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By Dr. Alan Gropman
The highly respected Council on Foreign Relations has published a great deal on President Obama’s operations in Libya. Meghan L. Sullivan’s essay, “Will Libya Become Obama’s Iraq,” argues that in his speech at National Defense University (televised to the country) President Obama tried to assure the American people that in directing U.S. forces to engage Moammar Gadhafi’s military (but actually attacking much more than assets to ensure a no-fly zone) he was not moving down the road President George W. Bush took in his engagement in Iraq beginning in 2003. The Bush national security team initially thought Iraq would be a short and fruitful operation, but it has turned out to be a long, costly, dragged-out war that has lasted more than eight years, and is still going on.
Dr. Sullivan was on the staff of Bush’s National Security Council Staff at a very high level and is a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has the background to help readers understand this extra-complicated issue.
She asserts, “Obama's road in Libya may prove more similar to … Bush's than it now appears.” As a White House veteran at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Sullivan recognizes the “pitfalls in America's new military intervention,” having heard Obama in his speech make statements similar to those made by Bush and his advisers in 2003.
She argues, the “Iraq war, and the Afghan war as well, offer hard-won insights about the nature of coalitions, the limits of military force and the power of unintended consequences.” Considering those lessons now gives us the opportunity to avoid the same errors.
“To succeed, you need clear goals,” she writes, and the “Bush administration went into Iraq with a multitude of objectives,” including “building a new democratic country in the heart of the Middle East.” But many in the administration did not agree “over how central the creation of a democratic Iraq was to American ambitions and interests.” The U.S., she declares, undertook “a complicated, multifaceted occupation and nation-building project without the planning and resources required for it to succeed.” Iraqi Freedom was doomed before it began.
In addition to framing understandable objectives, the president and his staff should not “sell the American public on a best-case scenario.” Bush's national security team was criticized for “suggesting that the invasion of Iraq would be quick, cheap and simple. This presentation turned out to be wrong … because … the administration failed to factor in the potential difficulties of a post-Hussein Iraq and the possibility of a protracted and complicated U.S. role in the country.”
Sullivan also warns Obama and his team not to expect anti-Gaddafi forces to accomplish much “too quickly,” as the Bush team did in 2003 and in Afghanistan earlier. Because, she writes, “Regardless of the talents of the Libyan people, they will need substantial international help. Societies that have endured decades of oppression rarely flourish quickly once the dictator is gone.”
The prime prerequisite for any state, and especially a newly reborn one, is security, and Sullivan points out the Bush administration discovered: “Security, often provided by outsiders, is needed to build sustainable political institutions.” This must be part of the plan for numerous reasons.
Libya, like Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom, and Iraqi Freedom, is a coalition engagement, and Sullivan warns, “Coalitions require constant care and attention.” “Maintaining a wartime coalition is in¬cred¬ibly difficult,” she writes, “and requires continued American leadership, especially when the operation is managed by NATO,” as is the conflict in Libya.
Finally, Sullivan advises: “Don't forget the neighborhood,” as the Bush team did in 2003, because small “decisions today are magnified tomorrow.” Libya, like Iraq, is in a turbulent region, and hurriedly made tactical decisions might have strategic consequences. She cites, among other pitfalls, the decision to make Iraq a federal state, which, while giving the Kurdish north an opportunity to flourish economically, has led to endless battles over exploitation of petroleum and also the ethnic makeup of the population
It will become obvious to the reader there is much more than Libya involved in this essay. The principles articulated by Dr. Sullivan will be useful to all security planners in the now and in the future.
About the author: Dr. Alan Gropman teaches a course at the National Defense University called Public Policy Formulation: Think Tanks. He is a Life Member of MOAA and served 27 years in the U.S. Air Force. His ideas are his own.
Copyright Alan Gropman and Military Officers Association of America. All rights reserved.
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