AS NATO prepares to wind down its air operations over Libya and end its naval blockade, satisfaction over the outcome will be mixed with concern over the weaknesses it exposed. Time was always against the brutal regime of Muammar Qaddafi, but had the effort to oust him dragged on into the winter, the political will of those NATO members doing the heavy lifting in Libya would have been tested and the mission’s critics, particularly in America, would have claimed vindication. The smell of failure would have added to NATO’s woes as it struggles to find a respectable exit from Afghanistan over the next three years.
In many ways, NATO did rather well. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 authorised the protection of civilians, but specifically ruled out the use of ground forces. The alliance stretched its mandate to the limit, in effect becoming the insurgents’ air arm. As Michael Clarke, the director of the Royal United Services Institute, a London think-tank, observes, supporting disorganised and poorly equipped rebel forces against a well-armed and ruthless regime required improvisation and flexibility.
So far, so good in the first part. We could grind down a gravely weakened Libya over time, but it was unclear if we'd provide that time. Further, we didn't use a no-fly zone to win, which I thought was completely pointless. But I was worried about the initial air campaign until we learned how to become the rebel air force and adapted over time by
But then the editorial gets the Iraq War of 2003 wrong in a very fundamental way in drawing a lesson from 2003 in how NATO planned its air war:
American-style “shock and awe” tactics were ruled out. Learning from Iraq, NATO decided from the outset that the last thing the rebels needed when they eventually took power was a civil infrastructure wrecked by bombing. So NATO warplanes took great care to hit only military targets.
"Shock and awe" was not about hitting civilian targets! Indeed, General Franks, who commanded the invasion, denied that it was in his playbook at all despite press descriptions of the air campaign as "shock and awe." Not only was our air campaign in 2003 not about hitting civilian targets, we did not hit civilian targets (John Keegan, The Iraq War (Knopf, New York, 2004. P. 143):
The air war could be, and was, directed almost exclusively at military targets, though in the opening stage, widely described as that of "shock and awe", the headquarters and administrative buildings of the Iraqi government and Ba'ath party were deemed to be military targets.
Remember, our intent was regime change and we went right for the heart of the beast by driving on Baghdad and the last thing we wanted when we actually put new people in charge was to have a massive reconstruction effort as the result of destroying Iraq in order to save it. The problem was that Iraq needed construction before we crossed the berm in Kuwait to change the regime. The infrastructure was threadbare after a couple decades of neglect and war damage during the Iran-Iraq War, the Persian Gulf War, and a decade of sanctions. We didn't break it in 2003. It was already broken.
Only 8 years after we defeated Saddam, a major news magazine has no idea of what our air campaign did in 2003 and is drawing lessons from that mistaken lesson. God knows what people will "learn" from Libya. I fear it will be based on their beliefs of what war should be like and not on what happened.
