The epic of Gilgamesh dates back 4,000 years, written first in Sumerian, and later in Akkadian, a Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Assyria and Babylonia. Last month, while reading Stephen Mitchell's brilliant verse translation of Gilgamesh, I was struck by how modern this figure seems. Gilgamesh ruled over the city-state of Uruk on the Euphrates in what is today Iraq. His character, as described in the epic, reminded me of so many strong men who have ruled in the Middle East and North Africa through the ages, a type most recently exemplified by Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. The city is his possession, he struts Through it, arrogant, his head raised high, Trampling his citizens like a wild bull. He is king, he does whatever he wants, Takes the son from his father and crushes him, Takes the girl from her mother and uses her… Is there something in the region's geography, in the dynamic between fertile soil and desert, which leads to the political prevalence of pharaohs, prophets, and presidents-for-life? If the pattern really does extend back to the days of Gilgamesh, then it predates the dominance of Arabic and Islam. How can we account for this recurring theme? Tyranny is universal, one might object. At one time or another in human history, dictators have been found everywhere. Still, the stubborn persistence of the phenomenon in the Middle East is at issue today. Does the “Arab spring” truly signify the passing away of the Strong Man model of rulership in the region? Or, as some have suggested, perhaps the artificial borders drawn in the 19th and 20th centuries by the British and French, cobbling together independent states out of disparate religious, ethnic, and linguistic elements, require a heavy hand to hold these fragile polities together. What makes a ruler legitimate? Obama said that Gaddafi had lost “the legitimacy to lead”. One cannot lose something one never had. For Gaddafi to have lost his legitimacy, he must have had it once. When was that? The colonel came to power in 1969 when he and other Libyan army officers overthrew King Idris. Was the revolution legitimate? Was his rule legitimate when the U.S. sent its most recent ambassador to Libya in 2008? It is a dangerous activity for a president of the United States to make pronouncements about which nations' rulers are legitimate and which are not, especially in the Middle East, where some of the leaders we cooperate with most closely are unelected monarchs – in Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf States. President Obama has not enunciated any theory of governmental legitimacy. Absent that, we should be concerned that rulers in America's good graces until a few short months ago, such as Mubarak and Gaddafi, suddenly are told by an American president that they must now leave office, apparently because of widespread popular demonstrations against them. I would argue that, regardless of street demonstrations, today's illegitimate rulers include Kim Jong-il, Mugabe, Gbagbo, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. But I would also advise the president of the United States to refrain from saying so unless he is prepared to follow through with overt or covert action to replace them. The issue of replacement should be considered prior to any determination that a ruler must go. Unfortunately, the simple political calculation of weighing alternatives prior to taking military action does not seem to be a principle of presidential foreign policy decision-making under Bush and Obama. Saddam Hussein was a vicious tyrant who deserved to be deposed, but did President Bush have a reasonable alternative governmental option in mind for Iraq prior to launching a war to remove him? Gaddafi is generally regarded as an erratic, autocratic, and sometimes dangerous ruler who has retarded the development of his nation. But the State Department and the CIA are now desperately trying to figure out who the rebels are and what sort of government they would establish if they win. First we provide them with air cover. Then we ask who they are. Hope as a foreign policy Writing in the New York Times and the Washington Post last week, Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria expressed similar sentiments. Zakaria: “Washington is now hoping that a bit more military power will dislodge Gaddafi's regime. My fingers are crossed.” Friedman opined that “most of all, I hope Mr. Obama is lucky. I hope Mr. Gadhafi's regime collapses like a sand castle, that the Libyan opposition turns out to be decent and united…” He concludes his article with a prayer: “Dear Lord, please make President Obama lucky.” American involvement in Libya is indeed a gamble that everyone hopes will pay off, but hope is a poor basis for a foreign policy. American battlefield commanders have some influence over the military course of a campaign, but as commander-in-chief of all U.S. armed forces, the president has no real control over the political dimension of conflict in another country. As a nation, we should have learned that lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the conflicts' outcome is significantly shaped by the governmental policies of al-Maliki and Karzai. We hope that if Gaddafi is removed from power, his eventual replacement will be better for Libya and for the United States, but that is only a hope. At this point, we can't even call it a likelihood. Despite Gaddafi's responsibility for killing American servicemen in Berlin and bombing Pan Am flight 103, he was rehabilitated in western eyes after he gave up his WMD program in 2003. A U.S. interest section was opened in Tripoli