Such a pleasure to see you all. Back to this seminar by Alan Cooperman on NATO intervention in Libya.
Alan has a really interesting take on this particular event.
He's been writing about humanitarian action, about the limits of humanitarian action.
He's an associate professor of public affairs at University of Texas and has been, as some of you know,
at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where he teaches in his new role in Texas courses in global policy studies.
Also working. I just realised this today, which is of interest to us on nuclear non-proliferation issues.
But I think the books that that some of you may know about and more the focus of his remarks today, the limits of humanitarian intervention,
his book on Rwanda from 2001, and his co-edited book, Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention, Moral Hazard, Rebellion and Civil War.
So today he's talking about this question of whether Libya is a humanitarian success.
So, Alan, welcome very much. I'm sure we'll have lots of questions.
After all, if you want to help you moderate those of you guys, turn it over to you.
Thank you very much. Well, thanks very much for the invitation and the kind introduction.
And thanks to all of you for for coming.
Iraq, of course, is an institute on ethics, law and armed conflict.
And I'm going to say from the outset, I'm not an expert on ethics and I'm not an expert on law.
So why am I here? I'm here because the topic that I'm going to talk about, which is humanitarian intervention,
the responsibility to protect, and specifically in the case of Libya, what were the consequences,
the literal consequences of the intervention that that topic the consequences of intervention
is essential for thinking about the ethics and the legality of of intervention.
So I think that's why I was I was invited. But as I say, my my specific question is going to be what actually happened?
What actually were the consequences of intervention in Libya last year, in 2011, and what are the implications of that?
So there is a common narrative about the NATO intervention in Libya last year,
and it may not be the common narrative in this room, but it is certainly the common narrative in my country, the United States.
And you'll see in our presidential election this year that neither party is going to criticise the intervention in Libya.
The only thing they might say is, well, we should have done it more of it or sooner.
But there is broad consensus that the intervention was a smashing success and the common narrative goes as follows that
what occurred in Libya in early 2011 was that there was initially a peaceful nationwide uprising versus a brutal dictator.
In response to that purely peaceful uprising, that dictator Moammar Gadhafi, killed thousands of peaceful protesters in the first three days.
It was only because of Gadhafi's brutal use of force that the peaceful protesters then switched to an armed rebellion in self-defence.
Gadhafi, then counter counter, retaliated by ordering his security forces forces to launch indiscriminate attacks on civilian residential areas,
both using artillery and using air power after Gadhafi's forces beat back the initial rebellion.
And the rebels were concentrated in the town of Benghazi.
Then Gadhafi threatened a bloodbath in this last town.
And in fact, it was considered likely that.
There would be something happening in Benghazi that would be similar to the Rwandan genocide.
And in fact, this analogy was brought up repeatedly at the time.
At that moment, the U.N. authorised and NATO's implemented a humanitarian military intervention that was solely to protect civilians.
The rebels in Libya who were able to regroup after this humanitarian intervention,
then over the course of several months, were able to defeat Gadhafi because of their nationwide popular support.
And so, in conclusion, when we evaluate this intervention,
the popular wisdom is that the NATO intervention prevented a bloodbath in Benghazi and promoted freedom and democracy.
So as I'm originally from New York and what we would say is, so what's not to love?
Okay. The only problem with this narrative is that is every single aspect of it is false.
Okay. So first of all, a couple of errors in the qualitative characterisation of the uprising and of the intervention.
Did Gadhafi actually target peaceful civilians who are engaged in exclusively peaceful protest?
The answer is no. Okay.
Even though that's the way it was reported at the time in most mainstream Western press.
If you look closer at both contemporaneous press accounts and also retrospective press accounts,
what you find out is that the protesters in the main area of protest at the beginning, Benghazi were violent from the first day.
From the first day. They had firearms. They had petrol bombs.
And they used vehicles as weapons. Secondly, the security forces initially did not resort to force except after protesters used violence.
And so we see this in Benghazi.
We certainly see this in Al-Bayda. We see this in Misrata.
