02/25/15 – Alan Kuperman – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scotthorton dot org.
Alright y'all, welcome back.
Get my headphones on here.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show here on the Liberty Radio Network.
We're live from noon to two eastern time, eleven to one Texas time.
And our first guest on the show today is Alan Cooperman.
He actually is a professor at UT here in Austin, Texas, teaches public affairs.
And you might remember we talked to him back in 2011 when he wrote that great article for boston.com.
I don't know if they printed it in the paper, but debunking the pretext for the Libyan war.
And now he's got one here four years later in foreign affairs at foreignaffairs.com.
Obama's Libya debacle.
How a well-meaning, they dropped the ironic quotes for some reason, I'm not sure.
How a well-meaning intervention ended in failure.
Welcome back to the show, how are you doing Alan?
I'm fine, thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you on the show and great peace here.
I'm sorry foreign affairs apparently put up the wall.
They let me look at it a couple of times.
So I wasn't able to re-read the story this morning, but it is a very good one.
I can send you a link that goes around the firewall, the paywall for about a month.
Okay great, I'll tweet that out and post that in the chat room for people too.
Because it really is a great article.
I'd quibble with you in the last paragraph, but I won't bother.
Let's start at the beginning with how it was that we got into this.
And in fact, maybe a little bit of a rehash of that famous article at boston.com where you asked, was this a false pretense for war in Libya?
How did we even get into this mess back in 2011?
Well, there was an uprising in Libya, started in the east of the country.
And the way it was portrayed in the media was that this was a peaceful protest as had occurred in some of the other Arab Spring countries like Tunisia and Egypt.
And that rather than allowing this peaceful protest to take place, the leader of Libya, the dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, had sent in his forces to massacre these peaceful protesters by the thousands.
And that had started a civil war that the people just in self-defense had taken up arms and they were so popular that they were on the verge of overthrowing Gaddafi.
And he had once again used massive indiscriminate force against this largely civilian protest movement and was now bearing down on the city of Benghazi, which is the second biggest city in the country, and he was about to commit a genocide on the scale of Rwanda.
And as a result of that, there were these calls that there needed to be a military intervention to create a no-fly zone so that Gaddafi could no longer use aircraft to slaughter his own people.
That was the pretext for the war.
Almost nothing of what I just said actually was true, but that was the way it was reported at the time.
All right, now one thing that I think is important, and I'm just going from memory from back then, but it seemed like all this happened in very slow motion.
There was even, I don't know if it was Palin herself or whatever, but there was a little bit of a rehash of the dithering charge from the fall of 2009 over Afghanistan, that when oh when will Barack Obama finally decide to do this thing, said all the critics.
It took a couple of few weeks, and then it was really obvious, not just to me, but I think in quite a few different places all over the media, that the basis, the rhetorical basis at least, for the no-fly zone, it implied immediately one domino falls down and you have a regime change.
Because the premise of the no-fly zone is the people of Libya, the people of Eastern Libya will not ever be safe as long as madman Gaddafi is the dictator in power there.
And so therefore anything short of a regime change is leaving them in jeopardy.
What are we going to do, have a no-fly zone forever?
And it was that obvious.
It was surprising to me that the Russians went along with it.
They claimed to be disappointed that the Americans stretched the no-fly zone mandate into something more, but how could they possibly have been surprised by that?
I thought everybody knew that the no-fly zone is just a pretext for sacking Tripoli.
The French made that clear that that was what they wanted.
Am I wrong?
Well, you asked a lot of questions there, Scott.
Dithering from the start of the uprising to the start of the intervention was exactly one month.
So in retrospect, it was actually pretty quick action.
But you're right that at the time it was portrayed as if the U.S. was behind the curve.
And that's because the French really got out very, very quickly and so did the British.
Essentially the French and the British aligned themselves with these rebels within a week of the uprising.
And they wanted to support these rebels to overthrow Gaddafi.
However, they couldn't do it on their own.
The way that NATO is configured and the fact that the U.S. spends so much more on its military than Europe does meant that you couldn't do this intervention without U.S. involvement in the air in terms of providing refueling, reconnaissance, etc.
So there were these calls from France and the U.K. on the U.S. to come on board so that there could be this intervention.
And then there were calls from the press which said we can't allow another Rwanda type situation.
So eventually that combination and a couple of key officials in the Obama administration really pushed the president to go ahead with this.
There was Samantha Power and Susan Rice, who are now ambassadors of the U.N. and National Security Advisor.
