NATO intervention in Libya: Acting beyond the UN mandate

What has transpired since March when the UN Security Council gave its go-ahead for the use of force to protect civilians in Libya should never have become an occasion for cheering despite the military and political outcome of the intervention. Instead, says Richard Falk, we should learn from the Libyan experience and reject it as a precedent.

IN Western circles of influential opinion, the outcome of the NATO intervention in Libya has already been pronounced 'a victory' from several points of view: as a military success that achieved its main goals set at acceptable costs, as a moral success that averted a humanitarian catastrophe, and as political success the creation of an opportunity for freedom and constitutionalism on behalf of a long-oppressed people. This is one of those rare results in an international conflict situation that seem to please both conservatives and liberals. Conservatives because it was a show of force that reaffirmed Western primacy based on military power. Liberals because force was used with UN backing in accordance with international law and in furtherance of human rights and liberal values.

Qaddafi and his loyalists are apparently a spent force, and the future of Libya now becomes a work in progress without any clear understanding of who will call the shots from now on. Will it be the Libyan victors in the war now battling among themselves for the control of the country? Will it be their NATO minders hiding behind the scenes? Will it be the NATO representatives doing the bidding of the oil companies and the various corporate and financial interests that make no secret of seeking a robust profit-making stake in Libya's future? Or will it be some combination of these influences, more or less harmoniously collaborating? And most relevant of all, will this process be seen as having the claimed liberating impact on the lives and destinies of the Libyan people? It is far too early to pronounce on such momentous issues, although sitting on the sidelines one can only hope and pray for the best for a country substantially destroyed by external forces. Even before the dust of the original conflict settles, it is not too soon to raise some sceptical questions about the unconditional enthusiasm in mainstream Western circles for what has been done and what it portends for the future of UN peacekeeping.

What has transpired since March when the UN Security Council gave its go-ahead for the use of force to protect civilians in Libya should never have become an occasion for cheering despite the military and political outcome of the intervention. This unfortunate triumphal spirit was clearly voiced by the normally critically sensitiveRoger Cohen.Writing in the New York Times,Coheninsists that the Libyan intervention should be viewed as a historically momentous discharge of the global moral responsibility that somehow rests on the shoulders of post-colonial proactive leaders in the West: '...the idea that the West must at times be prepared to fight for its values against barbarism is the best hope for a 21st century less cruel than the 20th.'

This rather extraordinary claim cannot be tested by reference to Libya alone, although even narrowly conceived the grounds for such confidence in Western uses of force in the global south seem stunningly ahistorical. But if the net is enlarged, as it must be, to encompass the spectrum of recent interventions under Western auspices that include Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the self-absorbed gaze of Cohen seems like a dangerously misguided form of advocacy relating to the use of force in international relations. Looking at this broader experience of Western intervention makes one squirm uncomfortably in reaction to the grandiose claim that the willingness of leading Western countries to police the world is humanity's 'best hope' for the future. Cohen is not timid about insisting that the Libya operation up to this point provides a positive model for the future: 'The intervention has been done right - with the legality of strong backing, full support of America's European allies, and quiet arming of the rebels.' A contrast is drawn with Iraq, presumably an intervention 'done wrong.'

There is a heavy dose of implicit paternalism, condescension, and pass consciousness, not to mention wishful thinking, present if the West is to be identified as the best hope for the future just because it managed to pull off this Libyan intervention, that is, even assuming that the post-Qaddafi experience in the country is not too disillusioning in this one set of circumstances. What about putting the failed interventions into the balance, and then deciding whether it is helpful or not to encourage the West, which means mainly the United States, to take on this protective role for the rest of the world? I seem to remember not that long ago such self-empowering phrases as 'white man's burden' and 'civilising mission' being used by colonial apologists with a straight face. The West has quite a record of barbarism of its own, both within its geographic confines and in its encounters with others. It seems arbitrary and contentious to situate barbarism geographically, and it certainly seems strange to think that the long exploited and abused non-West generates a new breed of barbarians at the gate.

And let us not be too quick to heap praise on this Libyan model. It is certainly premature to conclude that it has been a success before acquiring a better sense of whether the winners can avoid a new cycle of strife and bloodshed, and stick together in a Libya without the benefit of Qaddafi as the common enemy. Or if they do, can they embark upon a development path that benefits the Libyan people and not primarily the oil companies and foreign construction firms? Any credible assessment of the Libyan intervention must at least wait and see if the new leaders are able to avoid the authoritarian temptation to secure their power and privilege within the inflamed political atmosphere of the country. The majority of the Libyan people undoubtedly have strong expectations that their human rights will now be upheld and that an equitable economic order will soon be established that benefits the population as a whole, and not the tiny elite that sits on the top of the national pyramid. These are expectations that have yet to be satisfied anywhere in the region. The challenge is immense, and perhaps is beyond even the imagination and aspirations of the new leaders, posing a challenge that exceeds their capabilities and will.

