Ross didn’t care much for Peter Feaver’s “rigorous debate” comments, either:

I think this is a deeply mistaken way of looking at these kind of debates. The United States is not the government of North Africa, and Barack Obama is not the president of Libya. We have obligations in the region, certainly — treaty obligations, strategic obligations, and yes, moral obligations as well. But America’s leaders are not directly responsible for governing any country besides their own [bold mine-DL], which means that almost by definition, they/we bear less responsibility for tragedies that result from our staying out of foreign conflicts than for tragedies that flow from our attempts at intervention. By involving ourselves militarily in a given nation’s internal affairs, we effectively claim a kind of political responsibility for the nation or region or question — a small share in the case of a no-fly zone, the lion’s share in the case of an invasion or occupation — that we didn’t have before. We would become part of the government of Libya, in a sense, if we engage our forces in that country’s civil war. And thus our obligations to Libyans would increase, and so would our share of the guilt if things turns out badly.

This is almost entirely right. I don’t agree that intervention in another country’s civil war makes the U.S. part of Libya’s government, but it does mean that our government has made commitments to one political faction and has obliged itself to achieving their goal of becoming Libya’s government. That implicates the U.S. not only in what results from the escalation of the conflict, but also in what our newfound clients do with the weapons and power our government might provide them. The more entangled the U.S. becomes in another country’s civil war, the more that the U.S. is responsible for the behavior of its local allies. That doesn’t mean that the U.S. will actually have control over those allies, which puts the U.S. in the ridiculous position of having to answer for the misdeeds of its clients without having the authority to prevent them. This is one reason why opponents of military intervention keep pointing out that we don’t really understand the forces the U.S. would be helping by siding with the rebels. If the U.S. were to arm, equip and presumably train them, which doesn’t seem likely at this point, that makes the U.S. responsible not only for what they do during the current conflict, but how they use the power the U.S. would be helping them to acquire in the years to come. Today Kosovo is run by little more than a criminal gang. The U.S. and our allies put that gang in power, and then went beyond that and acknowledged their fiefdom as a sovereign state. The U.S. government is responsible for that, and I don’t have much confidence that the results of a “liberated” Libya would be any better.

Ross had a good column on Libya the other day, and we’re in agreement that the arguments for intervention in Libya are not persuasive, but I have to object to this claim:

It isn’t that we have no obligations to Libyans now: As the dominant power in the globe, we have some responsibility for furthering peace and order just about everywhere on earth.

What does that mean? How great can that responsibility be if it doesn’t apply in many of the worst cases of civil war and disorder? Because the U.S. does have great power, it has to be particularly careful to use that power responsibly so that it does not contribute to international instability, but the U.S. does not take on some responsibility for peace and order “just about everywhere on earth” on account of that power. If it did, that would revive Feaver’s suggestion that the U.S. is morally responsible for conflicts that it “lets fester.” In practice, “just about everywhere” excludes most of Asia, virtually all of Africa, and almost all of Latin America. This may be because the governments ruling over these territories don’t want and don’t accept that the U.S. has a role in their regions, or because the U.S. sees no reason to become involved in “furthering peace and order” there, but “just about everywhere” applies to remarkably few places when we start talking about specific cases.

Ross wrote later:

We may bear a share of responsibility for casualties that result from our inaction rather than our actions, but the two ledgers aren’t comparable.

One of the ledgers doesn’t exist. The U.S. wasn’t responsible for the war in the Congo at all, and that definitely applies to the second, much larger phase of the conflict. The U.S. wasn’t responsible for the bloodletting in WWI before 1917 at all. Did the casualties from these wars result from American “inaction”? Could the U.S. have done something that would have resolved these conflicts with less bloodshed? Had Wilson somehow been able to plunge into the European war as soon as it began, American involvement would have more likely intensified the fighting and possibly encouraged the Allies to press the war into Germany rather than ending it more quickly. Today, many interventionists aren’t primarily concerned about minimizing the overall death toll in Libya, but are instead concerned now to prolong the war to achieve a certain political result (i.e., Gaddafi’s downfall). Proponents of action like to cast their argument in terms of saving lives, and they like to argue that inaction equals indifference to mass slaughter, but in virtually all of the cases I can think of far more lives have been lost and many more people injured, displaced, and impoverished because of military intervention than because of a failure to intervene. There may be extraordinary exceptions, but they are very rare.

Ross also mentioned Indo-Pakistani wars. I don’t see how the U.S. had any responsibility for what happened in the first two, and the U.S. role in the Kargil war, as far as I know, was constructive in getting Pakistan to back down. However, the U.S. does have some responsibility for what happened in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war. The U.S. covertly provided some military support to the Pakistani side during that war by using allied governments to evade the legal restrictions on doing so, and it encouraged Pakistan in its war effort. The U.S. effectively took sides in a conflict in which the U.S. had no business being involved, and in that way tied itself to the dubious cause of smashing Bangladeshi independence.