And we see this in Tripoli in every single case in those first two days, from the 17th to the 21st of February.
It was the protesters who resorted to violence first.
Then when Gadhafi's forces did turn to violence in reaction to the protesters, violence, initially, the security forces did not shoot to kill.
And we know this two ways.
First of all, we know this from a U.N. report which interviewed former members of Gadhafi's security forces who had later gone over to the rebel side.
So they had no sympathy for Gadhafi. They weren't trying to they were now his enemy.
They had helped defeat him.
But they said at the time when we were working for Gadhafi, he ordered us to shoot to wound these violent protesters, not to shoot to kill.
The second way we know is from medics, Western medics,
who happened to be working in Benghazi and they said we were getting casualties in those first couple of days that had wounds in the legs,
not wounds in the torso. So we're talking about not very, very discriminate sniper fire that is clearly intended to wound,
not to kill, in order to end these protests without a high loss of life after the first few days.
There was also as as the as the protests became more violent and the rebellion escalated, there was more shooting to kill.
And yet and yet the initial death toll was less than 10% of what was initially reported in Western press.
So as I said, the the accounts at the time said that thousands,
thousands of protesters had been killed in the first three days in Benghazi and eastern cities of Libya.
And this you know what? I tried to figure out why this was.
And it turns out it was a mixture of misinformation and disinformation so that some of this was just innocent misinformation.
There was a French doctor who was working in Benghazi and he saw a few people come into his hospital and many were wounded.
Some died.
And he extrapolated and he said, I would think there must be a thousand dead in Benghazi already and another thousand in the eastern cities.
I think he really believed that his name was Buffet.
You can watch him on YouTube still from back then.
And the only problem is he was wrong. He was wrong in the way we know he was wrong is because doctors,
Libyan doctors in Benghazi and Human Rights Watch later reported that in those first three days throughout the entire country,
less than 250 people were killed. Okay.
So not thousands, 250 instead is a combination of misinformation and disinformation.
There was. There were. There was a concerted propaganda effort by supporters of these rebels to exaggerate
the civilian toll in order to encourage Western intervention on behalf of the rebels.
Moreover, when the security forces did resort to deadly force, this is Gadhafi's forces.
They were not indiscriminate attacks on residential areas.
They were highly discriminate attacks on rebels.
How do we know this? Again, from data provided by Human Rights Watch.
And again, Human Rights Watch is not a great sympathiser of Moammar Gadhafi.
Moammar Gadhafi. Right. They're not his PR team.
They don't like Moammar Gadhafi. And yet even their evidence supports this case that he was not indiscriminate.
He was very discriminate. So in the city of Misrata.
Which is where there was the most intense fighting in the first two months of the on the civil war in Libya in the in the city of Misrata.
Human Rights Watch reported in April 2011.
So almost two months into the war that of all the wounded in Misrata, only 3% were women.
There's about 22 out of 900 and something.
So if you're firing indiscriminately into civilian areas, using artillery, using air power, we know who lives in residential areas.
Half of them are men and half of them are women. So if you really engage in indiscriminate fire, that half of the wounded should be women.
But only 3% of the wounded were women.
And what that meant is that Gadhafi's forces were very carefully, indiscriminately targeting rebels, not civilians.
Moreover, in the city, which was, as I said, it had the highest level of fighting for the first two months.
This is a city of 400,000 people. And in the first two months, 257 people were killed out of a population of 400,000.
Okay. Now we have a one star officer from the British Air Force here.
I think he would agree with me that if you have a city of 400,000 and you have
the ability to fire artillery and you have the ability to launch weapons,
munitions, air to ground weapons from the air, you could probably kill 250 civilians in about 5 minutes.
But Gadhafi didn't kill 257 people in 5 minutes. He killed them in two months.
Right. So he was being extraordinarily careful to avoid civilian casualties as
Gadhafi's forces push back the rebels in about the third week of the civil war.
And I'll show you some some of the progression of the war. He recaptured a lot of the cities,
all of the cities except Benghazi and part of Misrata that the rebels had taken control of after he retook control of these cities.
