Libya & the U.S. - An Opportunistic History and a Historic Opportunity

It is always interesting to see the historical analogies brought forth by politicians and pundits. This week it's been 1979, and not without good cause. That was the last time a U.S. Ambassador was murdered on the job, and of course after President Carter allowed the exiled Shah of Iran into the United States, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was taken over by revolutionaries backed by the new sovereign government, who then held U.S. diplomats hostage for well over a year.  Carter had resisted granting permission for some time in spite of constant pressure from Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, John McCloy, Zbigniew Brzezinski and their acolytes. In the end, as the Shah's diagnosis was suspected to be cancer, the President relented and granted entry. A good retelling of the story by one of those taken hostage in Tehran can be found in the online journal American Diplomacy.

The Carter administration's late and failed attempt to rescue the hostage through limited military action was a strong blow against America's global reputation, and helped to seal his defeat in the subsequent election. His opponent, Ronald Reagan, was uncritical of the president after the failed hostage rescue attempt and called for national unity.  Now, the analogies between 1979 and this past week's events in Egypt and Libya have been repeated often (suspending for rhetoric's sake the far reaching differences between the situations in Egypt and Libya).  There are Islamists, an embassy, and a Democrat U.S. president.  For now I will focus on Libya.

I would like to offer an alternative historical analysis, all the while emphasizing that no political analogies are a perfect match to the situations to which they are being compared.  The 1979 takeover of the embassy in Iran did have a specific aspect in common with the 2012 Libyan strike on the U.S. embassy -- both appear to be in direct response to U.S. actions.  In 1979, it was the permission granted for the Shah to enter the United States.  In 2012, there is talk of the Libyan strike being in retaliation for the killing of a top al Qaeda figure, a Libyan, by the United States.  One might be tempted to add the revolutionary contexts in the two countries as another point of commonality. However, the Iranian takeover the embassy was a part of the revolution. In Libya, the United States enjoys widespread support among the Libyan people who, in post-revolution elections, elected a non-Islamist government that is aiding the United States in investigating the attack. It was a strike against the revolution by globalized terrorists, not a part of the revolution.  The situation in Egypt is far less settled even than in Libya. In Egypt, I am not convinced the revolution is over, and this week's events is evidence.  As I said in my previous post, there are many as yet unanswered questions, and I hope we find answers and learn the right lessons.

The politics of the American presidential election have unsurprisingly entered the scene, as each side attempts to frame the questions and control the messages facing the voting public.  The incumbent president has a great deal to answer for, given the confidence with which he planned to help stabilize this volatile region, and his actions over the coming weeks and months will have some impact on the election. The details will determine to what degree this impact is felt. The Romney campaign is trying to paint the Obama administration as weak and misguided, though I have not heard the alternative strategies the Obama administration should have taken.  Should he have protected Ghadafi and Mubarak?  What about the argument that was floated publicly by some conservatives, declaring the Arab Spring a vindication of, or even a result of, President George W. Bush's "freedom agenda"? But in the past 24 hours Gov. Sarah Palin was on television saying that the promotion of democracy in the Middle East and North African regions is an unrealistic proposition.  Conservative talk show host Sean Hannity and Sen. John McCain had a tense discussion in which McCain accurately depicted the situation in Libya while Hannity seemed unable to tell the difference between Egypt and Libya.  So, while important details are needed to answer specific questions about intelligence and embassy security, as a political issue I only seem to get confused as to what it is the president's critics offer as an alternative plan, or even a cogent criticism.

Let's take a look at timeline of instances, rather than just one, extending our perspective from a single historical analogy (the 1979 Iranian revolution) to a chronology of events that, because of Iran's support for Hezbollah, can be seen to be an extension of the Iranian revolution as well as the early developments of the global Islamist terrorism we still face today.  Much importance has often been assigned to the fact that in spite of an agreement to release them earlier, the American hostages were not released by the Iranian revolutionaries until after President Reagan had taken the oath of office.  There will always be debate about the reasons behind these developments, but ultimately it's not a very important point.  What is significant is that Islamist terrorism continued, even accelerated and expanded, over the years following the Iranian revolution, and it's my thesis that we benefit from realizing the historical similarities or connections between the developments of the 1980s and today, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).  First, an abridged summary --

