Gaddafi has survived five weeks of punishing airstrikes, and his military has not yet betrayed him, as officials in Paris and London were hoping. In a notable display of candor, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe suggested this week that alliance leaders — including his boss, Sarkozy — may have underestimated Gaddafi’s staying power in deciding to go to war.

“When the decision to take action was taken, there was a feeling that, in the wake of what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, this would be relatively quick [bold mine-DL],” Danin recalled. “Instead, it is turning out to be a protracted civil war on the ground.” ~The Washington Post

What could the thinking have possibly been here? What happened in Tunisia and Egypt was that in both cases the military refused to attack protesters, and Ben Ali and Mubarak realized that they were not going to be able to hold onto power through the use of force. The states with relatively stronger institutions saw the heads of state depart fairly quickly, which should have been a warning that things would be very different in Libya, where there are no strong institutions. Gaddafi kept the Libyan military institutionally much weaker than in the other countries to prevent coups against him, and some of his armed forces were already showing themselves willing to use force against the opposition. These were all things that these governments could have reasonably been expected to know before they ordered military action. Clearly, they did not know them, or they did not give them enough attention.

It’s impressive that none of the allied governments was able to recall how long the Kosovo campaign lasted. What was supposed to be a few days of bombing turned into two and a half months, and ultimately it was diplomatic pressure to force Milosevic to give up that mattered as much as the bombing. Compared to Kosovo, the U.S., Britain, and France have effectively committed themselves to achieving a much more ambitious goal (Gaddafi’s removal from power) with less of a political consensus in support of that goal, more limited resources, and more restrictions on what they can do. As in 1999, they assumed that the targeted regime would capitulate almost immediately, and somehow never considered that the regime they were attacking might actually be able to consolidate its strength because it was being attacked. Over the short term, Milosevic was able to draw on the shared, genuine outrage of Serbs on account of the bombing*. It was only later on, long after the bombs had stopped falling, that his political opponents were able to organize effectively against him.

Like almost every other stupid interventionist project of the last twenty years, the Libyan war was founded on the assumption that attacking another country would drive the population to turn against the government instead of realizing that the completely normal, human reaction of the majority of every nation on the planet is to resent foreign attacks and usually to defer to the government in an emergency. This is what we would do, and it is as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning, but for some reason we have to go through the same exercise of overconfident miscalculation, puzzlement, and then the dawning realization that bad and unjust governments don’t automatically collapse simply because we wish they would. Perhaps next time, if there must be a next time, our government should come up with a plan that doesn’t rely so heavily on the willingness of regime loyalists to commit the equivalent of treason.

* Humanitarian interventionists have had the uncanny ability to select countries to attack for their wars of choice that have deep, painful memories of being attacked by Nazi Germany and occupied and oppressed by Fascist Italy respectively. Of all the peoples in the world that might turn on their respective governments as a result of foreign attack, humanitarian interventionists have chosen two of the least likely, and then they profess surprise when the nations in question didn’t respond as they were expected to respond. It’s as if the interventionists think that it matters to the people being bombed that they aren’t being bombed in the name of conquest and empire-building. These nations don’t really know that when it’s happening, it certainly doesn’t feel like it at the time, and they aren’t likely to believe Western claims to the contrary.

Muammar Gaddafi has consolidated his position in central and western Libya enough to maintain an indefinite standoff with rebels trying to end his four-decade rule, U.S. and European officials say.

“Gaddafi’s people are feeling quite confident,” said a European security official who closely follows Libyan events.

A “de facto partition for a long time to come” is the likely outcome, the official said, because of Gaddafi’s improving position and the weakness of the ill-equipped and largely untrained opposition forces. ~Reuters

Suffice it to say, if our real Libya policy had any merit, this wouldn’t be happening. As current Libya policy is failing, support for fighting in Libya to topple Gaddafi receives a whopping 32% of the American public’s support. I should add that this is not 32% support for escalating the U.S. role in the war: just one in four of Americans supporting the goal of regime change want U.S. involvement to increase. The poll shows just how uninterested Americans are in increasing the U.S. role in Libya:

Even among people who favor ousting Gaddafi as a goal, a relatively small group, 24 percent, says the level of U.S. military involvement in Libya should be increased.

Support for an increased U.S. role is lower still, 9 percent, among those who favor the current mission, protecting civilians. In both groups, sizable majorities say U.S. involvement should be kept about the same as it is now.

