Britain and France are facing a rising torrent of international criticism over military intervention in Libya, with Russia and China leading calls for an immediate ceasefire. Just as a majority of Britons distrusts their government’s motives [bold mine-DL], according to a new YouGov poll, many, if not most, countries around the world also view the action as risky, self-interested, and duplicitous. ~Simon Tisdall

Thank goodness this war has nothing in common with the experience in Iraq. During the Iraq war, far fewer governments viewed the action as risky, self-interested and duplicitous. Invading Iraq was a disastrous, appalling decision without justification, and it quickly became almost universally reviled, but it was one that had the formal support of a few dozen governments at the start and for several years afterwards. One looks in vain for other governments that support the Libyan war apart from the handful engaged in military action and six of the seven non-permanent members that voted for the resolution. One of the resolution yes votes, South Africa, suddenly discovered that a no-fly zone and authorizing “all necessary means” involve bombing military targets. Perhaps South Africa would have been another abstention if its government had understood what was going to happen.

When all of the major powers opposed to intervention abstained on the resolution, supporters of the war were encouraged by this, but those abstentions were really votes of no-confidence. Germany was as adamantly against the Libyan war as it was against the Iraq war, but this time the permanent member opponents were willing to let Western governments plunge ahead without a lengthy, protracted debate and the threat of veto in the Security Council. After all, why should they jeopardize their relations with Western governments by opposing the Westerners’ folly? Brazil and Turkey have already experienced the unpleasant political consequences of trying to do the right thing by Western governments by opposing misguided Iran sanctions, and others probably learned from that episode that there is nothing to be gained by getting in between Western governments and their targets. Germany probably doesn’t want to repeat its Iraq war experience by damaging the relationship with the U.S. to save Obama from making a mistake. Abstaining allowed all of them to get out of the way, but they are still able to criticize the mission and berate intervening Western governments that they knew it was a bad idea all along.

As Michael Lind wrote the other day:

In any event, the claim that the international community supports the war cannot be sustained, in the face of the opposition of the BRIC’s plus Germany.