My essay for World Politics Review on Libya and the “responsibility to protect” doctrine is now available (subscription required). The other essay contributions can be found here.

Update: David Rieff’s article in the new issue of The National Interest makes some important complementary arguments on how the R2P doctrine is becoming nothing more than a new form of militarized humanitarian intervention from which it was supposed to be significantly different:

Instead, as the Libyan case illustrates, R2P’s most immediate relevance is that it can be used quickly and effectively as a legal and moral justification for military intervention. Evans is correct when he insists that the doctrine’s ambitions are far larger. Where he is wrong is in continuing to claim that, in practice, there has been all that much movement away from the “droit d’ingérence.” Some of his recent speeches suggest that Evans himself realizes this. Having greeted the passage of Resolutions 1970 and 1973 with profound satisfaction, noting on March 24 that the Security Council had “written exactly the right script,” Evans has since worried publicly that as NATO action failed to dislodge Qaddafi, its military operations began to stretch the UN mandate to protect Libyan civilians to its “absolute limit.” For Evans, the great danger is that this mission creep will accelerate the risk “of buyers’ remorse from those who did not oppose Resolution 1973, and of a backlash when the next extreme [responsibility-to-protect] case comes before the Security Council.”

As I said before, my money is that he’ll cozy up to this wing by sounding protectionist trade themes. ~Dan Drezner

Drezner did say this before, and it didn’t make sense the first time. Not only does Pawlenty favor all pending free trade agreements, he believes the U.S. “should start new bilateral talks with our trading partners,” and in his speech today he took a very aggressive neoliberal line on massively increasing inequality in Egypt opening up the Egyptian market. Pawlenty said:

We act out of friendship when we tell Egyptians, and every new democracy, that economic growth and prosperity are the result of free markets and free trade—not subsidies and foreign aid. If we want these countries to succeed, we must afford them the respect of telling them the truth.

That may be, but Pawlenty is not taking account of how much worse the backlash against such policies could be. When the would-be new democracy in question has an electorate that expects the next government to solve Egypt’s economic woes practically overnight, force-feeding the people neoliberal policies is a very good way to ensure an immediate populist backlash and the permanent marginalization of supporters of economic liberalization. It hardly helps that Egyptians correctly associate such reforms with the circle around Mubarak’s son, and they correctly perceive privatization policies as an important source of corruption and cronyism under Mubarak. Pawlenty may offer up thin pseudo-populist gruel on the debate stage when the debate turns to trade, but according to his speeches he appears to be a true believer in the virtues of free trade under any and all circumstances.

P.S. Earlier today, Drezner helpfully reported Pawlenty’s speech live on Twitter.

There are, I think, two inter-related explanations for this. The first is that ideology is a form of power and states wield it when they think it helps them advance more mundane geo-strategic interests. To take the U.S.-China example – America’s liberal democratic ideology is still fairly attractive globally, whereas not many people want to live in a single party communist autocracy that jails artists and Nobel Prize winners. Throwing this in China’s face puts them on the defensive in the eyes of global public opinion and, by extension, makes it harder for China to plead its case on other issues of strategic importance. This is why many people who want to take a “harder line” with China over its growing “assertiveness” in Asia usually begin by urging American politicians to call out Beijing’s human rights abuses.

The second explanation is that ideological parries are easy and demagogic. It’s difficult, time consuming and complicated to suss out which states have legitimate claims to various pieces of aquatic territory and then to rally people around those issues. It’s quite easy, by contrast, to call China (or any other state) “evil” and leave it at that. ~Greg Scoblete

Greg was responding to my earlier post on ideology. I agree that ideology is an instrument of state power, and ideology as such wouldn’t exist except for the desire to acquire and exercise power, but this is what still leaves me puzzled. It doesn’t help the U.S. gain much of anything to stoke hostility towards China, and it isn’t clear to me that it is all that useful to the U.S. to try to encourage regime change in China. America won’t benefit from conflict with China, and it won’t benefit from prolonged instability in China and East Asia. If deploying liberal democratic ideology were actually being used to advance some concrete U.S. interest, that would be one thing, but instead it seems to have become an end in itself that requires the U.S. to put its interests at risk for the sake of prior ideological commitment.

