To help set the record straight, I recommend this brief article that’s drawn from a longer scholarly article. I quote “The conventional account of Libya’s conflict and NATO’s intervention is misleading in several key aspects. First, contrary to Western media reports, Qaddafi did not initiate Libya’s violence by targeting peaceful protesters. The United Nations and Amnesty International have documented that in all four Libyan cities initially consumed by civil conflict in mid-February 2011 — Benghazi, Al Bayda, Tripoli, and Misurata — violence was actually initiated by the protesters. The government responded to the rebels militarily but never intentionally targeted civilians or resorted to ‘indiscriminate’ force, as Western media claimed. Early press accounts exaggerated the death toll by a factor of ten, citing ‘more than 2,000 deaths’ in Benghazi during the initial days of the uprising, whereas Human Rights Watch (HRW) later documented only 233 deaths across all of Libya in that period.”

The author, Professor Alan J. Kuperman, refers only to media claims being “misleading”, but what’s of greater importance is that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama publicly justified U.S. intervention in Libya upon these same false claims. The Libyan intervention was not purely a “well-meaning intervention” as Kuperman characterizes it in this article. Leaked e-mails reveal a number of ulterior political and power motives of Sarkozy, who led the charge to intervene and overthrow Gaddafi. Nevertheless, even though these other motives were certainly important and pertinent, my point in this blog is that false claims were the foundation of arguments that a UN and US intervention was justifiable on either humanitarian or R2P grounds. To this day, the U.S. officials most responsible for the intervention and its consequences (Obama, Clinton, Power and Rice) have not acknowledged that their public justifications at the time find no actual support in the facts of Gaddafi’s response to the rebellion.

Any regrets Obama and Clinton may have for the consequences of intervening in Libya are very muted, misconceived or absent. Obama holds on to the social-engineering attitude that relies on power to fashion whole economies and societies. He has said “If you’re gonna do this, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies.” Clinton thinks that Obama made the right decision and that Libya is a “work in progress”. She too thinks of war and intervention as some sort of social development project; and if at first you do not succeed, you just need to keep at it, collectively and through power, that is.

Both of them have faith in a version of liberal progressivism that’s expanded to global and international dimensions. They basically believe in the power of government to mitigate or bring evils down to minuscule remnants. They seem unaware of government’s role in creating new evils and worsening existing ones. They believe in “the law” as a means of controlling evil and ridding the world of it. This is a Pharisaic attitude that relies on observing forms, such as democracy. This opposes the idea of grace and individual redemption. The law can never remove an evil. Pushing laws further and further creates its own evils, such as in the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Whereas the initial progressive agenda included “overseeing civil society, regulating the economy, and redistributing wealth”, the expanded agenda includes such things as ending terrorism, remaking countries, forming states, instituting democracies, using force for humanitarian ends and, more generally, using government power to mitigate any and all evils. This is not a path to the Kingdom of God.

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