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March 24, 2011

SNAPSHOT

A New Lease on Life for Humanitarianism

How Operation Odyssey Dawn Will Revive RtoP

Stewart Patrick
STEWART PATRICK is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Program on International
Institutions and Global Governance at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of
the forthcoming Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security.

The United States and its coalition partners’ decision to launch Operation Odyssey Dawn to
enforce a no-fly zone in Libya on March 19 was a vindication of the fragile “responsibility to
protect” (RtoP) norm. The diplomatic process to build a consensus about intervention was
messy, involving protracted negotiations among multiple parties, and the military outcome
in Libya remains uncertain. Still, the Obama administration was correct to champion RtoP’s
basic principle: state sovereignty is not a license for a dictator to murder his citizens.

When it was endorsed unanimously by heads of state at the 2005 World Summit, RtoP was
the biggest challenge to state sovereignty in three and a half centuries. It makes a state’s
presumed right of nonintervention contingent on its ability and willingness to protect its
citizens and threatens “collective, timely, and decisive action” if it does not. Until recently,
however, putting this norm into practice proved tougher than enunciating it. UN member
states repeatedly failed to intervene in even the most egregious situations -- such as in
Darfur, Sri Lanka, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- and left hundreds of
thousands of civilians at the mercy of genocidal leaders and armed militias. Given its
seeming unenforceability, RtoP risked becoming a twenty-first century version of the 1928
Kellogg-Briand Pact, which “outlawed war” as an instrument of national policy.

In invoking “the Libyan authorities’ responsibility to protect its population” in UN Security

Council Resolution 1973 [1], which prompted Operation Odyssey Dawn, the Security
Council has seemingly given RtoP a new lease on life. How strengthened RtoP will be
depends both on how well the Libya case fits its mandate and how well the intervention

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turns out.

RtoP was never intended as a license to go after every misbehaving regime. It applies only
to those committing mass atrocities -- genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and
ethnic cleansing. Although there is no consensus on the body count needed to trigger RtoP,
the actions and intentions of Libya’s leader Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi have provided
ample justification. Qaddafi’s own security forces and the mercenaries he imported from
Mali, Niger, Chad, and other sub-Saharan African countries have used indiscriminate force
against civilians, massacring hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, Libyans. They have
also committed gross violations of human rights, the laws of war, and humanitarian law,
such as using live ammunition against peaceful protesters, employing civilians as human
shields, and denying relief to affected populations. On February 22, Qaddafi even pledged to
“cleanse Libya house by house” of antigovernment protesters. Resolution 1973 noted that
these “systematic attacks against the civilian population may amount to crimes against
humanity,” and, pursuant to a Security Council request, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief
prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has already opened an investigation
into Qaddafi’s actions.

Even in the face of atrocities, RtoP envisions military action as a last resort after diplomatic
efforts and sanctions have failed. In this, too, Operation Odyssey Dawn meets RtoP’s
standards. Before authorizing military intervention, the international community took
numerous other steps to dissuade Qaddafi from committing further atrocities, including
imposing an arms embargo, a travel ban, and an asset freeze; condemning Libya within
(and ejecting it from) the UN Human Rights Council; and referring the Libyan case to the
ICC. Qaddafi’s continued defiance left the Security Council with the choice between
escalating military intervention and tolerating, in the words of Resolution 1973, additional
“gross and systematic violations of human rights, including arbitrary detentions, enforced
disappearances, torture and summary executions.”

Of course, Qaddafi did himself no favors by promising [2] to “have no mercy and no pity” in
Benghazi, the opposition movement’s stronghold. As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
correctly observed [3] from Paris on March 19, “We have every reason to fear that, left
unchecked, Qadaffi will commit unspeakable atrocities.” The dictator’s large stockpile of
chemical weapons raised the stakes even further.

