U.S. Evacuates Embassy In Tripoli Amid Renewed Violence
Add Libya to the list of the world's trouble spots.
While the world has been paying attention to Ukraine, Gaza, and Iraq over the past several weeks, the political and military situation in Libya has also been deteriorating. Militia groups from Misrata and other parts of the country have been battling government forces for weeks now, with much of the recent fighting centering around Tripoli’s airport. In recent days, though, it seems that the situation inside the capital itself has deteriorated to such an extent that the United States has chosen to evacuate all personnel from the embassy:
The U.S. Embassy in Libya evacuated its personnel on Saturday because of heavy militia violence raging in the capital, Tripoli, the State Department said.
About 150 personnel, including 80 U.S. Marines were evacuated from the embassy in the early hours of Saturday morning and were driven across the border into Tunisia, U.S. officials confirm to CNN.
CNN has learned the plan to evacuate the Americans was in the works for several days, but the decision to carry out the plan was made just in the last few days as the security situation around the embassy deteriorated.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said the United States is grateful to Tunisia “for its cooperation and support.” She said the personnel are “traveling onward” from Tunisia.
“We are committed to supporting the Libyan people during this challenging time, and are currently exploring options for a permanent return to Tripoli as soon as the security situation on the ground improves. In the interim, staff will operate from Washington and other posts in the region,” Harf said in a statement.
“Securing our facilities and ensuring the safety of our personnel are top Department priorities, and we did not make this decision lightly. Security has to come first. Regrettably, we had to take this step because the location of our embassy is in very close proximity to intense fighting and ongoing violence between armed Libyan factions.
Militia fighting in the area of the embassy and airport has degraded security in Tripoli significantly.
(…)
The Pentagon had pressed for weeks to evacuate the embassy, especially after the Tripoli airport came under repeated militia attack, leaving Americans no way to get out via commercial air, the official said.
The decision to use vehicles to drive the Americans across the border was seen as the best low-profile approach to conducting the evacuation rather than sending U.S. military helicopters and troops into Tripoli.
Harf said the United States will work with Libya and the international community “to seek a peaceful resolution to the current conflict and to advance Libya’s democratic transition.”
“We reiterate that Libyans must immediately cease hostilities and begin negotiations to resolve their grievances. We join the international community in calling on all Libyans to respect the will of the people, including the authority of the recently-elected Council of Representatives, and to reject the use of violence to affect political processes. Many brave Libyans sacrificed to advance their country toward a more secure and prosperous future. We continue to stand solidly by the Libyan people as they endeavor to do so,” Harf said.
Instability has been the rule rather than the exception in Libya ever since the Gaddafi regime fell, of course, and in no small part is the reason behind the events that led to the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi in 2012. Much like Iraq after Saddam, it has seemed as though there is very little holding the nation together without the presence of a strong dictator, which leads to all the warring factions that have been fighting for virtually the last three years. In many ways, this is a reflection of the fact that there seems to have been very little discussion about what a post-Gaddafi Libya would, or should, look like either by Libyan opposition leaders or by the Western powers that intervened in the Libyan civil war in early 2011. The result was the creation of a power vacuum that militant groups rushed into, and a competition among the broad coalition that had opposed Gaddafi in the war for power. At the time, some suggested that the best alternative for the country would be either partition or a system with a relatively weak central government and regions with autonomy to go their own direction. Whether that’s the best solution or not is well above my pay grade, but it certainly seems as though the situation on the ground has gotten much worse, and that Libya is in danger of becoming the breeding ground and safe haven for terrorists that many feared it would become.
Welcome to hope and change.
wouldnt it have been better to have a CIC whose foreign policy went a little deeper than bowing and scraping, apologizing for everyone?
Yeah, I know, downvotes and all that, but frankly I dont much care, because nobody can even come close to explaining how all these issues are not the direct result of a feckless and supine foreign policy.
and that doesnt even touch on the rest of what the left, with the help of the entrenched GOP moderates, has bungled since 08.
It seems as if borders drawn a century ago are not working out like we thought they would.
@Eric Florack:
Perhaps you could start by explaining how they are?
As Doug notes, you can draw direct lines between the removal of dictators (Saddam in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya) and the unrest that followed. Removing dictators isn’t usually described as a supine move.
So, what would you like our CIC to do? Pull a Clinton a la Somalia? Act like Bush and Iraq? How many trillions are you loaning the treasury to give the Lybians a united enemy to use for target practice while CNN wines over civilian casualties?
