A Milosevic-style capitulation ending the Libya operation does not appear to be in the cards. Nor does the West seem to have the strategic patience to let Qaddafi’s regime wither on the vine (because it may still have sufficient wherewithal to crush the current rebellion). Plan B may have to be written up and executed after all. ~Nikolas Gvosdev

The Libyan war is a good example of fighting the last “humanitarian” war, but more than that its supporters have taken for granted that the last war was a sucess and that the use of force was the reason for that success. These are all badly flawed assumptions that account for why the Libyan war is becoming a much more prolonged, indefinite military commitment than most of its advocates expected. As Gvosdev explains, and as I and many others have said before, Russian diplomatic pressure was essential in bringing the Kosovo war to an end, and the goals that NATO had twelve years ago were much less ambitious. Libya’s diplomatic supporters are not taken seriously, and the governments that might have the influence to push for a settlement of the conflict have little reason to make the effort. Western governments have repeatedly rebuffed all offers of cease-fire and negotiated settlement, so it’s not clear that the intervening governments are willing to settle for partial success.

Gvosdev also notes that widening the war to attack the country’s infrastructure backfired in 1999 and wouldn’t be likely to work in Libya now:

Another question is whether the alliance should begin targeting more of the infrastructure of Libya in order to put pressure on Qaddafi to capitulate. The logic of widening the target set in 1999 from Serbian units in Kosovo to targets across the country was a (misguided) belief that by imposing hardships on the Serbian population, they would rise up to overthrow Milosevic. This tactic backfired; Milosevic benefited from a renewed sense of nationalism to stay in power for another year and a half. In Libya, however, the alliance would want to encourage citizens in the loyalist regions not to support Qaddafi, and targeting them would seem to be counterproductive to that end. Moreover, the greater the destruction in the country, the more likely it would increase calls for the West to play a direct and significant role in the country’s reconstruction.

It’s always a misguided belief that inflicting punishment on a population encourages people to turn against their government. In certain types of government, it may be the case that political violence can pressure a government to make concessions on matters of policy. It is a lot easier to make these concessions if they relate to peripheral or minor interests, but as long as these concessions are seen as “giving in” to threats they are politically perilous. If they touch on perceived vital interests, there is usually nothing that will change a government’s position, and it is unheard of for a mass popular movement to try to topple the government to make it give in more quickly.

There are no cases I can think of where foreign military attack has quickly provoked a domestic uprising in order to hasten capitulation to the attacker and end the attacks. If this ever works, it takes a long time, and it requires inflicting a lot more suffering on the population than anyone is considering for Libya. Russia in 1917 is one example where a government fell partly because it insisted on continuing a war that was unpopular after massive losses in the millions. This was a case of a relatively small group of revolutionaries exploiting the political weakness of a regime rather than an instance of a popular uprising toppling it.

Libyan war supporters have relied on a misreading of the Kosovo example in much the same way that democracy promoters relied on a misunderstanding of the 1989 revolutions in eastern Europe in their thinking about democratization in Iraq. Things didn’t happen the way they remembered them, and for that reason they never fully understood the causes of what did happen, which led them to support policies that they could and should have known would not work as they expected or possibly not work at all. According to this misunderstanding of 1989, liberal democracy would emerge and flourish once the authoritarian government was out of the way. The 1989 revolutions were overwhelmingly indigenous, national movements, but democracy promoters used their example as a model for exogenous, U.S.-directed democratization.