And they prevailed on Hillary Clinton and together they prevailed on the president.
He eventually decided to go for this.
They got the resolution in the U.N.
And then two days later they started bombing.
So that's the first thing.
There were these claims of dithering, but it was pretty darn fast.
If you look historically at how long it took us to get involved in Bosnia or Kosovo, Bolivia was lightning fast by comparison.
Sure, that's true.
I just meant it's not like on the day that Qaddafi or within a day or two of Qaddafi saying, oh, I'm coming to get the rebel rats and all that, that they just started bombing.
They had a big discussion about it for weeks on end.
No, that's exactly what happened is that Qaddafi got to the outskirts of Benghazi and two days later we started bombing.
It was that fast.
From the beginning of the uprising until the intervention was one month, but from the time when he got to this town where supposedly there was going to be a bloodbath, it was two days later we started bombing.
Well, but I guess from the time that they first started calling for a no-fly zone and intervention to the time that they actually started bombing was what, three of those four weeks, right?
Maybe a couple weeks, yeah, a couple, three weeks possibly.
I mean the irony, as I said, is that there is zero evidence that Qaddafi was actually using aircraft to attack civilians.
In fact, he wasn't attacking civilians.
He was attacking rebels and we know that from the statistics.
So, for example, in Tripoli where 200, that's the capital, where 200 people were killed after they started a violent uprising, started burning government buildings.
Of those 200 people, two were women.
So what that indicates clearly is that the security forces were not targeting random or indiscriminately, randomly or indiscriminately the civilian population.
They were targeting the violent uprising.
They were targeting the rebels.
The same sort of statistics come from the other city that had a lot of violence which was a place called Misrata, third biggest city.
Where 3% of the casualties were women.
97% were men.
And so clearly the security forces were targeting the rebels.
They were not targeting civilians.
And these are statistics, by the way, from Human Rights Watch and from the UN.
They're not pro-Qaddafi.
We've got to take this break, so hold it right there.
When we get back, we're going to talk all about Qaddafi's son and possible alternatives to the war the way it played out and where Libya stands now with Alan Cooperman, professor at UT, author of this new piece in Foreign Affairs, How Obama Failed in Libya.
Hey, Al Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee, lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee, company at Darren'sCoffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade, with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren'sCoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
Darren'sCoffee.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Professor Alan Cooperman from UT and author of this article in Foreign Affairs, the Journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, Obama's Libya debacle from the March-April 2015 issue.
And so we were talking about the trumped-up pretext for war from back then.
And I wonder, Alan, I kind of assume, although I don't know, but I assume you wrote this article before the Washington Times series hit.
It probably takes a little while to get published in Foreign Affairs.
That's correct.
Yeah.
Did you read?
What did you think of that?
I mean, was that astounding or what?
The degree to which the Pentagon apparently tried to stop Hillary Clinton from doing this.
Yeah, I mean, it was not astounding to me because it fit with all my research and the things that I had published previously.
The really interesting new material were details about negotiations that were taking place between parts of the U.S. government and the Libyan government to try and find a peaceful way out of this either before the bombing started or immediately after it started.
And according to the sources that the Washington Times spoke to, it was the U.S. government which killed those negotiations and said, no talking, we're going to finish this militarily, not diplomatically.
And that, again, was consistent with the things that I had found in my research, but it was more detailed and more going right to the source of people who were in the negotiations.
So it just shows that the supposed goal of stopping the violence wasn't actually the goal.
The goal was or had evolved to very, very quickly to regime change, to overthrowing this guy.
They would rather have had a violent conflict that killed a lot of people to get rid of this guy rather than a quick diplomatic resolution that would have saved a lot of lives but would have left Gaddafi or his family in power.
So it was sold as a humanitarian intervention, but it actually sacrificed human lives in order to achieve a political objective.
And now this may just be a matter of opinion or maybe there are solid enough quotes to go on or what have you, but it seems like from the Washington Times reporting they have a great quote from someone at Human Rights Watch along these lines.
And Michael Hastings' report in Rolling Stone touched on this, and it just seemed my impression even at the time at the beginning of the war that really the most important overriding concern was that after Tunisia and especially Egypt and the fall of the Mubarak regime that D.C. had a real PR problem, that it was even clear and obvious on CNN for the American people to see that Uncle Sam backs every dictator in the region other than Iran and Syria.
Every other one of them works for us.
