Libya, Drownings In the Mediterranean, and Obama Administration Foreign Policy Successes

The New Republic published an article last week in which Joel Gillin argued that, pending an Iran nuclear agreement, President Obama’s greatest foreign policy achievement is the opening of relations with Cuba.  Ignoring the question of whether this is all that much of an achievement (we are talking about Cuba, after all, not China), it is perhaps interesting to consider what were previously considered some of President Obama’s foreign policy successes and to see how they look, several years down the road.

In the late summer of 2013, in response repeated crossings by Syria of President Obama’s redline with respect to the use of chemical weapons, President Obama threatened military action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  Before he had to follow through on his threat, which you got the impression he really did not want to do, Vladimir Putin saved him.  Picking up on a comment made by Secretary of State John Kerry, Russia proposed that, instead of attacking Syria, Syria would give up its chemical weapons and allow them to be destroyed.  President Obama proclaimed this a great result, saying it was our threat of force that forced Syria to agree to give up its chemical weapons.

Where are we now?  If Bashar al-Assad is not as firmly in power as ever, it is because of ISIS (also known as Islamic State or ISIL), not any of the moderate opponents of his regime.  In fact, our bombing of ISIS in Syria has enabled Assad’s forces to focus more of their attention on the moderate rebels who we supposedly support.  Not only that, but there are reports that chemical weapons, now chlorine gas, are still being used in Syria.¹  While it has not been proven for sure which side, or sides, is using them, the most logical candidate is the forces of Bashar al-Assad.  And what are we doing to preserve the supposed success of 2013 in getting Bashar al-Assad to give up his chemical weapons?  About what you would expect.

Consider another supposed triumph of President Obama’s first term: Libya.  In March of 2011, President Obama, along with other nations, especially France and the United Kingdom, attacked the regime of Moammar Gaddafi.  Colonel Gaddafi had threatened to massacre people in Benghazi, Libya.  President Obama ordered U.S. military action, both bombing and helping other countries bomb, to prevent the killing.  We continued long enough to get Colonel Gaddafi overthrown.  And then, ignoring Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn Rule,” i.e., you break it, you buy it, we left.

What has happened since?  Pure chaos.  Actually, not pure, but definitely chaos.  In a country where President Obama ordered U.S. military action to prevent the slaughter of civilians, we now see Islamic terrorists deliberately murdering Christians just because they are Christian.

In addition, The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers reported Monday on what are believed to be the death of hundreds of migrants trying to get from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa in a twenty-meter-long fishing boat.  The Journal provided some background:

“The dissolution of law and order in Libya in particular has left Europe exposed to an increasing wave of Africans risking their lives to find a better life or flee conflict.

Accords between Rome and Tripoli helped keep the flow of would-be boat people under tight control before the fall of the Gadhafi regime in 2011.  But since Libya’s subsequent economic and political collapse, a people-smuggling trade has flourished in the country’s Mediterranean port cities.  One source of their demand comes from the large number of workers from sub-Saharan Africa who once flocked to jobs in Libya, many of them in oil fields, but are now without any livelihood.

A new surge of violence brought on by Islamic State’s expansion into Libya has pushed even more migrant workers to flee the country.”

The Journal article talks about the inability of the European Union to come up with a policy to deal with this crisis.  What it doesn’t talk about (though a Journal editorial mentioned it today) is the responsibility of those who led the ouster of Colonel Gaddafi to do something to create some kind of order in place of the order we helped destroy.

Certainly, the United States did not do a good job of this in Iraq.  Our initial invasion was a success, but we failed to adequately follow through to set up a way to govern the country.  It took us too long to come up with a proper policy, though George W. Bush eventually did so, with the surge and General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy.

President Obama took, from our experience in Iraq, the conclusion that we should not be involved in trying to rebuild a state after we oust, or help oust, the prior regime.  Perhaps, the proper lesson was, if you aren’t going to help re-build it, or at least help maintain some semblance of order, don’t tear down what is there in the first place.

In any case, the flood of refugees out of Libya is Europe’s practical problem because the refugees are trying to get to Europe.  It is, however, also a moral responsibility, in part, of ours.  We helped create the chaos; we need to help, if not solve it, at least ameliorate it.
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¹ I don’t know if it is strange or sad or funny (in some obscene way) that these reports of the use of chlorine gas are coming in now, with tomorrow, April 22, being the one-hundredth anniversary of the first use of chemical weapons, chlorine gas, as it were, in World War I.