Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest is Alan J. Cooperman.
He's a professor of public affairs at UT, Austin, and is author of The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention and co-editor of Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention.
That sounds interesting.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
Happy to have you here.
Now, your article that you wrote for Boston.com has been reprinted all over the place.
That's the Boston Globe newspaper, I guess.
And it's really been picked up far and wide.
It's called False Pretense for War in Libya.
And this is in regards to the alleged massacre that was prevented by the American intervention.
And I guess the question you're addressing here is how believable is it that the Obama administration or the rebels pushing this narrative really believed it themselves, even?
Right, yeah.
I mean, certainly President Obama in his radio address and in his speech to the nation explaining the war, he said that the reason he was doing this was because there was going to be a bloodbath.
He has cited Rwanda as a precedent where there really was a genocide.
He used the term genocide in his speech and said that's justification for intervention.
And so that was the claim, that there was about to be a genocide in the Libyan city of Benghazi if it had been captured by Gaddafi, and the intervention prevented that.
But the problem is that there's really no evidence that there was going to be such a massacre.
And the best proof of that is that Gaddafi had captured lots of cities, either totally or partially, in the preceding weeks, and there had not been massacres in those cities, and there still haven't been massacres.
And so what I did is I cited this data that just came out from Human Rights Watch, which is certainly very sympathetic to the rebels, but even Human Rights Watch says that in this city of Misrata, that's the third biggest city in Libya.
It has 400,000 people.
And in that city, in two months of fighting, only about 250 people have been killed, and that includes the rebels and the soldiers.
So the number of civilians is really...
Killed in two months of fighting in a big city is just a handful.
And even more damning evidence is that of those wounded, only 3% are women.
If Gaddafi were really, you know, firing at apartment buildings or firing at crowds of people, then women should be half the casualties.
But they're only 3% of the casualties.
And so what that shows to me is that the Libyan forces are actually pretty specifically targeting rebels, not civilians.
So if they haven't committed a bloodbath in other cities, then they weren't going to commit a bloodbath in Benghazi.
And that raises the point that you made at the beginning, which is, well, was the Obama administration tricked, or was the Obama administration tricking the American people?
Mm-hmm.
Well, I mean, Obama said that...
Gaddafi said he was going to kill them all, and that just clearly wasn't true.
If you read the translation in the transcript there, it doesn't say that.
Yeah, you know, the president...
This was really troubling to me, is that the president time and again said that Gaddafi had threatened, quote-unquote, to show no mercy to his people, and that Obama was not going to stand aside and let Gaddafi do that.
But that's not what Gaddafi said.
Gaddafi said he was going to show no mercy to the rebels who continued to fight.
He said he would even show mercy to the civilians.
He would even show mercy to rebels if they stopped fighting.
He would even allow the rebels an escape path out of the country to Egypt.
So at no point did Gaddafi threaten no mercy to his people.
At no point did Gaddafi threaten or commit massacres against his own people.
So, you know, the question is, as I say, was the president tricked by the rebels, or did he know there wasn't going to be a bloodbath, but he used the bloodbath as an excuse for intervention that he wanted to pursue for other reasons?
One more pretty obvious indication, I would think, of the latter there is that if they really thought there was going to be a genocide, well, they would have had to send in some Marines and say, you can't cross this line at all.
And they fought this sort of ridiculous, you know, quarter-assed war over there.
They're still fighting with the French and the British over who's supposed to come up with an endgame and whatever.
They're fighting like they don't even really mean it.
And that's not the kind of thing that you would do if you really thought all these people were going to be lined up and put in ovens or something, you know?
Yeah, you know, I don't know.
But I would say that there are indications that, clear indications that the administration has other goals besides saving lives.
So President Obama said that Qaddafi had to step down and leave the country.
That's going well beyond saving civilians.
That's regime change.
If you look at the use of military force by the U.S., if the U.S. really had been interested only in preventing a massacre and saving civilians, then it would have concentrated its force on the front lines where the city of Benghazi, where Libyan troops were massed at the time.
But instead what U.S. forces did is not only hit those troops, they also hit retreating Libyan forces.
Retreating forces aren't a threat to civilians.
They also hit Libyan forces in the city where Qaddafi is from, where he's popular, where there's essentially 100% support for Qaddafi, the city of Sirte.
Those forces in Qaddafi's stronghold are certainly not a threat to civilians because all the civilians there support Qaddafi.
So if you're hitting forces that are retreating and you're hitting forces in cities that support Qaddafi, then you're not just protecting civilians.
You're clearly doing something more, and that something more is you're trying to do regime change.
And so it raises the possibility that the goal all along really was regime change and that the president and his advisers just used this potential idea of genocide just to rally American and world support for the intervention.
And Barack Obama's continued attempts to continue the Bush policy of selling armed, not directly weapons, but armored personnel carriers and training and all kinds of things like this to Qaddafi, forgetting that for the moment, pretty obviously if they're saying he's going to commit a genocide here and that's why we have to intervene, part of that is the same narrative they use against Quresh or Hussein or the Ayatollahs in Iran or anyone else, which is that they're crazy, they can't be dealt with, there is no deal that we could sit down and make with Qaddafi now.
For him to remain in power is for him to threaten those civilians that the UN mandate says we must protect at all costs.
So it's only one domino to fall down from there to say that at some point they're going, unless somebody gets a really lucky airstrike, they're going to have to send in some ground troops into Tripoli or admit that they blew it and lost.
I think you're right that there is this unfortunate conflation of the concept of humanitarian intervention with regime change.
And the logic that they use is exactly what you said, that these leaders are crazy, so at any point they could harm civilians, so therefore the only way to save civilians is regime change.
And that sounds logical, but each step is not actually logical or true.
So exactly as you say, Qaddafi, I do not like Qaddafi, I'd be very happy if he weren't in power, but the fact of the matter is he has made some very strategic decisions.
So, for example, in 2003 he gave up his weapons of mass destruction, he went from being an enemy of the U.S. to be an ally of the U.S., he paid reparations for past attacks, he started providing the U.S. intelligence against Al-Qaeda.
So that's not a crazy person, that's someone who's capable of making strategic decisions.
And similarly, he made a strategic decision not to massacre civilians, probably because he knew that it would provide an excuse for international intervention against them.
So there are ways to deal with people like that besides overthrowing them.
But you're right that the prevailing narrative has been, whether it's the Clinton administration, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, is these folks, these leaders are crazy.
In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Qaddafi a creature.
A creature.
Yeah, dropping one bomb means that all else failed and we had to do it, right?
Keep in mind that just a few months earlier that creature was a U.S. ally.
Well, yeah, they were trying to sell more and more personnel carriers even in February.
Exactly.
In February.
Exactly.
I mean, come on.
All right, listen, I really appreciate your time, Alan, it's been good.
Thank you very much.
Everyone, that's Alan J. Cooperman from UT Austin.
I think Austin, UT, anyway.
Boston.com, false pretense for war in Libya?
Yeah, damn right.
We'll be right back.
