John Bolton is terrified that Russia has been invited into a mediating role to try to end the Libyan war:

Inserting Russia into the middle of the Libyan war gives it an unmistakable advantage in shaping the TNC, and post-Gaddafi Libya more broadly. Moscow (along with Beijing) has a keen interest and now a real possibility to become far more involved in exploiting Libya’s oil and natural gas resources than at present. This opportunity is something Russia could never have achieved on its own. To be handed it by Obama and Clinton, utterly gratuitously, is breathtaking.

This is Bolton’s standard hysterical nonsense, but it’s certainly entertaining. Russia compromised its position as a possible mediator from the moment that Medvedev insisted on Gaddafi’s departure at the Deauville summit earlier this summer. Bolton’s entire argument is based on the illusion that Russian mediation matters.

How much does Bolton think this role matters? He tells us:

Now, as a mediator, Russia will, in effect, have the chance to rewrite the Council’s resolution according to its own lights.

This isn’t true. The resolution has already been “rewritten” in that its original limits and authorization have been cast aside for the actual goal of regime change, but despite making noises of protest early on the Russian government has endorsed the position that Gaddafi must be removed from power. Despite objections at home that he was ignoring Russian interests, Medvedev has gone out of his way not to block or interfere with U.S. and NATO policy. Unlike twelve years ago during the Kosovo war, Moscow cannot influence Gaddafi to yield, much less shape or control the future of Libya. There are many things badly wrong with the administration’s policy on Libya. Welcoming Russian efforts to try to get the U.S. and NATO out of this embarrassing blunder is not one of them.

Stanley Kurtz keeps pushing his mistaken ideological reading of administration policy:

Obama’s willingness to cede so much to the Russians reflects the fact that he is far less interested in achieving and enforcing regime change in Libya than in using this intervention to advance the utopian plans of his hyper-internationalist advisers.

Right, because the obvious ally in any effort to strengthen international norms that undermine state sovereignty is Russia. Obviously, Obama hasn’t ceded anything to the Russians. All that Obama has “given” them is the dubious honor of being a mediator with Gaddafi in order to negotiate his exit. As I said, Russian mediation will likely go nowhere, but involving the Russians is part of the effort to achieve regime change. Like the French proposal that Gaddafi might remain in Libya after leaving power, it is an acknowledgment that the Libyan war is dragging on much longer than it was supposed to, and it is an admission that the U.S. is not going to let itself get pulled in any deeper into the Libyan morass than it already is.

Kurtz also writes:

That is, Obama may be willing to cede Russia substantial de facto control over Libyan oil and gas resources as the price for Russian cooperation in authorizing and organizing a post-war U.N. peacekeeping force.

This is verging on conspiracy-theory territory. Russia would vote for a U.N. peacekeeping force anyway, and it is not going to be involved in organizing it. Kurtz is claiming that the administration is trying to buy something with resources it doesn’t control to get something it will already receive.

Kurtz continues:

That would simultaneously bolster the development of a post-American world order — with an R2P-enforcing U.N. exercising a larger military role — and exempt Obama from having to send in U.S. troops. The only drawback would be the substantial enhancement of Russia’s strategic position, i.e. the heightening of its ability to use its control of oil and gas resources to bully the Europeans. But again, Obama is less concerned about those sorts of strategic considerations than about advancing the vision of a world policed by a U.N. freed of U.S. domination.

The only part of this that is true is the part about the U.S. not having to send troops to Libya, which is the sole redeeming quality of Obama’s policy. Russia’s ability to use its energy resources to wield influence in Europe won’t be significantly enhanced by anything in Libya once the fighting is over. In fact, once Libyan oil production resumes Russia’s leverage in Europe will decrease. Russia often provokes unreasonable reactions from American hawks, but this panic about a non-existent Russian menace in North Africa sets a new standard.

Update: The Russian and Libyan foreign ministers recently met, and here was the result:

Muammar Gaddafi will not step down from the helm of affairs in Libya under any deal with the opposition, country’s foreign minister said on Wednesday in Russia, describing the proposal as unacceptable.

After his talks here with his Russian counterpart, Libyan Foreign Minister Abdul Ati al-Obeidi said: “The proposal for stepping down of the Libyan leader Gaddafi was unacceptable to Tripoli, it is out of question.”

