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A Mass Grave in the Mediterranean
Late on Saturday night, as many as 950 men, women, and children perished in the Mediterranean 60 miles south of the Italian island of Lampedusa in the greatest sea disaster since the Second World War. Last week, two separate shipwrecks off the coast of Libya claimed an estimated 400 lives. The Italian coastguard has rescued nearly 10,000 people this month. In Sicily and Lampedusa, medical teams regularly treat migrants who have been tortured by their smugglers.
Postwar Europe has never confronted a population movement like this. A human wave from the failed states of the Middle East and Africa has resulted in a 50-fold increase in migrant and refugee deaths since last year. There will be many more. The state apparatus has collapsed in Libya. There is no Libyan coast guard. Last fall, Italy ended the “Mare Nostrum” search-and-rescue operation, which had saved 100,000 lives in 2014; Italian naval units have instead been deployed off Libya’s eastern coast to guard against sea-borne attacks from the ISIS-occupied ports at Derna and Sirte. ISIS, meanwhile, is beheading Christians on Libya’s beaches, and Italian police have just arrested 15 Muslims on charges of throwing 12 Christians from a migrant boat.
To say these refugees are unwanted in Europe is an understatement. EU governments have until now refused to fund search-and-rescue operations on the grounds that the prospect of being rescued only encouraged more to venture the journey. Overland routes are impenetrable: Greece has fenced off its border with Turkey, and Spain has sealed off Ceuta and Melilla.
In the wake of Saturday’s shipwreck, there are calls for “something to be done.” Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat said, “What is happening now is of epic proportions. If Europe, if the global community continues to turn a blind eye… we will all be judged in the same way that history has judged Europe when it turned a blind eye to the genocide of this century and last century.” Pope Francis has appealed for “much broader involvement.” “Illegal immigration is about to reach the top of the scale of the multiple crises Europe is facing,” wrote Le Monde’s editorial board this morning. “It is a crisis … of catastrophic proportions … a challenge not only to the dignity of man, but to the values and economic rationality on which the European Union is based.”
But there is no rational solution. Europe has only two options: let migrants drown in the hundreds or thousands, or open the gates to hundreds of thousands of immiserated refugees–along with an indeterminate number of refugees who throw Christians overboard en route. The latter will not happen.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is correct to say that the problem lies in Libya, which is now a failed state. Italy is contemplating a military mission there, possibly under a United Nations mandate. “If we cannot remove the problem in Libya, we will never succeed in solving this terrible problem,” he said, and he is correct.
When Obama explained the US intervention in Libya, these were the words he used:
To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and -– more profoundly -– our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.
And here is Hillary Clinton:
I was in complete agreement with Adam Garfinkle when he wrote this in February:
Personally, I’m not enthusiastic about the prospect of Mrs. Clinton as President; nor do I think she was such a good Secretary of State. But it is a fantasy, and a lurid fantasy at that, to try to hold her personally accountable for what happened during and after September 11, 2012, in Libya.
More than that, it is a distraction from the key policy lesson we should by now have learned from that whole unfortunate episode. Whatever the real mix of reasons that went into it, the Libya war was a mistake. It has touched off a cascade of completely predictable misanthropies (if I predicted them, which I did, I take it for granted that others, not least then-Defense Secretary Gates, did too). It has, to take just one example, ensnarled the French in a real mess in Mali, probably made things worse in increasingly ghoulish northern Nigeria, and it is already washing back into Libya, threatening to alienate the southwestern, Tuareg chunk of Fezzan permanently from the Libyan state (such as it is). The sin that Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton (and others) committed was starting this stupid war in the first place, and then having no plan whatsoever for a post-Qaddafi “Phase IV” (remember Iraq?). That is the decision that began the sequence of events that got Ambassador Stevens and three other American officials killed.
Why aren’t Republicans on the make making this argument?
It should also be noted that Garfinkle opposed the intervention. He predicted this outcome in lucid detail:
Of course, if democracy breaks out in a post-Qaddafi Libya, everything will be sunshine and roses—except that is about as likely to happen as a hookah-smoking caterpillar offering you a tuna on rye, with a pickle. Or about as likely as a clean and clear endpoint to the battle in Iraq ever was. Whenever there is a conflict in a far-off land between some protesting horde and some morally unaesthetic incumbent government, the Manichean American mind rushes ineluctably to the conclusion that the throng in the street has to be a democracy movement. It’s the Children of the Sons of Light against the Children of the Sons of Darkness over, and over, and over again, except of course that it’s never that clear-cut. This amounts to a pre-adolescent understanding of any region, and the Arab world isn’t just any region.
