Nevertheless, he [Obama] remains uneasy about our intellectual exports. Like many men of the left, like most “realists,” he gives his attention first to the natives’ search for authenticity, not to their profound, often bulldozer-like, love affair with Westernization. That Libyans could be inspired by the ideas of freedom and democracy, and at the same time actually want the United States to blast the hell out of Qaddafi’s army, must be disturbing to one who has accepted some of the third-world critique of American imperialism. ~Reuel Marc Gerecht

Via Scoblete

Are we supposed to take this seriously? It “must be disturbing” to him? What evidence for this is there? Obama has supported the Libyan opposition, he facilitated and launched a military intervention on their behalf that has involved more than a little “blasting” of Gaddafi’s forces, and he has cloaked all of this in the rhetoric of universal rights. Yes, there appears to have been a passing phase when Obama hoped that anti-Gaddafi forces would prevail on their own, and that would have been better for the opposition and for the U.S. and our allies, but if he has been “disturbed” by any of this he has kept it well-hidden.

Do realists actually care about “the natives’ search for authenticity”? Anyone who has given these things much thought understands that anti-colonial movements could be intensely anti-Western and nationalistic, but also strongly in favor of Westernization as a means of modernizing and strengthening their respective countries. The Turkish national movement is one obvious example of this. There are traditionalists in any society that view nationalist modernizers and Westernizers with deep distrust and set themselves up as the arbiters of authentic religious and cultural traditions, but the same was also true in European societies as well. I have no idea what any of that has to do with realist foreign policy arguments, and neither does Gerecht.

There are all sorts of political movements that have been happy to receive the backing of outside forces regardless of whether their ideology and goals had anything to do with “freedom and democracy,” and Obama belongs to a liberal internationalist tradition that has aligned the U.S. with many of these movements over the decades. Indeed, quite a few have been happy to mouth all the right phrases about “freedom and democracy” to win outside support and then pursue very different agendas once they succeeded. The KLA didn’t give a fig for freedom and democracy as we mean it (except that it provided cover for Albanian nationalist majoritarianism), but they were quite pleased that NATO was attacking Serb forces on their behalf. By his own admission, Obama supported all of that. What would make Obama view Libya any differently?

All of this comes back to Gerecht’s most easily falsifiable claim:

President Obama has certainly seemed sincere, if not Kennedyesque, in his intent to save the rebels in the eastern half of the country from the depredations of the most Orwellian strongman in the Middle East. But his sincerity rests in constant tension with the core tenet of a developing Obama Doctrine: American hegemony is not a good thing, either for the United States or for the world [bold mine-DL].

This is painfully wrong. There is no developing Obama Doctrine, and it has no core tenets, but if one wanted to describe a core belief of Obama about foreign policy this would not be it. Obama doesn’t believe “American hegemony is not a good thing, either for the United States or for the world.” It would be welcome and shocking news if he did believe that, because he has never once shown the slightest hint that he does.

This is why every Republican hegemonist attack on Obama lacks credibility, and why it is going to be so difficult for any of the candidates making these attacks to land any solid blows. They keep mocking him as if he weren’t one of them, but he is. Perhaps they think Obama is giving hegemonism a bad name, or perhaps it is mainly an expression of partisanship, but whatever the reason it helps to explain why hegemonists are desperate to describe Obama’s foreign policy as anything else than what it is, namely a largely hawkish center-left expression of the same hegemonism to which they subscribe. In this case, Gerecht would have us believe that this is the product of a union of the elder Bush and Fanon. There have been some similarities to the elder Bush in the past two years, but on the whole Obama really is much more aligned with hawkish neoliberals within the liberal internationalist tradition.

Success, despite what some pundits suggest, hardly guarantees Obama’s re-election. But it does choke off one Republican attack. It’s not a good week to publish a story complaining that the President is “Leading from Behind”. ~Alex Massie

I have seen some version of this several times this week. It needs to be emphasized that the “leading from behind” phrase comes from an administration official speaking to Ryan Lizza, and it is a plausible summary of the description of leadership that Obama offered in his March 28 address on Libya. Obama said:

In such cases, we should not be afraid to act, but the burden of action should not be America’s alone. As we have in Libya, our task is instead to mobilize the international community for collective action, because contrary to the claims of some, American leadership is not simply a matter of going it alone and bearing all of the burden ourselves. Real leadership creates the conditions and coalitions for others to step up, as well, to work with allies and partners so that they bear their share of the burden and pay their share of the costs [bold mine-DL], and to see that the principles of justice and human dignity are upheld by all.

