Echoes of Baghdad

Ibn Dawood

The fall of Tripoli, symbolically, represents a turning point for Washington, London, and Paris after six months of bombarding Qadhafi’s disintegrating forces. Similar to the fall of Baghdad in 2003, for the moment, all of the initial reservations and criticisms about the West’s air strikes in Libya have been swept aside, and Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy, interrupting their holidays, have come out to celebrate this August political victory.

The media has embraced this euphoria with every channel from Al Jazeera to BBC running hundreds of hours of coverage of the valiant efforts by the rebels to obtain their freedom. The BBC has triumphantly described this phase of the Libyan campaign, along the lines of great battles of the 20th century, as the ‘Battle for Tripoli’. Similar to the tearing down of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, the image of a rebel vandalizing the large clenched fist crushing a US warplane has become an instantly recognizable symbol of the fall of Qadhafi’s regime.

With Muammar al-Qadhafi on the run, the old regime in Tripoli has been replaced with this new rag-tag, disparate group of rebels offering a simple message: a new path for Libya, but few details of what this new path will be. It’s unclear whether the new leadership is committed to creating a democracy in Libya or instead taking Libya down the authoritarian path Maliki is pursuing in Iraq.

Post-war planners in the West, similar to after the fall of Baghdad, are confronted by the challenge of building a state out of rubble. Unlike Iraq, where Paul Bremer recklessly disbanded many of the state institutions that could have been used for state reconstruction, Libya lacks any of such institutions. Qadhafi’s Green Book governance operated on the principle of formal decentralization of power- few state institutions- but informally, through the tight control of his state security services and the whim of his own often irrational mood.

Libya represents a massive state-building project both for the new leadership and for the West. With a number of tribes, personalities, and groups that make up this new political space, the post-Qadhafi euphoria will soon wear off and deep differences will emerge amongst this coalition that took part in overthrowing Qadhafi. One cannot ignore as well the more unsavory elements of the new Libya- the militant Islamists, and a potential insurgency by former Qadhafi loyalists will be a constant security challenge for the new regime. Rebuilding Libya will be an expensive, possibly bloody, and very long endeavor.

For NATO’s most vocal members in the Libya campaign, Paris and London, and its patron, Washington, such a prospect is not one that will gain much public sympathy and support as the months of Libya’s fragile recovery will inevitably drag on with guaranteed setbacks along the way. In this new austere economic environment, Washington which pays 75 percent of NATO’s operations budget will soon discover that leading from behind will become a very costly endeavor at time when most Americans want the US to decrease its presence in the Muslim world and focus on nation building at home. The Obama administration has already alienated Congress over Libya by not seeking further authorization for its war in Libya. Any new funding requests for Libya will be met with steadfast opposition by members of Congress.

Britain and France, always up for a good fight but often absent when it comes to paying the bill, will be reluctant to invest any more into Libya, and the US inevitably will have to fill the gap. NATO often becomes an alliance of one when the going gets tough. Libya is bound to be a very expensive nation-building project, one that no state in the West should be welcoming at the moment. It’s time to hold off the celebrations, and begin serious discussions on how NATO can exit Libya without it becoming another Iraq or Afghanistan, or the very worst case, Somalia.