Here’s my question: can someone explain why the United States should stay on the sidelines when an international consensus wants to forcibly resist a despot’s brutal crackdown? Does that make strategic sense? ~David Shorr

It might make a lot less sense if the “international consensus” were meaningful and extended beyond a handful of NATO governments, a few small non-permanent members of the Security Council, and an opportunistic Arab League. If non-intervention meant ignoring most of the world’s governments when they were pleading for support, that would be something to take seriously, but that is almost the opposite of what happened. Instead, the U.S. has once again sided against most of the world, and once again supporters of the intervention try to console the American public with the fiction that there is broad international backing.

The Libyan intervention just barely cleared the hurdle of Security Council approval, but it is misleading to think that this means that there ever was broad consensus in favor of this action. The strategic wisdom or folly of the Libyan war doesn’t depend solely on this, but the genuine lack of international consensus behind the intervention has to be taken into account in determining whether intervention or non-intervention made more sense. As useful as it is to the case for the Libyan war, the U.S. was not dragged into this by an “international consensus.”

To the extent the U.S. was dragged into the war at all, it was dragged in primarily by France and Britain, both of which had their own reasons for wanting to throw their support to Gaddafi’s enemies. Likewise, most Arab League governments were eager to have Western governments strike at Gaddafi for them. This way they could be rid of an old antagonist, and they wouldn’t need to take the risk or do much of the work. It made things a little easier on them at home by allowing them to side with popular opinion on an intervention that posed no real threat to them. The question to be asked is whether it served some larger U.S. strategic goals to join the Anglo-French adventure with the blessing of Arab League governments eager to divert their publics’ attention elsewhere.

Honestly, I don’t see what those goals might be, but that is what we should be discussing. Would the U.S. relationship with two major European allies and a number of Arab allies have been greatly harmed had the U.S. stayed out? I don’t think so. In retrospect, the British and French might start wondering why we helped them to leap into this Libyan mess. Allies are sometimes more valuable when they keep a government from doing something impetuous and foolish than they are in supporting it no matter what it wants to do. Whatever their reasons, France and Germany were better allies to the United States in 2002-03 by trying to stop the U.S. from attacking Iraq than were Britain, Spain, and Italy in lending support to the attack. There are times when allies need to be restrained for the sake of their own best interests, and in Libya I suspect we are going to find that we served our British and French allies poorly by not trying to hold them back.

We’ll get nowhere if we keep arguing over whether or not the U.S. should have remained on “the sidelines” (i.e., not started a war) when an “international consensus” was calling on the U.S. to take action. When two permanent Security Council members plus the largest democracies in Europe, Latin America, and Asia are against a course of action, there is no “international consensus” in support of it. Had the U.S. aligned itself with the abstaining governments on the Security Council, the U.S. would have been aligning itself with the real consensus of most of the world’s governments to stay out of Libya’s civil war. Another question we should ask is whether it serves larger U.S. strategic goals for our government to participate in an attack on another country when most governments, especially most major governments in the world, think the attack unwise or unnecessary.

Most of the other governments in the world never wanted this intervention, but Libya was so strategically irrelevant and Gaddafi so isolated diplomatically that none of them was willing to incur the displeasure of the intervening governments to try to stop it from happening. Had the U.S. not thrown its support behind the intervention, it wouldn’t have been possible diplomatically, and the abstaining governments wouldn’t have had to balance their desire for good relations with the U.S., France, and Britain. As it is, the abstaining governments have not lost anything by staying on the sidelines, and it is doubtful that the U.S. would have lost anything by joining them there.

It isn’t a fact that a “surprising international consensus called for the intervention.” A somewhat surprising consensus of Arab governments called for the intervention. Beyond that, there simply isn’t much support for the intervention other than the usual Euro-Atlantic suspects.