It’s true that “not many people want to live in a single party communist autocracy that jails artists and Nobel Prize winners,” but it seems to me that this doesn’t really explain the value of promoting liberal democratic ideology to compete with China for influence. Other nations don’t have to want to live under a Chinese-style system to accept Chinese investment and influence, and they don’t. In practice, democrats around the world are going to be interested in pursuing their respective national interests, and insofar as China supports or does not interfere with those there is nothing about China’s domestic regime that obviously limits the influence it can have. After all, it isn’t as if China’s neighbors would be less alarmed by its moves in the South China Sea if it were a democratic state. It is fundamentally what China does, not its reigning ideology or its internal repression, that makes its neighbors wary of its intentions.

Drawing attention to internal Chinese repression may be gratifying to activists in China and in the U.S., but it’s not obvious that this puts China on the defensive in a constructive way. Many rising democratic powers and developing countries are understandably wary of infringements on their sovereignty, and they are not likely to want to encourage scrutiny into the internal affairs of any other country lest the same scrutiny be directed at them as well. Throwing the record of internal repression in the face of the Chinese, as Greg puts it, will produce a mixed reaction among other states, especially now that U.S. democracy promotion has become so closely associated with military intervention.

Emphasizing Chinese repression may be useful for building domestic support for more confrontational policies, and Greg is right that this is the easy, demagogic aspect of making ideological appeals, but this assumes that more confrontational policies actually serve U.S. interests. This prior embrace of confrontational, hard-line policies as a means to advance U.S. interests is itself an ideological commitment, and one that doesn’t seem to have much grounding in reality. I suppose that solves the puzzle, but it’s not a very satisfying answer. It suggests that the people promoting an ideological struggle with China are quite willing to increase the chances of conflict with China, because they badly misjudge which policies will best serve U.S. and allied interests.

History repeatedly warns us that in the long run, weakness in foreign policy costs us and our children much more than we’ll save in a budget line item. America already has one political party devoted to decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal; it does not need a second one. ~Tim Pawlenty

Pawlenty delivered a speech on foreign policy to the Council on Foreign Relations today, and this was one of the many silly things that he said. Obviously, Pawlenty is a presidential candidate and a Republican partisan, so he’s bound to portray the incumbent and Democrats in a poor light, but this is still an odd thing for him to say. The more typical hawkish argument is that all “serious” mainstream people endorse American “leadership,” and it is only the kooky fringe on either side that finds anything wrong with U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, that is the whole point of using the term “isolationist,” which Pawlenty used frequently today, because it can and will be deployed against both progressives and conservatives/libertarians when either side begins voicing opposition to the latest blunder overseas. To argue that the other party is devoted to “decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal” may satisfy people who write this sort of nonsense about what they think the Obama Doctrine is, but it’s so obviously untrue that it badly undermines Pawlenty’s already limited credibility on this subject. It would be a welcome change if even one party were dedicated to prudence and restraint, but at the moment the leadership of both parties remains intent on recklessness and aggression.

As for the lessons of history, it would have been useful if Pawlenty could define what he means by weakness or given an example of one of the many times that History has warned us of this. The things that Pawlenty would deride as signs of weakness (i.e., not supporting popular uprisings abroad, diplomatic engagement, reduction in military spending) have not had the effect that he claims. For some hawks during the Cold War, not supporting the Hungarian uprising in 1956 counted as weakness, but it would have been a disaster for the entire world had the U.S. intervened. In the ’70s, hawks concluded that detente was a terrible mistake, but it essentially cost the U.S. nothing in the short or long run. The cuts in military spending from their 1980s levels did not lead to greater costs for the U.S. down the road. Virtually every grim warning of the dangers of “appeasement” at least since the start of the Cold War has proved to be little more than groundless alarmism, the fear of “appeasement” has plunged the U.S. into unnecessary and damaging conflicts, and many of the efforts at engagement have yielded important gains for the U.S.

