it's mostly this is on the team approach gives out the troops room does the libyan levels the gun installing it the international air strikes it comes the song the coalition members including the u.s. britain other prongs instead all make the own decision and the warning to do would far outweigh the u.n. resolution. from fears of a terrorism backlash in europe with the alarm sounded a bit possible revenge plot spine may be in his limits he a power broker

a good number of countries in some form of raids is the names of inspire a terrorist recruiting. funding is raided business been awaiting trial in georgia is finding that britain is the payback faults of the country's culprits calls for foreign investment probably thinks he's facing bribery charges but of noise say to these he's trying to wiggle out of paying the on hundred million dollars it owes the jailed in fact stuff. coming up next to develop false talk this time around in all the foreign powers can really design a future for libya without gadhafi. bringing you the latest in some instance or the ones from the realm. of the future.

ok. hello and welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle the battle for libya is a so-called humanitarian intervention there so noble and straightforward must intervention lead to military occupation in human suffering and is the libyan scenario a new template for disaster. to discuss what's happening in libya i'm joined by david gibbs in tucson he's a professor of history and government at the university of arizona in london we have i bet she is a senior lecturer in international relations at the university of kent and in beirut we cross the aisle a question he is a professor of political science at the american university of beirut and another

member of our crosstalk team you know in the hunger all right folks this is crosstalk that means you can jump in anytime you want if i could go to london first i don't know if how would you describe events being played out now in libya because i've been covering this watching this very closely obviously it's my job in and that's what i do for this program and it seems to me this is a civil war in the west but under the guise of a coalition has chosen a side in my being unfair in that description i think it's a very difficult one this one in terms of intervention because on one hand you know doing nothing at all would have sent the signal broadly from the west that we just don't the responsibility to protect anymore because it didn't quite work out very well for us. and intervening of course has all sorts of connotations like the one you mentioned taking sides in the civil war. and there's also the interim. the

security council resolution which is really i mean the political objective which is to protect civilians so there's no mention of regime change there but then if you inadvertently sort of create a military balance on the ground through military intervention and that favors one side then you're obviously you know taking sides and leading towards regime change and you know president obama already had made a political statement about that so i think it's a linkage of different political objectives here that i'm not entirely clear in the long run well since president obama was mentioned you know why don't we listen very quickly what he said a few hours ago about america's mission in libya which was what he had to say. we've accomplished these objectives consistent with the pledge that i made to the american people at the outset of our military operations i said that america's role

would be limited and that we would not put ground troops into libya but we would focus our unique capabilities on the front end of the operation and then we would transfer responsibility to our allies and partners tonight we are fulfilling that pledge. to you by that because one of the things that's very interesting about president obama's statement is that he doesn't talk about in and game getting into a war is not that difficult we've seen that since the iraqi adventure of starting in two thousand and three even before that afghanistan and american coalition forces are still there now because they didn't think about the end game is this a mistake being made again. i mean the u.s. . and its occupation will were you was dragged into the situation in libya it was the french and to a lesser extent the british who were in forty years clickable intervention there on

the grounds of. minimizing civilian casualties. but from the beginning none of western powers said that they would be committing ground troops to the conflict and libya. i mean the u.s. had no option but to interfere against the pressure from its european allies ok david i mean i can't think i mean and i really tried to do my homework for this program i can't think of any humanitarian quote unquote humanitarian intervention where you didn't end up putting a ground forces on moving them into the into the battlefield expanding the battlefield expanding the civil war. why agree with what you just said. i think that obama's statement to me seems confused and a bit naive. the problem the united states faces is that when the us becomes publicly involved in a military operation there's an expectation it's going to succeed and if it and

produce something you can call a success however defined if it doesn't do this then the us would be humiliated and there be a perception the us is weak and america being the head you want to power feels it can't tolerate that probably threesome libya's very simple the us has already committed itself publicly to some military objective however it will be fine and if it cannot overthrow gadhafi through air power which is an open question here and then there will indeed be pressure to escalate and the us consider sending ground forces and the event that we do overthrow gadhafi then there'd be a question of the us would have responsibility as well as with the europeans for establishing some kind of political stability and thereby establishing a government that may have that is very likely to require a long term commitment of ground forces possibly in a peaceful situation possibly in a civil war this could indeed evolve into a very large scale military operation that could go on for years i think that's