International law concerns

Yet such worries are not just about the uncertain future of Libya. Even if, against the odds, Libya turns out to be the success story already proclaimed, there are still many reasons to be concerned about the Libyan intervention serving as a precedent for the future. These concerns relating to international law, to the proper role for the UN, and to the shaping of a just world order have been largely ignored in the public discussion of the Libyan intervention. In effect, once NATO helped the rebels enough to get rid of the Qaddafi regime, it has been treated as irrelevant to complain about aspects of the undertaking and such issues have been completely ignored by the media. In the rest of this article I will try to explain why the Libyan intervention is far from providing future diplomats with an ideal model. I believe we should learn from the Libyan experience, and reject it as a precedent.

As the World Court made clear in the Nicaragua decision of 1986, modern international law does not allow states to have recourse to force except when acting in self-defence against a substantial prior armed attack across its borders, and then only until the Security Council acts. The United Nations, normally the Security Council, but residually the General Assembly, has the authority to mandate the use of force under Chapter VII of the UN Charter on behalf of peace and security, including on the basis of UN evolving practice, for humanitarian ends under extreme circumstances of the sort that arguably existed in Libya during the latter stages of Qaddafi's rule. This humanitarian extension of UN authority has been challenged as opening a loophole of indefinite dimensions that can be used to carry out a post-colonial imperialist agenda. Even granting that humanitarian ends should now be understood to have been legally incorporated into prevailing ideas of 'international peace and security', a crucial further question exists as to whether the force used by NATO remained within the confines of what was authorised by the Security Council.

The Security Council debate on authorisation indicated some deep concerns on the part of important members at the time, including China, Russia, Brazil, India, and Germany, that formed the background of Security Council Resolution 1973, which in March 2011 set forth the guidelines for the intervention.This extensive resolution articulated the mission being authorised as that of protecting threatened Libyan civilians against violent atrocities that were allegedly being massively threatened by the Qaddafi government, with special reference at the time to an alleged imminent massacre of civilians trapped in the then besieged city of Benghazi. The debate emphasised the application of the norm of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) endorsed by the Security Council a few years ago that sought to allay fears about interventions by the West in the non-West by refraining from relying on the distrusted language of 'humanitarian intervention' and substituting a blander way of describing the undertaking as less of a challenge directed at the territorial supremacy of sovereign states and more in the nature of a protective undertaking reflecting human solidarity. The R2P norm relies on a rationale of protecting vulnerable peoples from rulers that violated basic human rights in a severe and systematic fashion.

But once under way, the NATO operation unilaterally expanded and qualitatively shifted the mission as authorised, and almost immediately acted to help the rebels win the war and to make non-negotiable the dismantling of the Qaddafi regime. NATO made these moves without even attempting to explain that it was somehow still acting primarily to protect Libyan civilians. This was not just another instance of 'mission creep' as had occurred previously in UN peacekeeping operations (for instance, the Gulf War of 1991), but rather mission creep on steroids!

Dilemma

It would have been possible during the Security Council debateto explain in a forthright manner what obviously must have been the real intentions all along of NATO. It would have been possible and respectful of the integrity of UN discourse to have made the attempt to convince the members of the Security Council that the only way the Libyan people could be protected was to help the rebels win the civil war and to be sure that Qaddafi was taken out of the picture. Presumably such forthrightness was avoided by the pro-interventionist states because it would almost certainly have turned several of the already reluctant abstaining five countries into negative votes, including, in all likelihood, those of China and Russia that are permanent members whose votes have a veto effect, which in this case would have prevented the Security Council from reaching a decision. So the pro-interventionists admittedly faced a genuine dilemma: either dissemble as to the ends being pursued and obtain the legitimacy of limited advance authorisation from the UN, or reveal the real goals of the operation and be blocked by a veto from acting under UN auspices. If so blocked, then the further issue arises as to whether to intervene in the absence of a UN mandate.

A similar dilemma faced the intervening governments prior to NATO's 1999 Kosovo War. It was resolved by ignoring the legalities altogether, with NATO acting without any Security Council authorisation. It was also a controversial precedent, and some blamed the Kosovo reliance on 'a coalition of the willing' or on a military alliance as providing a sufficient authorisation, for the later claim of de facto authority to carry out the Iraq invasion without gaining prior UN approval. In both Kosovo and Iraq circumventing the UN's legally prescribed role of deciding when to authorise non-defensive force on behalf of international peace and security was criticised, but the unlawfulness of the action led to no clear repudiation of either intervention after the fact, and rather highlighted the weakness of the UN. In both cases the UN after the fact acted to ratify the results of uses of force that clearly violated the UN Charter's unconditional prohibition imposed on all uses of non-defensive force by member states. The rogue recourse to force was especially disturbing in Iraq as the attack legally amounted to a war of aggression, a crime against the peace in the language of the Nuremberg Judgment rendered in 1945 against surviving Nazi leaders after World War II.

