The governments that make up the Arab League earned the world’s respect in March by condemning Gaddafi’s threats to slaughter Libyan civilians wholesale. They have brought shame on themselves by watching Assad’s savage campaign to exterminate his political opponents in Syria in silence until Sunday. Even then, they stopped short of clearly condemning Assad in a statement that expressed concern and distress over Syria’s violence. The March resolution turns out to have been more personal — aimed at Gaddafi, not bloody repression — than it was principled. ~Jim Hoagland

I’m sure we are all shocked by the suggestion that Arab League governments were more interested in payback against a hated adversary than they were in the protection of Libyan rebels. Who would have thought that their call for Western intervention was an example of cynical opportunism? Obviously, the governments that were helping Bahrain’s government crush protesters were not objecting to Gaddafi’s actions on principle. They were objecting to them because they were his actions, and because of them they saw an opening to exact retribution. Inexplicably, the U.S. and its allies agreed to carry out their vendetta for them.

It is tedious to have to keep saying this, but there were no “threats to slaughter Libyan civilians wholesale.” Gaddafi was specifically threatening those taking up arms against his government, and he had earlier offered amnesty to those armed rebels willing to put down their arms. As Doug Bandow commented in April:

Moreover, he was using brutal military force to restore regime control, not to commit mass murder or genocide. Nasty, but hardly unusual. Casualties climbed because the rebellion spread.

I don’t expect supporters of the Libyan intervention to agree, but seeing such false claims repeated so matter-of-factly on a regular basis is obnoxious.

Hoagland continues:

This retreat from international humanitarian standards greatly hampers all other international efforts to pressure Damascus. Moral indignation by outsiders, to say nothing of military action like that undertaken by NATO in Libya, best succeeds when there is local political cover and cooperation.

It is a mistake to call the Arab League’s reverting to form a “retreat” from these standards, as this implies that there had been some sort of advance toward those standards earlier. The Arab League provided some local political cover for attacking Libya, but except for Qatar and one or two others there has been negligible support from the governments that requested intervention. The Libyan war was something of a fluke. Had it never happened, the Arab League would not want to put significant pressure on Syria, but as the war drags on it provides a very useful excuse for all governments to react more cautiously.