1981 Libyan Air Force learns lesson from challenging USAF

June 1982 Israel invades Lebanon, bombing Beirut

                SecState Haig and then Shulz want US involved in peace process

                SecDef Weinberger and JCS do not want to deploy troops

                Reagan finds middle ground, sends 800 Marines in August 1982

                                PLO fighters leave, U.S. troops withdrawn

                

 September 1982  700 refugees killed by militia with close ties to Israel

                                  US troops ordered back on shore

April 1983 Hezbollah truck bombs US Embassy Beirut, 17 Americans killed, including 8 CIA

                  Attacks continue. Reagan orders shelling of militia camps

October 23, 1983 Marine barracks at Beirut airport bombed – 241 servicemen killed, mostly               Marines.    Over 100 wounded.  More US shelling in response. Baker, Weinberger and JCS want troops removed.

December 12, 1983 US Embassy in Kuwait bombed, 6 killed, 80 injured

February 1984 remaining troops removed from Beirut

Libyan international terrorism continues 1985-6 in Rome, Vienna, Berlin; Reagan drops 60 tons of bombs on Tripoli, Qaddafi lives and two days later 3 U.S. employees of the American University in Beirut are murdered for the state purpose of revenge for the attack on Tripoli. (The history.com link in the preceding sentence is from 1986, just linked for a quick summary. It includes the often reported death of Qaddafi's 15 month old adopted daughter as a result of the American raid. During the 2011 revolution, it was revealed that the now-grown woman was not killed and was never formally adopted by the long time dictator).

1988 Pan Am 103 bombed over Lockerbie, killing 270, including 189 Americans. Qaddafi stayed in power until 2011.

A more global look at acts of terrorism and war from 1979 to 1988 can be found here.

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So where do we go with this?  Thousands of Libyans fought against us and for al Qaeda in Iraq, and since then many have moved on to Syria and are contributing to the overthrow of Assad with who knows what to come after he's gone.  After losing the revolution at home, a reported 12,000 Libyan fighters carried their weapons to Mali, a country that has seen rising expectations dashed hard on the rocks of tribal and religious warfare.  For decades the Libyan people have suffered under the cloud of the terrorism-sponsoring Qaddafi and now find their homeland and young men subject to non-state terrorism recruitment and a country flooded with arms. 

Where we go is to continue assessing U.S. geopolitical interests in Libya. I believe we are still looking at a historic opportunity to both stabilize Libya, thereby protecting the energy infrastructure and squeezing out another cell of al Qaeda, as well as to assist an incipient democracy take hold. As a principal stakeholder in the geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa for over fifty years, the United States has inevitably been dragged into the tribal, sectarian, and political-economic struggles of the region.  The targeting of U.S. embassies is not a recently invented tactic, as the abridged summary above illustrates, and I'm only writing about the MENA region, whereas there were attacks on U.S. installations in Europe and Latin America as well.  It's part of being a global power. President Reagan is widely praised for taking action against Libya, but those doing the praising also claim that the bombing of Tripoli silenced Qaddafi, taking Libya out of the terrorist picture. The historical evidence shows otherwise, particularly the 189 Americans killed on Pam Am 103.  Furthermore, throughout the 1980s just as today the Libyan situation has dual qualities: in many ways it stands apart, for example, the current differences between Libya and Egypt, but has also been part and parcel of the broader MENA geopolitical environment. In the 1980s, Americans were killed in Beirut in retaliation for the American bombing of Tripoli.  The US embassies in Beirut and in Kuwait were attacked, and for all of its sincere support of Israel, President Reagan issued harsh words and demands against Prime Minister Begin as Israel's invasion of Lebanon was conducted with a fury that mocked the laws of war.  Reagan's cabinet was heavily divided on the right course of action.  The same dilemmas would plague all subsequent administrations, and will plague the administrations of the near future as well, regardless of partisan control of the White House and of debates over defense spending.

President Obama's handling of the current situation can affect the upcoming election, or at least will be on the minds of his political handlers, just as previous political handlers worried about the effects of policy on voters' decisions.  We all hope stability can be restored without mass destruction. But regardless of the electoral outcome in November, the Commander-in-Chief will have to manage these affairs under conditions we cannot wholly control.

I repeat a theme from my last post: The U.S. government cannot determine which groups will rise and which will fail in foreign cultures, though as in Libya the U.S. can be an important factor in shaping the outcomes.