President Obama’s position on his authority to launch military action was rather different from candidate Obama’s in 2008, when he had stated unequivocally that “the president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” In fact, there had been a vigorous debate within the administration over whether he had the authority—without congressional action—to sustain the intervention in Libya for more than sixty days, with the Justice Department and the general counsel of the Defense Department arguing that he did not. He chose to go with the opinion of the White House counsel and State Department legal adviser, that the engagement fell short of “hostilities” as defined in the War Powers Act and therefore the mission could be continued indefinitely without permission from Congress. A small minority of Republicans and Democrats on the Hill strongly objected to this assertion of presidential power, but there was never a serious challenge to the legality of the president’s actions.
There was a challenge, however, to the limitations Obama had placed on the military mission. In a televised speech at the National Defense University on March 28, he explained why he had decided to intervene in Libya, offered justification for acting there and not in such conflicts elsewhere, and described the limited nature of the U.S. military mission. He made clear that we would transfer leadership of the military operation to NATO two days later and reduce the level of our involvement, and he explicitly stated that using the military to bring about Qaddafi’s removal would be a mistake.
Mullen and I caught the full blast of congressional blowback on those limitations when we testified before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on March 31. The ranking Republicans in both houses—McCain in the Senate and Buck McKeon in the House—asked why the military mission fell short of regime change. I replied that we had to differentiate between political goals and the military mission. The military mission authorized by the UN was to establish a no-fly zone and protect civilians, whereas the U.S. political goal was to get rid of Qaddafi. McCain was bitterly critical of the president’s decision to turn over the military mission to NATO and reduce our support after the initial destruction of Qaddafi’s air defenses, saying that would only make it harder to achieve our policy goals. We should, he said, do whatever was necessary to succeed in Libya, short of sending in ground troops. Senator John Cornyn of Texas said he wished the president had gone to Congress before he went to the UN; he added that the mission in Libya was unclear, that NATO wouldn’t be able to finish the job on its own, and that there was no plan post-Qaddafi. When he asked me about the “ill-defined endgame,” I responded that the last thing America needed was another enterprise in nation-building, other countries ought to take responsibility for Libya, and “I don’t think we ought to take on another war.”
At another point in the hearing, I acknowledged that I was preoccupied with “mission creep” in Libya and that, given our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I needed help from Congress to limit our role. The House committee was far more critical than the Senate of the president’s failure to get congressional approval for the Libya action. Members also pressed me on the cost. I said we had nineteen ships and 18,000 troops committed to the operation, and the cost for the first eleven days was about $550 million, and probably $40 million a month going forward. I agreed with several members that “we should not overestimate our ability to influence” what would happen after Qaddafi fell. I acknowledged we knew little about the rebels, but “we know a lot about Qaddafi and that is reason enough to help them.”
The hearings were awkward for me because many of the members were raising precisely the concerns I had raised during the internal administration debates. Asked if the situation in Libya involved our “vital national interests,” I honestly said I did not think so—but our closest allies felt that it affected their vital interests and therefore we had an obligation to help them. When asked whether there would be U.S. forces on the ground in Libya, I impetuously and arrogantly answered, “Not as long as I’m in this job.” The response was a further reflection of my diminishing discipline in testifying. I simply should have said that the president had been quite firm in prohibiting the use of American ground forces.
I later confided to my staff that I had considered resigning over the Libya issue. I told them I had decided not to leave because I was so close to the end of my tenure anyway; it would just look petulant. Frustrated, I said I had tried to raise all the issues for which the administration was being criticized—an open-ended conflict, an ill-defined mission, Qaddafi’s fate, and what came after him—but the president “had not been interested in getting into any of that.” I was, moreover, at the end of my tether with White House–NSS micromanagement. The same day the military campaign began, I started to get questions at a principals’ meeting from Donilon and Daley about our targeting of Libyan ground forces. I angrily shot back, “You are the biggest micromanagers I have ever worked with. You can’t use a screwdriver reaching from D.C. to Libya on our military operations. The president has given us his strategic direction. For God’s sake, now let us [Defense] run it.” My well of patience had gone dry.
All twenty-eight NATO allies voted to support the military mission in Libya, but just half provided some kind of contribution, and only eight actually provided aircraft for the strike mission. The United States ultimately had to provide the lion’s share of reconnaissance capability and most of the midair refueling of planes; just three months into the campaign, we had to resupply even our strongest allies with precision-guided bombs and missiles—they had exhausted their meager supply. Toward the final stages, we had to reenter the fray with our own fighters and drones. All this was the result of years of underinvestment in defense by even our closest allies.
Libya’s population of 6.4 million is made up of a mix of ethnic groups and indigenous Berber tribesmen. It has been occupied, dominated, or governed over the past 2,500 years by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Ottomans, Italians, British, and French. Its three historical regions—Cyrenaica, the eastern coastal area; Tripolitania, the central and western coastal area centered on Tripoli; and Fezzan, the southwestern part of the country—were politically unified only in 1934, and the autonomy of the regions was reduced largely through Qaddafi’s repression (although even at his strongest, he had to pay close attention to tribal politics). In short, Libya as a unified entity is a relatively recent phenomenon, created by foreigners. Problems abound there. Can a weak central government hold the country together in the face of long-standing centrifugal pressures? We shall see.
I believe we are in the early stages of what is likely to be a very long period of instability and change in the Arab world. Above all, we must stop pretending to ourselves that we can predict (or shape) the outcome. At a White House meeting at the end of March 2011, U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford asserted that “Assad is no Qaddafi. There is little likelihood of mass atrocities. The Syrian regime will answer challenges aggressively but will try to minimize the use of lethal force.” He would be proven horribly wrong.
Fundamental questions remain unanswered. Will free elections in the Arab countries inevitably lead to Islamist-dominated governments? Will those governments, in time, revert to authoritarianism? Will the military reverse the outcome of elections that bring Islamists to power (as in Algeria and Egypt)? The absence of democratic institutions, the rule of law, and civil society in virtually all Arab states—and the challenges facing secular reformers—do not provide much reason for optimism. Will freely elected governments be able to make the hard decisions necessary to bring economic growth and alleviate the grim existence of most Arabs? If not, will they turn to extreme nationalism, blame Israel and the United States, or ignite sectarian violence as a diversion from their domestic failures? Can states whose boundaries were artificially drawn by foreigners and that are composed of historically adversarial tribal, ethnic, and religious groups—above all, Iraq, Syria, and Libya—remain unified absent repression? Will the monarchies and emirates strive to preserve the internal status quo, undertake gradual but real reform, or face their own violent challenges to stability and survival? I believe the only way the United States will find itself “on the right side of history,” as these revolutions and their aftermath unfold, is to continue to articulate our belief in political freedom and human rights, and to affirm that government exists to serve the people and not the other way around, as well as our belief in the superiority of a regulated market economy. Beyond that, we will have to deal with each country individually, taking into account its specific circumstances and our own strategic interests.