The Logevall/Osgood article from last year that I have mentioned before is relevant once again. Pawlenty receives some criticism in the article for his use of the appeasement charge, but what makes the article valuable is that it reviews past accusations of appeasement and assesses whether they had any merit. They conclude that they didn’t:

As the current debate over U.S. foreign policy again turns on the lessons of the past, Americans would do well to take a closer look at the country’s long wrestling match with Munich’s ghost. Such an examination would show, first, that “Munich” has retained its power in American political discourse for more than seventy years largely because of electoral calculations. Second, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the success or failure of American foreign policy since the 1930s has to a great extent hinged on the willingness of presidents to withstand the inevitable charges of appeasement that accompany any decision to negotiate with hostile powers, and to pursue the nation’s interests through diplomacy. Sometimes these negotiating efforts failed; sometimes the successes proved marginal. But those presidents who challenged the tyranny of “Munich” produced some of the most important breakthroughs in American diplomacy; those who didn’t begat some of the nation’s most enduring tragedies.

Pawlenty takes for granted that engagement is both weakness and an endorsement of other regimes’ behavior, and he repeated that again today. He is fully in thrall to the Munich mythology and its distorting effects. It is fortunate that he continues to languish at the back of the Republican field. We may never have to find out what blunders a President Pawlenty would make because of this flawed understanding.

Update: Here is the full text of Pawlenty’s speech.

I wish you could think of another way to describe this wing of the party, other than McCain and Lindsey Graham. I love John, but that’s like saying we’re embracing Nelson Rockefeller on economics. ~Tim Pawlenty

That’s what McCain gets for having passed Pawlenty over in 2008. More seriously, it is obvious that Pawlenty does hold the same views as McCain and Graham and represents their “wing” of the party. It is understandable that he would be embarrassed to be associated with them. Who wouldn’t be? Think about what Pawlenty has said here. He thinks that being associated with McCain and Graham on foreign policy is akin to being accused of being a Rockefeller Republican on economic policy. Clearly, Pawlenty fears for his reputation as a conservative, and he seems to be aware that his foreign policy views might give some voters reason to question that reputation.

Pawlenty goes on to confirm that he subscribes to the frankly irrational view that the U.S. must persist in misguided or unnecessary interventions for the sake of “credibility.” When Jeffrey Goldberg pressed him to judge Reagan’s decision to withdraw from Lebanon, Pawlenty said:

I guess I would go back and say that my view, without referencing a particular president, is that once the United States commits to a mission, it’s really important that we prevail. Because when you don’t, it diminishes the respect and credibility and awe that other people view the United States with. And our goal here is to avoid as many future conflicts as possible by having our relative position be so strong and so unquestioned and so certain that nobody dare challenge us.

Of course, our relative position in the world is regularly undermined by fighting unnecessary wars until “we prevail” in countries where what “prevailing” means is usually unclear and ill-defined. It is hardly making other major powers nervous or awe-struck to see the U.S. wasting resources and plunging into new conflicts on a regular basis. I would like Pawlenty, or anyone else who thinks withdrawing from Lebanon was a mistake, to explain what it would have meant for the U.S. to “prevail” in the midst of the Lebanese civil war. I doubt that anyone can explain what that would have looked like, and no one could explain why it would have been in the American interest to stay longer than Reagan did.

