The Bush administration continues to talk
about applying the "Libya option" to Syria. In
itself, this would be an excellent idea. The
problem is the White House took the wrong lessons
from Libya's decision to renounce weapons of mass
destruction and rejoin the international
community. The Libya model may yet provide a path
through the Syrian imbroglio, but only if applied
correctly.
Winding road to settlement
Prior to the Libyan decision in December
2003 to renounce weapons of mass destruction, the
Gaddafi regime had been trying
for
more than a decade to come in from the cold.
During the George H W Bush administration, Libya
made several attempts to open dialogue with the
United States. The Libyans were willing then to
exchange two suspects in the Pan Am Flight 103
bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland in return for
opening negotiations to suspend sanctions and
normalize relations.
Even though the
Libyans also expressed a willingness to discuss a
verifiable cessation of terrorism and a confirmed
abandonment of weapons of mass destruction, the
State Department rejected bilateral talks.
Once Libya had remanded the two suspects
in the Pan Am 103 case and United Nations
sanctions were suspended, the Bill Clinton
administration opened secret talks with Libya in
mid-1999. At the initial meeting, which took place
more than two years prior to September 11, Libyan
officials recognized a common threat from Islamist
fundamentalism and agreed to cooperate in fighting
al-Qaeda.
Responding to Washington's
expressed concern with Libya's alleged chemical
weapons program, the Libyans agreed to open their
facilities to international inspection and to join
the Chemical Weapons Convention. (The 1992
convention was the first disarmament agreement
negotiated within a multilateral framework that
provides for the elimination of an entire category
of weapons of mass destruction.)
The
Clinton administration declined to pursue the
question of weapons of mass destruction then
because its policy priority remained resolution of
Pan Am 103 issues prior to additional engagement
with Libya.
With the conclusion of the
Lockerbie trial, American and British officials
opened talks with Libya at the United Nations,
detailing steps it must take to terminate UN
sanctions. These talks produced a script,
indicating what Libya must do to satisfy the
families of the victims of Pan Am 103 and to
accept responsibility for the acts of Libyan
officials implicated in the bombing. This script
later became the foundation for three-party talks
to resolve the Lockerbie issue.
In the
wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the
Gaddafi regime offered immediate support for the
"war on terrorism". And bilateral talks between
American and Libyan officials continued in
2001-02, even as the George W Bush administration
ratcheted up its rhetoric regarding Libya's
alleged unconventional weapons programs. In marked
contrast, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi continued
to assert the international legitimacy of Libya,
arguing it was no longer a rogue state.
In
March 2003, weeks before the invasion of Iraq,
Libyan officials approached the British
government, initiating talks with Great Britain
and the United States aimed at dismantling Libya's
unconventional weapons programs. Nine months
later, Libyan Foreign Minister Mohammed
Abderrahman Chalgram announced Libya's decision to
renounce weapons of mass destruction, emphasizing
his country had decided of its own "free will" to
be completely free of internationally banned
weapons. Gaddafi and other Libyan officials
stressed this point in later statements.
Corralling rogue states One clear lesson to be taken from the Libyan
model is the power of engagement as opposed to
containment. Once Libya and the United States were
engaged, progress came through a step-by-step
process of negotiations in which both sides were
clear on what was expected from them and what the
next steps would be. With agreement on clear
guidelines for each stage of the talks, a road map
if you will, both sides shared a full
understanding as to what needed to be achieved
before advancing to the next stage.
In
contrast, the use of force or the threat to use
force generally proved counterproductive in the
Libyan case. The repeated use of force against
Libya, including the bombing of Benghazi and
Tripoli in 1986, failed to produce the policy
change desired by the United States. On the
contrary, it brought Gaddafi welcomed
international attention and enabled him to
consolidate his domestic political position.
As negotiations proceeded in 2002-03, John
R Bolton, then under secretary for arms control
and international security and now US ambassador
to the UN, continued to make widely inaccurate,
threatening charges against Libya. In part for
this reason, the Libyans came to the British, not
the Americans, in the spring of 2003 with their
offer to renounce weapons of mass destruction. In
the course of the negotiations leading to the
December 2003 announcement, Bolton's behavior was
so offensive that he was eventually banned from
the talks.
A third lesson to be drawn from
the Libya model is that sanctions, most especially
bilateral sanctions, are not in themselves an
effective means to change state behavior. In the
case of Libya, "sanctions fatigue" was
increasingly evident in the latter half of the
1990s as more and more states in Africa and the
Middle East ignored the multilateral sanctions
regime. In turn, European states increasingly
challenged, where they did not ignore, the terms
of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act passed by the US
Congress in 1996. At home, Gaddafi took advantage
of the sanctions in place to quash internal
opposition in tribal, military and Islamist ranks.
Finally, regime change was never a
component of the Libya option. As early as
November 1999, Ronald E Neumann, then deputy
assistant secretary for Near East and South Asian
affairs and now ambassador to Afghanistan, made
the point in a short, provocative comparison of
Iraq and Libya. "Libya is not Iraq. We do not seek
to maintain sanctions until there is a change of
regime in Tripoli." While it rejected regime
change in the Libya case, the Bush administration
in the run up to the invasion of Iraq stonewalled
Libyan attempts to comply with nonproliferation
accords.
