Mission creep and the Security Council
The question of whether to arm Libya’s rebels simmers on. The United States insists that doing so would be in compliance with existing Security Council resolutions. Most others, including key NATO players and Security Council members, disagree. "We are there to protect the Libyan people, not to arm them," said NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen ...
The question of whether to arm Libya's rebels simmers on. The United States insists that doing so would be in compliance with existing Security Council resolutions. Most others, including key NATO players and Security Council members, disagree. "We are there to protect the Libyan people, not to arm them," said NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen this week. Russia and China argue that coalition action in Libya has already gone well beyond what the Council authorized. For its part, the Obama administration hasn't yet presented a clear explanation of its legal reasoning, but interpreting the resolutions to include arming the rebels would be creative, to say the least.
The question of whether to arm Libya’s rebels simmers on. The United States insists that doing so would be in compliance with existing Security Council resolutions. Most others, including key NATO players and Security Council members, disagree. "We are there to protect the Libyan people, not to arm them," said NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen this week. Russia and China argue that coalition action in Libya has already gone well beyond what the Council authorized. For its part, the Obama administration hasn’t yet presented a clear explanation of its legal reasoning, but interpreting the resolutions to include arming the rebels would be creative, to say the least.
I think the Obama administration would say that the Council authorization was essential for the Libya operation. This was in part a cold political calculation (certain key allies wouldn’t come on board without it) but also part ideological: this administration places great stock on international legality and legitimacy and sees the Council as key to achieving them. Bypassing the Council was something the Bush team did. But insisting on working through the Council means that you take what you can get, and what the Western powers could could get was a resolution centered on protecting civilians, not one authorizing support to the rebels or a policy of regime change. There is now a mismatch between the coalition’s real goal (quite clearly regime change) and its legal authorization (safeguarding civilians) which is generating significant tension.
That in turn raises an important question about the use of the Security Council: Could bypassing the body be less injurious to it than securing a lowest-common-denominator resolution and interpreting it beyond common-sense limits? Relations between the Council’s members have sometimes been frostiest not when the body was bypassed (as in Kosovo) but when some of the members felt that others where abusing the body’s authority. During the 1990s, Sergei Lavrov, Russia longtime UN ambassador and current foreign minister, often expressed outraged that the Iraq sanctions resolutions did not include a "sunset provision." The absence of such a provision–to Lavrov, an unintentional oversight–meant that any single permanent member could keep sanctions on Iraq in perpetuity by opposing resolutions to lift them. In that case, Lavrov felt that Russia had effectively been hoodwinked, that its authority as a Council member was being deployed in ways that it never intended.
Most Council members would no doubt feel that same about a policy of arming the rebels without seeking new authority to do so. And those feelings of resentment could well come back to haunt the administration when it wants to achieve something else through the body.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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