Thoughts on a Two-State Solution

July 15/16, 2011
last update July 22


So here we are in mid-July, with the Libyan Civil War / NATO's war for Libya on the verge of five months old. Even France and the US are backing down from their broadest swipe at Libya's system, narrowing the focus back to the rule of Muammar Gaddafi. Negotiations with the sitting government are now being considered, based on whispers that the strongman might consider leaving power, if not Libya. His sons, not so central. This might be the talk of the tired.

And discussions on the future shape of the country, as seen on the map, are opening up. I've been meaning to explain my proposed two-state solution, but it took being annoyed by an article to finally spur this attempt. Matt Gregory wrote about - and panned - such a solution the other day.
http://technorati.com/politics/article/south-sudan-libya-and-the-two/page-3/

Many have suggested that a two state solution, in which two seperate entities, East and West Libya, were created; the Western state would be controlled by Gadhafi and have a capital in Tripoli, and the Eastern state would be governed, like in South Sudan, by a new government with its base in Benghazi. The border would be located in the area outside the rebel-held Misrata. And, like in Sudan, everyone would be satisfied. Right?

No, that's ridiculous. See the map below, where red is areas solidly held by rebels (it's a bit simplified, and doesn't show the implied southern desert control). The loyal people of the Sirte basin would not be happy to be swallowed under traitor control by the Misrata rebel's intransigence and ability to barely hold on.

Hell, there's a rebel toehold in Az Zintan, and other rebel holdings that come and go in the surrounding Nafusah mountains, west even of Tripoli. Do the rebels get the mountains and everything east of there now? That's the whole country! If the rebels keep Misrata at all (and despite the unfair cost to real Libya, it'll be hard to avoid), it'll be as a discontiguous exclave, and under military quarantine. Misrata cannot be the threat to Tripoli the rebels want it for.

Reality is what it is - real. No one among the great powers will now sanction a re-conquest of all Cyrenaica by Gaddafi's forces. The two sides are not likely to peacefully re-integrate any time soon after what's happened. The border should be just southwest of Ajdabiya. The cease-fire would leave the Nafusah mountain rebels frozen out of control, and quite possibly Misrata, besides the aspirants in other cities. They would be allowed to leave for the east. In fact, all people who feel displaced must be free to migrate.

It should be noted my east Libya is not really large (nor all that small), and pretty coastal. No one needs the desert south of there except for the oil in it. And this was never about stealing Libya's oil, only about freedom. There - two million people, hundreds of miles, beautiful cities, the second largest among them - coastal Cyrenaica, under rebel control and recognized, in peace, with elections, and endowed with offshore oil (north and slightly west) that's not bad.

I recommend also a cut off the top of all onshore and offshore oil under Tripoli's control, as these are still (some of) the peopl of Libya. But the management of that, via terminals in Brega and westward, should stay under Tripoli. Whatever else they've done, Gaddafi and his government have shown an ability to manage the oil wealth for the peoples' benefit, as opposed to Wall Street's. Benghazi should have a small share (reduced for extreme intransigence and sedition), but not be allowed to control and sell it out.

And then, maybe that could just be nullified in trade for continued access to the Great Manmade River, built by the government the rebels reject, but relied on by all Libyans... they could call it even Steven there, and have a small start towards re-discovering what they have in common. The truth and reconciliation will take a while to even broach, it's been so horrific since the rebels started the war in February.

Anyway, that's my proposal. It's much too fair to Tripoli for most peoples' liking. Just about anything is, it sometimes seems. For his part, Mr. Gergory in his article was pessimistic even about his narrow Western slice of Libya being acceptable.

Unfortunately, this plan would not work for several reasons. First of all, Muhammar Gadhafi is a war criminal. Retired British army Brigadier Ben Barry, who served as a peacekeeper in Bosnia, stated that should a two-state solution be implemented and Gadhafi remain in power, he would, "behave like an intransigent Bosnian warlord...controlling energy resources and then reverting to previous bad behavior."

Indeed, should Gadhafi, to whom an arrest warrant has already been issued by the International Criminal Court, be allowed to remain in power, he would be able to revert to his ruthless, tyrannical ways and virtually enslave all the people unfortunate enough to live west of rebel-held Misrata. Gadhafi has already been accused of human rights violations, such as the use of cluster bombs, which are extremely dangerous to civilians, and the location of military personell and weaponry in close proximity to buildings such as mosques, schools, and hospitals. If democracy is the object of NATO's mission in Libya, such a solution would not work.

