To understand what is at stake in this war, it is best to see Libya as a large drinking well in the desert fiercely contested by various tribes, but finally brought under the control of a powerful sheikh. Access to the well means life for the sheikh’s allies, and to be denied it means death for his rivals. Because that well is filled not with water but oil, global powers also have a stake in the outcome. The conflict gathering strength in Libya is not over who gets to rule the tribes along the Mediterranean coast and desert interior of a North African country, but who gets to own Libyan oil. It is also about the chances for democracy in the Levant, and whether dictators can massacre their own people at no cost. ~Lee Smith

To recap, when interventionists want the U.S. to topple a government in a country that happens to have enormous oil reserves, the war has absolutely nothing to do with oil. When there is a conflict that interventionists want the U.S. to enter, they are more than happy to exaggerate the importance of a country’s oil to make the conflict seem much more important to America than it actually is. It’s true that there are some foreign corporations that have significant stakes in Libyan oil production, but the main stake that other states have is in the overall supply of oil, and conflict in Libya doesn’t threaten a very large part of this supply. Libyan oil accounts for approximately 2% of global oil production. At present, most of the Libyan oilfields and pipelines are located in the eastern part of the country outside of Gaddafi’s control, and so for all practical purposes the rebels already possess the bulk of Libya’s oil production. That may change, but in the end determining who owns Libya’s oil is not a reason to go to war.

Just so that his argument doesn’t hinge entirely on oil, Smith throws in a nod to helping democracy “in the Levant.” For one thing, I would point out that Libya is not in the Levant as it is usually defined, nor are most of the other countries where these protests have been taking place in the last few months. Leaving that aside, arguing that the U.S. must intervene against Gaddafi to discourage other autocrats from resorting to large-scale violence ignores that the U.S. seems to be succeeding for the most part in restraining allied governments from using force against protesters without needing to intervene in Libya. Contrary to Smith’s earlier laughable critique that Obama sees all Muslims as an undifferentiated mass, the U.S. seems to be tailoring its response to each country according to individual conditions and the degree to which the U.S. has perceived strategic interests there.

The argument that we need to intervene in Libya for the sake of protesters elsewhere isn’t remotely credible, not least because no one is proposing that the U.S. make armed intervention against internal crackdowns a standing policy to be applied in all cases. If intervention in Libya were to deter other unfriendly governments from trying to crush protest movements with violence, Washington would have to make these governments believe that it was prepared and willing to do the same thing to them. Pushing unnecessary war with Libya is bad enough, but if it were just the first in a series of unnecessary wars it becomes even more undesirable.

The U.S. can lend assistance to Tunisia and Egypt in coping with refugees from Libya, and it is appropriate to provide humanitarian aid for the civilian population in Libya where it is possible to deliver it, but there is no reason to become more involved than that.