Exit the Colonel (36 page)

Gaddafi voiced his threat in a speech on March 6: “There will be a jihad Islamic front on the Mediterranean. You will see a return to the time of Barbarossa, the pirates, and the Ottomans imposing ransoms on boats.”
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In very few words, Gaddafi cast himself as the antidote to an allegedly ingrained feature of Libyan people to turn to the dark side in times of stress.
He was effectively siding with the West against his own people, that is, claiming, “I can't control what happens next,” while reminding the US of a particularly dark period of US-Libyan relations and the threat of piracy, then synonymous with Somalia. Al Qaeda couldn't be far behind. This notion of Libya becoming a launching pad for a new generation of Mediterranean pirates—completely without basis—appeared in several security reports published early in the conflict.

Within a matter of days, Gaddafi's forces had retaken the initiative. Checkpoints sprung up throughout the capital with sporadic demonstrations in Fashloum, Tajoura, and other poor Tripoli neighborhoods.
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There were reports, as the weeks went on, of the regime using revolutionary flag–draped cars to incite anti-Gaddafi elements in the streets, whereupon armed men would jump out of the cars with machine guns, shooting anyone in the vicinity. Claims of a mini-rebellion in the Janzour neighborhood appear to have been exaggerated.
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On or about March 2, Gaddafi forces started their push toward Benghazi. The apparent strategy was to create a swath of coastal control from the Tunisian border to Marsa Brega, with a focus on the cities.
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Loyalist forces employed brute strength and fear tactics—bombing and helicopters—more for effect than for their destructive power. Brave as the opposition forces were, they scattered in the face of massive firepower.

On March 6, Gaddafi launched military strikes against the “oil crescent” towns of Ras Lanuf, Marsa Brega in the east, and Zawiya in the west. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US was “far from deciding what to do” about the no-fly zone.
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By March 7, the port and industrial capital of Misurata, 118 miles to the east, became the focus of a brutal counterassault as the regime pounded the city with airplanes and tank-fired mortars, killing at least eighteen.
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In stark contrast to the situation when he gave the desperate
zenga zenga
speech two weeks earlier, Gaddafi appeared to have pulled a rabbit from his hat. “In going after the rebels, suddenly Muammar Al Qaddafi is winning,”
The Economist
lamented.
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In a matter of days, loyalist forces retook Zawiya and Zwara, both of which were critical nodes on the eastern supply route from Tunisia to Tripoli, and prepared for a long siege of Misurata. Gaddafi forces rolled back the rebels along the coastal road, taking back the critical oil export and refining facilities of Ras Lanuf and Marsa Brega, subsequently seizing the equally strategic junction at Ajdabia, a stone's throw from Benghazi.

Increased Attacks Against Civilians; Requests for Help NATO intervention in Libya was predicated first and foremost on the need to protect innocent civilians from their own government. Agencies such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented significant acts of violence against civilians through videos and interviews with eyewitnesses and victims. Mainstream international media appeared to accept that Libyan forces killed “Libyan civilians in their homes and in the public space, repressed demonstrations with live ammunition, used heavy artillery against participants in funeral processions, and placed snipers to kill those leaving mosques after the prayers.”
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At a minimum, it was undisputed—even by the regime itself—that “hundreds of unarmed protestors” had been killed; Saif attributed this to overzealous and untrained security services.
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Nor was the use of imported mercenaries to quell rioting in Benghazi in any doubt. The regime appeared to be using helicopter gunships and aircraft to fire on protestors (later confirmed), and highly imprecise weaponry, such as cluster or spider bombs in areas where there were many civilians.
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The international media reported tens of thousands of dead in the first few months of the conflict. The International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor José Luis Moreno Ocampo later claimed (and at the time of writing was still trying to prove) that the regime distributed Viagra to troops as part of a deliberate effort to use rape as a tool of war).
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Other atrocities were clear, including the use of Red Cross–marked helicopters to fire on aid convoys attempting to relieve the siege of Misurata.
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The Human Rights Watch 2012 Report on Libya documented the use of low-metal mines, mortar-fired cluster munitions in residential areas in Misurata, and parachute antivehicle mines fired by GRAD rockets.
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The report added to this list the execution of prisoners by Gaddafi forces before the fall of Tripoli, the execution by the Khamis Brigade of forty-five detainees in a Tripoli warehouse about the same time, and likely regime complicity in scores of deaths in and around Tripoli, Al-Qawalish, and Bani Walid.
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In most of these cases, it is difficult to say who actually ordered the attacks, or if they were coordinated by the highest echelons of the regime. If Saif and Abdullah Senussi make it to trial, the claims of “intent” presumably need to be addressed, though by early May 2011, the ICC's Ocampo decided that he had enough evidence to proceed with formal charges of crimes against humanity, including forced disappearances, firing on
unarmed civilians, wide-scale arrests, and the use of torture, to issue arrest warrants for individuals within the regime—Muammar Gaddafi himself, Saif Al Islam, and Abdullah Senussi.
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With control reasserted over much of the west by early March, Gaddafi was free to refocus on what was happening in the east. Forces and a substantial fraction of Gaddafi's armaments, led by Khamis's 32nd Brigade, were collected and sent out to roll back rebel advances, en route to a showdown in Benghazi.