That Gaddafi is a war criminal is undeniable on paper, but reality is another story. I'm not impressed with the opinion of a crusading war-crimes-empowered, war-crimes-believing, British general. There's been serious disinformation about a certain class of NATO target governments like Yugoslavia and Libya.

For one, Libya never blew up Pan Am flight 103 in 1988; this much is known by the best minds on the issue, although on paper they're still guilty by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's preposterous 2001 conviction. Likewise, the supposed crimes of this war have a legal reality in the ICC arrest warrants - but these are based on what could best be understood as unverified rumors, as the 1991 indictments over Lockerbie were based on dubious stories from a paid and coerced informant. This time, by and large, it's unconfirmed and unlikely "tweets" from self-described rebels.

The cluster bombing - which has been questioned but might still be true (I need to update that issue) - is the least of it. The Gaddafi regime has been accused of using black foreign mercenaries to commit a range of atrocities against innocents. Hundreds or thousands have been arrested for the crime, hundreds others killed, but all expert analysis [see "refutations"] of these claimed foreign fighters shows they're foreigners but just workers, or fighters but Libyans and serving their country. Tripoli has been acused of bombing protesters with fighter jets, ordering them shot and ordering soldiers who refuse shot, bombing mosques and shooting worshippers for no good reason ("God vs. Gaddafi," he's secretly a Jew, etc.), ordering mass rape, again and again in different sadistic ways, having young children shot by snipers, planning various genocide and preparing for chemical warfare, and much more, all with no credible evidence. This will be the subject soon of a mega-post to keep score of how these have all panned out under scrutiny.

If a lying campaign like we're seeing emerge is pervasive and audacious enough that the world has called it true, should we, in the interests of skepticism, presume it must be mostly true?

Furthermore, a peace deal at this time in which the civil war was halted in order to create a division between Gadhafi's Libya and the rebel-held East would negate any of the positive progress that the rebel forces have made over the last few days. Slowly but surely, rebels have crept through the desert towards Tripoli, overtaking supply routes and weapons depots as they move forward. While no major victories have been won in the recent past, this new progress offers hope that rebel forces will eventually be able to eliminate Gadhafi and his forces for good, negating the need for any two-state solution. Should such a deal be signed, any momentum accumulated will be lost and Libyans will only be able to dream of what could have been a unified state under a democratic government.

Ask the people of conquered Qawalish (aka Gualish) how positive this progress is. They fled the rebel conquest, and if they ever return, it'll be to burnt homes, looted stores, dead livestock, and a drained gas station. At least six defending soldiers were brutally killed and dumped outside Qawalish. Civilians were beaten and homes burnt in other towns in the area, to punish them for siding with the government. [see here for explanation]

Whatever the nature of it, this progress towards Gharyan and then Tripoli came only after relentless and costly outside bombing, destroying perhaps half Libya's real army, stealing a huge chunk of its money, refusing compromise, punishing peace initiatives, and finally air-dropping weapons for weeks in violation of the arms embargo. Only then this army of a thousand Islamist mountain punks made some gains towards what? Imposing their will on the million in Tripoli itself? Imagine David Koresh's group, twenty times larger and better armed. Should the Russians be holding out for a takeover of Texas? Or the whole US?

Again, the People there DO NOT WANT IT. The people west of Ajdabiya are already "enslaved" under Gaddafi and most seem fine enough with it, for now, if the world would just let them run their country, buy gasoline, work, and get paid, ever again. That's great that so many talking heads and world leaders and crusading journalists want rebel control over the green-washed masses to start re-programming them. So long as the free market people currently heading the rebel TNC stay in charge, the West is happy, confident they'll get those spoils coming in to satiate the masses at home who complain about the cost - as if they don't know a burglary takes a few bucks to set up.

The only fair solution to the reality on the ground is a (temporary) two-state solution. Anything else puts a lot of people under the rule of others they consider traitors and butchers. It's that simple. 