As noted, there is a regional and tribal element to the fight in Libya. It is unlikely that the Benghazi-based rebels could by themselves establish stable control over the whole country. It is almost as unlikely that the Tripolitanian tribes could re-establish firm control over Cyrenaica. Qaddafi managed the feat through a combination of patronage, terror and cooptation. That will be a very hard act to follow in the wake of so much bloodletting. We are therefore looking into the maw of a Libya that may well be divided, in the throes of some kind of protracted, at least low-level civil war, and that could very easily produce an insurgency spilling over the Egyptian and Tunisian borders—complete with refugees, the usual dysfunctional NGO triage operations and all the rest. And in due course, if the fractious mess lasts long enough, there is a reasonable prospect that al-Qaeda will find a way to establish a foothold amid the mayhem.
Who will want to send in peacekeepers to baby-sit a Libya that looks like that? Who’ll want to go to the UN to get the job authorized? The African Union?
Now, given that this sort of problem is foreseeable, and that it was also foreseeable before the cruise missiles started flying on Saturday, it stands to reason that a responsible, serious government will have thought about all this in advance, and come up with some plan for the post-combat “Phase IV” of the Libyan War, right? Not on your life; the President and his war council almost certainly have not even begun to think about this sort of thing, because they’re still in denial that it could happen. This is, after all, just a limited, humanitarian mission as far as they’re concerned. They don’t realize it yet, but these guys are on a path to make even Donny Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks look good—and you thought that was impossible.
So if anyone says this outcome was unlikely or unpredictable, they are wrong. As Garfinkle continued:
These three observations do not, of course, exhaust the madness of what the Administration has done. This Libya caper will constitute a huge, compound distraction. Not only will it distract us from longer-term challenges, mainly in Asia, that will determine the success or failure of America’s grand strategy of forward presence on the flanks of Eurasia, it will also distract us from even more portentous Middle Eastern dangers. Just yesterday the head of the Yemeni army withdrew his support for President Ali Abdullah Saleh. This portends a major, multifaceted tribe-and-clan based civil war with a potential to put core U.S. security interests at risk—for an anarchic Yemen, a mountainous country with four times the population of Libya, can host a sanctuary for al-Qaeda that will make their Taliban-era digs pale by comparison. And in Yemen, al-Qaeda already has a kind of defense-in-depth across the Bab al-Mandeb in what’s left of Somalia.
He wrote those words on March 22, 2011.
Perhaps this latest news will inspire someone, somewhere, to connect the dots. The scandal isn’t Bengazigate. It is Libya itself.
Update: Three more boats are reported to be sinking right now, one with 300 people on board.
Published in General
Frankly I love these Libya discussions. Everyone gets to be so smart and stand on such high horses. Oh, we saw this coming nothing good comes from America over throwing dictators. This is just like Iraq, whine, whine, whine, bitch, bitch, bitch…
Why don’t people ever look at all the facts. We did nothing in Syria, we backed off and let things play out as they will. Where did ISIS found its capital? Iraq? Libya? Oh wait I know! Syria. The land of American non-interventionism…well at least until our hands off approach spawned the seven headed Hydra that is ISIS.
Simply put the light touch and the no touch do not seem to work. ISIS breeds chaos and thrives on chaos. The Arab governments are all sitting on self-made powder kegs of ethnic and religious frustrations. These things where going to blow up with or without us. Predicting that the Middle East will be a mess is like predicting Christmas will come at the end of December.
Simply put it is always going to be a mess because all of the real problems are baked into the situation. Our invasions might set them off but they don’t create them. Everything is simmering under the surface and one day it will explode. Did the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 really cause the Arab spring and its various messes nearly a decade later? What is the mechanisms for that?
People are drawing lines and connecting dots with wild abandon, of course they don’t seem to have ever bothered to try and connect all the dots. In science we call that “cherry picking”. Its a great way to come up with a beautiful theory that helps you predict nothing.
Libya is a mess, so what is the plan then? Other than bragging about how we all predicted it would turnout this way. Is there a way to fix the mess without more intervention? I guess we can just sit around and wait it will all sort itself out in the end I’m sure. (Hey, I’m not even being sarcastic here. Really. If we leave it alone I’m sure some time before the next century it will all calm down.)
Yep, and now its time to dismantle that old system into an new and better one more suited to today’s geopolitical structures. Our big mistake after the end of the Cold War is we never really formulated a coherent post-Cold War vision. I mean who the heck thought the USSR was really going to to collapse like a cheap lawn chair? I can tell you no one in Romania expected things to go the way the did. Maybe just one crazy American president.
What Valiuth said.
Twice
Wonderful things can be done if you need no nouns as subjects for your verbs. The passive voice helps, too.
