Why France Will Finish Off Gaddafi
Let’s make something clear, the civil war in Libya will not end in a stalemate. The French will likely intervene with ground forces and topple the Gaddafi regime, and they will probably do it within a month. It is quite possible that they will do so with Italian help. President Obama has fervently wished for America to be just one of the boys; in the end, this may be a case of wishing for something so much that you get it. America has abrogated the role of global marshal that it assumed after World War II. Every posse needs a Marshal to lead it. The French will likely pick up the tin star they found lying in the street of the global village.
When General Petraeus asked the famous question, “tell me how this ends?” early in the Iraq war, he was signaling unease about launching conflicts with no clear idea of how the world should look after the fighting stopped; the military calls this an “end state”. When he had a chance to do something about it, Petraeus as a caveat for assuming command in Iraq, insisted that the civilian side of the government craft a clear end state and give him adequate forces to pursue it. By the 2008 election, both candidates were promising never again to get us involved in an open ended conflict. Fast forward to 2011, where we have embarked on a military campaign with no clear strategic objective other than to “do something”; having done something that is clearly not enough, the administration seems at a loss. At this point, we have a strategic leadership vacuum, and the French will probably fill it.
There are four reasons why the French will step in. The first is that President Sarkozy is a student of history. France got involved in two disastrous stalemates in the last century on the western front in World War I and in Indochina mid century. These twin debacles coupled with the fiasco of the French collapse in 1940 sucked the vitality out of French martial traditions. France cannot afford a long war of incremental escalation such as the American involvement in Vietnam, and his country’s earlier Indochina experience.
A second reason is that France clearly fears and cannot tolerate, another wave of Muslim immigration into a country already on the brink of seeing the Gallic race becoming a minority in their own homeland. Italy is even more vulnerable in France in this respect as she is Libya’s former colonial ruler and a likely destination of choice for refugees. That is why I believe that the Italians may assist in a ground intervention.
Third, Sarkozy clearly wants French world, or at least regional, leadership restored. He wants to succeed where De Gaulle failed, and the Libyan situation presents a golden opportunity to restore the martial traditions of the French glory days of the Sun King and Napoleon.
Finally, of the European powers, only France retains a credible power projection capability beyond continental Europe. Although her constitution greatly restricts the use of the regular French Army beyond the defense of metropolitan France, she has maintained a volunteer expeditionary army in the Foreign Legion and her Marines (expeditionary infantry) which would be more than capable of dispatching Gaddafi’s battered loyalist forces.
None of this is to say that the French may not be walking into a situation similar to that we faced in 2004-6 in Iraq when Iraqi factions fought over the remains of their country and the more radical factions turned on their would-be Coalition Force liberators. Libya will likely be a mess for years to come. However, I am suggesting that the U.S. will not be calling the shots if the French intervene decisively, and we should think about if that is what we really want.
In fairness to President Obama, this is what he promised he would do and it is where the first President Bush also wanted us to go. The United States is just another rider in the posse at this point. If the posse threatens to become a lynch mob, we no longer have the decisive vote; nor do we have a veto if the rest of the posse decides to let the guy in the black hat go free. If the American people really want that, they are about to get. I have no choice to defer to the will of the majority if that is really what the majority wants; but I don’t have to like it.
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps officer. He is an Adjunct Professor at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
