rise and super they had been introduced to cover the congress and which we actually did during world war two. and did you sign the entire. marketplace and that's going to do it for now for more on the stories we covered go to our team dot com slash usa also check out our you tube page you tube dot com slash our to america and christine for that. the issue is that so much given to each musician on the mark when the battle for libya is the so-called humanitarian intervention there are so noble and straightforward most instruments.

wealthy british style. markets why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with much stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to the report on r g. h i'm arriving here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.

i think it's. a low in the well from the crosstalk i'm peter lavelle the battle for libya is the so-called humanitarian intervention there so noble and straightforward must intervention lead to military occupation and human suffering and is the libyan scenario a new template for disaster. they can.

discuss what's happening in libya i'm joined by david gibbs in tucson he's a professor of 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 caution he is a professor of political science at the american university of beirut and another member of our crossfire team illinois hunger all right folks this is crosstalk that means you can jump in anytime you want if i could go to london first to 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 under the guise of a coalition has chosen a side in my being unfair in that description i think it's just been 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 do 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 a civil war. and there's also the intricacies of 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're not really sort of create a military balance on the ground through military intervention and that favors one side then you're always see you know taking sides and leading towards regime change and you know president obama already made a political statement about that so i think it's the linkage of different political objectives here that are not entirely clear but the longer 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 let's listen to 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 that we would focus our unique capabilities on the front end of the operation and that we would transfer responsibility to our allies and partners to night we are fulfilling that pledge. and. you buy that because one of the things that's very interesting about president obama's statement is that he doesn't talk about him and again 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 and coalition forces are still there now because they didn't think about the end game is this

a mistake being made again. yeah i mean the u.s. found itself in a situation in the world she was dragged into the situation in libya it was the french and to a lesser extent the british who were enthusiastic about intervention there on the grounds of. minimizing civilian casualties. but from the beginning none of the western powers said that they would be committing ground troops to libya we are i mean the us had no option but to interfere against the pressure from its european allies ok david i mean i can't think of really trying to do my homework for this program i can't think of any humanitarian corridor or humanitarian intervention where you can end up putting ground forces are moving them into the into the battlefield expanding the battlefield expanding the civil war. well i agree with what you just said.

i think that obama's statement to me seems confused and a bit naive. the problem that i'd states faces is that when the u.s. becomes publicly involved in a military operation there's an expectation it's going to succeed and if it and produce something and call a success however defined if it doesn't do this then the u.s. would be million in there be a perception the u.s. is weakened america being the head on it power feels it can't tolerate that the problem we face in libya is very simple the u.s. 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 then there will indeed be pressure to escalate and the us consider sending ground forces in the event that we do overthrow gadhafi then there'd be a question of the u.s. would have responsibility as well as with the europeans for stablish in 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 a civil war this could indeed evolve into a very large scale military operation that could go on for years i think it's a probability at this point when they're talking about to you in london i again researching this program i came across a quote from 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 hear it least in this part of the program is that you know that without an endgame clearly defined in with gadhafi still in power which 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 does ambiguity make 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 asian specialist recently sold me he said well as far as i can see it. with the other interventions like iraq they didn't have an exit strategy with this one they don't seem to have an entry strategy. and i think you know to some extent you can say that's true because you know when you look at the the aerial the air campaign during the gulf war ninety one which was very layered very strategic very well thought out even that couldn't achieve its nutri 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 want to some extent the beginning of the aerial campaign did stop the advancement of the of these forces from entering into benghazi so i think if that was a political animal it three objective you can say that has been successful but on the other hand you know this mixture of enforcing the no fly zone on the other hand starting off with bombing the specific military targets if you like of the libyan

government and not achieving that completely either because now that nato has taken over there and we'll 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 so if i go to you back to you in beirut and worry question so 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 alicia is not nearly as solid is the mainstream media in the western politicians want us to believe because it's not a growing quote coalition of the willing there's more and more countries that are doubting this and how far we started out with a no fly zone and now we're going to keep or 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 what's the power of how one till yesterday said that they are not inclined to arm the insurgents and libya i think there was a a gross error committed and the beginning of the launching operation everybody in the west see in the under the impression that all the rebels want to have was some sort some aerial support before they could march on tripoli and unseat their free market duffers forces and tribal support he has been receiving lately have upset the balance of power and the insurgents are not really up to the forces the political to 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 little situation that may eventually lead to a stalemate. here i mean at the beginning it could have been possible i mean had the insurgents been far more capable militarily it would have been possible for them to conclude the outcome of the confrontation but would this moment really put forward once i think we would expect more bloodshed i david i know you're an expert on the breakup of the yugoslavia and it seems to me that libya could be spelled in a very different way and that's cos of 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 ended there 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. well