The issue isn’t whether anyone is challenging the U.S. The U.S. has made it a bad habit over the last twenty years to make other states’ internal conflicts our business. Pawlenty is mixing up the desire to persist in unnecessary interventions to save face with the need to maintain credible deterrence against attack. They aren’t the same things. There is a strange belief that the U.S. has to demonstrate staying power when it blunders into strategically unimportant countries and avoidable conflicts. According to this belief, the U.S. invites attack if we do not show that we are mindlessly stubborn enough to remain committed to an intervention long after it has served its purpose or proved to be a terrible mistake. This is simply false, and it comes from an inability to admit that the goals set for the intervention were either unrealistic or not worth the cost required.

Conor Friedersdorf has a useful summary of some recent commentary on Libya, and he and Reihan have an interesting conversation on Libya and war powers. I would like to challenge one claim that he made. Conor cited Colin Dueck’s recent op-ed as an example of a “resurgence of foreign policy realism on the right.” As far as Libya is concerned, this is somewhat misleading.

Prof. Dueck correctly argues that skepticism on Libya and Afghanistan is not proof of “isolationism,” and describes Republican discontent with both wars in terms of Jacksonian nationalist sentiment. As far as this argument goes, Dueck is on solid ground. I don’t dispute that a candidate advancing “a muscular, unapologetic” foreign policy is much more likely to win the GOP nomination, and Dueck is also right that most Republicans support what he describes as “a foreign policy posture of American leadership, strong national defense, energetic counter-terrorism, and firm support for U.S. allies.” Of course, much of this hinges on what Dueck thinks “leadership,” “defense,” and “firm support” mean.

Dueck has authored a lengthy article outlining his vision of a conservative realist foreign policy, in which he distinguished realists from hawks and nationalists, and much of it is very sensible. On Libya, it seems that Dueck has run afoul of at least one of his own requirements for conservative realism. In his 2010 article, Dueck wrote:

Seventh, with regard to military intervention, the U.S. should be much more careful than it has been over the past 20 years about intervening abroad, and at the same time much more capable, overwhelming, and relentless when it chooses to do so. From Somalia to Iraq, the pattern must be broken of initially inadequate interventions in peripheral locations of questionable centrality to U.S. security. Picking fights in unpromising locations only encourages the impression of weakness when these fights go badly. Once American forces are committed, however, there can hardly be anything more important than winning the wars the U.S. is actually fighting. This means, among other things, building on the dramatic improvements in recent years in American capacities when it comes to counter-insurgency. If the United States is going to intervene militarily abroad, it must be adequately prepared for the constabulary and reconstruction duties that inevitably follow, or it will only invite humiliation.

Nothing better describes the Libyan war than an “inadequate intervention” in a “peripheral location of questionable centrality to U.S. security.” If Libya is peripheral to U.S. security interests, it is hard to take seriously the claim that the U.S. must see the Libyan war through up to and including being prepared for “the constabulary and reconstruction duties that inevitably follow.” Dueck greatly overrates the harm to U.S. security that would be done by pulling the plug on a mistaken intervention, and he sets himself up for endorsing escalation of an “inadequate intervention” once it has begun. As it happens, escalation is exactly what Dueck favors in Libya.

Dueck wrote in his op-ed:

I believe the answer in this case [Libya] is not to pull the plug on operations, but to escalate U.S. airstrikes, in order to speed Gadhafi’s overthrow; we cannot simply walk away, now that the United States has picked a fight, without bolstering impressions of American weakness overseas. But if frustration with this Libyan operation amounts to isolationism, then we need to find a new foreign policy lexicon.

Certainly, “we” can walk away. It does not convey weakness to acknowledge that irrelevant, unnecessary conflicts are irrelevant and unnecessary and to adjust accordingly. Rather, this suggests a measure of wisdom and indicates that some learning has taken place. Is it better to bolster an impression of American foolishness and an inability to extricate itself from unnecessary conflicts?

