American Embassy in Libya

It's nearly midnight and a stack of AP World History essays sits on my work desk, still awaiting my pen.  I need to plan a lesson about the Han Dynasty for tomorrow.  I need to sleep.

But instead, I'm sitting on the floor in front of the TV, watching the news.  A deep pain is filling my heart.  The US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya has been bombed and Ambassador Chris Stevens is dead, the first American diplomatic envoy to be killed in over two decades.  It is shocking news that saddens me not only because of its inherent tragedy, but because of what I've been teaching over the last couple years.

US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya
burns on September 12, 2012

Christopher Stevens, US Ambassador to Libya,
killed on September 12, 2012

In February 2011, I was teaching two freshman humanities classes about the Arab Spring.  We were fresh off the heals of learning about genocide and the international community's chronically sluggish response.  We were agitated and disgusted, both at the horror of such a crime and the world's lack of decisive action to prevent these human atrocities.

Rankling in our distress, we tuned in to the daily news and saw that even as we sat there, a potential genocide was brewing.  As nonviolent protests in Libya were giving way to an open civil war, we saw the blustering dictator Muammar Gaddafi threatening unchecked violence on his own people, using the dehumanizing language we came to recognize as a warning sign of impending disaster.

Speaking to the nation on February 22, Gaddafi called protestors "rats", "dirt" and "filth" and promised a "holy march" that would go "house by house, home by home, street by street, person by person" to "purify" the land.

Muammar Gaddafi's Speech on February 22, 2011

With troops poised on the borders of Benghazi, Libya's second largest city and capital of the opposition movement, the world witnessed something that never happened in Bosnia, Rwanda or Darfur.  The United Nations passed Security Council Resolution 1973, authorizing the use of military force to stop Gaddafi under the "Responsibility to Protect" or "R2P" doctrine.

The United States contributed most of the money and firepower for NATO's Operation Odyssey Dawn and by the end of March 2011, Gaddafi's forces had been turned back.  We'll never know how many civilian lives were saved in Benghazi by this action, but there seems little doubt that, for perhaps the first time in history, the United Nations moved with the agility and speed necessary to prevent acts of genocide.

In a sight rarely seen in the Islamic world since the USA's "War on Terror" following the 9/11 attacks, jubilant Muslims danced in the streets of Benghazi with the American flag.  For once, it seemed, the US had found its place in an international world, not acting with brazen unilateral force, but following the procedures of the United Nations and intervening with the sanction and blessing of the larger global community.

Libyan rebels celebrate with the American flag

Christopher Stevens was a US diplomat who had been deployed to liaison with the Libyan rebels during the revolution and was eventually installed as ambassador to build relations with the fledgling government.  Indeed, it seemed as though it was the dawn of a new era.

Chris Stevens introduces himself to Libya (produced for Libyan TV)

The United States legacy in the Middle East, however, could not be reversed with a single successful operation.  And while relations with the new Libyan government were cordial, a number of paradoxes in American policy were apparent to those who were looking for patterns and consistency.  Where was UN resolution for the ongoing US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?  Why were peaceful protestors against authoritarian regimes in Yemen and Bahrain not similarly supported by the US?  How come gas canisters used against democracy activists in Egypt read "made in the USA"?  When would similar R2P principles be enacted for Syria?  And what about those drones?

Of all the incongruities of US policy in the Middle East caused by the conflict of "American values" and "American interests", it is this last that is most troubling to me.

According to its founding documents and faithful citizens, the USA values human rights and due process of law.  It's why many, especially liberals, have recoiled in alarm at revelations of prisoner abuse, torture, and indefinite detainment of suspected terrorists in "black ops jails" around the world, including the notorious Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.  When President Obama took office in 2009, the global community rejoiced when he signed an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay on his first day in office.

President Obama signs Guantanamo Order on January 22, 2009

He promised to return America to "the moral high ground" by disavowing actions which contradicted American values in the pursuit of national security.  Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and international optimism for the new president soared.

Nearly four years later, the Guantanamo Order has never been carried through due to political wrangling over what to do with the detainees, and much of the luster of Obama's Nobel Prize has been lost.  While he has removed the majority of the American troops from Iraq, the war in Afghanistan rages on and, in fact, continues to spill over into other countries in the region.

Apparently, President Obama has been authorizing an unprecedented number of drone strikes in these other countries, taking out high-level terrorist suspects with a simple order to a soldier with a remote control in an American military office.

And now we come all the way back around to the original news story that broke my heart, and the reason that I can't sleep tonight.

How did it happen that a city that was waving American flags in the street in celebration just one year ago is now the location where a US embassy has been attacked and a respected ambassador killed?

The commentary grabbing most of the headlines suggests anger about a despicable YouTube film of murky origins depicting the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) as a lying, bumbling, womanizing fraud.  For a religious tradition that already takes any visual representation of the prophet as an abomination, images that are also hateful and derogatory will obviously spark intense convictions.

The September 11 protests in Egypt in which the American flag was ripped down from the embassy in Cairo, torn and burned before the camera show an "in kind" retaliation for the video's blasphemy.  These protestors' actions are repulsive and destructive and deserve the condemnation they have received.  This is religion at its worst, serving as a convenient rallying point for disaffected passions that rise in violent outbursts.

Egyptian protestors deface the American flag
at the US Embassy in Cairo, September 11, 2012

Much of the rioting today in Benghazi likely stems from the same passions and a debate needs to be had about whether or not vile denigration of religion is protected by free speech, but I'll leave that for another time.  For now, suffice it to say that even if being insulting and abominable towards religious people in a YouTube video is a protected human right, reacting to such rubbish with violence is even worse and does nothing to disarm hate and everything to multiply it.  Stop.

But an even more alarming impetus behind today's violence has to do with those contradictions in American policy, in particular, the increased use of drones.  This is not the first attack on the US Embassy in Libya since Gaddafi was ousted.  That came earlier this year in June, when a pro-Al Qaeda group in Benghazi detonated a bomb at the embassy in response to the USA's announcement that they had killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, Al Qaeda's second-in-command and Libyan national, in a drone strike in Pakistan.

Abu Yahya al-Libi, Al Qaeda's second-in-command.
Killed by US drone strike in Pakistan on June 4, 2012.

Yesterday, on the 11th anniversary of September 11, the current leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, confirmed that al-Libi was indeed killed in Pakistan by a US drone, as the American government claimed three months ago.  He called for retaliation saying of al-Libi, "His blood is calling, urging and inciting you to fight and kill the crusaders."  Now it appears that this Libyan group, taking up Zawahiri's charge, is behind the attack on the embassy and the death of Ambassador Stevens.  Blood for blood.

What now?  Ramp up the drone strikes for another round?  Do we think that assassinating al-Zawahiri will stop the violence?  Did assassinating bin Laden stop it?

It seems like all the hope we shared for a new beginning in Libya with the Arab Spring, a new beginning in US foreign policy with the Obama administration, and a new international precedent of R2P intervention has been lost.  What can I now hold out to my students as hope that we might break the patterns of our violent history with a more humanizing course?

It's 2:26 in the morning now and I still have to plan that lesson, so I'll try and wrap up quickly.

If this world is going to have peace, bullets cannot be met with bullets, hate cannot be met with hate, and violence cannot be met with violence.

If this world is going to have peace, values must be more important than interests, human rights more important than security, and promises more important than politics.

If this world is going to have peace, then we need to condemn both the al Qaeda bomb and the American drone strike for continuing a cycle of violence instead of winning the day.  Even operations like Odyssey Dawn need to be reconsidered, because it seems like war always breeds more war, not more peace.

What does our responsibility to protect really mean?  Where do we go from here?