It’s not our place, they’re just doing the same old tribal fighting they’ve been doing for 1300 years.
Don’t I know it. The world was a peaceful, stable place before Obama took office.
The lesson here is that we have artificial countries in areas that have been by nature tribal since the beginning of time it usually takes a tyrant to hold them together. When you overthrow a tyrant like we did in Iraq or aide in the overthrow tyrant as we did in Libya we shouldn’t be surprised if the country comes apart at the seams afterwords.
When I worked for the DIA in the early 70s we often had discussions on how the old Yugoslavia was likely to come apart when Tito died. Tito was a bit of an exception – he was what we would refer to as a benevolent tyrant and treated all of the ethnic and religious groups equally. Indeed when he died the country erupted in civil war and eventually broke up on ethnic and religious lines.
@Tillman: more likely it’s the savages being unable to govern themselves without a heavy handed dictator!
Just think of all the educational and cultural exchanges we will lose out on now. All the scientific breakthroughs that won’t happen. The advances in science. The list is endless. Let’s dedicate our economy and army and future to saving this nation. Only we, ‘Merica, know how to save them. We can do it bc we are ‘Mericans
In the end, what the USA, Britain and France did when it aided the overthrow of Gadaffi was (1) to forestall a threatened massacre(2) give the Libyans a chance to set up a modern, democratic regime. The Libyans seem to be screwing up their chance, but that’s on them.
One of the things a study of revolutions teaches is that revolutions often fail or are subverted when the victors fall out and fight out among themselves. I know Americans (who arguably have had the most successful revolution in history) are often dismayed by the frequent failure of revolutions, but there it is.
I think the best analogy to Arab Spring is 1848 and the flurry of revolutions that broke out all over all Europe demanding democracy and freedom. They succeeded at the first-then the forces of counterrevolution set in and they all collapsed. By 1850 the old order had been restored- yet the revolutionary spirit wasn’t extinguished, and eventually, democracy came to Europe.
Now it may be just misguided idealism to imagine that the Libyans are on the same trajectory, as, say, the western Europeans were in 1848. But I think it is at least a possibility. What this means though is that we have to take a long view of history. Those who wonder why Libya hasn’t achieved Austria on the Mediterranean by 2014 should understand that the Austria of today is the product of many failed revolutions, successful counterrevolutions, mishaps, and turmoil.Realistically, Libya may be a generation or two away from achieving modern democracy-and they may never actually make it. But we did give them a chance, and that’s a good thing.
@stonetools
Do you think that the overall point of your post applies to Iraq, too?
@Eric Florack:
Do you think McCain was lying about his Libya foreign policy preferences back in ’11? Because if you took him at his word, the only difference (if he was CiC) would be he would have gone in earlier, without the UN / Arab League / African Union mandate.
@Eric Florack:
Apparently suppine in your provincial dialect means “not supportive of permanent war and poorly thought through imperial ambitions.”
@stonetools: Yes quite.
The 1848 analogy is quite spot on, both relative to the relative development of various national identities and the political system framing.
Libya was worth a shot – it was not going back to pre Tunisia revolution state regardless – the best case without intervention was likely Libya would look rather like Syria does now.
Of course American comment tends to forget the French were going in regardless of the Americans and were rather active with their own special forces. Not all rode on what Americans did.
@ Lounsbury
Florack is always in favor of war, as long as he is not one of the folks getting shot at.
actually, i prefer actually winning the wars brought to us.
Negotiation does not bring peace, only more war, @anjin-san.
@Lounsbury same comment to you. One would think youd have figured that after watching the continuous war waged on Israel, despite all the consessions she has made… of late mostly at the behest of US leftists, such as the Clinttons.
@Jeremy R: As ive said repeatedly, McCain is an idiot I want nowhere near the white House. The man is nowhere near being a conservative. I am on record as only marginally supporting the man as being a somewhat smaller worldwide disaster than Obama has bee.
@stonetools: Of course its on them. Youre quite right, but it has gone down that way each time. appears to me that there is something to the idea that not all cultures are equal, huh?
@Ron Beasley:
Hmmm. Excellent point. In fact, it sounds rather like what I suggested over a decade back…
Now… translating that to the middle east… well, you get the idea.
What happened to “you break it, you bought it”?
Oh yeah, that only applies when a Republican is president.
