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Ignore the Hawks

One thing that can be said for Obama’s cautious response to the conflict in Libya so far is that it has annoyed all of the right people. The signatories to the letter Rogin cites is a Who’s Who of hawkish interventionists whose advice should be ignored as often as possible. Of the five specific recommendations […]

One thing that can be said for Obama’s cautious response to the conflict in Libya so far is that it has annoyed all of the right people. The signatories to the letter Rogin cites is a Who’s Who of hawkish interventionists whose advice should be ignored as often as possible.

Of the five specific recommendations they make, three are unremarkable, and virtually everyone can support them because they are obvious and unobjectionable. Freezing assets, announcing that members of the regime will be held accountable for their crimes, and providing humanitarian assistance are all reasonable, fairly easy things to do. The recommendation of a no-fly zone is a mistake for all the reasons outlined before, and it also doesn’t seem as if it is very likely to be imposed. They want the U.S. to call on NATO to develop plans for a no-fly zone, but Rasmussen just said yesterday that the conflict in Libya “does not threaten NATO or any NATO allies.” For once, NATO leaders seem to understand that it is not the alliance’s role to police conflicts on other continents.

That leaves us with the hawks’ other recommendation, which is to consider cutting off importation of Libyan oil. This seems unusually daft even for this crowd. The vast majority of Libya’s oil pipelines and ports are in the eastern part of the country currently controlled by anti-regime forces, so cutting off importation of Libyan oil would deprive the anti-regime forces of the one reliable source of revenue that they have.

According to The Economist, the rebels may beat the interventionists to the punch with their threats to shoot themselves in the foot:

Libyan oil-industry operators are now threatening to destroy pipelines, and cut supplies to Europe, if European states fail to intervene to end Mr Qaddafi’s rule. Workers at Brega, one of Libya’s five ports used by tankers, stopped work on Monday, said Mansour Saleh, a manager at a Tobruk-based oil company who oversees the pumping of 300,000 barrels a day. “If that doesn’t make them act against the tyrant,” he added. “We’ll destroy the wells.”

According to this chart, the European countries that depend most heavily on Libyan oil are Ireland, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, France, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. Of these, the French government is the only to express a strong interest in a significant response to the Libyan conflict, and it is unlikely that Italy is going to be forced to take action that its government clearly doesn’t want to take, since it is treaty-bound not to intervene militarily in Libya. Should Libyan rebels sabotage the parts of the oil industry under their control, they may cause some temporary economic difficulty in a handful of European countries, but they will mainly be sabotaging their own cause.

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