For an RtoP intervention to be legitimate, it has to have international support, which the
United States was prudent to secure before launching military operations. Critics, such as
former UN ambassador John Bolton and Kori Schake, a research fellow at the Hoover
Institution, have bemoaned the administration’s willingness to allow other countries,
particularly France, to spearhead the intervention as a retreat from leadership. They decry
its insistence on seeking a UN imprimatur and warn of the dangers of war by NATO
committee. But a U.S.-led intervention in Libya without Security Council authorization would
have been disastrous, fanning the flames of anti-Americanism in the region, upending the

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narrative of this year’s protests as an indigenous “Arab awakening,” and saddling the United
States with exclusive responsibility for yet another Muslim-majority country.

Attacking Libya without international backing, moreover, would also have done grievous
damage to the RtoP norm, allowing critics to frame it as window-dressing for Western
interventionism. Security Council authorization provided critical legitimacy for the United
States and its allies to combat Qaddafi’s atrocities. The endorsement of the no-fly zone by
the Arab League, Organization of the Islamic Conference, and Gulf Cooperation Council was
also crucial. None of these bodies has ever lifted a finger against regional tyrants, but this
time their members made a different calculation, presumably reflecting a collective distaste
for Qaddafi and their vulnerability to democratic aspirations sweeping the region.

One key aspect of successful intervention is clarity of political goals. In this respect, the
United States and its partners’ dithering over Operation Odyssey Dawn’s aims is disturbing.
In early March, the Obama administration signaled multiple times that it wanted full regime
change in Libya. U.S. President Barack Obama has since vacillated, insisting in a March 19
address that the United States would not use force “beyond a well-defined goal --
specifically, the protection of civilians in Libya.”

Unfortunately, the notion that any country could impartially intervene on behalf of civilians
is a delusion [4]. Using military force to protect beleaguered civilian populations invariably
means taking sides -- a lesson it took years for the West to learn in Bosnia. And war
involves other uncertainties: coalition aerial attacks could cause civilian casualties, and
Arab League support could evaporate. If Qaddafi’s forces dig in and hold their forward
positions, they could still exact revenge against rebels in areas left under their control. The
conflict could settle into a bloody, inconclusive stalemate, or alternatively, Qaddafi could
abruptly fall from power and victorious rebel forces could launch their own round of score-
settling. Given the likely possibility that at least one of these things will happen, the Obama
administration is kidding itself if it believes that it can hand [5] Libya over to coalition allies
or victorious protesters after a few days, without any involvement in the endgame. As the
only power with the strength to respond to these various contingencies, the United States
will need to see this through to the end.

The “responsibility to protect” implies a responsibility to rebuild [6] once the shooting
stops. Although Resolution 1973 explicitly rejects foreign occupation of any part of Libyan
territory, stabilizing the country for the long term will likely require a multinational
peacekeeping force. Ideally it would be authorized by the United Nations and include
significant contingents from the Arab world. Such long-term tasks as reconstructing Libya’s
economy and political institutions would only be possible with major commitments of
financial resources from the European Union, the World Bank, the African Development
Bank, wealthy Gulf sheikhdoms, and the United States.

In a seminal Foreign Affairs article in 2002, Gareth Evans, then president and CEO of the
International Crisis Group, and Mohamed Sahnoun, who was special adviser on Africa to

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the UN secretary-general, argued [7] that any military intervention to support RtoP must
satisfy six principles: the cause must be just, the intentions of the interveners must be
pure, the use of force should be a last resort, it should be sanctioned by the Security
Council, it must be undertaken with proportional means, and it should have reasonable
prospects of success. The imposition of the no-fly zone in Libya has met the first five of
these criteria. But its ultimate success will depend on meeting the sixth. To do that, the
United States and its allies must show more willingness to remove the Qaddafi regime and
then rebuild a war-torn Libya.

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Links:
[1] http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm
[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/19/501364/main20044927.shtml
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/clinton-us-supports-all-necessary-measures-
to-enforce-un-authorized-no-fly-zones-over-libya/2011/03/19/ABSiTnv_story.html
[4] http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/50545/richard-k-betts/the-delusion-of-impartial-
intervention
[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-actions-may-speak-louder-than-words/2011/03
/19/ABVWsZx_story.html
[6] http://www.iciss-ciise.gc.ca/report2-en.asp
[7] http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/58437/gareth-evans-and-mohamed-sahnoun
/the-responsibility-to-protect

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