@Eric Florack: I think this is probably true:
I think you miss a few important points. Russia under the Czars was a tyranny and a majority of the population suffered. The same can be said for Cuba under Batista, the top 1% of the population held most of the wealth and it too was a tyranny. They basically traded one tyranny for another. In the case of East Germany you are probably right and I really don’t know much about the history Korea. As for the Middle East it remains culturally a tribal society and I don’t see how that can be changed overnight.
@Eric Florack:
How very amusing:
In short, then you are one of those ill-learned provincial Americans that have been duped into believing that every conflict must follow your Great Moral Story of WWII mythology.
Of course any proper reading of history indicates rather clearly your opinion on negotiations is utter bollocks without any grounding in proper history.
US Leftists like Clinton….
Amusing, it does tell me you are one of those dim wits who repeats empty-mindedly ideological cant. Formerly an endemic disease of the Hard Left (the real Hard Left not your bizarre readings) in particular, in the USA, the former conservatives in USA have rather been infectec by Bolshie style ideological cant.
Israel has done bugger-all in concessions, and the idea that the country has been conceding anything much at all is only something believed by apparently Americans and Israelis of the Hard Right. Complete bollocks.
Of course, I’ve actually been there and to the territories, for reasons business and investment, so need not rely on lapping up AgitProp.
@anjin-san:
Yes that does come through now. Someone who has lapped up the Bolshy Ancien Trotskite thinking that your NeoCons ported over to your right.
Bloody surreal, your Right Bolsheviks.
@Ron Beasley:
Libya is no more artificial than Belgium nor Germany nor Italy. The two main parts of Libya, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania are really quite ancient ‘identity units’ and rather more ancient than your country.
Nations are made, not natural entities.
What can be said is that is that it is hard to build a national cohesion on the backs of a personalised family/tribal dictatorship (the Gaddafa), that itself hesitated between pan-National identity (pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism) and did a piss-poor job of creating any proper institutions at all. For all that it sometimes made quite amusing TV if one could tolerate watching the Libyan national channel – Gaddafi personally reviewing ‘moussassa’ accounts on TV, going off on odd rant-tangents and occasionally accepting a correction had a most surreal quality. Crap as governance, but amusing at some level.
The North African nations are not the same as the Middle Eastern one in their histories.
@Dave: Indeed so, and this thread seems to demonstrate that clearly.
@Ron Beasley: Oh, there is no question in my mind it wont be. indeed, I said as much… that it was going to be a long task to turn things around…. and took a lot of heat for it…. complaints I was supporting perpetual warfare, from the usual suspects. Defeat is inevitable when you withdraw before the task is completed.d
@Lounsbury: Yes, like Clinton.
Ponder what I said pre-9/11.. 1999, I think this was…
So, what has changed?
Not a blessed thing.
Nor will it ever change, so long as we keep trying to negotiate with these unspeakable bastards. Each time we do so, particularly when a leftist is in the WH, the attempt is made to ascribe the title of “Peacemaker” to people like Clinton, and Carter before him, each of which unquestionably made the situation worse, not better, in that region.
@Eric Florack:
What like a corporate raider? Yeah I don’t see how an in-depth knowledge of off-shore banking laws would help here.
Oh I know, the Senator whose answer for every problem is more war, that would work well, man if we’d only armed the Libyan rebels more and then armed the Syrian rebel groups- then at least the people fighting in the streets of Tripoli and Tikrit would have M-16s instead of AKs that would make things better right?
@Ron Beasley: You could make a decent argument for the latter years (pre-Revolution) Qaddafi as a relatively benevolent tyrant in the Pinochet/Tito mold– killed his enemies and suppressed dissent but didn’t wipe out tens of thousands ala Saddam.
@Eric Florack:
What war in the last 50 years was “brought to US” other than perhaps Afghanistan– which if you’re counting that one as being “brought to us” was won by Obama in May of 2011 when Bin Laden was killed.
@ Florack
What do you propose? Genocide? Maintaining Gaza as a huge, eternal concentration camp?
@socraticsilence: at what point have I ever argued for such? Straw man.
@Dave:
Obama “broke” Libya? Did I miss our sending in ground troops?
@socraticsilence: Radical Islam, in this context.
@anjin-san: No, I suggest winning the war.
see also, Germany & Japan.
@ Florck
In other words, bomb them until we are simply blasting rubble into smaller rubble, and kill hundreds of thousands of non-combatants.
Oh, and maybe use nukes.
And when the arab countries end oil exports and our economy collapses, what is your plan?