Despite the obvious limits of the “allies and partners” in Libya and the problem that the would-be burden-sharers can’t carry the load nearly as well as many Americans might like, Ryan Lizza’s article attempted to put a positive spin on all of this. Bill Kristol naturally wants to attack it, perhaps because he sees an end to non-U.S. dependence on U.S. power as a potential threat to continued hegemonist policies. Once America ceases to be considered “indispensable,” Americans will have a hard time understanding why America still has to act the part of the global hegemon.

Even so, Kristol is doing little more than quibbling over tactics and means and pretending that larger principles are at stake. Kristol pretends that “leading from behind” has something to do with repudiating American exceptionalism, but Obama waxed romantic in the same speech* on the special American vocation to attack other countries for the sake of high idealism:

Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.

As the raid that killed bin Laden shows, “leading from behind” does not sum up or define all of Obama’s decisions or policies, but refers almost exclusively to the Libyan war. Despite this, the endless (and pointless) pursuit of an identifiable doctrine guiding Obama’s foreign policy continues. The Libyan war was a multilateral affair because the administration saw a political advantage in making it so, and the raid was a unilateral action because there were advantages in taking that kind of action. The multilateral or unilateral nature of an action is at best secondary to whether or not the action makes sense and serves American interests.

The problem with complaining that Obama is “leading from behind” is that the entire argument that hawkish interventionists have been making against Obama on Libya is fundamentally flawed. Hawkish interventionists not only insist on the frequent use of American military power and outside intervention in other nations’ conflicts whenever possible, but they also can’t stand the thought that there is a crisis somewhere that does not involve the U.S. as the main intervening power. Obama can satisfy them on the former, but not on the latter. It’s not enough for them that Obama facilitated the Libyan war both politically and militarily, but he must also be at the forefront of waging it despite its irrelevance to U.S. interests.

The Libyan war wouldn’t be any wiser or more successful if it were a unilateral action or if it lacked U.N. approval, and if the U.S. were more directly involved in all aspects of the war that wouldn’t readily bring the conflict to a conclusion that much sooner, but as ever hawkish interventionists know that whatever action Obama has taken it has been too slow, too limited, and too indecisive. The symbolism of a policy is at least as important to Obama’s hawkish critics as its effectiveness. Hawkish interventionists take delight in a strong executive and the symbolism of decisiveness and “toughness” they associate with this, and for that reason any significant emphasis on cooperation and consensus-building angers them.

What is really ridiculous about attacking Obama for “leading from behind” is that it is basically an intramural squabble between different sets of interventionists about the precise details of how to go about starting wars that have nothing to do with American security interests. It doesn’t really matter who prevails in such a squabble, because the end result will be more or less the same. As long as American leadership is wrongly defined in terms of starting wars, meddling in other nations’ affairs, and dictating outcomes in foreign conflicts, it makes little difference whether that leadership is from “the front” or happens to be coming from “behind.” It will still lead America to the same bad end of frequent foreign entanglements and unnecessary wars.

* A month ago, after Obama had launched the U.S. into yet another unnecessary war, Kristol’s estimation of Obama’s March 28 speech was rather different:

The president was unapologetic, freedom-agenda-embracing, and didn’t shrink from defending the use of force or from appealing to American values and interests.

Now here is Kristol from his most recent editorial:

His administration’s lack of strength and confidence in defense of liberty, its trembling before illiberalism, its failure to lead, is now dressed up and sent out into the world as “leading from behind.”

The world isn’t much fooled. Dictators aren’t fooled. The American people aren’t fooled. Even liberals are getting hard to fool. Lizza’s article gave the Obama adviser the last word. But did even the typical New Yorker reader nod in approbation as he put down his May 2 issue and picked up his glass of Chablis?

P.S. Massie scores a direct hit with this:

Many American pundits, gorged on the moral clarity available to those thousands of miles from the action [bold mine-DL], now seem keen on treating Pakistan as an enemy state. Because three (or two and a half) wars aren’t enough.