And so Hillary said we've got to, for public relations purposes, confuse the issue a bit by taking the side of some protesters somewhere and here's somewhere, and Gaddafi they brought him in from the cold in 2003, but he was still no Mubarak, not a loyal close friend of America or anything.
So he was expendable.
So they stabbed him in the back so they could pretend that America is on the side of the little guy after such an embarrassing black eye on TV with the revolution in Egypt.
What do you think of that?
I agree with you, but it wasn't just the U.S. that had a PR problem.
Lots of countries had a PR problem.
France had been really in bed with the Tunisian regime that had just gotten overthrown.
So that's the most likely explanation for why France took the lead on saying we've got to be on the right side of history when it comes to Libya.
Same thing with Russia.
You mentioned that Russia didn't block the resolution at the U.N.
And, of course, they have a veto as a permanent member of the Security Council.
They could have blocked it.
They decided not to block it, and I think for the same reason.
They thought, hey, there seems to be some momentum here.
We don't want to be backing every losing regime.
I think, were they surprised that this turned out to be not just a no-fly zone but a regime change?
Probably not, but they felt they had to go along with it because they didn't want to be on the wrong side of history.
And, as you say, the U.S., the same thing.
It looked like dominoes, first Tunisia, then Egypt.
It looked like Libya was going to fall, and the U.S. didn't want to be on the side of opposing the wave of history, the wave of democratization, which it turns out hasn't turned out to be so rosy after all.
So I think that the reason the U.S. went into this was a combination of things.
I think it was partly what you're talking about, which is this wanting to support the Arab Spring, and partially what I was talking about, which is this real fear of a humanitarian disaster.
It's very important to go back and trace who made decisions, who lobbied within the U.S. government.
It was clear that the Pentagon didn't want to do this.
So the people who were lobbying were Rice and Power, and Samantha Power, her famous book, she won a Pulitzer Prize for saying we should intervene to stop genocide.
So was she lobbying because she wanted to promote the Arab Spring?
I don't think so.
I think she was lobbying because she thought, hey, here's my chance to put my mark on history and show that the U.S. can stop genocide, and unfortunately it backfired.
It took a war that had a very, very low death toll, and by NATO intervening, it multiplied the death toll by ten times at least.
So not only did she not save lives, but she wound up actually costing a lot of lives, getting a lot of innocent people killed.
But I do think that's why she lobbied.
So why did President Obama decide to go for this?
I think it was a combination.
Some people were saying we've got to do it for supporting the Arab Spring.
Other people were saying we've got to do it for stopping genocide.
Other people were saying we've got to do it because our allies, the French and the British, are telling us to.
And all of that went into the calculus, and he decided that this was the right thing to do.
And unfortunately, it was bad for everybody.
It was bad for the Libyans, and it's bad for the Americans and our interests around the world.
It got a lot of innocent Libyans killed, and it wound up creating a massive safe haven for terrorists in both Libya and in Mali, and we've got both al-Qaeda and ISIS in those countries.
It's a total disaster.
All right.
Now, we have very little time, but I've got to ask two different things here real quick.
Wouldn't it apparent very, very early on here that the rebels we were fighting for were not the people of Libya but really a bunch of Iraq War veterans of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, et cetera?
From the very get-go, it wasn't that obvious.
And then secondly, I guess just to wrap up, tell us as much as you can about Gaddafi's son and the negotiations to try to maybe give power over to him.
That's mentioned in the Washington Times piece, but you really talk a lot about how he was no Gaddafi Jr.
He really had his own mind about how things should be.
Okay.
So it was clear from the beginning that some of the rebels were radical Islamists who had fought either in Afghanistan or had fought in Iraq against U.S.
Well, in Afghanistan maybe four U.S. inches and in Iraq trying to kill Americans working with al-Qaeda in Iraq.
These were hardcore, and Gaddafi had suppressed them for many years.
They were part of this thing called the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and he had suppressed them.
But once we provided air cover for them and pushed back Gaddafi's forces, these folks came to the fore.
And when it turned out to be tough fighting, the people we thought were our allies, these moderate liberals, they weren't very good fighters.
The folks who were good fighters were these people with al-Qaeda experience.
And so they very quickly took over the rebellion, and they're still to this day in control of large swaths of Libya.
So yes, I think to anybody who was thinking about this, it was pretty obvious.
And if you look at why the Pentagon opposed this, the Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert Gates, said we don't need to be fighting a third war in a Muslim country.
And it was clear what he meant by that is that we don't need to be creating another reason for al-Qaeda to recruit against us.
So that's that part of the story.
As for Gaddafi's son, he was very different from his father.
