Swaggering unilateral US action is out, but partnership has its problems, writes LARA MARLOWEin Washington
IF US president Barack Obama seemed distracted during his Oval Office meeting with Taoiseach Enda Kenny it was because visions of jet-fighters – not Moneygall – danced in his head.
Earlier on St Patrick’s Day, Muammar Gadafy had bombed Benghazi airport and his son Saif al-Islam boasted that it was “too late . . . We are at the gates of Benghazi.”
That afternoon, between the Irish lunch on Capitol Hill and the White House reception, Obama took his decision to join in the Libyan intervention. The UN Security Council voted resolution 1973, authorising the use of force to protect civilians, while Obama, Biden and Kenny were making their evening speeches.
For weeks, Obama had been buffeted between opponents of intervention, led by his defence secretary Robert Gates, and female “humanitarian interventionists”: the Irish-born Samantha Power and Gayle Smith, both senior advisers on the National Security Council; and Susan Rice, the UN ambassador who was Bill Clinton’s adviser on Africa at the time of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Secretary of state Hillary Clinton shifted to the second camp last week, helping to tip the balance.
Two factors apparently persuaded the reluctant president: the Arab League's endorsement of a no-fly zone and reports that Gadafy's forces were closing in on Benghazi. "The administration was stampeded in the end by a Rwanda impulse. The avoidance of blame in statesmanship and diplomacy is always the most powerful incentive," says Patrick Tyler, author of A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East.
Rarely has a war been so much compared to earlier conflicts. The gung-ho attitude of France and Britain are reminiscent of Suez in 1956. As in the 1991 Gulf War, the US secured Arab support and a UN mandate. The genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia served as examples of what the US wanted to avoid, while the 1999 Kosovo war marked a precedent for pre-emptive, “humanitarian” intervention. Unlike his predecessors, whose hyperbole extended to calling Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein “Hitler”, Obama has been studiously low-key.
The conflict is dividing liberals and conservatives among themselves. Senator John McCain – who never saw a war he didn’t want to be part of – says Obama should have acted sooner.
Left-wingers like Dennis Kucinich oppose the intervention on the grounds that Congress has not approved it. The representative from Ohio yesterday announced he’ll try to block up to $100 million a week spent on the no-fly zone.
“We now have to define some positive goals for this enterprise,” the former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said on National Public Radio. “Otherwise, we could get mired in a situation in which the country gets divided, in which there’s a civil war, in which Gadafy manages to mobilise a great deal of animus towards the West.”
In particular, Dr Brzezinski said, the coalition must arrive at “a clear statement regarding the nature of the authority in Benghazi . . . some provision for UN-mandated elections in all of Libya . . . a common stand excluding Gadafy because he is the source of the problem.”
The fate of Gadafy remains the crux of confusion. Obama’s academic distinction between UN-mandated military action to protect civilians and a US policy which demands the departure of Gadafy has been lost on critics.
The president said he would rely on sanctions, frozen assets and an arms embargo to drive Gadafy from power. But the US has tried these measures against Cuba, Iran and North Korea for decades, to little effect.
The war on Libya nonetheless marks a change in the US presidency and US foreign relations. The days of swaggering cowboys are over. Obama is, in the words of a Washington Post headline, “leading by hanging back”.
In his first address to the United Nations, in September 2009, Obama said American unilateralism had fed anti-Americanism. “We have sought . . . a new era of engagement with the world,” he said, praising the benefits of multilateralism.
This week, the president gave more practical reasons for embracing multilateralism: “It relieves the burden on our military and it relieves the burden on US taxpayers to fulfil what is an international mission and not simply a US mission.”
America’s overwhelming military firepower has so far doomed it to lead the war on Libya. Of the first 132 cruise missiles fired into Libya, the US fired 124 to Britain’s eight.
The most urgent task now facing the coalition is to establish a unified chain of command. With France, Turkey, Norway, Germany, Turkey, Luxembourg, Italy, the Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin all quibbling about the circumstances of the intervention, Obama is also learning the drawbacks of multilateralism. If Gadafy slinks off to Harare or Caracas next week, or dies in a bombing raid, Obama will no doubt be praised. But if the conflict drags on, Libya will compromise the president’s standing, and prospects for the “Arab spring”.