How will the U.S. survive this dramatic expansion of Russian power?

The EU deserves the chance to help make Bosnia a real country. But that will depend less on persuasion and the promise of EU membership than on fortitude in controlling Bosnia’s ethnic tensions, determined management of Serbia’s EU membership process (once they grant Belgrade accession status in the near future) and avoidance of land mines in the continuing Serbia-Kosovo negotiations that have borne a few modest administrative agreements. ~Morton Abramowitz and James Hooper

As the authors suggest earlier in the article, the partition of Serbia with formal Kosovo independence in 2008 has made the disintegration of Bosnia that much more likely. Bosnia is not and never has been a “real” country as far as a majority of its population is concerned, and the EU has had more than a decade to try to make this cobbled-together political fiction into a state to which its constituent parts might feel some loyalty. In short, they have had their chance and failed. The Republika Srpska’s current position in Bosnia seems untenable, and there is no incentive for its inhabitants “to join together in a workable central state.” Most of them don’t want the central to exist. Earlier this year, Ted Galen Carpenter reviewed the history of Bosnia over the last fifteen years in his article on partitioning Bosnia:

The bottom line is that Bosnia seems no closer politically to being a viable country now than it was fifteen years ago when the U.S-brokered (and largely U.S.-imposed) Dayton accords ended the civil war that had cost more than 100,000 lives. Extinguishing that bloody conflict was no minor achievement, but it did not alter the reality that Bosnia and Herzegovina remained an unstable political amalgam of three mutually hostile ethnic groups. The country was politically dysfunctional from the moment it seceded from the disintegrating Yugoslav federation, and the Dayton Accords did not solve that problem.

The United States and its European allies used Dayton as the launching pad for the most ambitious nation-building mission since the rehabilitation of Germany and Japan following World War II. But continuous frustration has dogged the effort in Bosnia, and political paralysis has been the defining characteristic over the past fifteen years. To the extent that the country has functioned at all politically, it has been at the subnational level, that is, the Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation. The national government has remained weak to the point of impotence.

Abramowitz and Hooper write:

The Office of the High Representative (OHR), once the Western oversight mechanism to prevent ethnic backsliding and hopefully reduce Dayton’s structural separatism, is widely perceived to have frittered away its influence.

Yes, and how did it fritter away its influence? It managed this by acting as if it were colonial administrative authority imposing the political outcomes that it wanted. As Carpenter explained:

Indeed, most real political power has resided with the UN high representative, an official who has often ruled like a colonial governor. Over the years, high representatives have repeatedly disqualified candidates for elections, removed elected officials from office, and imposed various policies by decree.

This has naturally bred resentment and helped to discredit and delegitimize the project of creating a unified Bosnian state in the eyes of many of the people subjected to this rule. Carpenter acknowledged that partition is not a panacea, but persisting in a failed policy of trying to create a Bosnian state where most of the people living in Bosnia don’t accept it makes no sense. Instead of seeing this as a cause for despair, the U.S. and EU should be willing to give up on the fiction of a unified Bosnia that has kept most of its inhabitants trapped in a political arrangement they don’t want and won’t support in the future. This is more likely to prevent a worse conflict down the road.

James Joyner confirms that there appear to be no NATO governments willing to participate in a stabilization mission in Libya:

Yet, for all the UK’s foresight in planning, they have been steadfast in declaring that they will not participate in any peacekeeping force, with Mitchell reiterating that there will be no British boots on the ground. The Obama administration has said the same for America. This rules out, therefore, the two most significant military powers in NATO.

After a decade of war and overseas occupation, this reluctance is understandable. Additionally, while happy to have Western help in the fight against Qaddafi, the Libyans are likely to come to resent any long-term presence of European forces in their country.

I agree. This is what makes the apparent lack of U.N. planning for post-war security that much more troubling. As James explains:

Though NATO’s intervention in Libya was authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1973, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been virtually silent on the mission. He’s certainly expressed no interest in post-conflict reconstruction. Abdul Elah al-Khatib, the UN special envoy to Libya, has made numerous trips. But all his public statements indicate that his efforts have so far been devoted strictly to achieving a settlement to end the current fighting. If there’s been any planning for post-conflict reconstruction, it has been quiet.