a probability at this point when if i go back to you in london i again researching this program i came across a quote from a colin powell before the invasion of two thousand and three of iraq and he said you know you break it you own it i mean we're getting involved into a very broken situation idea because as all of us seem to have here at least at this point in the program is that you know that without an endgame clearly defined in with gadhafi still in power we're still told that he has to go but we're not going to get rid of him i mean again this is it creates an ambiguity here this ambiguity making this mission creep even worse because we don't even really know what we want. you know i would agree with that i mean actually a friend of mine who's not an international ation specialist recently sold me he said well as far as i can see it. with the other interventions like broccoli didn't have an exit strategy with this one they don't seem to have an entry strategy either and i think you know to some extent you can say that's true because you know when you look at the the aerial air campaign jury in the gulf war ninety one which

was very layered very strategic very well thought out even that couldn't achieve its military objectives with air power alone whereas here i mean you have sort of multiple layers of objectives which are both political and military. i mean to one ex some extent the beginning of the aerial campaign to stop the advancement of the . forces from entering into benghazi so i think if that was a political animal a true objective you can say that has been successful but on the other hand you know this mixture of enforcing a no fly zone on the other hand and starting off with. the specific military targets if you like of the libyan government and not achieving that completely either because now that nato has taken over the operation will see less of that bombing it will be a sort of very much more standard no fly zone operation so it's not very clear here what the military objectives are because they've been happening in different layers

simultaneously and if i'm going to you back to you in the router hillary clinton said just as we were sitting down here we have prevented a potential massacre is there is there a potential massacre still in the cards i mean given what we just heard here because the regime is not nearly as solid is the mainstream media and the western politicians want us to believe because it's not a growing call ition with the willing there's more and more countries that are doubting this and and how far we started out with a no fly zone and now we're going deeper and deeper again there are news reports that the u.s. may even consider arming the rebels now i mean again are we just going down the path of just more more war not less. yeah i mean the western powers have until yesterday they said they are not inclined to arm the insurgents and libya i think there was a gross error committed in the beginning of the launching operation

everybody in the worst scene under the impression that all the rebels want to do was some some aerial support before they could marshal on tripoli and unseen their free one of the deficit forces and the tribal support he has been receiving lately. the balance of power and showed that the insurgents are not really up to the forces of the political the combined forces of qaddafi i mean i understand that this morning forces were driven about one hundred kilometers from sort so we are witnessing a very complicated political situation eventually lead to a stalemate. here i mean at the beginning it could have been possible i mean insurgents been far more capable militarily it would have been possible for them to conclude the outcome of the confrontation what would be this moment of three or

four months i think we would expect more bloodshed and david i know you're an expert on the breakup of the yugoslavia and it seems to me that libya could speak spelled in a very different way and that's cos of zero and everything we've heard on this program again everything i'm reading in them in the news tells me and i read your article your recent article on it this is another cost of all adventure and there is kind of a disneyland version for western audiences but it's going to do very badly and it is very long term very expensive and really no solution it's just waiting it out and we could see the same thing happen again in libya. but on a much larger scale well one of the things that one of the things that has come out since the end of the kosovo war very dramatically is that the image people heard of that war as a simple case of villains versus victims with the serbs the villains and the costar liberation army is the victims was overly simplistic and that the serbs were indeed

villainous but the kosovar of the kosovo liberation army wasn't that much better and they also engaged in terrible massacres and ethnic cleansing and recently the european union has issued a report implicating the leadership of the k.l.a. in the possible trafficking of human organs taken from slaughtered serbs. so what you had in kosovo is a situation where neither side came off very well and backing the kosovo liberation army the united states and the european union made itself complicit in mass ethnic cleansing and other atrocities. i fear that that's a possibility in libya and that we don't really know that much about the opposition and we've got the clearly more market duffy's a very unsavory and brutal leader we know that but there is a danger there at the opposition may also commit ugly atrocities and then backing the opposition which again we just don't know that much about the west may be

setting itself up for became infamous at the very just moment let me jump in here and say i want to assure break after the actual break we'll continue our discussion on the intervention in libya stay with r.t. . if you. think you can. keep your social and he have your i pod touch from the q sampson. our chief all. video on demand tease minefield costs an r.s.s. feeds now in the palm of your. question. call. for the full story we've made for. the biggest issues get