Zafar and Claire have hit the nail directly on the thumb. The American electorate has been dysfunctional for many years. That dysfunction reveals itself most clearly in instances like this. The electorate is too fractionated and angry to hold elected officials responsible for major failures in policy. The observation that neither party can afford to blame the other for Libya is reminiscent of the Savings and Loan scandal during the Reagan-Bush years. The cases are different, but the political dynamics are the same. Both major parties were responsible for the tragedy, therefore neither of them could afford to point fingers at the other. Dukakis brought up the S&L debacle during one of the debates with Bush, but Bush quickly(and half correctly) shifted the blame to Congress instead. Dukakis (although uninvolved in the scandal himself) immediately shut up and never returned to the subject. He needed a Democratic Congress if he were to become president.
There was quite a bit of anger about the S&L’s at the time, but not much protest. Just a few years earlier the electorate would not have watched helplessly while $500 billion of their money was stolen. So what caused the singular incident of the electorate “that failed to bark in the night” at that particular point in history? People were focused at the time on issues that were of greater significance to them. Anger about the S&L’s became lost in the crosscurrents of much greater angers seething beneath the surface. Why doesn’t the electorate “bark” now about Libya and other things? Because the same grievances are still there and not much will get done about other issues until they are resolved. But that is a subject for another post.
There are some good points in this comment, but I don’t trust people who use the word “dysfunctional.” Sometimes I can overcome my mistrust if I learn it was just a careless choice of words.
To be fair, it wasn’t their money stolen – it was their children’s.
Baby Boomer been stiffing Gen-X since we were born. It is probably because we like our grandparents more than them.
Gosh, did someone misuse the word when you were a kid while stealing your lollipop? Or was there some other tragedy? :-)
It was some other tragedy, which left me with a tendency to look at the literal meanings of words in addition to any connotations overlaid on them.
My first thoughts too.
Libya sounds like the Sudan crisis to me.
The United Nations should be on top of situations that are near the boiling point.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is supported by donations from most civilized nations in the world. One would think then that this agency would be the monitor for countries experiencing upheavals. When people start seeking asylum in high numbers, it’s time for the United Nations to move in and maybe remove that country’s leaders.
It seems to be such an obvious solution. People being forced to flee their home countries is unacceptable. There’s nowhere for them to go.
We need to come together as a world community to authorize the United Nations to act.
No – I don’t. The crises was real – but like Obama’s staff said, “Why let a good crisis go to waste?”. What I am saying is I think an opportunity presented itself to certain people who thought they could influence the direction of the Arab Spring to go in a more “controlled” fashion with personal benefits, but it backfired. I believe everyone on the ground desperately wanted their freedom and a more democratic leadership, just like the Chinese in Tienanmen Square. But I think certain influential people or even countries with a lot of money may have “created” the domino effect by interjecting and trying to control certain aspects of it, and it did not go as planned. Not a conspiracy theory, but is it not above the realm of possibility that there are groups out there that would love to control the Middle East, North Africa and its resources?
Except membership in the UN is offered by the rulers of various countries – including our own – and rulers are unlikely to set precedent where rulers can be removed by UN fiat.
I know I would resist that here to my dying breath – even if they were removing P. Hillary.
What do we do with refugees then?
Marci,
We must find a way to kill the people who are creating the refugees.
Regards,
Jim
That is Europe’s problem – they did, after establish a Convention on Human Rights which prohibits mass deportations or the death penalty.
It is up to them to deal with the refugees.
Dude, no one can exercise power there in a meaningful way to make the cost of extracting raw materials profitable while maintaining civil society. If they could they would have already.
They can only make a profit by relying on existing governmental structure for general security and then hiring protection to make individual sites “secure”.
As for any group that wishes to “control the ME and NA and it’s resources” they can wish in one hand, defecate in the other and see which fills up first.
For what purpose?
Ret,
Some purposes are self-evident.
Regards,
Jim
I’m trying to think of one that is. Do you have any examples in mind?
Ret,
Life.
Regards,
Jim
Sigh. Yes, okay. It’s always more fun being a prophet of doom saying ‘I told you so’ than to listen to one.
To be fair there are drone strikes in Syria against ISIS. And there were sound decision not to act to overthrow Asad (hint: which was Israel’s quietest border?). I’ll admit it may not (or has it?) worked out as hoped for, but there are worse outcomes so long as you aren’t Syrian. Right now ISIS is fighting on two or three fronts – which is not, in itself, a bad thing.
No, but decades-long Western support of Arab dictatorships (like the ones in Egypt and Tunisia) certainly contributed to baking in the situation. Iow, the situation was not entirely self-made, we propped it up because it was to our advantage. The fact that it reached breaking point isn’t just because of us, but we need to own some responsibility for the fact that it lasted as long as it did and resulted in the pressure that it has.