Yes, there are most likely elements of the Pakistani power structure that are sympathetic to the Taliban and al Qaeda, and some of these elements might have helped Bin Laden, or at least turned a blind eye to his presence. But: These elements, if they do exist, do not represent the entirety of Pakistan. They certainly don’t represent the civilian leadership of the country, a leadership we should be buttressing, not demonizing. ~Jeffrey Goldberg

This seems right to me. On the radio today, I heard Anatol Lieven commenting on the possibility that elements within the Pakistani establishment knew of bin Laden’s whereabouts, and I take seriously his view that it is very hard to trust any Pakistani authorities at this point. I agree with his argument that there has to be more pressure from the U.S. and accountability within Pakistani institutions for major failures. Lieven is also right that military aid to Pakistan should be very carefully scrutinized and if necessary reduced or cut off if Pakistan cannot satisfactorily answer for its lapses.

It is a bit remarkable that an allied government that has come through for the U.S. numerous times in apprehending Al Qaeda members is being treated in many quarters as obviously guilty of complicity in sheltering one of the most prominent Al Qaeda members. This is especially odd given that Pakistan reportedly shared information about the courier that led the U.S. to locate the compound where bin Laden was residing. If there were an active effort by the Pakistani government and/or military to shelter bin Laden or to turn a blind eye to his location, does it make sense that they would provide the U.S. information about this? Wouldn’t they withhold that information and try to direct U.S. attention elsewhere? I don’t say all of this out of any enthusiasm for Pakistan, if that makes any difference, but because the accusation doesn’t make very much sense.

What bothers me about the snap judgments about Pakistan’s complicity (as opposed to complicity on the part of a relative few people within Pakistani intelligence) is that they are not informed by any clear evidence of complicity apart from the location of the compound. There is an assumption that complicity simply must be the explanation for why bin Laden was where he was, and there is an added assumption that this implicates a large part of the Pakistani establishment. This is jumping to conclusions at its worst. If there were elements within the ISI that sheltered bin Laden, as I assume there were, that doesn’t prove that they were acting with the knowledge or approval of all Pakistani authorities.

I agree with Greg Scoblete when he says that “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to probe this question with more urgency and to demand changes in Pakistan’s behavior if their complicity can be proven.” That’s a very reasonable suggestion, and based on what I have been hearing from administration officials today that is what they intend to do. Accountability and answers are perfectly reasonable things to demand from Pakistan.

Obama, by contrast, is now fused in the public imagination with the most successful American military operation since Inchon. Symbolically, it’s the opposite of the Carter Iran mission; in fact, it’s America’s Entebbe. ~Peter Beinart

The operation to kill bin Laden was clearly a success, and the administration deserves full credit for it, but these comparisons that Beinart is making can’t be taken seriously. The most successful American military operation since Inchon? Entebbe? Why not liken it to D-Day while we’re at it? It is not to disparage the soldiers who carried out this mission to point out that these other operations were far more complicated and risky.

The flip side of what Beinart is praising is that Democratic administrations for much of the last century have historically been too ready to resort to force and too willing to intervene in conflicts overseas. It’s not as if Obama needed to prove his support for taking military action more than he already had. Before this weekend, he had escalated one war and helped start another. Admittedly, these were not “Jacksonian” policies, but there couldn’t have been any serious belief that Obama was averse to using military force.

The difference, as Beinart understands perfectly well, is that the brief, successful operation to kill bin Laden is universally popular in the U.S. because everyone accepts that it was legitimate, they understand the reason for it, and because it was short and completely successful in its very limited objective. The war in Libya has no strong popular support because none of these things is true of the Libyan war. The public has grown weary of the war in Afghanistan because the objectives have become unclear, and they have lost patience with what seems to be an interminable mission.

Quick, decisive action that leaves no obvious loose ends is the sort of thing that Americans like to see, which is the exact opposite of much of what Obama has been doing for the last two years. Put another way, everything that Obama may have gained for himself and for Democrats with the killing of bin Laden may yet be frittered away and wasted if Libya drags on and the administration does not begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan this year as it had originally promised to do. Indeed, the speed and success of this operation will underscore just how prolonged Afghanistan has become and how ill-advised the Libyan war has always been.

Something good that may come out of this is that there may be fewer liberals in the future who feel obliged to support misguided wars because they remain stuck in the post-Vietnam “defensive crouch” on national security.