And how many of them did he commit a bloodbath in zero of them?
Did he commit a bloodbath after recapturing the city?
And yet we were told after he recaptured all of these cities with no black bloodbaths, when he recaptured this last city.
Right. If he if he recaptured this last city, Benghazi, there was going to be a bloodbath.
And this was the rationale for why there needed to be a humanitarian intervention.
Now it's possible, right?
It's possible that after not committing a bloodbath in any other recaptured city, then when he got the last city, he would commit a bloodbath.
Right. I've never committed a bloodbath at a lecture.
It's possible that I will today write possible right past action is the perfect predictor of future action, but it's a pretty good predictor.
I think you folks can can relax even though I'm Texas and I'm not carrying concealed or otherwise.
And finally, when Gadhafi's forces approached Benghazi, this last rebel stronghold, all the Western media reported that he had threatened a bloodbath.
He had threatened civilians. In fact, he had not.
Not only had he not done so, he had explicitly said he would not target civilians.
In fact, he said he wouldn't even target rebels who stopped fighting and he wouldn't target rebels who fled.
In fact, he encouraged the rebels to flee. He said, you have free passage eastward to Egypt and you can gain safe haven in Egypt.
He said the only people we will target in Benghazi are rebels who continue to fight us there.
Okay. What he wanted to do was to recapture this last city with as low casualties as possible.
Right. So that's the first of these two qualitative characterisations that was in the common narrative that is incorrect.
That is, was Gadhafi targeting peaceful civilians?
The answer is no. Full stop.
Now the second question. Was the native intervention to protect civilians.
Well. You know, it's possible that when the U.N. authorised it, they really intended it to protect civilians.
And it is also possible that when Naito decided to implement that intervention two days later, that NATO's intended just to protect civilians.
But if you look at how NATO's intervened,
it's clear that this intervention almost immediately transformed from protecting civilians to pursuing regime change.
That is a rebel victory to overthrow the Gadhafi regime.
Why do I say that? Well, first of all, Naito targeted Rich Gadhafi's forces while they were retreating.
Retreating forces are not a threat to civilians. They're just retreating.
They're running away. Okay.
So if you have forces that are threatening civilians and then the forces run away from the civilians, they're no longer a threat to the civilians.
And yet NATO's targeted those forces.
Second of all, NATO's targeted Gadhafi's security forces in in areas that were bastions of support for Gadhafi, including his hometown of Sirte.
So if you have Libyan security forces in a town where all the civilians support the Libyan security forces,
then those living in security forces are clearly not a threat to civilians at all.
And yet NATO's bombed those security forces.
Thirdly, the NATO's coalition both provided intelligence to the rebels to help them win,
provided weapons to elements of the population that supported the rebels and wanted the rebels to win.
And facilitated the arming and training of the rebels by third countries such as Qatar and Sudan and Egypt.
The arming of the rebels by land and sea.
The training of the rebels not in third countries.
But the training in Libya. Training of the rebels by Qatari security forces in Libya.
So clearly, de facto, the NATO intervention was intended to help the rebels overthrow Gadhafi, not merely to protect civilians.
And this is underscored by the fact that when the rebels when when Gadhafi offered cease fires and he offered cease fires repeatedly,
I've I've got this also fairly well documented.
The rebels rejected every single cease fire.
What did Naito do?
Did Naito say, well, we're trying to protect civilians, so therefore we're going to put pressure on the rebels to accept the cease fire?
No, Naito did just the opposite. When the rebels rejected the cease fire, Naito continued to help the rebels.
What did that do? That prolonged and escalated the war.
What did that do that got more civilians killed?
So when it came to a choice between protecting civilians or pursuing regime change, Naito chose pursuing regime change.
So clearly was the Naito intervention to protect civilians?
No. The Naito intervention de facto was to pursue regime change.
That doesn't mean, as I said, that the motivation originally of those who supported the U.N. intervention.
I mean, the U.N. authorisation and those who supported the NAITO implementation, it's quite possible that their motivation was to protect civilians.