I can see why putting the whole back together under Tripoli's rule will be unacceptable to everyon that matters. But I cannot support the opposite either. Perhaps Mr. Gregory - or Secretary Clinton? - will want to go to Tripoli and Brega, to the besieged loyalists still alive inside rebel-held Misrata and the threatened blacks of Tawergha that they just have to get used to the new order. A nasty coalition of the Lynch mob people who now say "Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata," Islamist radicals returned from Gitmo and Iraq, monarchists who just suck, and TNC sell-outs who eye kickbacks upon helping NATO's economies finally crack open Africa's largest oil reserves for real.

This seems to have been the aim of the rebel-NATO alliance, but that doesn't make it a just one, one that progress towards should be called "positive." People need to notice how fuzzy their understanding of this whole issue - starting with the geography of it - really is. Lives are at stake here.

Why Misrata Matters

April 25 2011
update May 18

Note: Below I failed completely to note that Misrata is a major port, serving a large surrounding area. The port being in rebel hands and the surroundings in government control is a central gripe behind the "tribal threat" of late April.

Misrata (alt: Misurata, Arabic: مصراتة) is Libya’s third largest city (after Tripoli and Benghazi), boasting in peacetime about 550,000 people. Considered Libya’s commercial capital, it lies in the west of the country about 130 miles east of the capitol Tripoli. [1] With the de facto rebel capitol Benghazi itself no longer in immediate danger, Misrata has become the new focal point of the Libyan civil war. To hear mainstream news accounts, this would seem to be from the humanitarian crisis there. However, the real reasons behind the West's desperation to "save" Misrata are certainly more strategic than altruistic.

A Crisis of Disputed Size in the Western Holdout
It was among the amazing number of Libyan cities, east and west, that fell to rebel control within just a few days of the revolt’s start on February 17. This flash of activity was much more violent and pre-planned than the world public realizes, but that was needed to seed the impression that the whole country had “voted” by popular action to secede from the capitol.

After the initial shock of this unprecedented mutiny, the loyalists in the army and within the “liberated” cities re-grouped with an early-March roll-back. In general, rebel support was too weak to last in the west, and caved easily, and by the 19th rebel control was limited to their de facto capitol Benghazi and points eastward. The only exception to this rule was vital and sizable Misrata, then and for the last month the only western city even partially held by rebels.

With its switched-off electricity and water, sometimes severed supply lines, and the flight of thousands unwilling to fight, the city has become much less vibrant, to the say the least. On top of that, there's the siege: neighborhood-scale fighting, tanks, snipers, and mortars and rockets launched from afar. It's been described by rebels as a living hell, with "unimaginable carnage," hospitals overflowing, bodies piling up uncounted in the streets. Rebel pleas always cite among those killed indiscriminately women, children, and the elderly, in every single explosion.  It's been said Gaddafi is flattening the city, strangling it, and intends to slaughter every person in it.

However on April 10, Human Rights Watch released information on Misrata showing something less inhuman than all that:

According to Dr. Muhammad el-Fortia, who works at Misrata Hospital, medical facilities have recorded 257 people killed and 949 wounded and hospitalized since February 19, 2011. The wounded include 22 women and eight children, he said. [2]

Dr. Alan J. Kuperman, a respected scholar of humanitarian interventions, cited this as evidence that "Moammar Khadafy is not deliberately massacring civilians but rather narrowly targeting the armed rebels who fight against his government" ("narrowly" being relative under the circumstances). Since the fighting there started nearly two months earlier, he finds from HRW's numbers "of the 949 wounded, only 22 — less than 3 percent — are women. If Khadafy were indiscriminately targeting civilians, women would comprise about half the casualties." [3]

In the roughly 45 days since the seige began, 257 is only about six deaths per day, on average. That isn't likely a complete number, but no more likely to be very far off. In reality it looks less like a genocidal massacre than the six weeks of low-level but NATO-prolonged urban warfare it is. Even presuming a gross margin of unreported deaths, 400 or even 500 dead is really not that high - at most about 0.1% of the population. If the government were trying to kill "as many people as possible," with this much time to have done it, they are failing badly.

The Key to the Whole of Libya
Misrata’s fate has become second only to Benghazi’s. But as with the capitol, the motivation to maintain the third city is not to prevent a slaughter of innocents, but for two interlocking geo-strategic reasons.