Responsibility

With regard to Libya, the culprits are not just the states that participated in this runaway operation; the members of the Security Council that abstained from supporting Resolution 1973 and the Secretary-General of the United Nationshave a special duty to make sure that the limits of authorisation were being respected throughout the undertaking. It would seem to be a matter of constitutional responsibility for all members of the Security Council to ensure respect for the UN Charter's core effort to prevent wars and seek peaceful resolution of conflicts. When exceptions are made to this generalised Charter prohibition on the use or threat of force they should always be strictly formulated, and then continuously monitored and interpreted, and if limits are exceeded, then the supervisory authority and responsibility of the Security Council should kick in as a matter of course, and in a spirit of upholding the autonomy and legitimacy of the United Nations. The Secretary-General also has secondary responsibility to take appropriate steps to call the attention of the membership to such blatant departures from an authorising resolution as an essential aspect of his role as custodian of the integrity of UN procedures and as the UN's de facto ombudsman in relation to ensuring fidelity to the Charter.

This allocation of responsibility seems more important when it is realised that the actions of the Security Council are not subject to judicial review. This controversial doctrine of judicial self-restraint within the UN system was ironically decided by the World Court in the 1992 Lockerbie case involving sanctions imposed on Libya in apparent violation of relevant treaty law. The majority of the judges concluded that whatever the Security Council decided needed to be treated as authoritative even if it went against international law, that the Security Council always had the last word in shaping UN policy even when it was acting unwisely or irresponsibly.

Against this background, the abstaining states were also derelict at the outset by allowing a resolution of the Security Council involving the use of force to go forward when it contained such ambiguous and vague language as to raise a red flag as to the scope of the proposed authorisation. Although Security Council Resolution 1973 did seem reasonably to anticipate mainly the establishment of a No Fly Zone and ancillary steps to make sure it would be effective, the proposed language of the resolution should have signalled the possibility that action beyond what was being mandated was contemplated by the NATO countries and would likely be undertaken. The notorious phrase 'all necessary measures' was present in the resolution, which was justified at the time as providing the enforcers with a desirable margin of flexibility in making sure that the No Fly Zone would render the needed protection to Libyan civilians. Almost immediately once NATO launched its operations, it became obvious that an entirely new and controversial mission was under way than what was acknowledged during the debate that preceded the adoption of 1973.

The US Supreme Court has often invalidated Congressional action as 'void for vagueness', and this is something in the UN setting that Security Council members should have been prepared to do on their own in their role as final guardians of constitutional integrity in relation to war-making under UN auspices. Given the Charter emphasis on war prevention and peaceful settlement of disputes, it should be standard practice that exceptional mandates to use force would be interpreted strictly to limit the departure from Charter goals and norms, but the UN record even before Libya has been disappointing, with geopolitics giving states a virtually unlimited discretion that international law purports to withhold.

There is a further related issue internal to best practices within the United Nations itself. The Security Council acts in the area of peace and security on behalf of the entire international community and with representational authority for the whole membership of the Organisation. The 177 countries not members of the Security Council should have confidence that this body will respect Charter guidelines and that there will be a close correspondence between what was authorised and what was done, especially when force is authorised and sovereign rights are encroached upon. This correspondence was not present in the Libyan intervention, and this abuse of authority seems to have been barely noticed in any official way, although acknowledged and even lamented in the corridors and delegates lounge of UN headquarters in New York.

This interpretative issue is not just a playground for international law specialists interested in jousting about technical matters of little real-world relevance. Here the life and death of the peoples inhabiting the planet are directly at stake, as well as their political independence, the territorial integrity, and economic autonomy of their country. If the governments will not act to uphold agreed and fundamental limits on state violence, especially directed at vulnerable countries and peoples, then as citizens of the world, 'we the peoples of the United Nations', as proclaimed by the Preamble to the Charter, need to raise our voices. We have the residual responsibility to act on behalf of international law and morality when the UN falters or when states act beyond the law. Of course, this imperative does not imply a whitewash for tyrannical rule.

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for 40 years. He is currently teaching in the Global and International Studies Programme at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The above is reproduced from his Citizen Pilgrimage blog (richardfalk.wordpress.com).

*Third World Resurgence No. 253, September 2011, pp 39-42