But the way that the intervention was actually carried out virtually from the start favoured regime change over the protection of civilians.
In fact, it put more civilians at risk in order to pursue regime change.
Okay. Now, I've talked a bunch about the course of this rebellion and and the intervention,
and I've mentioned a lot of towns and and and several dates and so forth.
And it's all very fresh in my mind that it may be fresh in the minds of a few of you who specialise in this.
But I want to just put some some some maps up here and go through them quickly so that
I can refresh the memories of the rest of you about exactly how the war did progress.
Okay.
So the conflict started with uprisings in five cities in those first few days from February 17th to 19th of 2011, a little bit more than a year ago.
As you can see, four of the cities where these uprisings occurred were in eastern Libya.
One was in western Libya, in Zawiya, and that one was actually peaceful.
Initially, at the start, the ones in eastern Libya were violent from the start.
And so the first thing that this shows us is that this was not a nationwide uprising against a dictator who was universally hated.
What this was was a regional armed rebellion against Gadhafi by tribes that had long been his rival.
There's a long history in Libya of power switching from eastern Libya to western Libya.
And Gadhafi had ruled for 40 plus for 40 years and had favoured tribes in central and western Libya.
And the folks in eastern Libya had long resented it.
Okay. And we can see from the nature and the location of these uprisings that this was a regional and tribal rebellion,
not a nationwide uprising against the dictator as it was portrayed in Western media.
Yes. Several days later, we start to see the emergence of rebels in western Libyan cities,
especially Misrata, another city with a tribal rivalry against Gadhafi and Zuwara.
And we start to see protests in Tripoli that again turn violent almost immediately.
February 20th, the protesters start burning buildings,
and it's only when they start burning government buildings that the government responds with violence.
Until then, the government had refrained from violence against the protesters.
The rebels then gained control of Zawiya in the west and they start to move.
Westward from the east. It's about a weekend.
The Libyan security forces finally sort of wake up and say, oh, my gosh, we have a real armed rebellion going on.
We have folks from the East who are going to try and move west and take control of the whole country.
And so Libyan forces initiate their defence on around March 2nd, but they still haven't gotten their act together.
And so the town where they initiated their defence actually falls to the rebels on March 5th.
And I would call this the high point of the rebellion.
This is about two and a half weeks in.
We see the rebels have gained control of almost the entire eastern half of Libya and then many towns and cities that surround the capital of Tripoli.
But once Libya's security forces got mobilised, this was not a a a level fight between equal forces.
This was a fight between an army, not a great army, but an army that was controlled by Gadhafi versus rebels who had very few weapons,
very little ammunition, almost no training, no cohesion.
This was a lopsided battle.
And as a result, Libya's security forces were able to push back the rebels and eliminate reverse their gains in about a week.
And so we see that very, very quickly in just a couple of days.
If Libya's security forces start pushing back eastward and they regain control of key cities around the capital.
Again, just a few days later, they've now conquered not only reconquered Ras Lanuf and Brega.
They're on the edge of Ajdabiya and then Ajdabiya falls.
So in one week, the rebels have lost control of all the cities that they had taken except for Benghazi.
And now on March 16th, the next day, Libya's security forces come to the gates of Benghazi.
And Gadhafi's son says everything will be over in 48 hours.
That is we recaptured this last rebel held city and the rebellion will be over in 48 hours.
And he was right in my judgement. He was right. That would have been it.
Around March 18th, this thing would have been over.
There were also still a few rebels fighting in Misrata, but they were running out of ammunition and Gadhafi's forces controlled the sea.
There was no way to get ammunition to them. So they were also going to be over in a couple of days.
This thing this war was going to be over around March 18th, except on March 17th, the U.N. authorised intervention,
a no fly zone and all necessary means to protect civilians, except no ground forces, no intervening ground forces.
Two days later, NATO's started bombing and immediately the rebels went back on the offensive.
And we see that within a week they've retaken Ajdabiya in the east.