Dueck was also one of the signatories of the open letter from the Foreign Policy Initiative urging the House GOP not to cut off funds for the Libyan war. The letter stated:

The United States must see this effort in Libya through to its conclusion. Success is profoundly in our interests and in keeping with our principles as a nation. The success of NATO’s operations will influence how other Middle Eastern regimes respond to the demands of their people for more political rights and freedoms. For the United States and NATO to be defeated by Muammar al-Qaddafi would suggest that American leadership and resolution were now gravely in doubt—a conclusion that would undermine American influence and embolden our nation’s enemies.

This passage is filled with mistaken assumptions. Success in Libya is not “profoundly in our interests.” It is much less important than that, just as the outcome of the Libyan civil war was much less important than interventionists claimed in March. The success of the Libyan war probably will not influence how other regimes in the region respond to popular demands for political reform. The start of the Libyan war certainly hasn’t stopped Assad’s regime from cracking down with great brutality, and it obviously hasn’t inspired any fear in the Sudanese government, which is reportedly engaged in an assault on the Nuba minority in South Kordofan.

Correcting a major policy blunder is not a sign of weakness. The supposed virtue of ruling out any ground forces in Libya was that it would make it much easier to cut U.S. and allied losses if the campaign dragged on too long. Dueck argues for the intensification of an air campaign that by itself is unlikely to yield the desired outcome, which is itself another form of “inadequate intervention.” At the same time, he has put himself in the position of supporting the escalation of an illegal war that is at most tangential to American interests.

This may be where Dueck’s position on Libya most clearly clashes with his earlier article. He stated in his article:

The proper and true end of American foreign policy is neither gross international power, nor the export of democracy, but rather the preservation of a republican and constitutional system of government inside the United States.

That’s a reasonable and admirable definition of the proper end of U.S. foreign policy, so how is it that Dueck signed a letter that effectively urged Congress to do nothing in the face of an illegal war that offends against our republican and constitutional system of government?

Update: Dueck had an article at National Review last week arguing along the same lines as he did in his op-ed. I disagree with most of the article, especially the idea that the withdrawals from Somalia, Lebanon, and Vietnam were mistakes, but there is one thing Dueck says that is absolutely right:

The management of the Libyan campaign has been a case study in how not to use force overseas.

Here is Tom Switzer’s review of Dueck’s book, Hard Line.

Still, McCain and Graham are right and Will is wrong: The United States must take an active interest in what transpires beyond our shores, and act militarily when and where we can to defeat our enemies and promote liberty. And we must do this not because we are vaingloriously “in search of monsters to destroy,” as John Quincy Adams famously put it.

Instead, America must promote liberty militarily when and where we can because we live in an increasingly close and interdependent world where time, distance and geography provide less and less protection.

Certainly, that ought to be a key lesson of September 11, 2001: Terrorists living in caves thousands of miles away can and did plan and execute a devastating attack on our homeland. So we best act swiftly and preemptively to stop them, as well as the countries and cultures that give rise to these sworn enemies of America.

Our intervention in Libya, then — which Will opposes — is best seen as part and parcel of this larger-scale effort. It is best understood as one battle in a larger-scale, long-term war (and I mean war in both its literal and metaphorical sense) to transform the Middle East and North Africa along more peaceable and democratic lines. ~John Guardiano

Guardiano must see the glaring flaw in all of this. Even if Americans were inclined to go along with this horrible idea, it is hard to ignore that deposing Gaddafi has nothing to do with it. The previous administration believed that such regional transformation was both desirable and possible, and to the extent that we take them at their word they believed that invading Iraq contributed to this goal of transformation. It was also the previous administration that resumed relations with Gaddafi after he renounced unconventional weapons and terrorism.

If there was any threat to the U.S. from Libya before that, it was largely eliminated. If it never became what anyone could call an ally, Gaddafi’s regime was at least no longer a hostile power. Though Gaddafi had once been a clear enemy of the United States, the Bush administration made the right decision to bury the hatchet. Interdependence notwithstanding, there was nothing in Libya from which the U.S. needed to be protected in 2011, or to be more precise the U.S. did not need to be protected from the Libyan government that U.S. and allied forces are now attacking. Even by the reckless, destructive standards of the Bush Doctrine, the Libyan war makes no sense at all.