Just as she has become irrelevant, Sarah Palin has started staking out less absurd foreign policy positions:

Still, Palin clearly stated a foreign policy philosophy that she says dates back to the Reagan administration – but in many ways came off as a five-point folksy version of the Powell Doctrine.

What has been interesting to watch is how Rand Paul and Michele Bachmann’s positions on Libya seem to be gaining more traction inside the GOP compared to the pro-escalation views of Rubio, McCain and the like. I don’t assume that Palin’s shift is all that significant, but it may be an indication of just how great the gap isbetween her former neoconservative advisors and the rank-and-file of the party that Palin has tried to cultivate. It is probably also an indication that those advisors don’t see Palin running in 2012, or perhaps they assume that she isn’t going anywhere in the 2012 race if she does run. It may suggest that Bachmann has struck a chord with conservatives on Libya, and Palin is attempting to play catch-up.

Politico‘s Ben Smith attributes this change to a change in advisors:

The personnel shift carries an ideological charge. Scheunemann, the former executive director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, is a longtime neoconservative stalwart, as is Goldfarb, a former reporter and protege of Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. They crafted for Palin a policy platform and voice reflecting an eagerness to use American force. The pair, who helped Palin with press and debate prep in 2008, were also something of Palin’s last link to Washington’s political establishment.

But Palin parted ways with that aggressive internationalism in a speech yesterday, condemning U.S. involvement in Libya and laying out a more cautious philosophy of the use of force. Schweizer has articulated a more skeptical view of the use of American force and promotion of democracy abroad.

If Palin’s views can be so noticeably changed by acquiring new advisors, it doesn’t inspire any confidence that she has given any more thought or has any better understanding of these issues than she did when she was repeating the phrases Scheunemann and Goldfarb were giving her.

Update: The wolves devour each other!

A Milosevic-style capitulation ending the Libya operation does not appear to be in the cards. Nor does the West seem to have the strategic patience to let Qaddafi’s regime wither on the vine (because it may still have sufficient wherewithal to crush the current rebellion). Plan B may have to be written up and executed after all. ~Nikolas Gvosdev

The Libyan war is a good example of fighting the last “humanitarian” war, but more than that its supporters have taken for granted that the last war was a sucess and that the use of force was the reason for that success. These are all badly flawed assumptions that account for why the Libyan war is becoming a much more prolonged, indefinite military commitment than most of its advocates expected. As Gvosdev explains, and as I and many others have said before, Russian diplomatic pressure was essential in bringing the Kosovo war to an end, and the goals that NATO had twelve years ago were much less ambitious. Libya’s diplomatic supporters are not taken seriously, and the governments that might have the influence to push for a settlement of the conflict have little reason to make the effort. Western governments have repeatedly rebuffed all offers of cease-fire and negotiated settlement, so it’s not clear that the intervening governments are willing to settle for partial success.

Gvosdev also notes that widening the war to attack the country’s infrastructure backfired in 1999 and wouldn’t be likely to work in Libya now:

Another question is whether the alliance should begin targeting more of the infrastructure of Libya in order to put pressure on Qaddafi to capitulate. The logic of widening the target set in 1999 from Serbian units in Kosovo to targets across the country was a (misguided) belief that by imposing hardships on the Serbian population, they would rise up to overthrow Milosevic. This tactic backfired; Milosevic benefited from a renewed sense of nationalism to stay in power for another year and a half. In Libya, however, the alliance would want to encourage citizens in the loyalist regions not to support Qaddafi, and targeting them would seem to be counterproductive to that end. Moreover, the greater the destruction in the country, the more likely it would increase calls for the West to play a direct and significant role in the country’s reconstruction.

It’s always a misguided belief that inflicting punishment on a population encourages people to turn against their government. In certain types of government, it may be the case that political violence can pressure a government to make concessions on matters of policy. It is a lot easier to make these concessions if they relate to peripheral or minor interests, but as long as these concessions are seen as “giving in” to threats they are politically perilous. If they touch on perceived vital interests, there is usually nothing that will change a government’s position, and it is unheard of for a mass popular movement to try to topple the government to make it give in more quickly.

There are no cases I can think of where foreign military attack has quickly provoked a domestic uprising in order to hasten capitulation to the attacker and end the attacks. If this ever works, it takes a long time, and it requires inflicting a lot more suffering on the population than anyone is considering for Libya. Russia in 1917 is one example where a government fell partly because it insisted on continuing a war that was unpopular after massive losses in the millions. This was a case of a relatively small group of revolutionaries exploiting the political weakness of a regime rather than an instance of a popular uprising toppling it.