They take Brega and Ras Lanuf, but then as many untrained military forces,
they go too fast, they outrun their supply lines and Gadhafi's forces push them back.
And we start to see this sort of fight in central Libya that goes on for about four months.
These cities trade hands multiple times.
Each time there is artillery fire, there is mortar fire.
There are civilians killed over the course of four months,
eventually due to arming and training of the rebels and naito airstrikes against that decimate Gadhafi's security forces.
The rebels finally go back on the march and we see them progressing westward again from their eastern stronghold.
We also see rebels in the western mountains of Libya.
The last gasp of the Gadhafi regime is on August 2nd when they momentarily attack and recapture Zintan.
But after that, the.
Rebels advance both from the west and from the east.
And we start to see all the towns around Tripoli fall and we start to see a pincer movement into Tripoli.
In late August of 2011 and then rather quickly, Tripoli is captured, Gadhafi flees,
and there are a few little strongholds such as Sirte and some towns in southern Libya.
But in relatively short order, Gadhafi is captured, tortured and killed.
And by late October, the last remnants of his forces have been defeated.
So that's the course of the war.
And now we get to the question that I laid out at the beginning in my in my introduction, which is what was the net impact of intervention?
What were the consequences of intervention? And in order to answer that, you have to look at two scenarios.
The first scenario is what would have happened without intervention.
This we call in my field of political science.
We call it a counterfactual. And with any counterfactual, you can't know for sure, right?
If this hadn't happened, would that have happened? You can never say 100%, but you can certainly make a very educated guess.
And in this case, I think we can make an estimate with pretty high confidence after doing that.
Then you have to look at what really happened. Okay.
That's a factual. And then you compare the counterfactual to the factual.
So what would have happened? Without intervention.
Well, I would argue that that Saif Gadhafi was right.
This thing was going to end in late March 2011 when Benghazi fell and then Misrata would fall in a day or two after that.
And so overall, we would have had a five week war in Libya.
How many people would have died in this war? Well, we have fairly good figures for how many people had died by late March in Libya.
We know that in Benghazi and the east, there was a total of about 400 had been killed.
And we know this from various sources. There was a medical committee in Benghazi that said in early March that 228 people had been killed
in Benghazi and Benghazi was under rebel control from that point on until it never felt right.
So under my scenario, it would have fallen around March 17th or 18th and maybe a few more people would have been killed.
But no bloodbath because Gadhafi's forces hadn't committed bloodbaths after recapturing towns.
So somewhere around 250 maybe would have been killed in Benghazi.
And if you add the cities to the east, according to Agence France Presse,
which interviewed medics in the area in mid-March, they say a total of about 400 in Benghazi and the other eastern cities.
So that's Benghazi.
In Misrata, we have a Human Rights Watch report that says in April that in April, only about 250 people had been killed in Misrata and since.
Under this scenario, without major into NATO intervention, the war would have ended in late March and it would have been even fewer than 250.
And so we can interpolate and say maybe about 200 in Tripoli.
There had been really two days of violence February 20th and 21st.
And the U.N. reports that 200 people had died in Tripoli in that violence, and that's based on interviews with doctors in Tripoli.
After that, Tripoli was under government control.
There were no more of these violent protests or retaliation against violent protesters.
And so had the war ended in late March, only about 200 total would have died in Tripoli.
Zawiyah. This this this number may be actually higher than it actually was.
It's a report from Time magazine. It's based on second-hand information from doctors in Zawiya.
And then there's those towns in central Libya, which had been the scene of fighting for about a week or two in early March.
But in those early days of fighting, there weren't very high casualties because when one side attacked,
the other side fled and the other side attacked the the the other side fled.
And so it doesn't look as if there were very, very high casualties. And so I would guess I would put them in the tens, maybe maybe as high as 100.
And so the total, therefore, without narrow intervention, is that about a thousand Libyans would have died.
About a thousand. It's possible that that this is an underestimate.
Maybe it's as high as 1500. It's possible to overestimate.
But I'm going to say it's it's probably around 1000. Now, what happened with NATO intervention?
