Hey there.
We don't hear a lot about Libya in the United States.
Even Yemen is getting more coverage now that everybody has woken up to how horrible Saudi
Arabia is.
Libya is awkward.
People are vaguely aware that the United States broke it back in 2011, and it never got better.
We Americans don't like to pay attention to that sort of thing.
But the truth is actually worse than that.
US neglect of the issue is keeping Libya broken.
A couple weeks ago I talked about how much good the world could do if it decided to start
trying to help Tunisia, the Arab Spring’s sole success story, instead of driving it
further into debt.
But the sad fact is that if Libya remains as screwed up as it is, Tunisia will never
recover.
Tunisia has many more People, but Libya has vastly more size.
Today Libyan refugees and instability are pouring into Tunisia, just as oil wealth did
prior to 2011.
Before there was a Bashar Assad, and even before there was a Saddam Hussein, there was
a Muammar Ghaddafi.
This Libyan strong man relished his role as a US hate object in the 1980s and 1990s.
He thought he had made his peace with the US under the second Bush, but in 2011, he
found that that was not the case.
NATO invaded the country overthrew his government, and Ghaddafi was savagely murdered in the
street.
We were told we had to do It, because Ghaddafi, the military strongman who controlled most
of the country, threatened the people of Benghazi.
So where are we eight years later?
Khalifa Haftar, a military strongman who controls most of the country, now threatens the people
and leaders of Tripoli.
Fighting has flared up in recent weeks, and Libya is once again on the brink of all out
civil war.
It's actually worse than it was back in 2011, there are a lot more people in and around
Tripoli than there were in Benghazi, and the leaders in Tripoli are supposedly the United
Nations approved government.
Many welcome Haftar's attack on the country’s main population center.
It is being officially condemned all over the world, but only half heartedly.
Many see one strong man as an improvement over the anarchy the country has experienced
for the past 8 years.
I was sympathetic to this idea as well, before I started researching what's actually happening.
Honestly, The more I read about Haftar the less I like him.
The main thing we are supposed to like about Haftar is that he's going to provide unity
rather than a patchwork of militia controlled areas.
But the more you look at Haftar's liberation army, the more it looks like a bunch of militias,
held together mostly by loyalty to one rather old, occasionally sickly man.
Libya is a country that currently has at least three attempts going on right now to manage
militias with kind of representative institutions.
It seems like kind of a shame to throw them all out and go with a strong man.
And then there's this.
Haftar's brand is opposing terrorists.
It seems like he may have stamped out some legitimately bad guys over the past few years,
but it's hard to see exactly what went on through the fog of war and propaganda.
It's also become clear that like most Middle East strongmen Haftar's definition of terrorist
seems to include anybody who disagrees with him.
Right before launching this new offensive on Tripoli, he visited King Salman of Saudi
Arabia.
It's possible he is carrying out this new attack with Saudi Arabia's stealth endorsement.
This wouldn't be too surprising, because he hates the Muslim Brotherhood just as much
as the Saudis to.
Haftar's definition of terrorist seems to include anybody who believes Islam and Democracy
are compatible, which why he has the eager support from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt.
They send him a lot of money, and occasionally bomb thong for him.
Even worse, it seems that some of Haftar's anti-Muslim Brotherhood militias are pretty
serious Salafists Who have tried to enforce a fundamentalist Muslim lifestyle in the areas
they control.
Who knows, maybe Haftar is Libya's savior.
But it's hard for me to believe he isn't a step backward.
What I am more interested in is how we got back to basically the same situation we were
in 8 years ago.
The Libya intervention started out very hopefully.
Pretty much nobody liked Ghaddafi, so China and Russia ran an experiment.
For once they let the US have a security council resolution for a humanitarian intervention,
on the understanding that we wouldn't do regime change.
Aand we screwed them, taking the inch we were given and taking a mile, overthrowing Ghaddafi
and essentially killing the idea of organized global action for the past decade.
With such a bad start, it's little wonder that there hasn't been a United front since.
There were Libyan elections in 2012 and 2014.
Both of those elected legislatures still claim power to some degree The UN has done endless
mediations, but nobody takes it seriously.
Every outside power claims to support the UN process but then goes and supports its
own guys.
We have the same dynamic we have seen elsewhere, with Turkey and Qatar supporting Muslim democrats,
and Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt supporting the people who want to kill those Democrats.
Egypt is big on Haftar, because they see echoes of their own dictator in him, which is another
bad sign.
The EU can't even keep it together.
France supports Haftar, and Italy supports the Tripoli government, because the two European
countries are competing for oil contracts.
This whole thing gets worse because the Libyan power structure is so fragmented.
A single country can find itself supporting opposing militias in different parts of the
country, or even in the same city.
Haftar’s March on Tripoli is making the international community's policy even more
schizophrenic than it already was.
The United States claims to support the UN supported process in Tripoli, but Haftar is
a US citizen, who lived next door to the CIA for a couple decades, and seems to travel
back and forth to the U.S. without any problems.
Basically the United States does not care.
We would rather not hear about this disaster we caused.
But we should care.
Not because we care about Libya, we clearly don't, but because of Tunisia, the struggling
democracy next door.
In the unlikely event that Haftar can take Tripoli, what's to stop him from taking his
crusade against Islamic democracy across the border?
Tunisia's governing coalition includes some Islamist too.
That could be alarmist.
But why take the risk?
The nice thing here is that the United States can make an incredible difference in Libya
without doing much.
If Secretary of State Mike Pompeo could take a day off from his busy schedule of trying
to create new Libyas in Iran and Venezuela he could actually do some good.
A quick word of forceful support for the UN supported government of Libya would go a long,
long way.
Thanks for watching, please subscribe, and if you want to hear more about the US's colossal
2011 screw up in Libya you can check out this rather rude video on Samantha Power from a
couple years back.