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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
My favourite bit:
Muezzinoglu? Extortion racket? I’m shocked.
But more seriously – a bureaucrat’s job is to present information in such a manner as to justify whatever course of action a ruling politician chooses to take. The situation in Turkey is clearly laid out, but stopping short of drawing conclusions which require one course of action or another is, imho, both deliberate and a core requirement of the job.
Amen, sister.
Zafar: I agree that that it is not unreasonable to ask that our government actually articulate a broad plan for the region. This administration seems scatterbrained and always getting caught flatfooted by events in the region.
To me it seems with respect to Libya it was always going to be chaos after Qaddafi fell because there was nothing tangible to replace him. Just a mishmash of various ethnic and ideological groups that hated him for various reasons. The only way we would have stability there now would have been for Qaddafi to win his civil war. But that would just be a return to the same unstable status quo, presumably. Furthermore I don’t think it was obvious in anyway that had we not acted he would have won. My point being Syria (which was way better organized than Qaddafi and still went belly up). So chaos was unavoidable in other words, short of full on NATO invasion where we stepped on everyone (though by the standards of this debate I am not sure that would count as stability either). Basically everything is breaking apart and whatever we do it has to break apart in order to be reformed any way.
What we don’t want is chaos, because that favors ISIS and Al-queda. At least that is my view. The worst thing for the US is zones of no governance where these wackos can set up shop. So if the option is between Assad and ISIS I say we should pick Assad and be done with it. Of course what we get into is that what our options are are predicated by time of choosing. In other words they are fluid. The options we have today are not the options we had yesterday or will necessarily have tomorrow. I think in Syria we had a third option at least early on but we refused to capitalize on it. Out bad. Now we have just the two.
My view is not acting doesn’t seem to give us any better results than going in Shock and Awe style. I don’t know what the right level of intervention we should have is. Heck I’m not even sure what our options really are to control things. We don’t have massive propaganda and infeltration campaigns in these nations do we? Do we have civilian allies on the ground like we did in Easter Europe. Where there we clear dissident movements. That doesn’t seem to be the case from what I can tell. Basically we might actually have no soft power whatsoever to employ in the middle east. So maybe our options are only to do nothing, bomb somewhat, and full invasion.
Claire: Okay I agree our state department is filed with idiots. But what was the right move in Libya? Someone was able to predict doom, good fine they are a genius. I applaud them. What was the right move? What is the guarantee that it would have worked that way? That is what gets me about so many of these things. Even when someone predicts that something will turn out a certain way and they appear to be mostly correct, there is no way to verify that they actually had the real solution. I fear it is all wishful thinking.
Is Libya really the worse it could be now? Maybe but heck maybe we aren’t even imagining the worst case scenario because we can’t.
Frankly I say if you can’t be right at least be consistent, and that is where we have really dropped the ball. We seem so arbitrary, and we seem that way because we don’t know what we want any more. In the Cold War our foreign policy made sense. We wanted to keep the Russians out. Everything flowed from that.
What do we want now? What is our great goal now? Bush had a plan knock off unfriendly regimes and replace them with democracies, but no one has a love for that anymore. Fine. But he had a plan at least. What is the plan now?
That was quite interesting to read. I think I have seen that phenomenon elsewhere — in punditland — where the conclusions and evidence from the same person seem to be unhinged from each other, usually in defense of some scandal. I’ve never known what to do about it other than be exasperated.
I also see something similar in leftwing academic historians, who do excellent research and writing about the past, but are oblivious to the relevance to the present. It might be in gender studies or more traditional topics. They do excellent work in analyzing how power has been wielded through the past use of history – and then turn around 180 degrees and whine about insufficient government funding for the discipline of history today.
I think the objective is stable polities, preferably not particularly democratic, which are dependent on the West. (That’s what it looks like we’re aiming for in Egypt.)
But it’s the lack of authentic representative democracy that leads to long term instability – ie the Arab Spring, or even the quick series of intafadas that swept Eastern Europe as soon as the Soviet Empire crumbled.
I guess they’re willing to kick it down the road a bit – the hard part is how to sell it. After so many years of singing democracy’s praises it’s hard to change course without losing credibility. (Also, given Libya’s current state, any kind of stability looks pretty good.)
I used to believe in representative democracy before Egyptians chose Mohammed Morsi to be their president. Pogroms against the Copts followed in the wake of that election. When democracy is suppressed in Arab countries radicals organize in the mosques, since Arab dictatorships are unwilling to suppress Islam. This leads to a radical form of Islam, supporting your thesis that the lack of representative democracy leads to long term instability. But when democratic elections are held radical Muslims are the ones most likely to come to power. That is the dilemma of Arab democracy. There must be a solution, but I have no idea what it is.
Well it’s not really a dilemma, but it is absolutely true. The question is: why is this the case? It wasn’t always so.
I really am not into this ‘the US is responsible for everything that happens in the world’ thing – because I don’t think the US (or the West, more broadly) has the power to determine how other societies turn out without actually conquering them and then hanging around for decades (and usually not even then). I do think, however, that the US does have enough power to determine how other societies (at least some of them) do not turn out without expending that level of effort, so here’s a thought:
At the end of WWII the Arab world, like the other colonised countries, had a number of intellectual and political currents swirling through it. One of these was indeed political Islam, but there were also a number of secular ideologies that trended either fascist or downright Marxist (or a mixture of the two) – in fact it was a variation of the latter two (Ba’athism) that ended up dominating two major Arab states, Iraq and Syria, and in another guise (Nasserism) that initially dominated the most important country in the Arab world, Egypt.
