Peace Later!

TRIPOLI, Libya — Many Americans will find it unsurprising that most aspects of Libyan life under Muammar Qaddafi were marked by corruption and cronyism. We may not know first-hand what living in a thoroughly corrupt police state is like, but we can guess that most aspects of life require payoffs and special connections, that the law counts for nothing, and that the honest can choose between leaving, withering on the vine, or going to prison.

What’s harder to understand is the mental disorganization that remains even after the tyrant has gone, the sense that Libya and Libyans exist in a miasma of unknowns and rumors, in which almost no hard information is transmitted in any conversation, but everyone incessantly gossips about everyone else.

As a visitor who speaks Arabic hardly at all and understands with difficulty, I initially attributed what I thought of as Libyan haziness to linguistic problems. Either I wasn’t getting a good translation or the concepts didn’t translate. It has taken me a half dozen trips and experience writing about a broad range of topics to understand that it’s not the language barrier, it’s the mental barrier.

ZWARA, Libya, August 23 — I have written before in this blog about one of the lesser-known sins of Muammar Qaddafi, the pillaging of the Libyan environment. Both Libyan state enterprises and foreign companies operating in Libya have been guilty of toxic waste dumping, gas flaring, and disregard of standard safety and health measures for factory workers. Now, the new management of one of the worst violators is speaking candidly about what the former regime did.

There’s a scene in the new movie Savages where the “good guys,” artisanal pot growers Ben and Chon, organize some of Chon’s ex–Navy Seal friends to emplace IEDs in the road they know a group of nasties from the Baja cartel will take to a meeting. It was a strange moment for me, after seven embeds with American troops in Afghanistan—to be rooting for the IED-makers. It would be an even stranger moment for an ex–Navy Seal. Yet no one knows better than American officers who fought in Afghanistan or Iraq how much more fun it would be to be on the insurgents’ side.

These complexities were explored more entertainingly and with greater nuance in the 2009 movie Avatar, which may be the best expression on film yet of the counterinsurgent’s envy of the insurgent’s more glamorous, appealing side. But Savages points to a cost that the blue people never pay in Avatar—becoming degraded themselves by the necessities of the fight. As Oliver Stone engineers it, Ben and Chon can’t simply give up the business when the Baja thugs move in—they have no choice but to fight. And yet that fight does not improve them.

“We don’t know who the opposition is!”

Fainéant pundits and politicians are once again reviving this trope, now as an excuse for removing America entirely from any influence in the direction of Syria’s revolution. In the spring of 2011, it was the standard plaint about the Libyan rebels. In both cases, this demand for knowledge shows a lack of understanding about how Muslim societies under dictatorship have evolved.

As we meditate on the lessons of our failure in Afghanistan, one that’s easy to diagnose is the isolation of the American State Department presence there. In Afghanistan—and Iraq, Pakistan, and even in Libya, where it can be argued there is no threat to our personnel—American diplomats are unable to travel on short notice or using ordinary cars. Typically our consulates and embassies are highly fortified compounds in remote suburbs.  Even for an American citizen, getting inside the Kabul embassy is a big deal, involving a quarter mile walk to the first checkpoint, an airport-style security check, and the surrender of one’s mobile phone at the security desk. 

As for getting out—forget about it! Our diplomats are often required to travel by armored cars, usually in scarce supply, which makes it difficult for them to get outside and actually learn what’s going on in the country. In many places, they have to give travel plans to their security chief 48 hours in advance, making it almost impossible to react to events in real time, much less to shape them. While such constraints often hinder most nations’ diplomats, American officials face particularly stringent rules.

Seeing the fine new production of As You Like It at Shakespeare in the Park, and then bicycling downtown through the leafy precincts of Central Park West, through Times Square, watching the tourists from around the world and the United States chatting at the café tables and chairs in the pedestrianized zones and in general behaving with civility and grace to each other, even at midnight, it’s clear what a great thing this republic of ours is and why it is worth defending at almost any cost.

Here you have art and culture of every sort (including bad), and wealth, and the chance for almost anyone to make it, and the freedom for women to walk down the street scantily clad with nary a comment at midnight, as many women I passed were doing, and the freedom for men and women to appear openly gay, and the promise, in the stunning public art space that is Times Square, that this is indeed the center of the world.

Whenever I tell someone I have spent a lot of time in Libya in the last year or so, they confess that they have only a vague idea as to what is happening there. I tell them I know exactly what they mean. I explain that part of the reason is that the English-language media—especially in the US—are not covering the situation very closely. Part of the reason is distance, part of the reason is that Libya is not vital to American national security, and part is that with cutbacks in the media, few papers or magazines can afford to station a correspondent, much less more than one, in Libya permanently. So, when I went back to the west coast town of Sabratha this spring, I was told that no other foreign journalist had stayed overnight since I’d left in November. (It’s fairly easy to tell, since there is only one open hotel in town.)