Libyan war supporters have relied on a misreading of the Kosovo example in much the same way that democracy promoters relied on a misunderstanding of the 1989 revolutions in eastern Europe in their thinking about democratization in Iraq. Things didn’t happen the way they remembered them, and for that reason they never fully understood the causes of what did happen, which led them to support policies that they could and should have known would not work as they expected or possibly not work at all. According to this misunderstanding of 1989, liberal democracy would emerge and flourish once the authoritarian government was out of the way. The 1989 revolutions were overwhelmingly indigenous, national movements, but democracy promoters used their example as a model for exogenous, U.S.-directed democratization.

The help of the Pakistani intelligence services to Britain has been vital in identifying the links of these potential terrorists to groups in Pakistan, and to preventing more attacks on the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Islamabad therefore has been only a partial ally in the “war on terror”—but still a critical and irreplaceable one [bold mine-DL]. For we need to remember that in the end, it is only legitimate Muslim governments and security services that can control terrorist plots on their soil. Western pressure may be necessary to push them in the right direction, but we need to be careful that this pressure does not become so overwhelming that it undermines or even destroys those governments by humiliating them in the eyes of their own people. ~Anatol Lieven

Whenever one is tempted to start talking about Pakistani perfidy or makes claims that Pakistan should “no longer be regarded as a U.S. ally,” I recommend that he read some of Lieven’s analysis of Pakistan’s politics. Many Americans seem to be yielding to another form of the sort of moral absolutism that took possession of the country after 9/11, but in this case there is much less excuse for it. For one thing, we have already seen where that sort of absolutism can lead when it is manipulated or exploited, and for another the “perfidy” or complicity with which everyone seems ready to indict the entire Pakistani establishment does not obviously apply to the whole. Despite the last decade’s experience with our own government’s shoddy and incomplete intelligence-gathering, many of us suddenly have enormous confidence in the competence and awareness of the Pakistani government. Let me suggest that relying on Indian news accounts for a fair treatment of the issue of Pakistan and terrorism is likely to lead one astray as often as not. Indian papers are understandably eager to exploit the situation to make popular anti-Pakistani arguments, but we shouldn’t be so quick to follow suit.

Whenever an allied government doesn’t measure up to what the U.S. expects of it, it is tempting to accuse it of perfidy or betrayal, but that avoids considering whether we are expecting something that the ally can reasonably provide. Libya hawks have taken to bashing Germany for its pacifism, which is another way of saying that allies are supposed to act like satrapies: they are not permitted to make independent judgments about policy questions, nor are they allowed to act in their own interests. Iraq hawks derided Turkey for its opposition to the invasion, and some of them built up entire narratives that portrayed France as our traditional nemesis. Considering how widely loathed our government is in Pakistan, and considering how antagonistic many of our policies are to Pakistani interests, the U.S. has no reason to expect any Pakistani cooperation. For various reasons, we have received some cooperation anyway. Inevitably, that isn’t enough for some people, who seem to expect allied governments to commit a sort of suicide to fulfill our demands.

Just two months ago, Hosni Mubarak was ousted by his military to defuse the political crisis that had started in late January. Egypt’s foreign policy alignment with the U.S. and its “cold peace” with Israel were not the main issues of that crisis, but they certainly didn’t endear him to his people. Since Mubarak stepped down, Egyptian foreign policy has begun slowly readjusting to match Egyptian public opinion. Pakistan’s government is every bit as much out of step with public opinion in its country as Mubarak was, and perhaps even more so. Instead of recognizing the political constraints that limit how much cooperation Pakistan can provide, Americans are adopting the sort of all-or-nothing, “you are with us or against us” pose that guarantees that the U.S. will indeed get nothing if it were to adopt the anti-Pakistani line that is currently being promoted.

Damning Pakistani authorities for not doing enough overlooks the problem they face, which is that their institutions are inevitably starting to reflect the views of the broader population, which are not not at all sympathetic to the U.S. As Lieven wrote three years ago:

The presence of extremist sympathisers in the security services reflects the situation in the population in general. Election results which show the Islamist parties’ share of the national vote as very low are somewhat misleading from this point of view. Pakistanis who have no desire for an Islamist revolution in Pakistan may still sympathise with Pakistanis who hit at the old enemy, India, or at America, now perceived by much of the population as a de facto enemy of Pakistan.

