Our Limited Options in Libya

Is saving half the country good enough?

In the Ottawa Citizen, Romeo Dallaire and Hugh Segal deliver an impassioned plea for the international community to live up to its “responsibility to protect” the innocent from war crimes and take practical steps to intervene in Libya. Their recommendations include instituting an arms and military technology embargo against Gadhafi’s government, imposing sweeping UN sanctions, launching an International Criminal Court investigation into the government’s brutal crackdown, and enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya to stop Gadhafi’s air force from bombing protesters. Notably Dallaire, who was desperate for international military intervention in Rwanda in 1994, does not seem to think armed intercession in Libya is a workable solution. The alternatives he presents are all good ideas that Canada should follow through on (especially an arms embargo, which should be a no-brainer), but with the exception of the no-fly zone, sadly none of them would significantly curtail Gadhafi’s present ability to wreak violence on his own people.

The Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui offers another possible, admittedly imperfect, solution to the Libyan problem. Gadhafi has already lost the eastern half of the country, he reasons, so why not just let the East “peel off” and become its own country. Gadhafi might wage a brutal war to win it back, but Siddiqui thinks it’s more likely he will “let it go to keep what he has,” and the international community could flood the East with aid, effectively salvaging half the country while waiting for Gadhafi to die. This pragmatic approach is rooted in Siddiqui’s belief that sanctions are too weak a measure and that any intervention from the west will only fuel Gadhafi’s argument that the uprising is foreign-influenced. It’s an interesting idea, but given how quickly things are evolving on the ground it's premature. With Libyan army units and diplomats defecting by the dozens, who’s to say that Gadhafi won’t be toppled by his own entourage or driven out by rebel battalions in the coming days? And of course Siddiqui’s plan would do nothing to stop Gadhafi from murdering the people who remain in his reach, and the grim reality is that nobody can say what will.