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 had of the war as a simple case the villains versus the victims with the serbs the villains and the coast for 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 they also engage in terrible massacres and ethnic cleansing and recently the european union has issued a report implicating the leadership of the k.l.a. and 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 in back of 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 the ghazi clearly moammar gadhafi is a very unsavory i do the leader we know that but there is a danger the opposition may also commit ugly atrocities and then back into the opposition which again we just don't know that much about the west may be setting itself up for became infamous here in just a moment let me jump in here so you know sure break after the actual break we'll continue our discussion on the intervention in libya stay with our. case. into the country. in the invasion by means of. tradition.

the language is really you. just did the beat. and culture. thing is that the how the germans are still unaware of what's going on in their minds silastic much. i don't know anything about alaska the great. h. i'm arriving here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.

welcome across time you know about to remind you we're talking about libya in the western led coalition. 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 jail civil war and a western led coalition isn't forcing a u.n. resolution on the country public opinion agency look at us and i ask russians to describe the events happening in the arab world twenty seven percent call them people's revolutions particularly teens twenty four percent say their troubles i

knew she did but to stall more convenient rulers in the region eleven percent regard them as forced takeovers ten percent believe that revolutions to heaven islam a character and then the so called them as senseless riot what and who is next to fall is a burning question. 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 to countries around the world that people don't like you know china the democratic republic of congo iran and venezuela zimbabwe bahrain you can talk about so many places where you could have a humanitarian intervention but no it's libya this time a 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 of the americans if you don't 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 regional support and i think that template and the euphoria of that sort of lead lead that 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 mentioned all 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 that 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 hadn'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 that 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 pulls their 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 and 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 pressure we want democracy we want. you know we want to get rid of our dictator that 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 is this playing to a weakness that the west has that in certain cases it has to stand up and has to be prove its values and sleep 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 that's being played out in the region. i don't think it's a question of the action i think with libyan case is special mainly because of its proximity to europe. after all libya is in italy and france is

back backyard so i mean there are issues such as oil definitely. illegal immigration to europe through libya and of course i would argue that the humanitarian they mention is a variable and i would not i would certainly not use it as the only verbal or otherwise i will give you the option of i mean there is a humanitarian dimension to it 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 is complex the european powers felt over the years that perspectives of them have been negatives and they seem to have to wanted to do something in order to reverse the negative public out of public opinion about what's to tell especially after the war

in iraq in two thousand and three david is will be a 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 trustees of there are worse there let's say in the ivory coast in which the world is doing nothing there's no question the atrocities being committed in libya are on the whole will lessen the atrocities that have been committed over 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 dar for which was that which is a very serious ugly conflict was not the worst humanitarian crisis in the world at the time and even there there was that element of arbitrariness and so the

arbitrariness it with which this doctrine has been employed 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 us does involve in libya and i think for a lot of reasons and it's never a single issue but i think oil is indeed a factor here and that 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 the facilities being damaged and their oil supplies being interrupted b. as a major supplier of oil not really excited states but here at the special 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 a 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 purposes and if i go back to you in london again no matter how you can. i mean however you look side on the right to protect. these type of injury interventions this is a third war in the last few years by the west in the arab world that cannot go down well or or there are people on the ground and we are thinking of the gulf states and things like this and the western fuels that it is it's frustrating because its efforts in the greater middle east are basically failures that's in my opinion anyway we can call down very well and it certainly has to tell people on the ground that you know the this democratic awakening which i think that's a very broad picture that is being missed in a lot of these discussions 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 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 responsibly to protect now i think with this intervention it's been not clearly thought out at all and like i said there's different factors coming together and they 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 the sort of 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 of the opposition and i think you know that creates a problem as to you deal with but also we're coming back to the oil companies i mean. all the international companies have now pulled out it's very uncertain when they're going to come back and so he has said that if there's

a stalemate or if he's already said that you know he would just turn around and deal with in terms of the oil trade with the china brazil in india which he probably will do once if there is a stalemate so in actual fact everybody turns out to lose 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 converging factors came together and so bit of a blunder but now you know let's try to sort it out with a broader 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 it when he gets out of control they're going to always use force or they can call on their american friends. absolutely there was no question and there was no doubt in my mind that kate that it leaders need to use caution and excess of caution that in order to suppress the opposition. and we

don't believe that the western intervention is a repeat the u.s. secretary of state hillary clinton made it clear the other day that's not that's what we are doing and libya would not be applied say in syria we have to jump in here i hope we hope that doesn't happen again many thanks to my guest today in london to sun and in beirut and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember across talked.

into the country. it's the invasion by means of. tradition the language. compete. and culture. that the how the germans are still unaware of what's going on in the land. much. less the great.