National Review‘s editors propose that the U.S. embark on a Bay of Goats exercise:

All this means that we should want the rebellion against Qaddafi to survive. We initially opposed a no-fly zone, but circumstances have changed. We should establish both a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone in the approach to the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi to prevent Qaddafi’s armored vehicles from entering the city. The no-fly zone is unlikely to tip the military balance in itself, but Qaddafi’s air force has been a factor in his fight against the rebels. Coupling a no-fly zone with an effort to stop his advance on the ground should save Benghazi and allow the rebels time to recoup. Ideally, the Egyptians would dispatch peacekeepers to the city. Regardless, we should work with our allies to provide logistics, training, and arms to the rebels.

The U.S. isn’t even involved in Libya’s civil war yet, and already we are being warned about the dangers of abandoning rebels we don’t really support. Imagine how much more difficult it will be to give up on the Benghazi Freehold (or Republic of East Libya) after the U.S. has started launching attacks on Gaddafi’s forces. The argument for why the U.S. should do this never gets any stronger. On the contrary, each time I see it repeated I find new reasons why it doesn’t make any sense.

The editors write:

The question now is whether Qaddafi crushes the rebels with impunity and consolidates his terroristic, anti-American rule.

It is in the interest of the United States that this not happen.

U.S. interests didn’t dictate supporting rebels in Cyrenaica six weeks ago, and they don’t now. The U.S. didn’t seriously entertain sponsoring rebellions against Gaddafi before 2003, so why is it imperative that the U.S. actually do so now? When the rebellion started, it did appear that it was proving to be something more than a regional uprising against the government in Tripoli, but that was evidently not the case. Setting up an extra-legal protectorate created on the fly with no specific purpose beyond perpetuating the existence of the protectorate is the sort of lousy, short-term “solution” that people come up with when they can’t articulate why the policy serves concrete American interests. It is a good example of how some people let what the U.S. can do define what it should be doing.

It doesn’t help their case that part of the editors’ argument is based on wishful thinking:

We should have no illusions about the rebels, a rag-tag crew that, no doubt, includes its share of bad actors. The standard here, though, shouldn’t be particularly high — are they better or worse than Qaddafi?

The editors can’t know the answer to that, and neither can I, which is why the sensible thing is to err on the side of caution and not provide unknown actors with a large arms cache and the training in how to use it.

A de facto partition of Libya seems like a recipe for the creation of at least one and maybe two failed states, and an endless drain on U.S. resources for as long as Washington was foolish enough to keep subsidizing the rebels. Critics of Russia’s presence in South Ossetia point out it has become a “black hole” outside any real legal authority that allows the flourishing of corruption, weapons trafficking, and massive wasted spending by the patron government. Essentially, this is the sort of extra-legal enclave that is being proposed for Benghazi and its surroundings, except that the editors also envision the rebels in Benghazi being recognized as the legitimate government of Libya. This goes a bit beyond what Russia did in 2008. It would be more like recognizing Eduard Kokoity as the “real” president of Georgia, and insisting that its military presence in South Ossetia was only there until Kokoity and his supporters could “retake” the rest of the country. Offhand, my guess is that such a Libyan government will have about as much legitimacy in the eyes of most Libyans as the Somali transitional government did for most Somalis when the Ethiopians helped re-install it in Mogadishu, which is to say very little. Some interventionists have worried about Libya turning into something like Somalia absent outside intervention, but what the NR editors are proposing is that the U.S. very deliberately begin the “Somalification” process.

As far as the U.S. is concerned, this is an awesomely bad idea for the reasons Ross outlines here. It’s easy to imagine how this would go down badly not only with Libyans supportive of the regime, but also among Libyans in both east and west that would like to be rid of Gaddafi. Think about it. A rebellion breaks out against the repressive government in your country, but it falters and only survives by being propped up by outside governments through the creation of a semi-permanent partition of your country. Are you going to see the government that the outside powers support as the legitimate government of your country, or are you more likely to see it as the outsiders’ puppet? It is conceivable that most Libyans would rally against the government in Benghazi, which they might come to see not as the launching pad of their liberation, but instead fear as the beachhead of foreign domination.

P.S. This last bit of speculation seems to find some confirmation in this Time report that Ross cited:

Gaddafi boosted his own forces by attracting volunteers ready to fight to hold Libya together, a sentiment reinforced when the rebels adopted the flag used by King Idris al-Sanousi, Libya’s former monarch, whom Gaddafi overthrew in his 1969 coup. That flag, says Fetouri, “represents the misery my country lived through as puppets of the West.” He cites one of his relatives — no fan of Gaddafi — who traveled 400 miles (640 km) to join the government forces against the rebels; he had driven from the Bani Walid area, the heartland of the Warfalli tribe southeast of Tripoli, which has long been the bedrock of Gaddafi’s support. Fetouri, who says he himself had been tempted to join the antigovernment protests before they morphed into an armed rebellion, asked his relative why he was “fighting for Gaddafi.” He said the man told him “it was about Libya the country, not Gaddafi.”

Enthusiasm for Libyan rebels in the West seems to have followed the consistent pattern of the last decade in always overestimating how representative and broad a movement there is opposed to the existing regime.