Guardiano claims that Libya was a “target of opportunity” and goes on to say:

The uprising there offers us the opportunity to rid the world of one of the most menacing anti-American dictators and terrorist sponsors….

Of course, the U.S. and our allies are trying to rid the world of the dictator after he stopped being menacing, anti-American, and a sponsor of terrorism. The message is clear: non-hostile, cooperative authoritarian governments will be targeted for destruction when the opportunity arises. That should do wonders for advancing U.S. security interests.

As Paul Pillar has explained, Gaddafi’s renunciations were not a product of the Iraq war, and the effort to reconcile with Gaddafi had begun years earlier:

Qadhafi was responding to the pressure and ostracism of multilateral sanctions and to the prospect of an improved international standing if he came clean about the bombing of Pan Am 103 and was willing to deal seriously with the United States on the issues of most concern to the United States. The secret negotiations that confirmed and codified all this were begun in 1999, under the Clinton Administration. It was the willingness of the United States to engage Qadhafi’s regime that made this all possible, not some prospect that military force would be used to remove him—let alone, as with the ouster of Saddam, that force would be used to oust him no matter how he tried to adjust his policies.

The deal with Gaddafi achieved considerably more in terms of non-proliferation and counter-terrorism at vastly less cost than the terrible blunder of invading Iraq did. The Libyan war has undone all of the gains made by one of the Bush administration’s very few successes, and it has turned an ostensibly rehabilitated dictator once more into a bitter enemy. Even once Gaddafi falls, as Amitai Etzioni argued last week, the Libyan war will probably yield both chaos in Libya and confirm other authoritarian regimes in their belief that a nuclear deterrent is essential for their security. It is incorrect to see the Libyan war as “one battle in a larger-scale, long-term war…to transform the Middle East and North Africa along more peaceable and democratic lines,” not least because the Libyan war is certainly not going to yield a “more peaceable” North Africa, and it seems likely to encourage proliferation in the region and elsewhere. Whether it becomes more democratic remains to be seen, and on that point Etzioni is also appropriately skeptical:

However, we know that Libya has few of the foundations of a liberal democracy: it has a weak civil society, a thin middle class and no democratic tradition to revive. If this unhappy prediction holds true, five or ten years from now, when one looks at the Libya intervention, it will not be the overthrow of a tyrant to make for a liberal democratic regime. It will be God knows what kind of mishmash of chaos, bloodshed, and pseudo-democracy.

Judged by its own standards of the “responsibility to protect,” the Libyan war already falls short. By any reasonable analysis of U.S. security interests, it has been a terrible mistake. It is yet another example of how the militarized promotion of the “freedom agenda” that Guardiano supports has been and continues to be a disaster for the U.S.

Jim Antle considers the Pawlenty campaign’s attempt to spin their horrible numbers in Iowa by comparing Pawlenty to Mike Huckabee in 2007:

Huckabee had to deal with Fred Thompson siphoning votes from his right, having already dispatched Sam Brownback. Pawlenty needs to convicingly outdistance Santorum and then leapfrog Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, and Paul (Romney’s numbers may fade on their own since he’s bypassing the caucuses). So Huckabee is indeed the model for Pawlenty, but he has a long way to go.

Jonathan Bernstein noted (via Nate Silver) Saturday that Huckabee had trailed the field in the first Register poll. There are a few important differences that suggest that Pawlenty is in significantly worse shape than Huckabee was. Huckabee’s main competition for social conservative voters, Sam Brownback, wasn’t polling much better than Huckabee at that time. Pawlenty has multiple competitors for those voters, and the most significant of these, Bachmann, outpolls him better than three-to-one. Pawlenty is the governor of a neighboring state, and he has already visited Iowa 18 times. By comparison, Huckabee had visited Iowa just seven times at this point in 2007. Pawlenty has put much more effort into his Iowa campaign than Huckabee did by this time four years ago, but his support remains just as weak.

