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Juan Cole, a progressive, has an excellent write-up, The Top Ten Myths about the Libya War. It is a must read. Cole argues that it was not the U.S. which led the charge, but the British and French. In addition, Cole argues that there are no NATO military brigades on the ground, emphasizing that both Libya and the Arab League objected to the presence of foreign ground brigades and that the Libyan people did not need foreign brigades to succeed in their revolution.

Regardless of how the intervention is viewed, one thing is for certain, Obama’s foreign policy is a much welcome return to multilateralism, away from Dubya’s unilateralism. Furthermore, Obama’s multilateralism has been far more successful than Dubya’s three-stooges-cowboy-defendmydaddy-unilateralism schtick ever will be.

Two important myths that Cole debunks include points seven and eight:

7. There had to be NATO infantry brigades on the ground for the revolution to succeed. Everyone from Cockburn to Max Boot (scary when those two agree) put forward this idea. But there are not any foreign infantry brigades in Libya, and there are unlikely to be any. Libyans are very nationalistic and they made this clear from the beginning. Likewise the Arab League. NATO had some intelligence assets on the ground, but they were small in number, were requested behind the scenes for liaison and spotting by the revolutionaries, and did not amount to an invasion force. The Libyan people never needed foreign ground brigades to succeed in their revolution.

8. The United States led the charge to war. There is no evidence for this allegation whatsoever. When I asked Glenn Greenwald whether a US refusal to join France and Britain in a NATO united front might not have destroyed NATO, he replied that NATO would never have gone forward unless the US had plumped for the intervention in the first place. I fear that answer was less fact-based and more doctrinaire than we are accustomed to hearing from Mr. Greenwald, whose research and analysis on domestic issues is generally first-rate. As someone not a stranger to diplomatic history, and who has actually heard briefings in Europe from foreign ministries and officers of NATO members, I’m offended at the glibness of an answer given with no more substantiation than an idee fixe. The excellent McClatchy wire service reported on the reasons for which then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the Pentagon, and Obama himself were extremely reluctant to become involved in yet another war in the Muslim world. It is obvious that the French and the British led the charge on this intervention, likely because they believed that a protracted struggle over years between the opposition and Qaddafi in Libya would radicalize it and give an opening to al-Qaeda and so pose various threats to Europe.

Read the entire piece, The Top Ten Myths about the Libya War.

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