Well, the war didn't end in five weeks. It lasted 36 weeks.
So the war was greatly perpetuated. What about the death toll?
We do not have a firm, firm documentation of this for the overall death toll.
Ironically, we have we have better information about those first weeks than we would than we do about the overall conflict.
But we have several estimates. We have a U.S. estimate, and this comes out of a conference organised by the Brookings Institution in November 2011.
This is an anonymous U.S. government official that I've talked to the organisers of the conference and they
say this was an official who was in a position to have the best information that the U.S. would have.
It doesn't mean it's accurate, but this is what the U.S. thinks, and that is that 8000 people died in Libya.
Over the course of the war, the estimate of the new Libyan regime in September 2011 after the capture captured Tripoli, but before the war was over.
So this is even before the war was over,
they estimated 30,000 had died and they said half of these were Gadhafi's forces and the other half were either rebels or civilians.
And if you think about this, again, this estimate may not be precise or accurate, but there is some logic to it.
Gadhafi's forces came under persistent Naito airstrikes for seven months.
Okay. When you bomb military bases, when you bomb tank formations, those are not empty military bases and they're not empty tanks.
There's human beings inside those tanks and there's human beings at those bases.
And so it is quite plausible that thousands of Gadhafi's security forces were killed.
And you may say, well, who cares? They were Gadhafi's security forces as well.
I still think they're human beings.
They were people who either were drafted into the security forces or volunteered to be patriotic to their country, whatever.
They're human beings, and they would be alive if not for the NATO intervention.
The estimate of 15,000 rebels and civilians.
Again, it's possible it's it's higher than that. But but there's some reason to believe it's plausible.
So in Misrata, as I said, it was the scene of the most intense fighting from the beginning of the war.
And the the death toll really did mount and doctors reported this as well.
And so so whereas the death toll was about to 50 in April, eventually by the end of the war is about 2000.
And similarly, the fight for Tripoli was rather intense, as you can imagine.
This is where Gadhafi's forces made their last stand, and the rebels really had to fight to try to conquer the city.
And that's the sort of situation where you're likely to get high casualties.
So somewhere between 8000 to 30000 as the eventual death toll, I think is plausible.
Another question that I look at is.
Did. And this is something I've looked at in in my work for many years.
It's this question of what I call the moral hazard of humanitarian intervention.
It's we just discussed it in that 2000 book that was mentioned called Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention.
It's laid out most clearly in an article I did in International Studies Quarterly in 2008 called The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention.
And then it's summarised in another article I did in 2009 called Rethinking the Responsibility to Protect.
And the question I raise in those articles is, does the prospect of intervention actually encourage rebellion in the first place?
And then once rebellion is started,
does the prospect of intervention actually encourage escalation of rebellion and therefore escalation of civil war?
And on those two questions, I would say that we really don't know.
On the first question, there is very little evidence yet on why the rebels decided to launch their rebellion,
how they thought that with, you know, a few guns and a few bullets they were going to take on Gadhafi's tanks and air forces.
We don't know, right? We don't know.
It's possible they did so thinking that they would win on their own without any help, that David would be Goliath.
But we do know that within about ten days of launching their rebellion,
the rebel leaders appealed to the international community, saying, we need intervention.
It is our only hope of defeating Gadhafi.
So we don't know if they thought that when they launched the rebellion on February 17th.
We do know that within about ten days they thought that and they expressed it so that the civilian leader of the opposition,
Jalil, called for a no fly zone to be established.
He called for that on February 28th.
Two days later, the military leader of the rebels, General Yunis, asked the U.K. explicitly to establish a no fly zone over the no fly zone,
as I said, was was authorised by the U.N. and the resolution authorised all necessary means to protect civilians, but no ground troops.
And yet, lo and behold, ground troops were deployed. Okay.
So it wasn't disclosed at the time. But in retrospect,
the chief of staff of the of Qatar's of Qatar's military revealed that there were hundreds of Qatari
troops in every region of Libya training and fighting with the rebels and clearly encouraging escalation.