Pawlenty is often touted in the national media as one of just two or three candidates likely to become the nominee, and his name recognition has risen to a point where he can’t hide behind his former obscurity. If McCain and Giuliani’s early poll results were mostly meaningless, the support for Bachmann and Cain seems unlikely to collapse in the same way. Pawlenty is likely in much worse shape than Huckabee because Pawlenty intends to run as a conventional, well-funded, mainstream candidate, and the reason that Huckabee surprised everyone with his victory in 2008 was that his campaign had been anything but conventional. Pawlenty isn’t going to have the same ready-made access to evangelical church networks that Huckabee enjoyed, which suggests that he does not have a way to make up the same distance that Huckabee covered.

For Pawlenty to be this cycle’s Huckabee in Iowa, he has to hope that Bachmann loses support to finish behind him in the straw poll as Brownback did in 2007. After Brownback came in third at the straw poll, his campaign faltered and he dropped out in October of that year. It seems unlikely that Bachmann will do likewise. The greatest difficulty Pawlenty has in imitating the Huckabee campaign is that Bachmann is doing the same thing, including hiring Huckabee’s old campaign manager, and she is already having more success as the new Huckabee in a few months than he has had over the last year.

The press corps is claiming that all this reflects “war weariness,” but the war in Libya will only drag on longer if Gadhafi and his bloody-minded sons have reason to believe that the Americans are divided. These resolutions will encourage our enemies to conclude that if they can only hold out for a few more weeks or months, the U.S. and NATO will give up and sue for peace. The House is also undermining the morale of Libya’s rebels, not to mention domestic support for the intervention. ~The Wall Street Journal

Let’s review what has actually happened. Americans have been badly divided over this war from the beginning. That would still be true had the House never voted at all, and Gaddafi would hardly need Congress to tell him that the attack on Libya is one of the least popular recent military actions on record in the U.S. It was the administration’s failure from the beginning to rally political support for the intervention, its refusal to consult Congress properly, and its neglect of public opinion that have brought things to this pass. One of the reasons why a reasonable expectation of a national consensus in favor military action is so valuable is that it precludes exactly this sort of dissension after the war has started. The administration entered the Libyan war hastily and recklessly, and its policy is suffering the inevitable backlash that it could have avoided.

Domestic support for the Libyan war has been low from the start, and it started weakening long before anyone in the House voted on anything. One reason for this lack of support is that the war has nothing to do with American security, so Americans are understandably not excited about starting a third war when two others remain unfinished. Another is that the war has stretched on much longer than government officials and pro-war pundits led the public to expect. Yet another reason is that the administration has deliberately avoided oversight and accountability from Congress and, by extension, from the public as well.

For public support for the Libyan war to be undermined, it would have to have been strong at some earlier point. War opponents have not had to undermine anything. The administration’s own shoddy handling of the intervention has done far more than anything its critics ever could. Essentially, the administration short-circuited the appropriate process of debating the merits of the intervention, ignored obvious public dissatisfaction with the war, kept Congress largely out of the loop, and now they and the supporters of this war want to blame members of Congress for finally, belatedly starting to do their job.

Now that Libyan war supporters have helped commit the U.S. to a foolish, unnecessary war, it takes some gall for them to accuse opponents of being backstabbers. Opponents of the war did not have the chance to vote against the war before it began, and they still have not yet had a proper opportunity to vote to end the war. As things stand now, Gaddafi already has every reason to fight to the very last. How members of the House vote can hardly make the stakes any higher for him or increase the incentives he has to resist until the end. War supporters are attempting to lay blame for the effects of the flawed Libya policy they support on those who never wanted the U.S. to intervene there.