The White House found it
difficult to reward Libyan attempts to disarm when
they didn't fit its rogue state model. Preoccupied
with Iraq, a negotiated settlement with Libya
would have undermined the administration's
argument that removal of Iraq's alleged weapons of
mass destruction necessitated war.
In the
end, the Libyan decision to renounce weapons of
mass destruction marked a success for patient,
traditional arms control diplomacy. Initiated by
the Gaddafi regime, the process was honed into an
eventually successful diplomatic game plan by the
Clinton administration. It then fell to the Bush
administration to implement the policies
originated by others that led to Libyan
disarmament.
Power of distortion For a complex negotiation, the details that
led to Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass
destruction were surprisingly clear; nevertheless,
the Bush administration immediately sought to
distort the process. White House officials
portrayed the Libyan decision as a byproduct of
the preemptive strike strategy in Iraq, and Bush
suggested in his State of the Union Address that
Gaddafi's decision was a result, not of patient
diplomatic efforts, but of the invasion of Iraq.
Former secretary of state Colin Powell in a March
2004 interview with James Kitfield of the National
Journal joined the chorus, suggesting US policy in
both Afghanistan and Iraq influenced Gaddafi.
While the Bush administration's distortion
of the "Libya option" is hardly surprising, it is
disappointing to see how many journalists and
other observers have failed to understand the
process that led to the Libyan decision. In March
2004, for example, the American Enterprise
Institute published a paper entitled "Beware the
'Libyan model'," which focused on Gaddafi's
"internal repression and international
adventurism", largely ignoring the process that
led it to renounce weapons of mass destruction.
In mid-October, The Times of London
carried an article that suggested a "long list of
painful concessions" demanded by the Bush
administration constituted a "Gaddafi deal" to
bring Syria in from the cold. Two days later, The
Australian carried a similar article that
described the concessions demanded by the White
House as a "Gaddafi deal" to end the Assad
regime's isolation. While other examples could be
cited, the point is that many analysts have joined
the White House in ignoring the step-by-step
approach that made the "Libya option" a success.
The "Syria option" An effective
application of the Libya option to Syria would
include the following elements. First, the Libya
model highlights the extent to which engagement
and dialogue are central to effect desired policy
changes. The Syrian government has often
complained, and rightly so, that its has almost no
channels of communication with the United States.
Long absent from the post, the United States
should send its ambassador back to Damascus. At
the same time, American diplomats should reach out
to Syrian dissidents, human rights groups and
other open-minded Syrians with the message the
United States is standing with them as they move
into the future.
At the same time, the
United States should be careful to let the Syrian
opposition run its own show. Syria's often
fractious opposition has taken advantage of the
international pressure on the Assad regime to join
forces and demand political reform. The "Damascus
Declaration", a statement issued by an array of
small and disparate groups in mid-October, called
for radical change, including an end to emergency
laws the regime has used to curb political
activism. The Damascus Declaration gained the
support of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood,
thought to have an important constituency in the
country, as well as exile groups in Europe and the
United States.
Less than a week after the
issuance of the Damascus Declaration, Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, addressing the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, bantered on about
regime change, refusing to rule out possible
military action against Syria. At the same time,
anonymous sources in the Bush administration were
suggesting the aim of the United States in Syria
was a change in Syrian policy but not a change in
the Syrian regime.
As it did with Libya,
the United States needs to eliminate the
confusion, taking the idea of regime change in
Syria completely off the table. Armed US
intervention in Syria is anathema to most
opposition groups. Equally important from the
standpoint of US policy in the Middle East, the
result of an American-sponsored overthrow of the
Assad regime isn't likely to be better in terms of
regional stability and could well be worse.
If President Bashar Assad Assad is
toppled, the most likely replacement would be
either a hard-line Ba'athist regime or a
fundamentalist Islamist government. Given the
turmoil prevailing today in the Middle East,
opening a new arena of instability in the region
is, to say the least, a very bad idea.
A
commitment to dialogue and policy change should
then be followed by multilateral talks aimed at
setting mutually agreed upon policy objectives for
the Damascus government with explicit rewards for
desired policy modification. While the United
States has an important role to play in this
process, the United Nations should lead the effort
in Syria. The Bush administration should stick to
the diplomatic path and avoid military threats
that could rescue Syria from its current
international isolation.
Working through
the United Nations, steps should be taken to deter
Syria from further destabilization of Lebanon and
to prevent insurgents from crossing into Iraq
while fully backing the judicial process launched
by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, the chief
investigator in the assassination of former
Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Finally, the White House must recognize
that economic sanctions, if the objective is to
promote policy change, simply don't work.
Influential politicians often favor sanctions as a
means to demonstrate resolve, but they have seldom
produced policy change. Iraq, Libya and Sudan
offer three examples. And there is little reason
to believe additional sanctions would be more
effective in the case of Syria.
On the
contrary, the imposition of a comprehensive
sanctions regime would play into the hands of
Syrian hardliners who want no change. Broad-brush
sanctions would also isolate the Syrian people
from the West and alienate ordinary Syrians in
need of reassurance. In short, the innocents in
Syria, not the regime in power, would pay the
price of economic sanctions.
Ronald
Bruce St John, an analyst for Foreign Policy
In Focus, has published extensively on Middle
Eastern issues for almost three decades. Author
of Libya and the United States: Two Centuries
of Strife (2002), and the Historical
Dictionary of Libya(4th edition), which will be
published in early 2006.