In terms of consequences. There's two other categories of consequences.
First of all, what does post-war Libya look like?
Compared to pre-war Libya or pre intervention Libya?
Well, first of all, when the rebels came into power,
they summarily executed hundreds of their fellow Libyans and also foreigners whom they suspected of having been allied with or fighting for Gadhafi.
They also ethnically cleansed the black African town of Tolaga, which is near Misrata.
Again, saying that because some of Gadhafi's forces had been black Africans from the town of Tawargha.
Therefore, no black Africans should be allowed to live in that town.
Okay. Gadhafi never committed violence like that. In Libya.
What about the state of governance? Do we have a strong or at least growing central government?
No. We have rival militias,
essentially warlords or gangs who some of which are radical Islamists groups that had fought in Afghanistan and or Iraq against the US,
UK and coalition forces. So these are folks who had allied in the past with Al Qaida and now they have,
because of NATO's intervention, have been able to come into control of certain parts of Libya.
Different militias control different cities. And in the capital, different militias control different neighbourhoods in the city.
And the again, Jaleel, the head of the of the transitional government, said we can't do anything about it because if we did, it would cause a war.
Moreover, the eastern half of Libya, which is where most of the oil is, has threatened to secede, saying We want our rebellion.
Now we're going to take the oil and make our own country and you guys can have the sand.
Human Rights Watch said just this month that the former rebels,
the victorious rebels have come to power in Misrata continue, quote, crimes against humanity.
This involves torture and cruel treatment of prisoners and summary execution.
And then somewhat ironically, there was a study that was done here in Oxford earlier this year.
It was based here. It was it was it was a poll that was taken in Libya, the first nationwide poll in Libya.
And it revealed that 42% of Libyans want a new strongman like Gadhafi.
So that's post-war Libya.
The last consequence that we need to look at is the regional effect,
because even though this intervention was focussed on Libya, it doesn't mean that all the consequences were confined to Libya.
And so what about Mali? Well. Gadhafi had been allies with Tuareg rebels in Mali's north, but he never really wanted to heat that place up too hot.
And so he kept them on a short leash. And any rebellions that occurred in Mali were rather mild.
Once Gadhafi was going down in Libya, weapons flowed to these Tuareg rebels in Mali who then went on the offensive.
This caused tens of thousands of Malians to be displaced.
The rebels then succeeded at conquering the northern half of the country in Mali and announced they were declaring an independent state.
The Malian military, which was losing to these rebels, got so upset that they staged a coup and overthrew the president.
And so we have this intervention in Libya leading to a civil war in Mali.
Humanitarian suffering in Mali and a setback for democracy in Mali.
What about Syria? At the same time that events were occurring in Libya, there was a truly peaceful protest in Syria for months and months.
The Syrian protests really remained peaceful.
But then the Syrian protests turned violent.
The Syrian protest turned violent after the Libyan violent protesters had benefited from Naito intervention.
Now, I cannot. And no one, I think,
at this point can know for sure whether the Syrian protesters turned from non-violence to violence because they saw that in Libya.
That was the way to get Western help.
All we can know is that the NATO intervention in Libya certainly did not discourage the Syrian protesters from moving to violence.
And when the Syrian protesters moved to violence, Assad escalated his crackdown.
And the death toll has grown and accelerated in Syria.
We don't see five or ten people killed today. We see 30 or 50 people killed a day.
In addition, some of the weapons from Libya not only flowed westward into Mali,
they flowed eastward into Somalia where they fallen into the hands of the al-Shabab rebels and possibly exacerbating the civil war in Somalia.
And there's still this worldwide hunt for the man portable surface to air missiles that went missing by the thousands in Libya.
So if a plane comes down one of these days with a Libyan MANPADS, that will also have to be added to the toll of this intervention.
All right. How do we put all this together? What was the net humanitarian impact of NATO intervention in Libya?
Well, the war was perpetuated somewhere around seven times as long as it would have been.
As a result, the death toll was magnified somewhere between eight and 30 times.
The human rights situation in Libya is unimproved at best.
