Were There Better Choices Than an Air Raid on Libya?

The U.S. raid on Libya involved less than 12 minutes of combat. Yet it has raised issues that the United States and the rest of the Western world may spend years trying to resolve. The raid also has revealed a number of important lessons about modern weapons and the fight against terrorism, which are getting increasingly close attention as American euphoria wears off and the Defense Department examines the results of the raid in depth.

While it is premature to judge all of the lessons of the raid, several points have become clear.

It is an open secret in Washington that many senior military officers and defense officials believed that the raid lacked a clear objective, and that the United States used military force without sufficiently clear purpose. Defense Secretary Casper W. Weinberger is believed to have been pushed into the mission by pressure from Secretary of State George P. Shultz and senior officials in the National Security Council.

The key uncertainties that surrounded U.S. contingency planning before the raid have re-emerged: whether it made sense to attack any targets other than Libya’s oil export capability and Moammar Kadafi, and whether the United States could have accomplished more through covert action.

Few of those involved in the planning really question whether something had to be done. Most believed that nothing would be accomplished by waiting for more vague signs of collective Western disapproval, or more ineffective economics and arms supply measures.

And there is a general consensus among American military planners and experts on terrorism that doing nothing would have given Kadafi a license to kill. More Americans would have died without the U.S. action than with it, and U.S. willingness to act in support of its own citizens and friends in the Middle East would have been steadily discredited.

But there were--and are--important criticisms of the raid. Many experts and planners considered it either too large or much too small. It was not sufficiently large to deter or remove Kadafi from power, but its failure to achieve decisive results meant that it was more than large enough to gain Kadafi broader support in the Arab world and temporarily consolidate his people behind him. Many intelligence officials believe that a lower-level effort to support his opposition would have been more successful--particularly since there had been several recent attempts to remove him from power.

Although few would say it publicly, many U.S. intelligence officers and experts on the Middle East believed that the raid was necessary because President Reagan and Secretary Shultz had glorified Kadafi by giving him such a high public profile, attacking him with broad, unsubstantiated rhetoric that reduced them to his level. These same experts believe that the U.S. naval action in the Gulf of Sidra had the same effect. The United States took on Kadafi without damaging him, made him more of a hero with extremists in the Arab world, and encouraged him to launch the series of terrorist attacks that culminated in the Berlin bombing.

Less publicity and more quiet support of Kadafi’s opposition would have brought him down much sooner. After all, there have been as many as 10 internal efforts to remove Kadafi from power in recent years. Libya’s current oil production is about half its 1978-80 level, and the country’s economy has contracted every year since 1980. The value of its exports has been cut in half, its foreign reserves have dropped from $14 billion to less than $3 billion, and its current account balance has gone from a $7.5 billion surplus to a deficit of more than $1 billion. Kadafi is nearly $9 billion behind in paying for foreign military and civil imports and services, and is not meeting payments even on his $4 billion to $5 billion arms debt to the Soviet Union. Nearly one-third of Libya’s best-educated managers and professionals have left the country; most industrial and consumer goods are in short supply, and the political situation is so bad that even Libya’s coffee houses have been closed to prevent public assembly.

There are no easy answers in how to approach these issues, and such uncertainties become much more severe when the same questions are raised about U.S. action against terrorist activities sponsored by more powerful nations, such as Syria and Iran. Although Defense Department officials publicly describe the Libya raid as a success, most have pushed hard for shifting to covert action or weapons systems, such as cruise missiles, which might avoid U.S. casualties.

The end result is likely to be a continuing debate in which hawkish civilians in the State Department and National Security Council are often resisted by “dovish” officers and civilians in the Defense Department. Ironically, both are meeting some resistance in the Central Intelligence Agency, where career officers are much more cautious than those outside the intelligence community are about the ease and efficiency with which the United States can use covert action.