Anyway – so, inevitably, political dispensations which are not subject to the discipline of elections become corrupt, their elites makes shady deals with the great powers that benefit themselves but damage their countries, the people groan under their yoke, various bright young things think about different ways to cleanse society and make it better and some of them get together and try to do just that, etc. etc. This is where the US, and its rivalry with the Soviet Union, come in.
It is uncontroversial, I think, that the US saw the Islamists as a more palatable option than the Marxists during the cold war. And that this influenced who they helped and who they hindered in the countries they dominated.
The Jewish Virtual Library has an interesting article on the Muslim Brotherhood, from which:
Iow, the Islamists do tend to win any free and fair elections held in the Arab world today, but a big reason for this imho is that they are the only group left standing beside the extremely compromised Governments. The Marxists are gone, in part because we thought that they were the more dangerous option and the Arab world could do with a counterbalance. (This is also sort of what we did in Afghanistan when we supported jihadis against the Soviets.)
In our eagerness to win the Cold War we created another rod for our own backs. (That’s a lesson to learn and apply while fighting Islamism, just saying.)
Wrt elections that result in things we don’t like – I’m afraid I think the only way to get over this is to let these parties try and govern if they are elected. either they wise up and moderate, or they stick to their ideological purity guns and the people grow to distrust their ideology. (As they do in Iran, and as I think they would have in Algeria and Egypt as well. That’s demonstrably true with Marxism as well, so I wish we’d given the various Arab communists and Iranian Tudeh party enough rope to hand themselves.)
That’s why I think it is unfortunate, but it isn’t a dilemma – we should let it play out because the alternative is so much worse in the long run. I am, however, very uncomfortable with leaving minorities to swing, so I admit that I am not on board with a completely consistent application of this in all cases – though I think the principle is pretty sound.
The problem with democracy is that there is no magical wisdom in a majority. If a majority adheres to radical Islam, or Marxism, or even Obamaism, we are going to have negative results.
In the extreme case we might get a genocide of a minority. This is what appeared to be developing under the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It’s what would likely happen if the Palestinians were able through a right of return to become a majority in Israel.
Democracy is no panacea for the ills of the Arab and Muslim world. There are simply too many crazy people for democracy to really work. If a “democracy” seems poised to commit genocide, the other nations of the world should intervene.
The wisdom comes from dealing with the consequences and learning from your mistakes. It’s not magic, it happens over time, it happens with mistakes.
This process never takes place for populations that elect Islamist governments when those governments are removed by external forces and never have to take responsibility for their bad governance or kooky ideas. That’s why they still have cred in the Arab world while taxi drivers in Tehran don’t even stop for clerics.
Every time we take them out instead of just letting them fail, we give them undeserved cred. It is such a self defeating strategy, I don’t understand it.
Who took them out? How do we allow a government to fail if, once elected, it seizes absolute power? I seem to remember Morsi issuing edicts arrogating all power in the executive, removing supreme court justices, and so forth, and it was this sort of thing that prompted the Egyptian army to depose him.
Look at Turkey. Do you imagine that Erdogan is going to allow a fair and free election? He has already removed most generals and judges that would challenge his authority, and has completely cowed the press.
Look at the PLA. Mahmoud Abbas is in the 10th year of a 4-year term. Hamas kills its political opponents.
Look at Pakistan. It has had plenty of failed governments. What have they learned?
I don’t believe that Sisi would have moved without an indication from the West that it would support him. We’ve certainly materially rewarded his administration.
The thing with Egypt is that there was so much discontent building up against Morsi because of his actions. The coup gave the Brotherhood the cachet of being militarily deposed rather than being defeated in a fair election. Which I really think it could have been – or (and this is another okay possibility) it would have adjusted its policies to satisfy the Egyptian people. That’s what I mean by letting them deal with the consequences of their own actions – and by them I mean both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian people who elected it.
What’s sad is that if they were allowed to compete in a free and fair election today they’d still win – and that this is not because of their performance in Government, but because they were deposed – they can blame all their failures on that. This can’t be the outcome we want, it isn’t good for us and it isn’t good for Egypt.
Yes, true. But he did win the last election, relatively fair, and the AKP could certainly lose subsequent elections. The fact is the AKP has enough popularity because real incomes in Turkey basically doubled under its watch – in some ways they did a good job.
The only reason he’s still there is that we didn’t accept the results of the election that would have replaced him. We had our reasons, but the result is that we relieved the party that defeated him of the need to perform in order to maintain its credibility.
They’re currently learning, the hard way, that giving the Army too much power locks the country into a state of permanent war footing because that benefits the Army, if not the country. They’re also learning that empowering terrorist groups to achieve policy objectives is like riding a tiger – it’s much harder to dismount than to climb on. When they hold free elections they never elect an Islamist Party to power. The vast majority of votes always go to the secular alternatives.