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Hey, We Could Also Bomb the Rebels!
| Isn't there anyone in Washington who can play this game? |
WASHINGTON Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, according to senior military and government officials.
As NATO takes over control of airstrikes in Libya, and the Obama administration considers new steps to tip the balance of power there, the coalition has told the rebels that if they endanger civilians, they will not be shielded from possible bombardment by NATO planes and missiles, just as the governments forces have been punished.
So after intervening to help the rebels depose Qaddafi, we'll bomb the rebels if we catch them harming civilians. In a civil war. A brutal civil war.
We're all for protecting civilians, but shouldn't we have made this clear PRIOR to intervening? |
Weve been conveying a message to the rebels that we will be compelled to defend civilians, whether pro-Qaddafi or pro-opposition, said a senior Obama administration official. We are working very hard behind the scenes with the rebels so we dont confront a situation where we face a decision to strike the rebels to defend civilians.
The warnings, and intense consultations within the NATO-led coalition over its rules for attacking anyone who endangers innocent civilians, come at a time when the civil war in Libya is becoming ever more chaotic, and the battle lines ever less distinct. They raise a fundamental question that the military is now grappling with: who in Libya is a civilian?
| Children, women without weapons in their hands, and old folk without weapons in their hands. |
In the early days of the campaign, the civilian population needing protection was hunkered down in cities like Benghazi, behind a thin line of rebel defenders who were easily distinguishable from the attacking government forces.
That is no longer always the case. Armed rebels some in fairly well-organized militias, others merely young men who have picked up rifles to fight alongside them have moved out of Benghazi in an effort to take control of other population centers along the way, they hope, to seizing Tripoli.
Meanwhile, fresh intelligence this week showed that Libyan government forces were supplying assault rifles to civilians in the town of Surt, which is populated largely by Qaddafi loyalists. These civilian Qaddafi sympathizers were seen chasing rebel forces in nonmilitary vehicles like sedans and trucks, accompanied by Libyan troops, according to American military officers.
The increasing murkiness of the battlefield, as the freewheeling rebels advance and retreat and as fighters from both sides mingle among civilians, has prompted NATO members to issue new rules of engagement spelling out when the coalition may attack units on the ground in the name of protecting civilians.
This is a challenge, said a senior alliance military officer. The problem of discriminating between combatant and civilian is never easy, and it is compounded when you have Libyan regime forces fighting irregular forces, like the rebel militias, in urban areas populated by civilians.
| But remember, according to the progressive Left the US military is a bunch of psychopathic killers... |
Oana Lungescu, the senior NATO spokeswoman, emphasized that NATO was taking action because Qaddafis forces were attacking Libyan civilians, including shelling cities with artillery. If the rebels do likewise, she said, the organization will move to stop them, too, because the United Nations Security Council resolution applies to both sides.
Our goal, as mandated by the U.N., Ms. Lungescu said, is to protect civilians against attacks or threats of attack, so those who target civilians will also be targets for our forces, because that resolution will be applied across the board.
But it is no simple matter to follow that logic.
Qaddafi is trying to take advantage of this mixing of combatants and noncombatants to deter NATO from striking, said one Obama administration official who was briefed on the intelligence reports.
| That makes the non-combatants, well, combatants. |
Even though rebel forces were in retreat on Wednesday, the civil war has seen repeated advances and retreats by both sides, and that is expected to continue. The biggest concern is not how to deal with fighters who are loyal to the government, but how NATO would respond to rebels firing on a town of Qaddafi sympathizers, like Surt.
Calls by some NATO members to provide heavier weapons to the rebels suggest that these worries will only intensify.
The deliberations about where to draw the line, going on at the highest levels of allied nations and among senior officials across the Obama administration, show how an intervention to stop a potential massacre is evolving into a much more complex, and perhaps open-ended, role in policing the Libyan chaos.
The situation is as complicated legally as it is militarily. The Security Council resolution that authorized a no-fly zone and other steps in Libya makes no distinction between pro-rebel and pro-Qaddafi civilians.
Senior legal advisers to the military campaign say unarmed civilians, whether living in towns or fleeing the fighting, are clearly meant to be protected by the United Nations resolution, while opposition forces taking an active part in combat away from cities are currently seen as falling outside of its protection.
That's the traditional view: pick up a weapon, even for self-defense, and you're no longer a 'civilian'. That works in a normal war, that is, one that pits one country against the other. Abide by the (mostly Western, post-Westphalian) rules of war and your own civilians are supposed to be protected. The 20th century demonstrated that such protection was relative, especially as civilians became to be recognized as part of the overall war effort.
A further problem is that there are, by definition, no laws in a civil war -- it's a society at war with itself in which the law of the government is no longer respected by the rebellion. The Marcus of Queensbury himself couldn't come up with a code. |
But one such official acknowledged that there were other situations that were much less clear. Noncombatants and the various shades of opposition, resistance and rebellion are so intermixed that it is not feasible to discern where the boundary between the civilians and opposition forces lie, the official said, adding: There are also those civilians entitled to protection that may be armed in order to protect their families, homes, businesses, and communities. Other civilians may join the rebels at certain stages, becoming armed combatants, and then decide to return home for whatever reason, thus transitioning back to civilian non-combatants.
At times when the rebels are gaining ground, the allies fear that the rebels will inevitably try to take loyalist cities by force,
| Brilliant. Yes, that's what rebels do -- take cities and land held by the loyalists. The loyalists do the reverse. A true Homer "d'oh!" moment. |
and could end up endangering or even killing civilians there. That is what prompted the coalitions warnings to the rebels, administration officials said.
The specifics of the warnings like when they were conveyed, who delivered them, and to which rebel leaders remained unclear.
| As is everything else about Libya right now. |
The traditional laws of war distinguish between combatants, who may be lawfully attacked, and civilians, who generally must be protected. Civilians who pick up weapons and join in fighting can be lawfully attacked as long as they are directly participating in hostilities.
But the laws of war are vague about how to categorize internal rebels, rather than external enemies. And the recognized government of a country even an internationally despised one like the Qaddafi government is generally seen to have a right to use force to put down an armed insurrection, said David Glazier, a professor of national security law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
| That was one of the key outcomes of the Treaty of Westphalia: sovereign governments, be they kingdoms or republics, have the right to rule at home, and thus may put down internal rebellions without outside interference. That's what most of Europe and much of the rest of the world hold to today, and one has to be a truly odious government (why, like Qaddafi!) to overcome that reluctance to interfere. |
I dont know that we have distinguished between civilians who are truly nonparticipants in the conflict and who no one has any right to attack, Mr. Glazier said, and those civilians who have taken up arms in revolt against the government and so are legitimate targets. This is all poorly defined. It really is all about politics, and not at all about law.
| Bingo. How many words did the NYT waste to get to that conclusion? |
Posted by: Steve White 2011-04-01 |
