As Daniel Trombly explains very well, Max Boot’s post from last week on the Libyan rebels is wrong in a number of ways:

The point is that Libya is not America in 1775, and the Libyan Civil War is not the American War of Independence. The experience of the American rebels is a dangerous and misleading analogy that creates a falsely reassuring narrative of intervention in Libya, when the historical situations and interests at play are extremely different. We are not somehow betraying our predecessors by remaining skeptical of the Libyan rebels, nor does invoking them give us any insight into how to handle a largely humanitarian intervention in another country’s civil war.

When the Libyan civil war started, supporters of Western intervention frequently scoffed at the idea that it should be up to the Libyan rebels to prevail in their own fight. “What about French support for the American colonies?” they would ask. This was never a good objection, and it is actually a disastrous comparison for interventionists to make in support of their new war. If Americans want to make arguments for military intervention on behalf of a rebellion in another country, they should probably try to avoid one of the classic examples of how such interventions can ruin major powers. France intervened on our side, and in the process burdened itself with ruinous debt such that its entire political system later went through violent, destructive upheaval for a decade as a result. The U.S. isn’t going to go through such convulsions because of expenditures on the Libyan war, but it would be hard to come up with a more discouraging comparison as far as the intervening government is concerned than France’s intervention on our side.

It was hardly any consolation to the Bourbons later on that the United States had achieved its independence, and far from advancing French interests the alliance with the U.S. proved to be fleeting and of little strategic value to the French later on. As Americans, we can be grateful that the French government was filled with people more concerned with getting revenge on Britain than in tending to the dynastic interests of the Bourbons and the real national interests of France. As a matter of serving French interests, the Treaty of Alliance might well be one of the bigger mistakes the government of France has ever made. Fortunately for us, the Libyan war is not on the same scale. That’s about the only favorable thing I can think to say about it.