Remembering Operation Odyssey Dawn, ten years on

Operation Odyssey Dawn, launched on 19 March, 2011, was the code name for the US military intervention in Libya vaguely authorised by United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1973. The assumption was that Libyan civilians were being killed, displaced and bombed by the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi because they “peacefully” protested his rule.

Neither the UN nor the US, or any UNSC member, had any precise knowledge of events on the ground inside Libya. A UN fact-finding mission is yet to visit Libya. The euphoria created by the ongoing Arab Spring had already gripped Tunisia and Egypt before reaching Libya. The rest of the Libyan disaster is history.

Resolution 1973 was entirely based on media reports coming out of Libya, mostly from news outlets with little access to the country. Most reports turned out to be biased, untrue and, sometimes, fabricated. Yet, the UN found them credible enough to decide the entire country’s fate for years to come.

Prior to Operation Odyssey Dawn, and hours before the UNSC adopted Resolution 1973, France launched Operation Harmattan, while Britain and Canada followed with Operation Ellamy and Operation Mobile, respectively.

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The US, UK and France, as UNSC veto powers, blocked or marginalised any meaningful discussions within the UNSC that dared to question the legality and consequences of what became billed as “humanitarian intervention”.

None of the major powers then had any contact with the Libyan government to listen to its side of the story. Instead, they, along with others, sent their bombers to Libya to “protect” civilians, or so they claimed.

By 30 March, 2011,  all three operations became one, code-named Operation Unified Protector, and commanded by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). In what became known as “coalition of the willing”, NATO maintained an around-the-clock air bombardment of Libya for the next seven months – all to “protect” civilians, of course. When, in fact, the events in Libya, by 20 February, 2011, spiralled into an armed insurgency harmful to the very civilians that NATO was supposed to protect.

On 30 October, NATO ended its operations after conducting 26,500 sorties. Dozens of civilians were killed, but ten years later, NATO still does not accept any responsibility for what it described as “collateral damage” among civilians.

The “coalition of the willing” included not only mighty NATO members, but also others like Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. None of these countries had any plausible democratic credentials, yet still came forward to make Libya more democratic. Libya’s neighbours, like Sudan, Tunisia and Egypt, facilitated the transfer of weapons, foreign fighters and special forces units into Libya in support of the insurgents.

READ: New mass grave found in Libya’s Tarhouna

By July 2011, it became apparent that NATO was destroying Libya to force regime change in blatant disregard of Resolution 1973, which, despite its controversy, excluded regime change.

In fact, none of the “coalition of the willing” members really cared about civilians. Each pursued its own interests, including score-settling with the late Gaddafi, not only by destroying his government, but also by killing him on 20 October, 2011. Meanwhile, the civilians were left to protect themselves.

In subsequent years, Libya became a battleground in which many factions, supported by different foreign actors, destroyed the country. Once safe, Libya became a haven for human traffickers, armed militias, criminal gangs and terrorists, rendering the lives of civilians in dire need of protection, which they could not find.

So, was Operation Odyssey Dawn a mistake? Or was the “humanitarian intervention” itself an ill-planned adventure for imperialistic countries, using the UN as a cover?

Almost all former leaders of the major countries involved in destroying Libya have long since, in various ways, acknowledged that it was indeed wrong. In 2016, former US President Barrack Obama described the Libyan intervention as the “worst mistake” of his presidential career. Before him, Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was the first to oppose NATO intervention. In July 2011, at the height of the war, Berlusconi said of the intervention: “I was against this measure. I had my hands tied by the vote of the parliament of my country. But I was against, and I am against this intervention which will end in a way that no-one knows.”

If any lesson is to be learned from NATO’s disastrous Libya intervention, it is the fact that foreign military interventions are bad, and foreign political meddling in Libya’s affairs are just as bad.

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The main reason behind Libya’s decade-long conflict has been foreign meddling and disregard of the UNSC Resolutions 1970 and 1973. NATO itself intervened in Libya in the name of reinforcing the UNSC resolutions, including these two.

Resolution 1970, for instance, calls on the UN member states to refrain from sending arms to Libya. Throughout the last decade, neither NATO nor any of its prominent members, including the US, UK, and France, did anything to stop this UNSC resolution breach.

Throughout the decade, thousands of Libyan civilians were killed, injured, internally displaced or forced to seek safety abroad, despite Resolution 1973 still being relevant and valid – the very document adopted for their protection. Yet, nobody came to protect them.

The 2011 military intervention in Libya made the principle of “humanitarian intervention” synonymous with a direct invasion of UN sovereign member states, simply because some members did not like their policies or governments.

Whatever supposed virtues were used to justify the 2011 invasion of Libya have now been exposed as a shameful excuse by hegemonic countries serving their own interests.

NATO and its partners are directly responsible for the loss of lives that Libya has suffered as a direct consequence of Operation Unified Protector. The UN is also responsible because, under its name and authorisation, Libya was invaded.

Ten years on, NATO and its partners still deny that they destroyed Libya, killing civilians, including women and children. The UN, on the other hand, has yet to acknowledge that it was used by the big powers to advance their own agendas, completely disregarding the world body.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.