While some continue to question Gaddafi's intentions with respect to Benghazi, others have no doubt that he intended a bloodbath. First, Gaddafi had a long and violent history with respect to Benghazi; second, Gaddafi habitually signaled his intentions in advance and had made it clear that he was sending his best generals to finish the rebellion. In a March 17 radio address,
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Gaddafi warned the eastern populations of an imminent operation to free those being held “hostage” by the rebels, who would be shown “no mercy.”
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Third, the combination of these events with the sheer size of the force sent against the east suggested the intent was to slaughter, not to intimidate. The US State Department received “many, many” calls daily from the Libyan community in the US, as well as people within Libya, pleading for the Obama administration's action before it was too late.
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One Libyan-American said he and his friends, hiding in Tripoli at the time, felt they were watching a climatic image from
Lord of the Rings
, as the forces of evil amassed to destroy the forces of good.

The majority of the Gaddafis seemed to believe that the US and other Western countries were bluffing, and that the NATO coalition would fall apart before it could take any meaningful action. One of Saadi's former Western business advisers later claimed that Saadi alone among his siblings understood the magnitude of his father's tactical mistake. Saadi had pleaded with Gaddafi to reverse his assault on Benghazi, lest the UN vote to authorize the no-fly zone. At the same time, he was attempting to contact CNN to dispute claims that Gaddafi would carry through with his threats against the east.
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CHAPTER 10

The Debate over Intervention

T
he proximate debate in the West over intervention in Libya was clearly conditioned or perhaps framed by President Obama's “New Beginnings” speech in Cairo in 2009. It had set the tone for what many hoped would be a new approach by the US and its allies in dealing with the Middle East, one based on respect for human rights and democratic ideals:

America is not, Obama said, “the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire.”
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The speech eerily foreshadowed much of what came next in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya—the people asking the US to join them in supporting these very ideals, including human rights and the pursuit of democracy;
the need to act in concert with other nations, collaboratively; the need not to engage in excessive force or to resort to force when other means would be preferable; of working with moderate Islamic elements to diffuse rejectionist strands; and the need to provide funds to support reconstruction and nation building in war-torn regions.
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While the speech did not figure heavily in media reports—Western or Arab—during the early months of the Arab Spring, it had become an implicit standard against which people in the region judged US actions. The speech became more relevant as the US was seen to be waffling between its support for established, friendly regimes—Egypt, Bahrain—and policy consistency. According to journalist Michael Hastings, “[O]nce those governments actually began to fall, the Obama administration was slow to distance itself from the oil-rich autocrats the US had supported for decades. In Egypt, Vice President Joe Biden downplayed the democratic revolt, saying that he didn't consider Hosni Mubarak a ‘dictator.'”
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Defense Secretary Robert Gates came out early against US military involvement in Libya, based on, in his assessment, the likelihood of escalation and resulting US commitments, and the nonessential nature of US interests in Libya. Testifying before Congress, he argued specifically that a no-fly zone would require taking out Libya's air defenses and would be a “big operation in a big country.”
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Clearly, Gates's main concerns were cost and mission creep—particularly given ongoing US commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the real possibility of hot conflict with Iran. The State Department, true to its mission (not the size of its budget), would prove more useful in examining the broader policy implications of nonintervention.

Gaddafi's bounceback was problematic for the West, and all those who were secretly and not so secretly hoping for Gaddafi's quick exit. The fact that Gaddafi could mobilize not just hundreds or thousands, but hundreds of thousands of supporters begged the question of how uniform the opposition to the regime really was.

Civil war
was a term avoided in the West and NATO circles, as it detracted from the cleaner notion of a unified popular rebellion. However one cut the conflict, however, several things were increasingly obvious to those with some knowledge of Libya: (1) there was a pronounced east-west divide, with far more support for Gaddafi in western Libya than in Eastern Libya; (2) western Libya benefited from an early unfair advantage in the form of mercenaries and heavy weapons.

The mainstream American press and pundits, including Nicholas Kristof at the
New York Times
, argued in April there was a need to support the Libyans in a “noble cause,” but not get too deeply involved.
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In late August, post-Liberation, he removed any hesitation in an op-ed entitled “Thank You, America!”
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Dirk Vandewalle, the academic with the longest consistent focus on Libya,
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cautioned the US and the West against falling into a “Gaddafi trap,” that is, supporting narratives of external domination and knee-jerk reactions that could easily lead to a dismemberment of the country, or that could be perceived as a partisan move in a country where tribal loyalties remained keen, and memories long.”
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Gaddafi's fixation on making a bloody example of Benghazi was probably his single largest strategic error. Prior to this, the European press had been decidedly soft on intervention. The Economist on March 3 published a lead piece noting that “Muammar Qaddafi [sic] has enough military power at his disposal to make dislodging him a bloody and uncertain business.... His air defenses include nearly 100 MiG 25s and 15 Mirage F1s, equipped with Soviet era air-to-air missiles and a huge arsenal of Russian surface to air missiles.”
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