If NATO (the U.S. Sixth Fleet in practice) can’t take out Libyan air defenses at no or minimal cost, we should all start studying Arabic and spending an hour a day with our foreheads pressed to the floor. ~Conrad Black

Via John Tabin

Black is free to do what he likes, but in what universe does that sentence make any sense? Gates was making a point of emphasizing what would actually be required to enforce a no-fly zone, partly as a way of responding to people who blithely talk about “taking out” other states’ air defenses when they have not actually done anything to provoke the U.S. Black is insisting that the U.S. government should never be reluctant to use its military superiority to intervene in another country’s civil war, and he implies that failure to do so is not far removed from inviting the forcible foreign conquest and conversion of the United States. There is a word for this: insane. The question is not whether the U.S. military can “take out” these defenses, but whether it makes any sense for the U.S. to insert itself in another country’s civil war. It clearly doesn’t make sense, which may explain why Black’s response to Gates’ testimony is so unhinged.

It wouldn’t just be the Sixth Fleet “in practice,” but of necessity, because there is no agreement among NATO governments in support of military action. The completely unjustified bombing of Serbia commanded much broader support inside NATO, which should tell us something about how little justification there is for an intervention in Libya. Both permanent and non-permanent members of the Security Council, including Brazil, object to military intervention. What everyone needs to understand is that military intervention in Libya would be an almost entirely American intervention, it would be widely (and correctly) perceived as illegal, and there is no consensus from any of the regional and international organizations representing those countries that have the most at stake in Libya. The costs may not only be casualties, which would be serious enough, but additional damage to relationships with allies and other states and unknown costs arising from complication, escalation, or blowback.

One wonders what Black thinks is “minimal cost.” This is fairly important, since it is the standard tactic of interventionists to minimize the risks of every military action to make intervention seem easy and relatively cost-free. Gates’ warnings are a valuable corrective to the impulse to ignore those risks.