In short, American public opinion narrowly supports the war so long as Americans aren’t currently doing any of the fighting and as long as we aren’t call on to do more than we already are. It doesn’t really matter to supporters that protecting civilians and toppling Gaddafi both appear to be beyond the reach of non-U.S. allied forces. That should tell us something about how shallow “support” for the Libyan war really is. Even the “supporters” aren’t willing to endorse doing what is necessary. Escalating U.S. involvement is political folly here at home (supported by just 10% of all respondents), and the administration has implicated the U.S. in a war that seems likely to drag on for quite some time if things remain as they are now.

Update: Max Hastings reports on the dismay among allied military officers that greeted the triumvirate’s op-ed last week:

To the bewilderment of military chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic, last week Barack Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy asserted that the only acceptable outcome is for President Gaddafi to quit. But how this is to be achieved without sending in Nato ground troops – a ghastly idea – the Lord alone knows.

‘We are living a lie by pretending that we have the means to win this militarily,’ said a senior Nato officer this week.

Hastings also mentions that Paddy Ashdown, former overlord of Bosnia (and now merely Lord Ashdown), is very keen on sending ground forces to Misurata. I take it as a given that whatever the Paddy Ashdowns of the world recommend, we should do the opposite. If we needed any more confirmation that putting soldiers into Libya is a very bad idea, we just received it.

Second Update: I don’t really understand what Marc Lynch is complaining about here. If anyone should be concerned with weak public support for the military intervention in Libya, it should be the people who have been calling for that intervention from the beginning. Weak public support for an intervention obviously didn’t matter to policymakers in the administration, who plunged the U.S. into the Libyan war without making a sustained public case for it. Weak public support potentially imposes limits on what the administration is willing to do now that the U.S. and our allies are involved. To the extent that the administration has deliberately limited its involvement in a war in a way that makes success less likely because of a fear of domestic political consequences, that is relevant to a discussion of the failings of the administration’s handling of Libya.

The U.S. should make decisions on policy based on the merits, and not whether a particular course of action polls well or polls badly. Had the administration done that a month ago and opted not to attack Libya, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Even so, it doesn’t say much for the Libyan war that public support for the intervention depends on the U.S. not doing those things that appear to be necessary to give the intervention a reasonable chance of success now that the administration has made the mistake of intervening. I should be pleased that public opinion is strongly against deeper U.S. involvement, since I certainly don’t want the U.S. to become more involved, but I understand that the lack of public support for anything other than the half-hearted, stalemate campaign is a recipe for prolonged Libyan suffering and indefinite U.S. and allied commitment.

Jacob Heilbrunn has written a valuable essay on Samantha Power and her published works for the forthcoming issue of The National Interest. Andrew Exum and David Shorr both pick up on the apparent irony that Heilbrunn criticizes Power for “dramatizing history through people rather than considering broader forces” when he seems to be doing the same thing in identifying the fortunes of humanitarian interventionism with Power’s influence, but there is one place in his essay where Heilbrunn might have dealt Power’s post-facto moralizing a truly damaging blow along these lines and strangely doesn’t even try. This concerns Power’s remarkably anachronistic discussion of the Armenian genocide and what the U.S. should have done about it.

Heilbrunn writes:

Woodrow Wilson, eager to remain neutral in World War I, had resisted the calls of his ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, to protest the killings of Armenians. Power castigates Wilson for refusing to “declare war on or even break off relations with the Ottoman Empire.” She would have taken America onto the European battlefields—and into the bloodbath—far earlier. In going to war against Germany, Wilson told Congress, “it seems to me that we should go only where immediate and practical considerations lead us and not heed any others.” According to Power, “America’s nonresponse to the Turkish horrors established patterns that would be repeated.”

What Power does not discuss is Wilson’s conduct of the war, namely his decision to intervene after he had promised Americans he would not. If anything, Wilson, who promised the war to end wars, was wildly idealistic, anything but a hardened realist, someone who was bamboozled during the Paris peace negotiations by his French and British counterparts, the champion of the League of Nations, whose headquarters in Geneva became a testament to fecklessness during the 1930s. It seems peculiar to condemn Wilson for not having been idealistic enough.

This misses the point. The main problem with Power’s attack on American policy during WWI is that it is indifferent to the reasons why the U.S. never declared war on the Ottomans. This wasn’t just because the Ottomans had not attacked Americans. The same might have been said about Germany’s other allies. It was because the U.S. had large numbers of missionaries and students living in Ottoman domains who would have been in danger of imprisonment or reprisals had the U.S. gone to war against the Ottomans, and partly because there was a belief that Americans might be able to do more for the Armenians where they were. Power even acknowledges these reasons in her book, but clearly dismisses them. There was, of course, no notion in 1915 that the United States had a legal obligation to take military action on behalf of persecuted Ottoman subjects, and the idea that the U.S. could or would have entered a war against a state that had taken no hostile action against American citizens at this point in history is purest anachronistic fantasy.

