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The U.S. Cannot “Atone” for Past Interventions with More Interventions

Shadi Hamid’s case for Syrian intervention will probably lose most people here (via Andrew): To be sure, one should always look at Western intervention in Arab lands with some degree of skepticism. The United States has a tragic history in the region, supporting repressive dictatorships for over 50 years with rather remarkable consistency. But where […]

Shadi Hamid’s case for Syrian intervention will probably lose most people here (via Andrew):

To be sure, one should always look at Western intervention in Arab lands with some degree of skepticism. The United States has a tragic history in the region, supporting repressive dictatorships for over 50 years with rather remarkable consistency. But where there is sin there is also atonement. What made Libya a “pure” intervention was that we acted not because our vital interests were threatened but in spite of the fact that they were not. For me, this was yet one more reason to laud it [bold mine-DL]. Libya provided us an opportunity to begin the difficult work of re-orienting U.S. foreign policy, to align ourselves, finally, with our own ideals.

Something that continues to bother me about the Libyan war is that its supporters typically present it as a great example of how U.S. foreign policy can be aligned with “our ideals” without appearing to give a second thought to the fact that the U.S. and its allies launched a war on an another state and toppled its government when that government had done nothing to us or any of our allies. Is that one of “our ideals”? Is the arbitrary use of executive power to wage a war without Congressional approval another one? Obviously not. What happened in this case is what usually happens in these debates: interventionists privileged certain values, ignore others that are being compromised in the process, and then sought justifications for how the state can use its power to realize them through military action.

What are the results? Now Libya is being run by its militias and its would-be national government has little control over most of the country. The new authorities are frequently charged torturing the supporters of the old order. The Daily Telegraph reports on the abuses that triggered the uprising in Bani Walid and abuses elsewhere in the country:

The town’s inhabitants were tired of the militia men barging into their homes, pushing their wives around and looting their possessions. Even worse were the arrests of suspected Gaddafi officials. Thousands of men have been dragged away across Libya in the past few months to prison and in many cases torture, in some cases for revenge just because they came from a town that was pro-Gaddafi during the war.

Torture has become a stain on the face of the new Libya. The United Nations and human rights groups accuse militias of doing what Gaddafi’s torturers used to do, with whips, chains and plastic hoses. Médecins Sans Frontières withdrew doctors from detention centres in Misurata last week, complaining they were being asked to patch victims up between torture sessions.

If the Libyan war were not the liberal interventionist cause celebre, this is a state of affairs that we would all acknowledge to be a deteriorating and dangerous one. If it weren’t the “pure” intervention based on “values,” the adverse consequences of collapsing a government in a country with no strong institutions would be recognized for what they are. Instead, we’re moving on to talk about the next possible target.

This brings me back to one of my earliest objections to the war. The U.S. cannot “atone” for earlier policies by launching new kinds of interventions to kill the right people for the right reasons. It is interference in the affairs of the region as such that most people there resent. It is the presumption that we have the right to take sides and determine political outcomes that generates hostility. In this case, the U.S. and our allies chose to oppose the dictator instead of tacitly or openly supporting him, but we’re still insisting on shaping the region at least partly according to our design. War supporters will point to the NTC and say that the difference is that “we” are being asked for our help this time, but outside interventions are always requested by one faction or another that may have no more legitimacy than their rivals. The NTC acquired legitimacy as the national leadership in Libya partly by default and partly because Western governments treated them as such. As the power vacuum filled by militias shows, it never was and likely never will be an effective government of Libya.

As a general rule, our government should not initiate hostilities against another state, and it should do so only when it serves the national interest. Once the use of force becomes largely or wholly unmoored from the national interest, the bar for the use of force can be lowered far too easily, and national resources can be frittered away on unnecessary and unwise wars. Advocates for a Syrian war say that intervening to topple Assad would serve the national interest, which is debatable, but any temporary gain from it would be offset by the U.S. role in plunging Syria and perhaps one or more of its neighbors into war. Attacking Libya was relatively low-cost for the U.S. because the Libyan government was weak and internationally isolated for the most part. Syria is not so weak, and it is has a patron and at least one major power that are not going to “stand idly by,” as interventionists like to say, and watch their client be destroyed. An attack on Syria would be a much more serious threat to international peace and security than other interventions of its kind.

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