One reason is, essentially, the city's location. Benghazi holds the key to Cyrenaica (the region from there eastward), which has remained in rebel hands since the end of February. But as the western outpost, Misrata holds a partial key to the whole nation. It's the last geographic bastion of the illusion that this is a nationwide popular uprising, as opposed to an East-West civil war. The latter, but not the former, could be settled with partition, an answer that makes sense now (any other option will leave substantial numbers of people under the rule of now-hated enemies and "traitors"). But the rebels and their western sponsors want to take the whole country, and so both are quite intent on keeping Misrata in rebel hands.

The other reason to the same effect is the city's size. Gaddafi is fully in charge of only one of the tree top cities (Tripoli), with #2 undeniably lost and #3 contested. As a piece in Bloomberg Businesswek noted yesterday:

Rebel control of Misrata would leave Qaddafi in charge of one major city, Tripoli, W. Andrew Terrill, a research professor of national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, said in an interview. “If the rebels have Benghazi and Misrata, they’re looking like a viable force and a legitimate government” and it could make a stronger case for other nations to join France, Italy and Qatar in recognizing them, Terrill said. [6]

And finally, a more immediate consideration, again location-based - when and if the rebel are ever able to attack Tripoli itself, it would be from Misrata, not Benghazi. After the putative pullout of April 23:

Colonel Ahmed Omar Bani, the rebel spokesman, dismissed reports of progress in Misrata."It is a disaster there," he said. "Kadhafi is not going anywhere. Misrata is the key to Tripoli. If he lets go of Misrata, he will let go of Tripoli. He is not crazy enough to do that."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1381068/Hundreds-dead-bodies-streets-city-reduced-rubble-Full-horror-Misrata-siege-finally-emerges.html

Human Shields?
Clearly something extraordinary is driving the rebels of Misrata to stay in that "hell" with their families, to reject each offer of truce or negotiation, and maintain the city as both a war zone and a buffer against legitimate government counter-attack. Any attempt to re-impose order with armaments is deemed unacceptable, since the fighters have situated themselves in a city stuffed with civilians. That is, they're using themselves and their families, in a sense, as human shields.

And when Gaddafi's forces aren't willing to deliver horrible enough atrocities, the rebels or someone sympathetic will fake the most incendiary crimes for them. Children targeted by snipers in Misrata widely claimed, but only "proven" by a highly dubious x-ray image that's been presented now in connection with at least two separate children who don't seem to have been all-but-killed as they should be.

Mid-April did see a brutal new offensive, with a few dozen more killed in rocket attacks on Misrata, as usual including women, children, and the elderly. [4] Cluster bombs have reportedly been found. The harbor was attacked again. The rebels predicted a total slaughter would finally befall them without more NATO involvement soon.

What they really mean is Misrata will no longer be a rebel town, but the coding helps. The leaders of the US, UK, and France, who happened to be meeting in these same bloody days, jointly denounced, among other things, the “medieval siege” of Misrata. And these pleas finally allowed them to make some new decisions on a core realization that all three nations have agreed on for four decades now - essentially, Gaddafi must go. "It is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Gaddafi in power," they lied jointly on the 15th. [5]

Nonetheless, NATO air strikes fell off notably and stayed low-key, for fear of civilian deaths, as government forces pulled themselves fully inside the city. The same situation the rebels had exploited for weeks, when it's protecting the Libyan army, is unaplogetically called "using human shields." This has created the impression that they are snatching civilians and strapping them to their tanks, tying NATO's hands while they drive over piles of young children.

So a decision was made to bring in the drones, well-known for differentiating between civilians and combatants (??) and then the whole situation shifted. (see Misrata: the Tribal Threat)

Sources:
[1] Wikipedia. Misrata. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrata
[2] Human Rights Watch. "Libya: Government Attacks in Misrata Kill Civilians." April 10 2011. http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/04/10/libya-government-attacks-misrata-kill-civilians
[3] Kuperman, Alan J. "False pretense for war in Libya?" Boston Globe. April 14 2011. http://articles.boston.com/2011-04-14/bostonglobe/29418371_1_rebel-stronghold-civilians-rebel-positions
[4] "Rocket barrage hits Misrata, NATO says Gaddafi must go" Times of India, April 15. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/Obama-Sarko-Cameron-seal-deal-Oust-Gaddafi/articleshow/7996431.cms
[5] http://www.libyafeb17.com/2011/04/letter-on-libya-by-obama-cameron-and-sarkozy/
[6] http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-04-23/u-s-drone-hits-libyan-target-nine-killed-at-syria-funerals.html