While Americans are appropriately satisfied with bin Laden’s death, there needs to be a serious American effort to understand how much Pakistan has been doing in support of U.S. goals and the limits of what Pakistan can do for the U.S. It is not as much as Americans would want, but it is far more than we have any right to expect.

As Lieven says later:

In the struggle against Islamist extremism and terrorism, Pakistan is a dreadfully flawed and unsatisfactory ally, but it is still an essential ally.

Andrew:

Does Mickey think bin Laden is the same as Saddam in the American psyche? OBL attacked ths country; Saddam didn’t. Osama began this hideously divisive bait of a war. Saddam just couldn’t cop to not having any WMDs.

I’ll have more to say about this in my next column, but I will say a few things right now. Kaus’ point was that “we thought finding Saddam would turn the tide in Iraq.” A lot of pro-war Americans did think that, because they incorrectly subscribed to Rumsfeld’s notion that the insurgency was driven by nothing more than regime “dead-enders” who fought on only so long as Hussein remained free. They assumed that the insurgency would grow weaker once Hussein was captured. Once he was dead at the hands of his enemies and the insurgency and bombing campaign intensified, it was all supposed to change once Zarqawi died. Each time such a claim was made, it was discredited by subsequent events. It’s not as if this is the distant past. It all happened in the last five to seven years.

Likewise, Beitullah Mehsud’s death was treated as a major turning point or a “very big deal” in the words of the late Richard Holbrooke. Two years later, the Tehrik-i Taliban hasn’t been significantly weakened by Mehsud’s death, and if anything the group has intensified its campaigns under the leadership of his brother. As I said when Mehsud’s death was announced:

Our tendency to personalize the enemy, identifying a cause with particular leaders, encourages us to conclude that their deaths are pivotal events. But the causes of insurgency are usually deeper, and more resistant to attempts to uproot them by force.

Obviously, losing prominent individual leaders hurts insurgencies and terrorist groups, but in the way we talk about these figures we tend to exaggerate greatly how important they are as part of the larger conflict. We have seen the latest version of this in the recent “accidental” assassination attempts on Gaddafi, as if Gaddafi’s death would force his sons to surrender rather than fight on. Indeed, the more that Americans come to believe that killing individual leaders is a ready-made solution to policy problems, the easier it will be to sell supposedly low-risk, promiscuous interventionism facilitated by missile strikes or special forces. It also helps to keep people from thinking very much about any of the other things that stoke jihadism and insurgency, and it encourages the false comfort that we just need to kill enough of the right people to prevail.

Update: Bruce Hoffman makes some of the same points:

Another piece of conventional wisdom that must now be left an open question is how effective decapitation is in terms of ending a terrorist campaign. Historically, the record is not a good one. During Algeria’s war of independence in the late 1950s, the French seized the entire leadership of the National Liberation Front, yet they discovered that the FLN was much more networked than they thought, and that even the decapitation of the entire group leadership did not have had much of an effect. The FLN, of course, went on to triumph and attain Algerian independence just four years later. In 2004, the Israelis delivered a one-two punch against Hamas’ equivalent of Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, when they killed in succession Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and leader of Hamas, and then a month later Abdel Aziz Rantisi, his deputy and successor—yet Hamas is stronger today than it was seven years ago.

Second Update: Andrew responds:

But we are not supposed to be glad that this monster is dead? Please.

I didn’t say this, and I wouldn’t say it. As I wrote in my column this week, bin Laden’s death is very welcome news. That’s no reason to overstate his actual significance or the significance of killing him. Paul Pillar makes sense here when he writes:

But the national reaction to the operation has been of a magnitude that would be appropriate if it involved something or someone bigger than what Bin Ladin really was. It would be appropriate if it had meant, say, the bumping off of a dictator whose demise would mean the introduction of an entirely new political order, or the elimination of a wartime leader whose death would mean the end of a war. Bin Ladin was neither of those things. An unfortunate irony of the huge reaction to the killing of Bin Ladin is that it continues to give him in death what he worked so hard to achieve in life: the status of arch foe of the most powerful nation on earth.

Robert Farley and I recently talked about Libya, Syria, humanitarian interventionism, and the forthcoming Five Days of August.