This is a simple foreign policy matter: The United States should exercise moral and political leadership by assembling a coalition of nations to end this wanton violence immediately. ~Job Henning

There is one thing that the situation in Libya isn’t, and that is simple. Henning’s “simple foreign policy matter” remark reminds me that interventionists are always promoting their “simple” solution each time there is a foreign crisis or debate over what the U.S. should do, and that solution is always that Western governments should use of force against the regime. Of course, the practical instruments that interventionists are calling for will not end all “this wanton violence,” but only certain types of it, and all of this will be in the service of improving the chances that the rebels will prevail, which will as likely as not lead to brutal reprisals against the defeated regime loyalists.

Like the Krajina Serbs driven from Croatia in 1995 in Operation Storm, the Serbs and Roma driven out of Kosovo or killed by the KLA after 1999, and the Sunnis expelled and slaughtered in huge numbers in 2006 (one of which the U.S. facilitated and two of which took place in NATO and U.S.-occupied territory), regime supporters in Libya will likely face terrible violence, but the R2P brigades will have moved on by then to go “save” another country. These crimes aren’t going to trouble the interventionists, and there will of course be no talk of intervening against the people whose victory our forces helped realize. Instead of thinking this through and seeing how horribly wrong it could go, Henning sees it as a clear-cut matter of moral leadership, which is one of the reasons why some of us are sick to death of hearing warmongers talk about morality.

To give the situation more than five minutes of thought is to realize that it is not a remotely “simple foreign policy matter,” but would be a tremendously complicated matter if the U.S. government were stupid enough to become entangled in it.

Henning continues:

Strengthening the concept that sovereignty is contingent upon behavior would make it less likely that in the future the United States would have to act unilaterally and conduct military interventions.

No, it would simply weaken the principle of sovereignty, which would make every weaker state vulnerable to greater interference and violence from its stronger neighbors. Each time that the U.S. and its allies endorse the idea of unilateral, illegal intervention in the name of “humanitarian” concerns, it provides one more precedent for other states to exploit internal problems in neighboring countries. It is an open invitation to illegal military adventurism by any state capable and willing to do it. The barriers of international law that interventionists want to tear down today might be necessary later to protect weak states and deter more powerful governments from meddling in their neighbors’ affairs. Interventionists want to destroy legal barriers to military action to get at particular despicable rulers, but they forget why those barriers were created in the first place.