In a piece seemingly designed to make E.D.’s head spin, Prof. Anne-Marie Slaughter, former State Department director of policy planning — and one of the most vocal supporters of the US’s involvement with the conflict in Libya — has written an op-ed for the Financial Times that doesn’t quite go “nah, nah, nah, toldjaso!” but does come awfully close.
Looking forward, it is really not up to the west, much less the US, to plan Libya’s transition. It is a relief to see so many articles and statements reflecting lessons learnt from Iraq. But the Libyans are far ahead of where the US was when the initial fighting ended in Iraq. The National Transitional Council has a draft constitutional charter that is impressive in scope, aspirations and detail – including 37 articles on rights, freedoms and governance arrangements.
The sceptics’ response to all this, of course, is that it is too early to tell. In a year, or a decade, Libya could disintegrate into tribal conflict or Islamist insurgency, or split apart or lurch from one strongman to another. But the question for those who opposed the intervention is whether any of those things is worse than Col Gaddafi staying on by increasingly brutal means for many more years. Instability and worse would follow when he died, even had he orchestrated a transition.
The sceptics must now admit that the real choice in Libya was between temporary stability and the illusion of control, or fluidity and the ability to influence events driven by much larger forces. Welcome to the tough choices of foreign policy in the 21st century. Libya proves the west can make those choices wisely after all.
This says to me, more than anything else, that this debate needs to be moved away from having history, as it were, stand as the decisive actor. What I mean is that it’s increasingly becoming impossible for either side to make a cogent argument based off of concrete events on the ground. If you’re against the Libyan incursion, you’re likely going to request that no one start pounding their chest in a declaration of mission accomplished until we’ve seen Libya over the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years.
But as Slaughter’s counter-argument shows, this whole game now rests upon counterfactual history. Also known as thin air. Everyone’s better served, then, focusing on moral or strategic arguments, confining the debate to the realm of the at least semi-tangible. E.D. and many of the war’s more vocal critics have done that, too, but I think they’re going to have to stick to it exclusively from now on. Otherwise, no matter what side we’re on, everyone’s going to end up like George W. Bush, waiting eternally for history’s vindication.
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