When discussing whether or not the U.S. and allies should be intervening in Libya, many people seem to be operating under the assumption that an air campaign will be sufficient to do what the resolution has authorized, namely protecting the civilian population in rebel-controlled areas. Robbert Haddick writes that this is not the case:

The coalition should reckon with Qaddafi’s likely responses. Although they are helpful, he does not need his tanks and artillery to regain control of Libya’s cities. Once coalition aircraft begin attacking conventional military targets, Qaddafi will switch to irregular warfare techniques. His soldiers and mercenaries will abandon their uniforms and travel by bus, accompanied by civilians, refugees, and friendly media for shielding against air attack. Once inside cities like Benghazi and in close quarters with the rebels, Qaddafi’s infantry will similarly be immune from air attack, especially if the coalition is prohibited from deploying ground troops as forward air controllers.

Finally, Qaddafi is a particularly unscrupulous and ruthless adversary with long experience using terrorism as a strategic weapon — Libya was a large source of suicide bomb volunteers during the Iraq war — so members of the coalition should expect terror retaliation in various forms.

Although his overseas bank accounts have been seized, Qaddafi already has the necessary money, troops, weapons, and ammunition to sustain a low intensity but brutal campaign against the rebels. The investigation begun by the International Criminal Court has left him and his sons with little choice but to fight on. The United Nations has authorized the wide-ranging use of air power against his regime. Air power will be enough to escalate this war but not enough to win it. Although prohibited for now by the Security Council, “boots on the ground” will eventually be required to remove Qaddafi and his sons from Libya.

The similarities with Kosovo are eerie, and that is a very bad sign for the people living in eastern Libya. Perhaps the only thing worse than intervening in a civil war in which the U.S. and our allies have nothing at stake is to intervene and then opt for those tactics that will do just enough to commit us to the fight without protecting the people our forces are supposed to be protecting. Quite apart from the outrageous harm done to both Albanian and Serb civilians in the prosecution of the air campaign, the war in Kosovo facilitated and caused the mass refugee exodus from Kosovo that it was officially trying to avert*. The U.S. and our allies weren’t going to be responsible for what happened to the people in eastern Libya, but our governments have now assumed responsibility for them.

Haddick makes a credible argument that the limited action that the U.N. just authorized will not be enough to achieve even those limited objectives set out by Obama yesterday, to say nothing of the much more ambitious goal of toppling Gaddafi. Leaving aside the inevitable drumbeat for escalation and regime change that was bound to happen anyway, U.S. and allied governments are going to feel compelled to go beyond what the current resolution authorizes. All of the talk of so-called international consensus and regional support is not going to last when the intervening governments decide to push for regime change.

* Anyone interested in a good analysis of the NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo should look at this 1999 paper by Christopher Layne from the Cato Institute. As Layne explained:

Before the onset of NATO’s air campaign, Belgrade’s objective was not to forcibly expel ethnic Albanians from Kosovo but rather to remove them from KLA strongholds, thereby depriving the KLA of its base of support.Once the bombing began, however, the Serbian campaign in Kosovo intensified as Belgrade moved (apparently according to a previously formulated contingency plan) to crush the KLA and to expel large numbers of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

The campaign triggered the mass expulsions from Kosovo. NATO made the entire civilian population of Kosovo a target of retaliation by intervening on the side of the KLA. Had Milosevic not backed down, U.S. and NATO would have had to invade to expel the Serbian forces or accept the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo as a fait accompli. If someone invokes Kosovo in defense of the new Libyan war, this is the campaign they are idealizing.