"Military Force Was Necessary to Send a Message to Arab Dictators."
They didn't get it. Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi's decision to cling to power by force happened at a delicate moment in the Arab Spring. The previous month, street protesters had ousted Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. But both leaders, however odious, responded to demonstrations with something less than total brutality, and ultimately left voluntarily (if grudgingly). As the revolutions spread elsewhere in the region, a grim lesson emerged from Ben Ali's and Mubarak's downfalls: The best way to hold onto power is to crack down violently against protesters sooner rather than later, before a rebellion gets out of hand. Qaddafi happened to be the first autocrat to put the theory to the test.
In response to Qaddafi's brutality, interventionists argued, preserving space for peaceful revolution in the Arab world -- or, at the very least, preventing copycat massacres -- required the international community to make an example of the colonel. In the absence of intervention in Libya, Obama warned in his March 28 speech, "democratic impulses ... would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship, as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power." New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof claimed that "the message would have gone out to all dictators that ruthlessness works."
But the region's undemocratic rulers seem to have drawn that lesson anyway. Most of this year's uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa have been characterized by security forces reacting to largely peaceful civilian demonstrations with force. On March 18, attacks by President Ali Abdullah Saleh's regime in Yemen killed 52 civilian protesters; since then, more than 60 more people -- including 26 children -- have died at the hands of the regime's security forces, according to Amnesty International and UNICEF. In Bahrain, human rights groups report government forces killing at least 26 people, imprisoning more than 300, and holding 35 without due process. In Syria, demonstrations over the past month against President Bashar al-Assad have resulted in security forces killing at least 400 people, according to Amnesty International.
What the interventionists failed to grasp was that military force, in Libya or anywhere else, is an ineffective tool for sending messages to states not directly in the crosshairs. It is also the height of American arrogance to believe that dictator's will interpret distant military signals "correctly" -- meaning that they accurately understand the signal conveyed -- and then react in the way that Washington policymakers wish. As Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned in 2009 about the military's strategic communication efforts, "We've come to believe that messages are something we can launch downrange like a rocket, something we can fire for effect. They are not."
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