When I read a blind quote from a White House staffer in Tuesday morning’s New York Times saying Obama “keeps reminding us that the best revolutions are completely organic,” I tried to convince myself our learned head of state is not, in fact, such a fool as his staffer. Organic? Meaning totally home-grown and self-sustaining? Ask the French, for instance, how “organic” the American Revolution really was. ~Christopher Dickey

Yes, very droll. I have seen some version of this “the French helped America, so America should help Libyan rebels” a few times in the last day or two, and I am amazed that interventionists are using this argument. I shouldn’t say anything, since they are doing an outstanding job of discrediting their own argument, but it is really too good to pass up.

It wasn’t out of sympathy with the finer points of British constitutionalism or because of humanitarian concern that Louis XVI sent military support to the rebels here in the colonies. The French intervened to deliver a blow to their British rivals as payback for the loss of their colonial holdings in North America and elsewhere after the Seven Years’ War. The French perceived support for our cause as a useful pretext and occasion for dealing the British a defeat. France saw a great strategic opportunity in an ongoing struggle for influence and power with another major power, and it assumed the risks and costs of significant military support for that reason.

As valuable as French aid was to our cause, that doesn’t mean that the decision to intervene was actually a wise one from the French perspective. If the French monarch and his ministers had appreciated the fiscal and political consequences of supporting a republican rebel movement, they might not have intervened at all. That would have been unfortunate for us, but it might have been much better for the gradual, healthier evolution of French politics. Urging intervention in Libya is bad enough, but urging intervention by saying that the U.S. should look to the disaster (for France) that was late Bourbon foreign policy as some sort of inspiration is truly mad.

There are no comparable American interests at stake in Libya. If Gaddafi prevails, that would be very bad for Libya, but that doesn’t mean that intervention is in the American interest. If the rebels prevail, that could be good or bad for Libya, but it still wouldn’t be in our interest to become involved. Some interventionists have been invoking the Reagan Doctrine, but the Reagan Doctrine was part of a larger strategic goal of combating Soviet influence by supporting insurgencies against communist/pro-Soviet governments in various parts of the world. There is no larger strategic goal advanced by supporting rebels we know little or nothing about against a dictator in a country of minimal strategic significance. Interventionists are scrambling to find some precedent or pretext for meddling in Libya instead of thinking through whether the U.S. has any reason to meddle.

As it happens, the best revolutions are not only organic, but they are those fought to safeguard customary rights and institutions against usurpation. By all accounts, Libya is a country whose institutions have been wrecked by Gaddafi’s misrule, and even if they are successful Libyan rebels will be confronted with building up new institutions more or less from scratch. The people insisting that we must intervene now are the same who will insist that we have an obligation to help Libyans fashion new institutions and fashion a civil society from next to nothing.

The most important question is not whether Western intervention would “taint” and discredit the cause of the Libyan rebels, nor is it whether the rebels could use military assistance, but whether it makes any sense for the U.S. to take sides in a Libyan civil war where it has nothing at stake. The answer to this question is no.