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Intervention Without the U.S.?

If the administration believes that waging war against Gaddafi is in America’s national interest, then it should do so irrespective of UN sanction. If the administration does not believe that waging war against Gaddafi is in America’s interest, it should not do so anyway simply because the UN has authorized it. Having the UN Security […]

If the administration believes that waging war against Gaddafi is in America’s national interest, then it should do so irrespective of UN sanction. If the administration does not believe that waging war against Gaddafi is in America’s interest, it should not do so anyway simply because the UN has authorized it. Having the UN Security Council authorize punitive measures against Gaddafi’s regime doesn’t suddenly transform the conflict from a peripheral interest to a central one. ~Greg Scoblete

I admit that I don’t entirely understand the administration’s approach, either, but I think it is trying to do one of two things. It doesn’t appear to believe that waging war against Libya is in America’s interest, which is why it has been keen not to volunteer, but it may have concluded that a Libyan intervention led and fought by other states is acceptable. When it lends rhetorical support to harsher measures against Libya, it may be trying to appear to be on the side of taking action against Gaddafi while supporting a resolution including measures that makes its passage even less likely than a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone. Instead of the Bush administration’s efforts to go through the motions at the U.N. in 2002-03 while always intending to attack Iraq anyway, this could be an attempt to use the procedures at the U.N. to run out the clock in order to avoid intervention.

The alternative is that the administration is willing to support a U.N.-authorized mission in Libya, and therefore wants the authorization to be as broad as possible, but it wants the U.S. to be only in a supporting role with European and Arab states undertaking the action and bearing most of the burden. Since the Libyan civil war is overwhelmingly one that concerns the interests mainly of European and Arab states, and the U.S. has essentially nothing at stake in Libya, this would be better than a predominantly American effort. This is Leslie Gelb’s interpretation of what Obama is trying to do, but I am doubtful. Politically, it would be an unsatisfying compromise all around. It would still implicate the U.S. in some fashion in a Libyan intervention. It would offend antiwar supporters of the administration and give endless fodder to critics that want to portray Obama as nothing more than an internationalist drip, but it wouldn’t satisfy Libya hawks because it would not be a sufficiently “robust” (code for militaristic) response.

Perhaps one reason that there is some confusion about the administration’s position is that no previous administration has successfully moved other states to take up these sorts of collective security responsibilities without major U.S. participation. We don’t quite know what we’re watching, because previous administrations haven’t seriously tried to encourage burden-sharing. It’s possible Obama isn’t doing this, but it would help make sense of what he has been doing.

If the U.S. stayed out of a conflict in the past, other states for the most part weren’t clamoring to enter it, but if the U.S. were intent on entering a conflict it was able to bring along other states in support. Regardless of more public reluctance on the part of the U.S., there is much more clamoring for action from some European and Arab states where Libya is concerned, so it may be that the U.S. is trying to facilitate action by others, or it may be that the U.S. is willing to give the clamoring governments enough diplomatic rope with which to hang themselves.

If the European and Arab governments that are demanding action won’t take action for something they insist is imperative, the message may be that the U.S. isn’t going to solve the problem for them. The experience of the ’90s has led most people to assume that regional states will not take action to address regional security problems without U.S. direction, and this is a dependence that many U.S. hegemonists don’t really want to end. We could be seeing an attempt to try to break that dependence by refusing to dominate the response to the Libyan civil war.

On a related note, I find it odd that so many interventionists are citing support from the Arab League and the GCC in their arguments for attacking Libya. This would be the same Arab League that includes all of the members of the GCC, which is presently engaged in a crackdown on behalf of Bahrain’s government. The GCC would be doing this whether or not there were a debate about intervening in Libya, but it’s a useful reminder that multilateral intervention doesn’t have to be only on the side of rebels and oppressed groups. People who want to trash the principle of state sovereignty when it is convenient are helping to make this sort of outside interference by authoritarians on behalf of authoritarians more common in the future than it needs to be. Comparisons with 1848 have become popular, and there is some merit to them, so it’s appropriate to remember that the Russians intervened on behalf of the ruling dynasty against liberal revolutionaries in Hungary. Protections against intervention are just as important for protecting nascent democratic and developing states as they are barriers to taking action against dictators. The GCC forces happen to be in Bahrain by invitation of the Bahraini government, as one would expect, but once liberal interventionists make a regular habit of ignoring state sovereignty it’s easy to imagine scenarios in which major and rising powers will make military interference in the internal political affairs of other states a normal part of their practice of foreign policy. If authoritarian states liberalize, that could also create new pressures to intervene in neighboring states in support of local popular movements.

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