Unimproved at best. They were not large scale.
There was no ethnic cleansing or large scale summary executions under Kadhafi's for at least 15 years.
There was a one crackdown in 1996 when prisoners revolted at a prison.
But that's not what's going on today in Libya. What's going on today is summary executions, torture and ethnic cleansing.
So I'm trying to be generous. The human rights situation is unimproved at best.
The economy is much worse. Governance is much worse in Libya than it was under Gaddafi.
Under Gaddafi. It may not have been the most efficient government, but there was essentially organised government.
Now there's not. In Mali we see civil war contagion and displacement.
In Syria, we see rebellion encouraged possibly and I think likely leading to the escalated death toll.
So all of these things suggest that the net humanitarian impact of the intervention was negative and significantly negative.
And then the only question is, is there something else? Something.
Five years down the road, Libya is going to be such a flourishing liberal democracy that will look back and will
say it was all worth it and this was actually a net positive humanitarian impact.
It's possible you want to invite me back in five years? I'll give another talk and we can see.
The only thing I can say is I don't think it's likely given where Libya's today.
And the only other thing I can say is that based on the evidence of where Libya is today,
the net humanitarian impact of NATO intervention was grossly negative.
So just finally, a few lessons. Okay.
Yeah, this is it. BP, a cautious consumer of news.
Beware of both misinformation and disinformation. As I said, this this French doctor.
You know, I don't think he was in bed with the rebels. I think he was in honestly reporting what he saw.
But anecdotal evidence is anecdotal evidence.
If you're stuck in one medical clinic, seeing your handful of a dozen or two dozen patients,
you're not qualified to say what the death toll is in your entire city in the eastern half of Libya.
And yet people do that. They do that.
That's misinformation. Be wary of that. So a tribal, regional, religious war is not the same as a democratic uprising.
And similarly, the discriminate targeting of rebels is not the same as civilian victimisation.
Secondly, and this is the point I've tried to make in all my work on the moral hazard problem.
And when I talk about I've come up with sort of a five point plan of how to rethink the responsibility to protect.
And the most important point there is, is this one that if humanitarian intervention benefits rebels,
then that will escalate a conflict where you're intervening.
And moreover, it will foster contagious civil war elsewhere, as may have occurred in Syria.
And both of these dynamics increase the humanitarian toll.
That is, you increase the suffering civilians where you're intervening and you increase the suffering
of civilians in other places where you've inadvertently encouraged rebellion and civil war.
And it seems to me and again, this gets to ethical questions, that it's hard to justify that kind of intervention on humanitarian grounds,
especially if the state was originally targeting mainly combatants, as Gadhafi was.
And lastly. Because of domestic politics, of the intervening states, any humanitarian military intervention,
even if it's originally started for purely humanitarian reasons, is likely to devolve into regime change.
Why? Because in order to get public support in the West for an intervention, you have to demonise the target state.
You have to say they're about to commit another Rwanda, another genocide.
Once you've done that, how can you cut a deal with the regime? It's like cutting a deal with Hitler.
You can't cut a deal with Hitler. You have to overthrow and kill Hitler.
Right. And so you start this and I believe and we can get into this in questions,
I believe we really the international committee started this for truly humanitarian reasons.
But once you start for domestic political reasons, you have to have regime change.
Unfortunately, as I laid out, once you start calling for regime change,
rather than just trying to make a peace like a power sharing deal by going for regime change, you increase the humanitarian toll.
And this raises a question, and I think it's a it's a legal question, and I think it's an ethical question.
I think it's appropriate way to end the opening remarks today.
Assume you have a regime that is not actually genocidal and is not engaged in grossly disproportionate retaliation.
That is, it is meeting force with force, as in Libya.
Can you support humanitarian military intervention if you also oppose foreign imposed regime regime change?
If you oppose neo imperialism.
Like if humanitarian military intervention is going to devolve into imperialism, what do you do if you support humanitarianism?
But you oppose imperialism? You know, it's a very, very tough question.
Thank you. Great. Thank you so much.