U.S.-LIBYA: Debate Stoked Over 'Leading From Behind'

• by Jim Lobe* (washington)
• Thursday, September 01, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Much of the debate has revolved around the claim made in April by an anonymous administration official quoted in The New Yorker that President Barack Obama was pursuing a conscious strategy of 'leading from behind' - by which he meant quietly galvanising action by others to gain the desired result without the U.S. itself being seen to lead the charge.

'It's so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world,' the adviser told the article's author, Ryan Lizza, who noted the contrast between Obama's 'softly softly' multilateral approach and the brash cowboy unilateralism of George W. Bush and particularly his invasion of Iraq.

'Leading from behind' was instantly adopted by neo-conservatives and other hawks as the catch-phrase that, in their view, effectively captured the weakness of Obama's approach to the rest of the world. As the conflict in Libya moved into stalemate in the following months, the phrase became something of their mantra, derisively repeated at every opportunity by Republican presidential candidates, as well as right-wing columnists and TV talking heads.

Gaddafi's apparent defeat, however, has turned the tables. Some analysts, such as the influential commentator for CNN and Time, Fareed Zakaria, have even claimed that Washington's successful strategy in Libya marks 'a new era in U.S. foreign policy'.

'Many have criticized U.S. President Barack Obama's strategy of 'leading from behind' in Libya, but that strategy now seems utterly vindicated,' wrote Blake Hounshell, managing editor of foreignpolicy.com. 'It was Libyans themselves, with significant help from NATO, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, who liberated their country from Qaddafi's grip.'

That analysis was echoed by Obama's deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, who contrasted the rebel march into Tripoli with 'situations when the foreign government is the occupier'.

'There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset (of the Libya intervention) that have been borne out in our approach,' he told foreignpolicy.com's Josh Rogin. 'The first is that we believe it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers.'

'Second, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions,' he said.

Others have made much the same point, with Zakaria arguing that Obama had rightly insisted on four conditions being met before committing U.S. military force in Libya: the existence of a local opposition willing to wage war; regional support in the form of an Arab League endorsement and the active participation by the two Gulf sheikhdoms; U.N. Security Council authorisation; and the willingness of Washington's European allies to bear much, if not most, of the burden in carrying out the campaign.

'It's important to recognize how different this is from Iraq, where the Bush administration — either through arrogance or incompetence — got almost none of these conditions fulfilled,' he wrote last week.

All of this celebratory analysis has stung the hawks who, while praising Gaddafi's demise, have declined to give Obama much, if any, credit.

Indeed, the first reaction by two key Republican leaders who had lobbied for early and forceful intervention in Libya sounded like sour grapes.

After praising the contributions of the rebel movement and Washington's European and Arab allies, Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham expressed 'regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower'.

Bush's top Middle East aide, Elliott Abrams, echoed that argument in a National Review article entitled 'No, Obama Was Not Right.' 'Had the White House acted sooner and more resolutely, Qaddafi could have been brought down sooner, and with fewer Libyan deaths,' he wrote.

Moreover, he suggested, the administration had inflicted lasting damage on NATO due to its failure to heed pleas from France and Britain, which carried out most of the air attacks on Gaddafi's forces, to resume the much more active role it played during the first week of Operation Unified Protector when U.S. warplanes and cruise missiles took out Libya's air-defence system and other major military targets.

The NATO allies 'will wonder whether 'leading from behind' is very different from refusing to lead …,' he wrote.

That argument was echoed by one of Abrams' former aides on Bush's National Security Council, Michael Singh, now with the pro-Israel think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

'Washington's reluctance to become involved in Libya …sends a negative signal to the Iranian regime and others regarding Washington's stomach for confrontation,' he wrote in a foreignpolicy.com article entitled 'Leading From Behind Still Isn't a Good Idea.'

'It conveys instead the impression of an America that is increasingly unwilling or unable to exercise influence in the Middle East, a development with deeply troubling implications.'

Meanwhile, Daniel Drezner, a conservative international politics professor at Tufts University, mocked the principles and conditions set forth by Rhodes and Zakaria which Obama purportedly insisted had to be met before he would intervene militarily.

'(The) set of criteria Zakaria lists is so stringent that I seriously doubt that they will be satisfied again in my life,' Drezner wrote on his blog on foreignpolicy.com, noting that Russia and China, for example, are unlikely to approve another Security Council resolution authorising the use of force to protect civilians when the last one was used by the Western powers to carry out regime change.

As for Rhodes, '…(B)urden-sharing and local support are obviously nifty things to have. I guarantee you, however, that the time will come when an urgent foreign-policy priority will require some kind of military statecraft, and these criteria will not be met. The Obama administration should know this since its greatest success in military statecraft to date did not satisfy either of these criteria,' he wrote in an allusion to the May killing of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Still other hawks took an entirely different tack, insisting that the talk about 'leading from behind' greatly understated Washington's actual role in the Libya operation.

'…(T)he American contribution, while small in absolute terms, was absolutely crucial,' according to Max Boot, a neo-conservative at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), in an op-ed entitled 'Did Libya Vindicate 'Leading From Behind?'' in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

'It's a shame that some officials are playing down the U.S. role, absurdly trying to turn the 'leading from behind' gaffe into some kind of Obama doctrine,' wrote Robert Kagan, a leading neo- conservative ideologue, in the Washington Post. 'In an allegedly 'post-American' world, it is remarkable how indispensable the United States remains.'

But unlike Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, David Rothkopf, an international business consultant and author who served under former President Bill Clinton, suggested that the anonymous Obama adviser quoted by The New Yorker may indeed have had it right and hailed the Libya intervention as a 'pivot point in U.S. foreign policy' that signalled 'a long-term shift away form the hyperpower unilateralism of the Bush years'.

'A cash-strapped U.S. is one that will necessarily have to lead in a different way that depends more on effective collaboration and burden sharing with other like-minded powers than did the triumphalist, exceptionalist, plutopower of the 'end of history' years,' he wrote in a post entitled 'On the economic roots of leading from behind' on his foreignpolicy.com blog.

*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service