There are two factions in Syria – one based in Tripoli and one based in Tobruk (which the West supports, and which is allied with the Sisi regime in Egypt). As you might expect, the one based in Tobruk is gaining ground and imho is going to end up dominating the country (albeit with a shaky grip). (This may have to do with what we were trying to quietly do in Benghazi.)
The choice was broadly: ground invasion of Libya (expensive, still result in a lot of refugees) and the current backing of the more acceptable side in an internal power struggle (which, apart from the boat people, is a bit out of sight out of mind).
Now arguably we are reimposing updated versions of our go-to option for the ME in Egypt and Libya, and these are predictably (going by past performance) going to result in some levels of tension and problems wrt the internal stability of these States (perhaps a feature, as far as we’re concerned, rather than a bug in the system), but – that’s what we’re doing.
Completely seriously, what was workable and worth it during the Cold War may not be either in the present. But whatever new system the West adopts or tweaks or finesses should learn from the failures of the old. That seems logical to me. The old system resulted in the Arab Spring. Can we live with that recurring? Is there another way to achieve our ends (which are precisely what?) without falling into that trap? Are ISIS and AQ game changers? What about En Nahda in Tunisia? The nuclear deal with Iran (if it ever happens)?
These don’t seem unreasonable questions to ask, or in fact to expect our Governments to address.
Valiuth, you might recall that a while ago I started a discussion in which I tried to encourage people to come up with rigorous criteria for assessing foreign policy failure–that is, distinguishing between that which no one could have anticipated (and thus that which no official could be blamed) and that which a competent official or government should have anticipated. In other words, I fully agree with you that before making the case that this or any administration has been incompetent in foreign policy, we need to make the case that there’s something like foreign policy malpractice, and to define what it is. Very hard to do, because of course it isn’t like medical care–you can’t run multiple tests on many subjects and see what works best.
But I don’t agree that because it’s difficult to do that, it can’t be done. I strongly believe that Americans are getting sub-standard service in foreign policy, and that our foreign policy apparatus is getting away with it because they’re implicitly making the argument, “Well, there was nothing we could do–those people were just screwed up to begin with, you see.”
I argue that it’s our job–not because it’s fair, but because we have an interest in doing it–to have a very deep level of knowledge about these places are before we do anything that has a high likelihood of making it worse. And I believe that’s possible–it’s just something we don’t do. I saw this up close, every day, in Turkey. The more you know about a country, the better your predictions will be about what will happen if you intervene in certain ways. After a long enough time there, my ability to predict what would happen was far from perfect–but I had a very good sense of who to ask if I wanted good predictions, and good relationships with those people. In other words, I would have been very good at sending useful intelligence back to the White House about Turkey. Of course, they didn’t ask people like me. And no one I know who really knew anything about Turkey was ever asked, by the way. That’s telling–and ironic, seeing as every American there is assumed to be a spy.
Above all, I suspect we’ve got massive problems in the part of our government least likely ever to be held accountable–our intelligence services. And then we’re compounding that by refusing to say, “If it looks like a fiasco, it is.”
Claire,
Do you think there is anything about the professional training received by people who go to work for the State Department that keeps them from being open and receptive to this kind of knowledge? Like maybe they pay too much attention to what each other is thinking and not enough to what people over there are thinking?
I’ve observed from talking to some of them that our news media people have a problem of that type that keeps them from doing a good job, so I’ve often advocated the unprofessionalization of the news media. I have no knowledge of whether foreign service people suffer from anything like that. I’ve never known anyone who works for the State Department – not in real life or on the internet — so I’m just groping about for answers here.
I was impressed by the caliber of the Wikileaks, and wrote a long piece about the Wikileaks on Turkey. My sense was that State was doing its job reasonably well, but refusing to ask some obvious questions about what it was finding out–and what’s more, what it was reporting was being completely ignored. If you have a look at that, you can see what I mean. What does it suggest to you? I suspect there may be a culture such that people at State are not rewarded–or punished–for delivering bad news. That’s my best guess.
My grandparents on my mother’s side were absorbed into Russia when Poland ceased to be Poland and had to escape to America from there…and on my dad’s side it was the Ukraine – they would be shocked to see what they are having to go through again in the Ukraine, just like your family would be shocked to see how Jews are being treated again in Europe – 70 years later. Many kids today don’t know these stories and need to hear them.
Tell that to Putin….p.s. I’m not a dude – I’m a cute blonde :-)
For all we know the careerists at the State Dept. are talented, hard-working, and well-trained. But so what? They report to idiots and charlatans. Whatever advice they can provide is given in the service of Obama, Kerry (or Clinton), and Harf.
God help us.
OK, so two letters were mistyped.
Putin is having a hard time annexing Georgia and Ukraine.