a human voice face to face with the news makers. wealthy british. margetts finance scandal. find out what's really happening to the global economy is a report on our. place to take you. live. welcome back to cross talk i'm futile about to remind you we're talking about libya and the western led coalition. led taking. plenty. but first let's see how russians view events in the arab world. what lies ahead for the troubled arab world revolution the who sweeps across the

region sparking heated international debate in libya tensions have resulted in a post calle civil war and western led coalition isn't forcing a u.n. resolution on the country the public opinion agency letter said i asked russians to describe the events happening in the arab world twenty seven percent call them people's revolutions begins this particular genes twenty four percent say the troubles i did by the west to stall more convenient rulers in the region eleven percent regard them as forced takeovers ten percent believe the revolution had been a slam a character and then the son called them a senseless riot what and who is next to fall is a burning question peter ok i go back to learning only if you feel comfortable with the term humanitarian intervention because it seems like newspeak to me because you

know you go through countries around the world that people don't like you know china the democratic republic of congo iran venezuela zimbabwe bahrain you can talk about so many places where you could have a humanitarian intervention but no it's libya this time lot of people will say it's because of oil there's other issues of hubris the united states standing in the world we see the french and the british all the certain politicians that are not doing too well in the polls a little war might help them out a question if the americans do what they like to do in the middle east the last forty years i mean it's you know humanitarian intervention is just a very odd term isn't it for what we're seeing. well i mean it's it's one of those sort of norms i suppose that sort of emerged in the early one nine hundred ninety s. especially because ninety one iraq war sort of euphoria that the west can do collective security they can be militarily successful in it and they can have full legal

backing and a regional support and i think that template and the euphoria of that sort of led led sort of an intervention to go on with things like bosnia and kosovo but one of the other norms that has emerged i suppose in the last twenty years is that you know the implementation of responsibility to protect has been very selective and i think you know nobody is surprised that it's selected again in this case but you mention oil i mean i you know if i was at a meeting and sort of here in london a couple of a couple of days ago with the policymakers and academics and i think one of the answers that came out to the question is it all about oil was that had it been all about oil the logical thing would have been to do nothing and i think you know people who are in the states who have intervened in this would be caught between two things here you know whether to do nothing because of this responsibly to protect if they haven't done anything i think that would have been the end of that doctrine completely and they didn't want to see that happening but on the other

hand what they didn't know how to intervene and then there is this caution over ground troops obviously. and then of course there was the hastiness of the action if you like which was inevitable because had it not started at buck point then you know we don't know what would have happened in benghazi so all of these things coming together and you're absolutely right certain politicians palls there are different factors here converging that have very little to do with each other i think and i think this is where you know the end game is not clear actually you know horrifying back to you in beirut i think it's really quite interesting as we put it in the scheme of the great arab awakening if you say you want a group of people saying we're all fresh we want democracy we want freedom we. want to get rid of are dictated it by the way you've been dealing with for decades or or in the khadafi case he was brought in from the cold i mean it is this playing to a weakness that the west has that in certain cases it has to stand up it has to be prove its values and unfortunately prove its values with its military that's what

it always does in these cases here my point is is that you know given the moments now in north africa is that maybe western powers are overreacting too fast to a very complex situation it's being played out in the region. i don't think it's a question of action i think with libyan case is persian mainly because of its proximity to europe. after all libya is in italy and france is back to back backyard so i mean there are issues such as oil definitely. illegal immigration. to europe through libya. of course i would argue with you many to mention is a variable and i would not i would certainly not use it as the only verbal otherwise i will give you the option of i mean there is

a humanitarian dimension to what but having said that i must emphasize that this human dimension has also a very strong political dimension as well so i mean the picture the picture is complex the european powers felt over the years that perspectives of them have been negative and they seem to have to want to do something in order to reverse the negative public out of public opinion about western intervention especially after the war in iraq in two thousand and three they were it is libya special in tucson is libya special because there are so many other cases where humanitarian intervention could fit the bill i mean considering how broad the term is you can use the word however you want. one of the things that very much bothers me about the doctrine of responsibility to protect is that it's very arbitrary at least in its application that libya is not special there's nothing to suggest that the cities if there are worse there are let's say in the ivory coast in which the world

