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Article by Anderson Peck
Confronted with the horrors of genocide, States claim “never again,” yet they remain gridlocked on issues of humanitarian intervention—where it should occur, how it should proceed, and under what authority is such action legitimate. In response to these questions, Gareth Evans and Mohamad Sahnoun published an article in 2002 entitled “The Responsibility to Protect (R2P),” in which they outline the need for intervention in the face of genocide and ethnic cleansing.[1] R2P calls on the international community to position humanitarian rights “not as an argument about the ‘right to intervene’ but about the ‘responsibility to protect.’”[2] NATO’s Kosovo intervention and the humanitarian crises of the 1990s cast doubt on the capacity of the United Nations to enforce humanitarian protections, prompting the endorsement of R2P in 2005 by UN member States. Unfortunately, the consequent implementation of R2P in 2011 inadvertently set the stage for the overthrow of Libya’s government and its ensuing chaos. The unintended consequences following the misapplication of the doctrine tarnished R2P’s international standing and emboldened a defense of nuclear weapons programs by isolated, authoritarian nations who cited them as a “deterrent” against the threat of regime change operations by Western governments.
What Happened in Libya in 2011?
In the eyes of many States, the risk posed to an intervening States personnel, together with the economic costs of any such operation, supplant any potential moral responsibility to act. However, R2P’s first real-world application proved to be a unique exception. In an operation designed to protect protestors at risk of human rights atrocities by the State’s dictator, Muammar al-Qaddafi, the UN Security Council (UNSC) passed Resolution 1973 on March 17, 2011, authorizing military intervention on humanitarian grounds.[3]
Eight years after Libya’s government voluntarily dismantled its nuclear weapons program, NATO forces carried out the military operation in Libya with UNSC authorization. The intervention was not cautious or preventative, as instructed by R2P’s authors, but a hastily taken and poorly executed one.
After seven months of military, financial, and strategic aid from NATO forces, Libyan rebels took control of the country and assassinated Qaddafi in October 2011. By May 2014, the State had devolved into a hotspot of terrorist activity, marred by a violent civil war.[4] What the operation possessed in virtue of its intention to minimize civilian casualties, it lacked in execution. The NATO coalition entrusted the fragile State to violent rebel groups, which was in effect an abdication of its responsibility to follow through on R2P’s project of protection.
The “Case” for Nuclear Weapons
American policy officials have frequently thrown out the term “Libya model,” in reference to the 2003 agreement whereby Libyan dictator Muammar Al-Qaddafi gave up his nuclear ambitions in exchange for sanctions relief.
Since the 2011 intervention by the West in Libya, the case study on nuclear disarmament has instead come to signal the threat of regime change for the world’s isolated, authoritarian States. Only a week after the UNSC passed Resolution 1973, North Korea released a statement suggesting that Libya’s dismantlement of its nuclear weapons program had made it vulnerable to military intervention by the West.[5] It described the assassination and overthrow of Qaddafi as a “grave lesson” that must be heeded by States with nuclear ambitions. Though Libya and North Korea may appear similar at first glance, the conditions and rationale under which Qaddafi relinquished the program indicates important disparities between the two States.
The True State of Libya’s Program
Although Libya had pursued nuclear weapons since 1970 while simultaneously broaching negotiations with the West, in which its nuclear program would serve as a negotiating chip, the nuclear program was far from formidable by 2003. Beginning in the 1970s, Qaddafi routinely gave contradictory statements about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and in 1996, he signed the Treaty of Pelindaba, making Africa a nuclear-weapons-free zone—all while working toward a nuclear weapon.[6] However, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohammed ElBaradei, described Libya’s nuclear program as being at an “early stage of development” after detailed inspections in 2003 in the wake of the State’s formal renunciation of its pursuit of WMDs. Only one week earlier, a Libyan envoy informed the IAEA that Libya had failed to construct an industrial-scale facility and produce any enriched uranium despite its more than decade-long effort towards developing a uranium enrichment capability. Qaddafi’s willingness to abandon Libya’s nuclear program therefore was not out of character, but a calculated decision based on a thoughtful study of nuclear armed nations and in the face of unique domestic tensions within Libya at the time.
Libya’s Cost-Benefit Analyses and Domestic Unrest
The Libyan government conducted cost-benefit analyses of pursuing a nuclear weapons program throughout the late 1980s and 1990s with a focus on deterrence. By the early to mid-1990s, the regime had begun to analyze the results of conflict between nuclear and non-nuclear powers. In Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons, Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer explains that Libyan officials recognized nuclear weapons as a “passive deterrent unable to yield positive results.”[7] They perceived conventional weapons as far more suitable than the “long-term” option of a nuclear weapons program.[8] Given regime sentiment toward nuclear weapons, the rudimentary nature of Libya’s nuclear program, and an abundance of domestic pressures between 1989 and 2003—a crumbling economy, an Islamist uprising, and global isolation by way of crippling sanctions—Qaddafi ultimately concluded that Libya’s security needs did not require a nuclear weapon, and he instead opted for global reintegration through the 2003 agreement.[9]
Conclusion
As the Responsibility to Protect doctrine runs the risk of sliding into irrelevance, fears over a potential nuclear war have only intensified with North Korea becoming the ninth nuclear-armed State. Despite commonplace misunderstandings to the contrary, the question of whether nuclear weapons serve as a deterrent against military aggression had no bearing in Libya’s decision to denuclearize in 2003. Despite his past pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, Qaddafi ultimately abandoned Libya’s nuclear program under rising domestic discontent and a rationale of pragmatism, a decision worthy of enduring praise.
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[1]Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, “The Responsibility to Protect,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 6, 106.
[2]Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, “The Responsibility,” 101.
[3]Alan J. Kuperman, “Obama’s Libya Debacle: How a Well-Meaning Intervention Ended in Failure,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 2, 66.
[4]Alan J. Kuperman, “Obama’s Libya Debacle,” 68.
[5]Brian Coquette, “The Wrong Model: Libya and the U.S.-North Korea Negotiations,” Columbia Journal of International Affairs, July 20, 2018.
[6]Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 197.
[7]Braut-Hegghammer, Unclear Physics, 199.
[8]Braut-Hegghammer, Unclear Physics, 199.
[9]Braut-Hegghammer, Unclear Physics, 196.
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