ABSTRACT
Along with Hillary Clinton, well-known humanitarian author Samantha Powerswho ran the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights in Obama’s National Security Council, together with United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, made the case forcefully, that if the United Sates military did not intervene in Libya there would be a bloodbath. The charge that Qaddafi was “murdering his own people,” was a talking point often repeated in the mainstream Western press. But Jacobin magazine in 2016, confirms that claims that Qaddafi was on the verge of carrying out genocide against his people were largely baseless. Also in 2016 the New York Times reported that Human Rights Watch later showed that media claims about Qaddafi’s repression of protesters, which were used to sell the war to the public, were grossly exaggerated by an order of magnitude. Yet on the basis of the 2005 provision endorsed by the UN World Summit in New York on March 17, 2011, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1973, which authorized a No Fly Zone and member states “to take all necessary measures…to protect civilians and civilian populations under threat of attack,” while also “excluding a foreign occupation force of any form.”
There are indications that throughout the bombing campaign regime change quickly became the military objective. NATO continued to aid the rebels even when they repeatedly rejected government ceasefire offers that could have ended the violence and spared civilians. Such military assistance included close-air support by NATO warplanes, as a deciding factor that eventually enabled the disparate rebels to capture and summarily execute Qaddafi, and seize power by October 2011.
Libya merits a closer look because the NATO bombing that destroyed the government and left the country in chaos was promoted by “liberal interventionists” as a “humanitarian war.” This chapter revisits the arguments that called for intervention, details the persuasions that justified it, looks at the UN Resolution that allowed it, (to determine what it actual permitted) and examines the role the media played in articulating it. We will compare the case made for a “humanitarian” intervention in Libya with the actual situation that was taking place on the ground, the false documentation that drove it, how the war was prosecuted, and offer an assessment questioning, in retrospect, on whether it was “the right thing to do.”