Previous interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq have all involved the introduction of significant ground forces by the U.S. and NATO members at some point so that a large U.N. force was not wanted or not needed. Libya is technically different in that it was originally sanctioned by the U.N., but in reality it has always been a project of western European and North American governments. If these governments aren’t going to contribute (and they aren’t), why are others going to volunteer to do what they wouldn’t? Leading governments throughout the developing world have made no secret that they oppose the war, and African Union members might reasonably ask why they should be expected to fill the security void that NATO created. AU objections to the war were ignored and their cease-fire proposals were dismissed. What incentive do they have for putting their soldiers at risk in a dangerous post-war Libya? Perhaps invoking the dangers of regional instability will be enough. Perhaps the major powers can revive the old slogan, “African solutions for African problems.”

While we are discussing post-war Libyan reconstruction, it is worth remembering that this is another area where the Libyan war’s justification under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine breaks down. When it comes to the “responsibility to rebuild,” which as an integral part of the doctrine, no one wants to take responsibility. According to the authors of the doctrine, post-conflict reconstruction planning is a necessity if there is to be a military intervention. In fact, their wording is even stronger than this:

If military intervention is to be contemplated, the need for a post-intervention strategy is also of paramount importance. Military intervention is one instrument in a broader spectrum of tools designed to prevent conflicts and humanitarian emergencies from arising, intensifying, spreading, persisting or recurring. The objective of such a strategy must be to help ensure that the conditions that prompted the military intervention do not repeat themselves or simply resurface.

The Libyan war has been a clear case of taking advantage of the authority that R2P grants without any intention of fulfilling the obligations that it entails. The inherent problem in the R2P doctrine and interventionist policies more broadly is that there is often more than enough political will to use force and very little will to repair the damage afterwards. Despite the belief that the wars in Libya and Iraq are radically different, the near-total lack of preparation for what comes after the war and the vague hope that the international community will pick up the slack are all too similar.

So what about nostalgia? Tony Blair has criticised Blue Labour in stinging terms, warning that echoing the Baldwin and Major idyll of old maids cycling to communion would ruin Labour’s chances. “I don’t think Tony Blair has read or seriously engaged with [our arguments]… Nostalgia is a wicked thing because it sanitises the past – as wicked as a certain kind of cruel modernism that sees no benefit in the past. The question is what kind of country we want to leave to our children.”

In his view, New Labour was “almost Maoist” in its approach to modernisation. “On managerialism, modernity and the market, Blair ultimately served the interests of the rich and the status quo.” ~Mary Riddell interviewing Lord Glasman, leading advocate of “Blue Labour”

It is a given that Blair never seriously engaged with Blue Labour arguments. They represent everything he and his allies oppose, and he would prefer that they didn’t exist, except perhaps as a useful, easily dismissed foil. Glasman’s dissent from the obsession with “freedom of movement” is refreshing, and his criticism of the distorting effects of nostalgia is very welcome. He is far from the only one to recognize that New Labour was Britain’s answer to our own bankrupt “centrist” corporatism, but it is encouraging that this is taking place among influential figures in the post-Brown Labour Party. Blue Labour could represent a healthy and necessary counterpart to Red Toryism, and it might force Tories to pay more attention to the demands of their constituents.

Update: Alex Massie’s line about a “neo-Poujadist” shift is unfair.

Ben Armbruster points out Rudy Giuliani’s fiscal policy savvy, which the ex-mayor recently demonstrated by commenting on how much the government spends on the military:

He also said that defense spending is “not a major part” of the federal government’s budget, only constituting “about four or five percent” of the total.

Oddly enough, Giuliani thinks even this relatively small amount is out of control:

“Yes, I would try to get control of defense spending,” Giuliani said, but added that it would not solve economic problems.

The budget analyst I cited earlier today added up all “defense”-related spending from the entire budget and found that it made up 23% of the administration’s FY 2012 budget request ($832 billion). So Giuliani is only off by a factor of four or five. Not bad for the guy who has based his entire national political persona on the illusion that he knows something about national security issues. I wonder how many other hawks think that military spending must remain untouched because it is such a small part of the budget.

