alight the flames of uprisings first in
Tunisia, then spreading to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen in 2010–2011
in what became known as the ‘Arab Spring’. In the following years the Middle East
and North Africa (MENA) region witnessed a series of momentous changes,
including the end of Ben Ali’s dictatorship in Tunisia, protests and an ongoing civil
conflict in Syria, the fall of Mubarak in Egypt, a crushed uprising in Bahrain and
an ongoing conflict in Yemen. In the midst of these changes protests in Libya in
February 2011 were met with state repression, an unsurprising continuation of the
Gaddafi regime’s violent stance towards civil protest. In response, a coalition of
countries headed by the US, France and the UK launched a military intervention in
Libya, under first US and then NATO control. The military intervention was
authorised on 18 March 2011 by UN Security Council Resolution 1973 and began
on 19 March. The operation had two main elements: the enforcement of a no-fly
zone, in which Libyan airspace was patrolled and closed to all flights, and the
protection of civilians from attack. The NATO operation was named Operation
Unified Protector, and formally ended on 31 October 2011.
This end to NATO operations came shortly after the events of 20 October, on
which day the conflict came to a nominal and brutal end with the capture and
summary killing of Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s convoy was bombed by NATO
aircraft shortly after departing from Sirte in an apparent attempt to leave the
country. NATO stated that the strike was launched by either a French plane or a
US predator drone (Gaynor and Zargoun 2011). By this point, NATO was
providing ‘close air support’ to the opposition, including assisting in attempts to
capture Gaddafi. Fleeing his car from oncoming rebel soldiers, Gaddafi sought
shelter in a nearby storm drain, where he was found and killed. His bloodied and
dying face appeared on front pages across the world the following day, drawn
from mobile phone footage of the incident. There were conflicting accounts of
Gaddafi’s death. Interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jabril alleged that Gaddafi
was killed in cross-fire while being carried to an ambulance by rebel fighters, after
being wounded in the air strike (Walt 2011).2 A Human Rights Watch (2012)
report into the incident states:
2 Introduction
As soon as the militia fighters had custody of Gaddafi, they began abusing
him. Blood was already gushing from the shrapnel wound in his head. As he
was being led onto the main road, a militiaman stabbed him in his anus with
what appears to have been a bayonet, causing another rapidly bleeding wound.
The report contests media accounts from the time that this was a deliberate sexual
assault, stating that this is difficult to discern. It also suggests that there is evidence
that Gaddafi was dead by the time he left the scene, contradicting the government
account that he died in an ambulance (HRW 2012b). In total 103 people were left
dead at the scene near Sirte on 20 October 2011. Human Rights Watch (2012b)
states that around half were killed in the NATO bombardment, and a significant
number of the survivors were summarily executed.
The international protagonists in the military intervention in Libya judged the
action to be a success. The then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was notoriously
gleeful on hearing of the death of Gaddafi, laughing in an interview on CBS News
and using the words “we came, we saw, he died”.3 The then-Secretary General of
NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen also celebrated his role in responding to the crisis
in Libya. Speaking at the close of military operations in Libya, Fogh Rasmussen
(2011b) stated that “we did the right thing, in the right way, and we achieved the
right result”. He stated that the intervention demonstrated that “military might still
matters in twenty-first century geopolitics”, and that in “an unpredictable
environment, hard power can enable peace” (Fogh Rasmussen 2011a). Ivo
Daalder and James G. Stavridis4 (2012: 3) argue that the Libya operation “has
rightly been hailed as a model intervention”. They go on to ground this judgement
in the following terms:
By any measure, NATO succeeded in Libya. It saved tens of thousands of
lives from almost certain destruction. It conducted an air campaign of
unparalleled precision, which, although not perfect, greatly minimized
collateral damage. It enabled the Libyan opposition to overthrow one of the
world’s longest-ruling dictators. And it accomplished all of this without a
single allied casualty and at a cost – $1.1 billion for the United States and
several billion dollars overall – that was a fraction of that spent on previous
interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
In these terms the war in Libya was successful because it was cheap, quick,
apparently bloodless, and led to the fall of a dictator. It was, in Der Derian’s
(2009) terms, a virtuous war, one that represents itself as clean, precise, swift and
imbued with ethical purpose. Der Derian (2009: 244) argues that “[a]t the heart of
virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if
necessary, actualise violence from a distance – with no or minimal casualties”.
This insures against the outcry over body bags materialising on home shores, or
the spectacle of dead soldiers paraded by foreign insurgents, as happened in
Somalia and Iraq. The aim of virtuous war is the minimisation of risk and
vulnerability, such that it is almost impossible to see casualties in intervening
Introduction 3
forces. Almost six years on, the legacy of the Libya intervention is very much still
contested. What was represented by its protagonists as an easy ‘job done’ military
action at the close of 2011 has been consistently revisited in the wake of a series
of unfortunate events in Libya since then.5
In an interview in 2016, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh
Rasmussen was asked whether he regretted saying in 2011 that the Libya action
was a “model intervention”.6 He replied:
Yes, it was really a model intervention in that it was a very successful military
intervention. A precision intervention with a minimum of civilian casualties,
a minimum of collateral damage, I saw it with my own eyes on the last day of
our operation. But we had to leave on the 31st October 2011 and we did. And
we were not allowed to have people on the ground and we left, and today
Libya is a disaster not because of our military operation but because the
international community did not follow up politically.
(Al-Jazeera 2016)
Rasmussen blames the UN and other international community actors for failing to
pick up the pieces when NATO left Libya in October 2011. He maintains that
NATO prevented genocide in Libya in February 2011. Regarding the rebels’
summary execution of Muammar Gaddafi, Rasmussen states: “we applauded it,
what happened, but we were not part of it” (Al-Jazeera 2016). Probed further
about whether he applauded the manner of Gaddafi’s death, he replied: “I think it
was a good idea to get rid of a scrupulous [sic] dictator” (Al-Jazeera 2016).
The differences between the bloody end of the Libyan intervention and the
terms used to describe it by elites are striking. While researching the military
intervention in Libya, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the simplistic terms
through which the debate is framed. Libya was seen as a test-case for the
‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) norm, and seen as an important milestone for the
development of normative practice in international politics. The intervention was
said to be born out of the increasing salience of civilian protection in foreign
policy, and the need to stand up for human rights norms in the face of large-scale
political repression. The norm of R2P was central to the NATO action in Libya as
it was the first military intervention to be framed in these terms. Although R2P
had by 2011 been reaffirmed by the UN General Assembly and referred to in a
Security Council Resolution on Darfur,7 Libya was the first time the UN Security
Council authorised a military intervention that explicitly referred to R2P principles.
Resolution 1973, which authorised the intervention, calls for “all necessary
measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of
attack” in Libya (UN 2011: 3-4). It authorises intervention to “ensure the protection
of civilians and … the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian assistance”
(UN 2011: 1). The resolution reaffirmed the importance of the principle of civilian
protection, citing the Libyan regime’s abdication of this responsibility as the
central cause of the intervention. The operation in Libya was invariably portrayed
as a success of the norm for R2P and of the international community in supporting