Iraq, Libya, and American Interventionism

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

Should the United States have helped bring down Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein? This is not ancient history and has a bearing on this year’s presidential election – it helped jettison Jeb Bush’s candidacy, in some respects thanks to his brother George W. Bush’s Iraq war.

Clearly, getting rid of the two were, by themselves, good things. Who could argue otherwise? They were bloodthirsty lunatics and killers. Their regimes were oppressive and dangerous.

But the next question is: did either George Bush in 2003, or Barack Obama, in 2011, actually think “regime change” would lead to some sort of democracy, or even just a better life, in those two countries? 

Were they really hoping to engage in the fantasy of “nation-building?” If so, they were foolish.

On the other hand, should they then have just left Iraq and Libya alone and allowed the tyrants to continue murdering their own people and stealing all their wealth, as well as interfering with their neighbours, as Saddam did in conquering Kuwait and going to war with Iran, and Gadhafi by supporting terrorism all over the world, and invading Chad? 

Given all that, Bush and Obama rolled the dice and hoped for the best. We now know the consequences.

The lesson I take from this is that countries like Iraq and Libya, which exist only on paper and are held together by a tyrant, will, after the removal of the dictator, almost certainly become anarchic entities run by, among others, armed militias, warlords, religious fanatics, and simple criminals. 

The Islamic State has taken over large swathes of Libya, which now comprises its largest base outside of Syria and Iraq.

Now we are in the realm of deep-seated political culture. After all, that’s what had already happened in Somalia after the demise of Siad Barre in 1991. Nor has Afghanistan become a “democracy” after the ouster of the Taliban in 2001. Maybe these were lessons that should have been learned.

In a sense, this has been a conflict between two schools of American foreign policy. One is political neoconservatism – oddly, a variant of Wilsonianian internationalism and the ideology of human rights – whose adherents believe that establishing democracy throughout the world is possible. They are willing to institute “regime change” to hasten the process.

The other strand is the “clash of civilisations” thesis propounded by the late Samuel Huntington. His followers are more often isolationists skeptical of intervening in places without the requisite political culture to support a liberal electoral order, at least for the foreseeable future.

The U.S. has seemed to oscillate between these two attitudes throughout its history.

These foreign policy options are not tied to specific parties. The modern neoconservative movement began in the Democratic Party in the 1970s, with people such as Senator Henry Jackson and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, while isolationists were more often found among Republicans.

Should either Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio win the Republican nomination, most “hawks,” who backed George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, would prefer either of them to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, the latter in fact  a “dove.” Many of them, including Elliott Abrams, Eliot Cohen, Michael Chertoff, Michael Mukasey and Dan Senor, have supported Marco Rubio.

However, many neoconservatives have threatened to support Hillary Clinton were Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee – to some extent, because they consider Trump less willing to defend Israel. They view her as more “hawkish” than him. 

“I’d vote for Hillary Clinton rather than Trump or Cruz,” declared Kenneth Adelman, a Reagan administration veteran who was a Pentagon adviser during the Iraq War. Another leading neoconservative, Robert Kagan, said the same thing.

The battle lines remain fluid.