in 2004 and full diplomatic relations were re-established in 2006. Two years later the United States sent an ambassador to Libya who was only recalled in January of this year in the wake of the Wikileaks disclosures. In other words, after years of viewing Gaddafi as a menace to the world, the Bush and Obama administrations no longer considered that to be the case. Here was a tyrant we could work with. War Propaganda 101 Only since the demonstrations against Gaddafi began in February of this year has the U.S. government turned on him, so that once again we are hearing about Lockerbie and stockpiles of chemical weapons. Every government of every nation that goes to war vilifies its opponents in order to solidify public support. Knowing this, we should not assume that we are being told the truth about Gaddafi and his supporters by the hawks at the White House, on Capitol Hill, in Foggy Bottom or the Pentagon. The administration line is that mass murder of Benghazi's 700,000 men, women, and children was barely avoided. In the words of President Obama, speaking to the nation last week: At this point, the United States and the world faced a choice. Gaddafi declared that he would show “no mercy” to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment. In the past, we had seen him hang civilians in the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day. Now, we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city. We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi…could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. The reference to Gaddafi killing more than a thousand people in a single day surprised me, since I had never heard that charge before. I found no explanation or questioning of this remark in any American media accounts of the speech. Eventually, with the help of Libya expert and Dartmouth professor Diederik Vandewalle, I discovered that Obama's words referred to an alleged massacre of some 1200 prisoners at Abu Salim prison in Tripoli in 1996 – fifteen years ago. Gaddafi's public threat to show “no mercy” to the rebels in Benghazi was a godsend to the Security Council and the Obama administration. It allowed them to use Gaddafi's own words – possibly hyperbolic – to justify intervention. Would Gaddafi really have mass murdered people in Benghazi after the city had surrendered? Possibly so. We can't know that since we stopped his attack, yet it has been reiterated by countless intervention advocates as an incontrovertible truth. In the American media it is now axiomatic that we prevented a massacre of tens of thousands of Libyan civilians. And perhaps we did. Alternatives to Intervention Was the possibility of massacre or a humanitarian disaster the real reason for intervention or merely the pretext for it? If the goal was to prevent a massacre, one would imagine that alternative courses of action were explored. What could we have done instead of launching a billion dollar air campaign that has destroyed Libya's military infrastructure, blown up its soldiers, shut down its airports, and shattered its economy? We could have: 1) Contacted Gaddafi and told him that if his forces began to indiscriminately kill people in Benghazi, we would target him personally. In other words, we could have threatened his life; or 2) Contacted Gaddafi and told him that we will entirely destroy his military, intelligence, and governmental apparatus if he unleashes his forces on the people of Benghazi. In other words, we could have threatened his regime; or 3) Targeted his military forces around Benghazi, taken them out, and left it at that. There may well have been additional channels of communication that could have been opened and other approaches made, perhaps through African leaders Gaddafi respects or with whom he has cooperated over the years. The course of action we took was not a single discreet move designed to save Benghazi. Rather, it was an open-ended action of interjecting ourselves not only into the fight for Benghazi but the much broader struggle for the future of Libya. And now we are in it, one way or another, for the duration. Stuck in a civil war If this is a civil war, partly tribal in its complexion, then it's conceivable there will be massacres carried out by one side or the other or both, without orders received from above. Given how little is known about the rebels, we cannot currently assume they will be generous in victory, if they achieve it. Imagine this scenario: The rebels get their act together and, with the support of western air power, defeat Gaddafi, race on to Tripoli, enter it and start killing Gaddafi loyalists, possibly including large numbers of the city's civilian population. Will the allies then intervene to prevent a massacre of the people they had been bombing? The distinction between military and civilian tends to blur in a civil war. Is a civilian carrying an AK-47 still a civilian? According to Army General Carter Ham, in his congressional testimony two weeks ago, yes he is. If however, he is driving an armored vehicle or is in possession of a heavy weapon, he is no longer a civilian. By this definition, the mission to protect civilians includes protecting the lightly-armed rebels driving around in jeeps and vans. When an established government, legitimate or otherwise, attempts to put down a rebellion, the result is typically loss of life. The only way that the lives of rebel “civilians” can be safeguarded is to see the rebellion through to victory. Gaddafi came to power in a bloodless coup. Apparently he will not leave power absent a protracted struggle and a high body count. Until he is gone, America is stuck in Libya. BM