@Yolo Contendere: Obama broke Libya when he took a mandate to prevent a massacre in Benghazi and perverted it into regime change. It has been anarchy in Libya ever since. I was no fan of Ghaddafi, but even he was better than the chaos and murder of the last three years. Not to mention what is yet to come.
Prominent Republicans cheered him on, but that’s no excuse for his massive blunder is it? At least that’s the party line when it comes to Bush and the Democrats who not only cheered, but voted to authorize his attack on Iraq.
@socraticsilence: us, being whom?
The United states proper, or western civ, of which we are the only superpower?,
@anjin-san: Not quite.
hit them with enough force that both they and the remainder of the world cannot see themselves winning such a fight Can there be any doubt that doing this with the afore-mentioned countries turned them into stalwart freinds of peace and freedom and among our closest allies?
@anjin-san: as for oil… we have more than they do. You do know that, right?
@ Florack
So you are going on record saying that if middle eastern oil stopped flowing tomorrow, it would not be a disaster for our economy?
@ Florack
You keep bringing up WW2. What you are talking about is not what we did to Germany and Japan.
In WW2. We engaged in systematic, wholesale slaughter of their citizens, and destruction of their cities and industrial plants. We wiped entire metropolises off the map. We nuked Japan, twice.
We did not hit them hard until they understood. We took them to the brink of utter destruction. Then we took over their countries with armies of occupation. Then we rebuilt their countries.
What was that line from Apocalypse Now? Oh yes, “Don’t get off the boat. Absolutely fu**king right. Not unless you are going to go all the way.”
We transformed Germany and Japan by slaughtering them until they were willing to do anything, anything at all to make it stop, including change. So don’t pretend that issuing a sound thrashing will somehow accomplish the same thing in the middle east.
@anjin-san: with Obamas “no domestic drilling” policy, hell yes. Otherwise, our becoming an oil supplier would tip the scales a bit, realisiticly. World supply would be off, but then again, that means higher prices and thereby bigger income for us. That minor point aside, however, I note once again, that when you’re arguing for liberals, you ignore profits but when arguing against conservatives, you tend to hold the dollar sign as your final moral arbitor.
And yes, @anjin-san: it will accomplish the same thing. It works every time its tried. And before you get on that high horse again about civilian deaths, explain to us how many more people on both sides have to die because we refuse to treat an enemy as such,. How does your moral compass (choke, cough) mesh with those deaths?
@Eric Florack:
“Everybody’s going to the party have a real good time.
Dancing in the desert blowing up the sunshine.”
@ Florack
Ah yes, well, that explains the historic energy boom we are in the middle of. Obama won’t allow drilling.
I remember getting smacked down for making uber-simplisic arguments like that when I was 11. I realize this sort of thing passes for wisdom with that people who read your blog, but you need to do a little better here, if you can.
What “we” are you referring to? What deaths are you referring to?
Well, what it would actually mean is bigger profits for oil companies. I am of the opinion that the 1% is doing just fine the way things are. For the average American, it would mean living in a more toxic environment and not a lot else. Have you not noticed that the energy boom we are in has not helped consumers in the least?
@anjin-san: we are in an energy boom despite, not because of federal policy.
Simplistic? (Shrug) Your issue is, you keep trying to read subtlety and complexity into situations that require slash and burn.
As to oil profits, it benefits anyone who is investing in it, including most retirement accounts in the try. Not just the one percent you hate so much. IN SHORT, Americans, not just the government. That said,… It also means increased tax revenue, lest you forget. And the boom hasn’t helped consumers because taxes are too high, government too big.
.
@ Florack
Please show anything I have said that would lead a reasonable person to conclude that I “hate” 1%ers. Understanding that the huge upflow of wealth in America to folks that are already fabulously wealthy is a bad thing does not equal hate.
If you have to make shit up to support your argument, you don’t have much of an argument.
When did gas taxes go up? Please be specific.
Israel has laid many stunning military defeats on the Arabs. Crushing, historic defeats.
Yet the violence continues.
Killing more people and blowing more things up is simply a perpetuation of the cycle of violence and destruction.
Interesting. You are silent about the stunning gains in the market under Obama, but you are excited about profits that exist in your imagination.
So, was taking out Qaddafi worth it? I didn’t think so at the time and I still don’t. I think the ongoing unrest is another indicator in favor of the notion that non-intervention was the right call, and Obama’s decision to reverse his general policy (and overrule some of his advisors, who were apparently giving him good advice to stay out) was a mistake.