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More Western Military Meddling in Libya Is a Bad Idea
04/04/2016
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Ivan Eland Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent Institute
Unbelievably, after causing the chaos in Libya by overthrowing Libyan
dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the United States is about to lead
another Western military intervention designed to unify the country to
fight ISIS’s strongest cell outside Iraq and Syria, which has arisen
from the post-Gaddafi anarchy. Repeating the same mistake will only
make a bad situation worse.
In my book “The Failure of Counterinsurgency,” I note that
insurgencies usually love to drape themselves in the “liberator from
foreign oppression” cloak, and further U.S. intervention will allow ISIS
to do just that. Of course, because of the American public’s
understandable exhaustion with foreign brushfire wars, the United States
will be reluctant to put significant forces on the ground, other than
maybe a few furtive Special Operations types, and will instead wail away
from the air by bombing targets from above. The United States has
already done some of this in the country on a selected basis.
Another caution
the book has for counterinsurgency campaigns is that foreigners never
get the benefit of the doubt, as we have already seen in the U.S. drone
campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Even if the
great powers using air power attempt not to hit civilians (the Russians
didn’t even try in Syria), they inevitably will kill some inadvertently.
Because they are foreigners killing indigenous people, the locals
usually frown upon this big time. The hawks will say that “collateral
damage” occurs in any war, but when battling an insurgency, support of
the people is much more vital than in conventional war. Because most of
Libya’s militias, including ISIS, are not easily identified by
uniforms, they can hide among the population and gain support and
recruits from that universe. Thus, bombing groups from the air, without
friendly local troops on the ground to direct and benefit from the air
strikes, only needlessly angers the population and thus creates more
insurgents.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/
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