He was very different from his brothers.
He was Western-educated, and he was fond of things in the West, such as liberal economics and such as democracy.
And he said, I will not succeed my father unless there's a constitution created in Libya that allows for free and fair democratic elections.
It's not going to be business as usual.
And Gaddafi, for whatever reason, the father loved this son and wanted to pass power to him.
He saw that as the future of Libya.
He realized that Gaddafi himself realized that the model he had created was not succeeding, and he wanted his son to be the reformer who would modernize Libya.
And during these negotiations at the early part of the conflict, the deal that was on the table was that the elder Gaddafi would leave formal power, and he would just go off and have some sort of figurehead status like the Queen of England.
And real power would go to his son Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi.
And so would that have been a perfect Jeffersonian democracy?
No.
Would it be better than the chaos, anarchy, and terrorism of today?
It would be much, much better.
So we threw away a chance for a soft landing, and we went for a military solution that, as I say, is bad for Libyans and bad for Americans.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry, Alan.
I've already kept you about a minute and a half over time here into the top of the hour break.
But if I could ask you one more thing real quick.
Sure.
Max Boot says that the problem is the lack of follow-through here, and that that guy Gaddafi, man, he was such a murderer and a rapist and a tyrant and a criminal and needed to be kicked out of power.
No question about it.
The problem is, is that, you know, weak old Obama, the Democrat, did not go in there and do the required nation-building and probably would have taken just a little bit.
But he wouldn't even do that.
And so that's what caused the problem.
Yeah, well, you know, Max Boot is talking about Gaddafi from the 1980s, and I'm talking about Gaddafi from when we actually did the intervention.
And in that period of time, Gaddafi had switched from being our enemy to our ally.
He'd given up his nuclear weapons program.
He had helped us in the war on terror, providing intelligence, and so that we could round up people who were trying to kill Americans.
He was our friend, unlike the current folks in charge in Libya who want to do us harm, who killed our ambassador, et cetera.
As for should we have gone in there and broken Libya and then just put more resources to rebuild it better?
Well, once you break it, maybe you should repair it.
I think there's a credible case that could be made for that.
But the smart thing to do would be not to break it in the first place.
And so both Max Boot and the president made this argument that the mistake was that after we invaded and overthrew or we bombed and helped overthrow Gaddafi, that we just should have done a really big nation-building intervention as we have tried to do in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And that's exactly the wrong lesson.
The right lesson is that you don't go in and gratuitously break countries, especially when they're your friends, especially when they're not committing genocide, and turn them into a haven for terrorists.
So for whatever reason, maybe it's politics.
These folks don't want to admit that the intervention in the first place was a big mistake.
But it was a huge mistake.
And as I argued on NBC the other day, Libya is Barack Obama's Iraq.
In other words, exactly what George W. Bush did to Iraq, that's what Barack Obama has done to Libya.
He took a stable state where no war was necessary.
He did a war of choice that was gratuitous, and he turned a country that was stable into a country where people are being killed and that is serving as a safe haven for terrorists who want to kill Americans.
It's a huge disaster, and it shouldn't be downplayed.
All right, thanks very much for your time, Alan.
I really appreciate it.
Okay, thank you.
All right, y'all, that's Alan J. Cooperman, Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.
Obama's Libya debacle is the article at Foreign Affairs.
We'll be right back.
In America today, teachers, cops, judges, and other so-called public servants make far more than the average taxpayer.
And their pensions, well, if the people knew, they'd join us.
That's where you come in.
Taxpayers United of America is embarking on a great new project to train activists how to take on the parasites in your communities.
The entire process, from prying loose the facts to disseminating the truth to the people.
The first of these great workshops is in Orlando, Saturday, March 7th.
It's just $25.
For more information, go to taxpayersunited.org slash govpensions.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of The Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
Since 1989, FFF has been pushing an uncompromising moral and economic case for peace, individual liberty, and free markets.
Sign up now for The Future of Freedom featuring founder and president Jacob Horenberger, as well as Sheldon Richmond, James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and many more.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition, 15 per year to read it online.
That's fff.org slash subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the social network and community-based publishing platform for the liberty-minded.
Liberty.me combines the best of social media technology all in one place and features classes, discussions, guides, events, publishing, podcasts, and so much more.
And Jeffrey Tucker and I are starting a new monthly show at Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire.
It's just $4 a month if you use promo code Scott when you sign up.
And hey, once you do, add me as a friend on there at ScottHorton.
Liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.