Viktor Bout, a former Soviet Air Force officer who allegedly became an unscrupulous arms merchant, currently resides in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. Thailand’s government extradited him to the United States following his arrest in Bangkok during a sting operation in which American agents allegedly fooled Bout into believing that he had a chance to make money selling weapons to Colombian rebels. (Bout, who will go on trial this fall, denies the charges.)
I first heard about Bout when I travelled in West Africa during the nineteen-nineties, covering some of its rebellions and struggling states. My then Washington Post colleague Douglas Farah was based in Abidjan, in Ivory Coast, around the same time, and became intrigued enough about the mayhem Bout was alleged to have been aiding, through arms sales to ragtag West African rebel groups, that he co-authored a book, entitled “Merchant of Death.”
Bout’s case is one way to enter the debate—apparently under way within the Obama Administration—over whether to arm the Libyan rebels who are seeking to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi. Under what doctrine or posture might the Administration prosecute Viktor Bout on the one hand and, on the other, provide weaponry to ragtag Libyan rebels whose principles, capacity, training, discipline, and understanding of international human-rights norms seem so doubtful—and may prove to be no better than those of many of Bout’s alleged African clients?
The rationale for French, British, and American intervention in Libya was humanitarian. Qaddafi said he would slaughter Benghazi’s citizens; he had the means and opportunity to do so; he had a track record that suggested his rhetoric should be taken seriously. In those circumstances, intervention under international law was justified. I thought President Obama was right to act, notwithstanding the ambiguity of the case and the obvious problems involving what to do next, after Benghazi was protected.
Now the Administration’s policy may be migrating toward the idea of supplying the rebels with weapons. Yet the rebels have as yet no command and control; they serve a political entity (if that is not too generous a way to describe the councils that have been set up in eastern Libya) that is recognized as legitimate by France alone. There is no way to police the rebels’ conduct or to hold them accountable for their actions on the battlefield. It is not clear what the rebels are fighting for, other than survival and the possible opportunity to take power in a country loaded with oil.
It might be justifiable to arm the rebels if that were only way to achieve the humanitarian objectives of the intervention. Yet there isn’t any evidence that it would be necessary to do so to defend Benghazi as a sanctuary. It seems clear that Benghazi can be defended from the air by NATO, even if that requires enforcing “no-drive” zones occasionally. That may be expensive and the aerial operations may last longer than American or European publics might wish, but if those are the decisive points then the intervention should not have been undertaken in the first place and Benghazi’s civilians should have been left to their fate; the high cost and indefinite duration of the aerial intervention was completely predictable. It cannot be policy to protect the lives of tens of thousands of Libyan civilians only if the intervention meets certain standards of cost effectiveness from week to week.
Of course, not everyone in the Obama Administration—perhaps not even the President himself—is content to proceed at this stage only for the purpose of defending a civilian and political sanctuary in eastern Libya. “Qaddafi must go” is not the explicit objective of the U.N. resolution authorizing NATO’s intervention, but it is the preference or the de facto objective now of the NATO governments carrying the intervention out. Qaddafi’s own reckless, all-in response to the intervention has increased the resolve to get him out.
No doubt some in the Obama Administration are thinking about the decade-long stalemate that developed in Iraq during the nineties, in circumstances that are partly comparable to those emerging now in Libya; they want to move quickly to seize on the momentum of the Libyan rebellion and push Qaddafi into exile before he can hunker down and sustain a long defense of Tripoli. The seize-the-day argument is compelling, but it should not be an excuse for enabling reckless violence that contradicts the purpose of intervening in Libya in the first place.
As the defection of Libyan Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa today indicates, there are many political avenues still opening to force Qaddafi out. Even if there weren’t, it looks impractical to arm the rebels as a way to overthrow him quickly. Jon Lee Anderson reports that the number of rebels who are trained fighters is perhaps a thousand; their performance so far, his front line reporting makes clear, suggests that they will not be ready anytime soon to defeat Libyan security forces head on. Perhaps in six months or a year, with substantial training, they could march on Tripoli. But conducting such training and supply, covertly or overtly, would turn the Obama Administration’s intervention from a humanitarian action designed to protect civilians into the promotion of proxy war devoted to regime change, with civilians as prospective collateral damage.
There is time to try to force out Qaddafi by enforcing the no-fly, no-drive zone; enforcing sanctions; and increasing the political pressure on his regime. If it is really necessary to do something more ruthless in order to overthrow him in a timely way, then it would be better to use the elasticity of the U.N. resolution, and the cover of air strikes, to target precisely culpable regime commanders or facilities the Libyan leader values, while quietly communicating ultimatums to Qaddafi and his sons. Precise NATO bombing in Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict persuaded Slobodan Milosevic to give up a lot faster than the operations of the Kosovo Liberation Army ever would have—and the K.L.A. looked like the Wehrmacht in comparison to the rebels who have been racing up and down Libya’s highways in recent days.
It might not be illegal to arm the Libyan rebels at this stage, but it would be wrong, unnecessary, impractical, and self-defeating.
Photograph: D.E.A.