This Omid Memarian profile of the MEK is from February, but it is worth reading in light of the new wave of enthusiasm for the terrorist group. Memarian shows why it is very misleading even to refer to the MEK as an Iranian opposition group, since the leaders of the Iranian opposition flatly reject any connection with them:

The MEK is now largely discredited in Iran, both with the regime and among the opposition. Leaders of the opposition Green Movement have denounced its goals and leadership. “The MEK can’t be part of the Green Movement,” said Zahra Rahnavard, a prominent opposition figure and wife of former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi. “This bankrupt political group now makes some laughable claims, but the Green Movement and the MEK have a wall between them and all of us” — including former President Mohammad Khatami and presidential candidates Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Back in March, Mohsen Kadivar and Ahmad Sadri warned that the MEK was one of the groups attempt to claim leadership for opponents of the Iranian government:

At the same time, within the Iranian Diaspora, some have sought to usurp leadership of Iran’s indigenous pro-democracy movement. This has alarmed the leaders of the Green Movement in Iran. Mir Hossein Mousavi warned against “international surfers” seeking to wield their own axe in the furnace of the Green movement in his last communiqué that was issued before he was put under house arrest on Feb. 29.

First and foremost among such groups is Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an organization that has been designated by the U.S. government as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). But despite its obvious threat to global security, the MEK could be taken off the State Department’s Terror List within the next week. If this happens, it promises to spell disaster for the pro-democracy movement in Iran, and will be a devastating setback in the country’s attempts to move forward.

Obviously, no decision on removing the group from the list has happened yet, but there continues to be significant pressure to de-list the group on the specious grounds that this will aid the Iranian opposition and undermine the regime. As Kadivar and Sadri made clear several months ago, de-listing the MEK would have exactly the opposite effect:

Removing the MEK from the FTO at this juncture would embolden Iran’s hardliners to intensify their repression and discredit the Green Movement by implying that it is somehow connected to the widely detested MEK terror group. Furthermore, supporting the MEK would provide the Iranian government with the specter of a foreign-based threat that could be exploited to heal key fractures within the system, increase the number of Iranians who would rally around the flag, and facilitate the suppression of the indigenous political opposition.

The real Iranian opposition repudiates this group and wants nothing to do with it. As Hooman Majd has written in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ:

Even Iranians most strongly opposed to the Islamic Republic cannot abide the MEK and its leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, who were allies of Khomeini in the revolution that toppled the monarchy but broke with the regime, it is widely thought, not because of any discomfort with its interpretation of democracy, but because they were excluded from power by the clerics. (p. 204)

Support for the MEK would be akin to backing Trotskyists just because they happened to oppose Stalin for their own very different reasons. Why then do so many Americans want the U.S. to reward and support such a group?

Update: Via Matt Duss, here is another explicit statement from a Green movement activist that their movement wants nothing to do with the MEK/MKO:

At the same time, we reject inclusion on any level of the MKO and the National Council of Resistance of Iran in our genuinely popular and indigenous movement which enjoys a large social base, unlike this group.

Duss has another post on this subject today.

Via Justin Logan, Kenneth Waltz talks about international politics with Theory Talks, and he made this sensible observation about proliferation worries:

The fact is that people worry that a new nuclear country, once it gets a nuclear shield, would then begin to behave immoderately or irresponsibly under the cover of its own nuclear weapons. Well, that has never happened. Every country that has had nuclear weapons has behaved moderately. If you think of the Soviet Union and China, both behaved much more radically before they had nuclear weapons. Stalin’s bravado in the face of American nuclear weapons was extremely impressive, or depressing—depending on how you want to look at it—but once they got the nuclear weapons, the Soviets calmed down. And the same thing was true for China.

So, what people fear is the opposite of what, in fact, has happened. That is rather typical in the nuclear business: we do not look at the past and say “Well gee, every nuclear country has behaved like every other nuclear country. What do we worry about?” In fact, the effect of nuclear weapons is that it moderates the behavior of their possessors; and that is very easy to understand!