is doing nothing there's no question the atrocities being committed libby are on the whole less than the atrocities that have been committed over the years in the congo which is probably the worst humanitarian crisis since one thousand nine hundred five by a long shot. this whole doctrine of responsibility to protect is entirely arbitrary doctrine even door for which was that which is a very serious ugly conflict was not the worst humanitarian crisis in the world at that time and even there there was that element of arbitrariness and so the arbitrariness with which this doctrine has been applied in my mind raises real questions about either how clearly people are thinking about this or indeed about the question of motive which brings us back to the issue of why the west is involved in libya i think for a lot of reasons and it's never a single issue but i think oil is indeed a factor here and i don't agree with the professor in london that the most logical response would be to do nothing because in the situation of civil war our companies

and countries supporting those companies would be worried about their facilities being damaged and their oil supplies being interrupted b. as a major supplier of oil not really thought it states look europe especially italy and some of the world's major oil companies are involved there and there's a larger regional issue which is it's not just a question of libya but the whole arab region which is indeed a source of more than half of the world's oil reserves and the whole region is in turmoil and i think the west wants to show that things aren't spinning out of control there and that it has some capacity to control events. so i would see a responsibility to protect has mostly worked as an excuse for intervention that has more shall we say traditional self interested purpose and then i go back to you in london again no matter how you can. i mean however you look side on the right to protect. interventions this is a third war in the last few years by the west in the arab world that

cannot go down well or are there people on the ground in the i'm thinking of the gulf states and things like this and the west it feels that it is it's frustrated because its efforts in the greater middle east are basically failures right in my opinion anyway you can call down very well and it's certainly have to kill people on the ground because you know the democratic awakening which i think that's a very broad picture that is being missed in a lot of users questions that's going to that can actually turn people away from the west even more because the only tool in your tool box is war and they look outside. i think you know i mean david's point i agree with the last bit i think it is about control and the west is feeling that you know if they sort of intervene in this it is really about showing that they have some kind of control in the region that's obviously changing very rapidly but on the other hand i mean i don't really think that there is this very cynical sort of well thought out strategy that you

know in the long term we would like to control certain resources in this country so let's do it responsibly to protect now i think with this intervention it's mean not clearly thought out a tool and like i said this different factors coming together. that have little very little to do with each other that resulted in this intervention and now i think one of the reasons for this conference today is to try to smooth out what this is going to lead to with a kind of broader coalition i think that's where the problem is because you know if you do sort of intervene in this in this kind of a situation and there is a stalemate and the west is always. taken sides this could go on for years i mean you know the no fly zone in iraq was in place for over a decade. and it didn't do anything to save government and this ins in fact is more complicated than that because although iraq you know there was a no fly zone over the north of iraq. there was no sort of implicit recognition of

any other party as a viable opposition to saddam hussein where is i think here is very blatantly you know some countries have said you know the rebels are definitely the sort of the legitimate government or the opposition and i think you know that creates a problem as to you deal with but also we can get the oil companies own. all the international oil companies have now pulled out it's very uncertain when they're going to come back in so. that if there's a stalemate or if you've already said that you know he will just turn around and deal with in terms of the oil trade with china brazil in india which he probably will do once if there is a stalemate so in actual fact everybody turns out to loose from this so you're wondering like you know it can't possibly have been carefully thought out i think you know a lot of like i said could have urging factors came together and a bit of a blunder but now you know let's try to sort it out with a broader coalition and see where we go from here i think that's where we are going to give you the last word in this program all of these events taking place right

now they're just going to embolden the dictators that are still in the arab world to crack down even more and i'm thinking of bahrain and other places like that where you know if when he gets out of control they're going to always use force or they can call on their american in neutral friends. well absolutely there's no question and there's no doubt in my mind that the. leader of leaders will use caution and excess of caution that in order to suppress the opposition. we don't believe that western intervention is a repeat of the us secretary of state hillary clinton made it clear the other day that that's what we are doing and libya would not be applied say in syria we had to jump in here i hope we hope that doesn't kavinoky many thanks to my guest today in london tucson and thanks to our viewers for watching as you are to see you next time and remember a prostate. cancer.