1. Lessons from Libya: How Not to Intervene
- Author:
- Alan J. Kuperman
- Publication Date:
- 09-2013
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- Many commentators have praised NATO\'s 2011 intervention in Libya as a humanitarian success for averting a bloodbath in that country\'s second largest city, Benghazi, and helping eliminate the dictatorial regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi. These proponents accordingly claim that the intervention demonstrates how to successfully implement a humanitarian principle known as the responsibility to protect (R2P). In-deed, the top U.S. representatives to the transatlantic alliance declared that “NATO\'s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention.” A more rigorous assessment, however, reveals that NATO\'s intervention backfired: it increased the duration of Libya\'s civil war by about six times and its death toll by at least seven times, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors. If this is a “model intervention,” then it is a model of failure.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, NATO, War, and Regime Change
- Political Geography:
- United States, Libya, Arabia, and North Africa