But that is not the end of the explanation for the perception of murkiness. Some of the lack of clarity comes from the Libyans themselves.

This Tuesday, I attended an excellent seminar on lawfare at the offices of Mayer Brown in New York City. “Lawfare” is a relatively recent term used for the manipulation of human rights law for purposes contrary to those for which it was created. Typical examples are libel lawsuits initiated by Saudi billionaires in British courts against American reporters writing about terror financing, or lawsuits brought by the Council on American-Islamic Relations against law enforcement agencies charging discrimination against Muslims, as well as human rights lawsuits aimed at Israel. It seems that Mayer Brown is one of the few marquee law firms interested in defending victims of lawfare, as opposed to defending Guantánamo inmates (see here for a list of the large number of prominent firms doing pro bono work for these prisoners).

Almost unnoticed outside the military, a significant change is occurring in the armed forces. With the backing of General Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, women, who make up almost 16 percent of the force, are being gradually introduced into positions the Army has classified as “combat roles.” Last week, the first 200 women reported to such jobs.

Every time there’s a scandal among our military overseas, the stereotypes pop up. One of them is that most of our warriors suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and have been broken by repeated deployments to combat zones. Another is that they represent the poorest and least educated segments of our society and have chosen the military because they can’t get other jobs.

I’ve found all of this to be false in my time with the Army in Afghanistan. And a survey of military families released on May 9th suggests that, contrary to the stereotype, military families are healthy and resilient, and have much higher rates of civic engagement than most Americans.

In the wake of the Wal-Mart Mexican bribery scandal, there’s been renewed attention paid to the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). As law professor Peter Henning pointed out earlier this week in the New York Times, there have been more prosecutions recently than in the first years of the act’s life. In fact, government actions increased 85 percent between 2009 and 2010, with 74 prosecutions brought and more than $1 billion in fines collected. “Depending upon the violation,” according to the law, “a company can be fined up to $20 million, and an individual can be fined up to $5 million and spend up to 20 years in jail for each violation.”

TRIPOLI, Libya — One of the best omens for Libya’s eventual development of a robust democracy is the grassroots civic activism in Zwara, Libya’s so-called “Berber capital,” a seaside town of 50,000. Spearheaded by a grad student in economics, Riad el-Hamisi, locals have successfully pressured the Ministry of Industry to investigate and clean up toxic waste dumping at the town’s largest employer, the archaic, barely functional Abu Kamesh Chemical Complex.

Bu Kamesh, as it’s locally known, was using mercury in one of its reactors up until the economic disruptions of the 2011 revolution forced the shuttering of the plant. It may have been the only PVC plant in the world still using the toxic substance, and at least a dozen former employees are now seeking treatment for mercury poisoning. The United States, one of the world’s major exporters of mercury, has banned its export beginning in 2013.

One of the tragedies of the irrational Qaddafi dictatorship was that so much of the damage it caused didn’t even make economic sense. 

ZWARA, Libya — Arab fighters, apparently from the nearby towns of Jumyl and Ragdelin, which remain loyal to the defeated Colonel Qaddafi, are shelling Zwara, a Berber port city located in Libya’s far northwest, less than 40 miles from Tunisia.

General Sensussi Mahrez, the highest-ranking military officer in the western coastal region to defect from the Qaddafi forces during the war last June, told me that the fighting broke out on Sunday. As I sit in his home in Zwara, I can see where shells exploded just 100 yards away yesterday. One fell on a school, but because this is a vacation week no one was hurt.

Fighters tell me that the shelling of Zwara has been steady for two days. Skirmishes outside of town today have apparently left eight Zwari fighters dead, and more than 100 were treated at the town’s little hospital, normally staffed by just a half dozen GPs. Today, a couple dozen volunteer doctors from Tripoli and Zawiya poured in to treat the wounded. An air ambulance took 15 critically wounded to Tripoli and about 60 others were transported by ambulance to bigger hospitals in Zawiya and Tripoli.

There are some easy explanations for the killings of Afghan civilians by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales in the 3rd Stryker Brigade. They describe an unbalanced individual reaching the breaking point in a stressful environment. Yes, the 38-year-old shooter from Joint Base Lewis-McChord had too many deployments in Iraq in a short period, and a traumatic brain injury (we don’t know how serious), and rumored marital trouble can’t have helped. But there are tens of thousands of soldiers who have had multiple deployments and many of these have had personal issues. They haven’t murdered any civilians.