But—and this is a message that no one in Washington wants to hear—we must not limit our war aims to simply toppling Gadhafi. We made that mistake in Iraq and Afghanistan. By not paying attention to what comes after the deposal of a dictator, we inadvertently created conditions for a long-term insurgency. In Libya it is imperative that the U.S. and our allies make plans now to insert a stabilization force after Gadhafi’s downfall to help the National Transitional Council gain control of the country. ~Max Boot

It is true that a lack of planning and general indifference to what followed the initial invasions badly plagued both of these wars, but there was also the small matter that a significant portion of the population regarded our forces as an occupying army. It didn’t help matters that this was true. In any event, there was always going to be part of the population that was not going to be reconciled easily or at all to the overthrow of the old regime, and the same holds true for Libya.

Assuming that everything else went as Boot imagines, there would likely be some form of insurgency against the Benghazi leadership as this stabilization force (filled mostly with Europeans, Boot assures us) tries to make the TNC into the de facto government of Libya. What Boot proposes is to put American and European soldiers into Libya as the post-war enforcers of a new government that currently has negligible legitimacy or authority and doesn’t even represent all of the rebels. This will make those soldiers targets of the Benghazi leadership’s enemies among old Gaddafi supporters and former rebels. These soldiers will also be at risk of attack from members of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which will be only too happy to insert itself into the post-war upheaval to strike at Western forces, and possibly from those members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) that will thank the U.S. and NATO for our help by launching attacks on our soldiers. If our soldiers were fortunate enough to face minimal resistance, they would still have to be there for a prolonged mission that could last many years. Even now, there are still almost 6,000 soldiers from NATO and other nations in Kosovo. Given the size of Libya and its political history, we would have to expect that a stabilization force would have to be much larger and would have to remain there much longer. Even for Boot, recommending a U.S.-European stabilization force for Libya is an unbelievably poor suggestion.

There is a certain logic to the idea that the governments responsible for throwing a country into chaos ought to shoulder most of the burden for restoring order. This is almost certainly not going to happen in the Libyan case, so I don’t see the point in preparing for it. There is not just limited political support for such a mission–there is no support for it at all. The European governments that have been fighting the war won’t want the responsibility or the cost, and the governments that opposed the war aren’t going to do more than France or Britain. Turkey might be the exception. If the U.S. had any role in post-war Libya, it would have to be limited to financial and logistical support. Congress has had no real say in any of this, but one thing that the House did agree on was that no U.S. ground forces would be put into Libya. Just imagine how uncooperative the members will be if Obama presented Congress with a nation-building/peacekeeping mission to restore order following a war that Congress didn’t want and never authorized. No, the responsibility will be shifted, as it probably has to be, to the U.N. and the African Union. That should reduce the incentive for an insurgency against an international force.

Posting at Steven Cook’s blog, Karim Mezran offers additional reasons why recognizingthe TNC as the Libyan government was a mistake:

There are, however, other reasons why the United States should not have offered official recognition to the TNC, notably the increased risks of splitting the country. The situation on the ground is stalled. The rebels in the western mountains are strong enough to control some villages, but definitely not enough to mount an attack on Tripoli. The forces in the East have made little real progress in weeks. The recent liberation of Brega though very important does not alter significantly the situation on the ground. Defectors from the Libyan army have expressed skepticism that the rebel army can ultimately prevail. All of this, coupled with the wavering European engagement, leads to affirm that the only way to get out of this impasse is to negotiate directly with Qaddafi.

Contrary to the general view that recognizing the TNC will help to hasten the end of the conflict, Mezran argues persuasively that it makes a negotiated settlement more difficult and may end up prolonging the war or possibly result in the break-up of the country in the worst-case scenario:

Anyone who knows the Libyan leader knows that he respects only one power, the United States of America. To be effective, the Americans should be able to exercise strong influence on both sides to force them to accept a negotiated solution, though recognition of the TNC has weakened Washington’s position. Recognizing the rebel’s government has outraged Qaddafi and his supporters, while at the same time depriving the United States of a powerful tool to pressure the TNC into accepting a possibly unpopular negotiated solution. Moreover one has to be wary that, the TNC may feel a duty to reward the people of the eastern provinces who have suffered much in the last month. In other words, while the situation on the ground remains stalled, the TNC may prefer to spend and invest resources in the reconstruction and strengthening of the liberated zones thus decreasing the war efforts to liberate Tripolitania. The unintended consequence of this policy would hasten the breakup of Libya. This would be the worst possible outcome of recognizing the TNC.