Though Cowards Flinch

I want to address three points made by Naadir Jeewa in his thoughtful piece on Liberal Conspiracy today:

1) “Proponents of an NFZ must answer the basic question: what exactly we’re trying to achieve?”

Gaddafi has almost exlcusive use of the air, and though it’s disputed by Russia there have been reasonable claims that air operations have resulted in many of the +1000 death toll. To cite finances (“would anyone be satisfied with maintaining a decade-long, open-ended engagement at a cost of at least £9.5m, and maybe up to £185m per week.”) as a reason why the West shouldn’t back a NFZ seems to miss the point.

Further, if Gaddafi defeats rebels, which is likely without an intervention of sorts, this will send a rather optimistic message out to other despots in the region. Of course, a NFZ runs the risk of failing, as does any operation one engages in, but such a defeatist attitude when the rebels have disproportionate use of strategic manoeuvring is inappropriate.

One reason given to oppose all western-backed intervention is that if a NFZ helps secure victory, Arab patriots will forever pour scorn on the National Transition Council for using imperialism as a way of settling differences. Perversely, if a western-backed NFZ fails then at least that will apease those patriots, but the death toll would almost certainly have risen quite considerably by then.

2) “…there’s the internal legitimacy problem. Historian Dirk Vandewalle warns that the Libyan National Council is representative only of Cyrenaica tribal leaders.”

This may well be true, but then did you see from the reuters article the amount of support Gaddafi receives from large tribes?

Though even if you’re assessment holds true, this simply requires pressure from inside the council to reach out to those tribes which are broadly and unambigiously against Gaddafi. The Warfalla tribe for example, the largest in Libya, announced early on they were turning against Gaddafi, not to mention the Magarha and Zuwayyah tribes. Further, despite having military personnel among their numbers, the Tarhuna and Zentan tribes in the west of the country declared early support for protests.

3) “An NFZ will not be an invisible, skies-only operation. Sec. Gates has stated that the presence of large stocks of Surface-to-Air-Missiles dictates the need to bomb Libya’s air defences, in contrast to Iraq, where most of the air defences had already been destroyed as a consequence of the Gulf War.”

This is akin to the argument that it looks too much like war. There are rules attached to the NFZ and if Gaddafi breaks those rules then we know what will happen (though we don’t want another Downing of Scott O’ Grady). Gaddafi’s army will only be made culpable if they break the resolution (should the block by Russia or China be overturned) and thus the onus is upon them.

The extent to which I would hope the NFZ is not skies-only, is in equipping the rebel forces with amunition, basic accessories should they be needed, and at a push strategic assistance. No ground troops! The rebels have been clear and foreign intervention should recognise who is in charge here.

Naadir has produced a thoughtful rebuttal of the NFZ which, unlike many attempts by others, does not appeal to absurd logic, or mere epithets. Though in spite of his efforts, I disagree with his conclusions and look forward to his response.