Had there somehow been the political will to go to war against the Ottomans, it is hard to see how the U.S. could have actually intervened in a timely fashion that would have done any good. The Gallipoli campaign turned into a bloody disaster, and that was a fairly straightforward attempt to take the Ottoman capital. A campaign aimed at invading Anatolia for the sake of an oppressed, persecuted minority likely would have ended as the later Greek Ionian campaign did: a rout for the intervening army, and an even greater disaster (if that was possible) for the “protected” population. I have no idea how the U.S. or the other Allies could have embarked on a successful military intervention in eastern Anatolia in time to halt the genocide, and neither does Power. Even when the U.S. had entered the war on the side of the Allies in 1917, it took the better part of a year to mobilize, train, and transport American forces to France so that they were ready and able to participate in Allied operations.

I have discussed this before at some length, and I will close with a quote from my earlier argument:

If Power’s wish could have come true, tens of thousands of Americans would have perished making some equally ill-fated Dardanelles-esque landing in an ultimately vain bid to stop a mass slaughter, most of which had been accomplished within a few months from its beginning in April 1915, and the American witnesses of the crime who relayed their reports to the rest of the world would have been in no position to verify the genocide of the Armenians.

As the 96th anniversary of the genocide comes up on Sunday, it’s important that we remember it as the genocide that it was, and we should also not indulge satisfying stories that it could have been effectively prevented by outside intervention.

But so far, the Mormon issue doesn’t seem to be nagging Huntsman the way it did Romney four years ago. Did Romney’s 2008 candidacy itself help allay anti-Mormon prejudice? Is there something different about the way they embrace their faith? Do the two men discuss this issue differently? All of the above? ~Erin McPike and Scott Conroy

One answer is that conservatives largely don’t take Huntsman seriously as a presidential candidate, so they’re not going to spend any time thinking about how his religion might or might not affect his electability in the primaries. Most conservatives, myself included, take for granted that his service in the Obama administration, his open disdain for conservative activists, and his relatively few, but notable departures from the party line make him politically radioactive in the GOP. If that weren’t enough, his fawning letters of praise to the President and Bill Clinton would be enough to make even some potentially sympathetic Republicans feel slightly ill. In other words, Huntsman’s candidacy is beset by so many ordinary problems with conservative voters that hardly anyone bothers to think about how his religion might complicate things for him. As far as conservatives are concerned, he would already be such a hopeless case that dwelling on his religion might seem a bit like kicking a man while he’s down.

Perhaps the most obvious answer why Huntsman’s religion has received less attention as a liability is that the people writing about him have paid less attention to it. Huntsman’s candidacy is almost entirely a creation of mainstream media outlets, and he has been pushed as a viable and “electable” candidate for almost as long as Obama has been in office. To that end, the journalists that seem keen on promoting Huntsman have an interest in minimizing the importance of obstacles for Huntsman that they may have emphasized or exaggerated when they affected Romney. Romney went out of his way to go from being the acceptable, moderate Republican from Massachusetts to try to make himself as a conservative demagogue and culture warrior. By contrast, Huntsman began in deepest-“red” Utah and over time has been giving indications that he is interested in moving towards the all-important “center.” Someone keen to fight cultural battles is naturally going to come under scrutiny for his religious beliefs a lot more than someone who sees such things as distractions at best and mistakes at worst.

Unlike Romney, Huntsman has made it clear that he has no interest in portraying himself as a particularly religious person, and he doesn’t want to stress social issues in any campaign that he runs. He is apparently looking to fill the moderate Republican space in the race, or so his supporters hope, and seems to be doing everything to model his would-be campaign on McCain’s 2000 and 2008 campaigns (i.e., rally independent voters in New Hampshire, and then try to go from there). This New York Timesreport confirms that Huntsman backers want to do exactly this:

The strategy for Mr. Huntsman, if he decides to run, would most likely begin in New Hampshire. His supporters believe he should follow a path similar to that taken by Mr. McCain: ignore the Iowa caucuses, where social conservatives have a louder voice, and try to compete aggressively in South Carolina, where Mr. Romney has struggled to win over voters.

Elsewhere in their article, McPike and Conroy promote the idea that Nikki Haley’s election proves that South Carolina will be more hospitable to Huntsman, but this overlooks that Haley’s difficulty was overcome because she had chosen to convert and become an evangelical Christian. The Haley example is one that undermines the argument for Huntsman in South Carolina. Haley may have had an “unconventional” background, but she very publicly identified herself with evangelical Christianity. Huntsman can’t do that, and he’s not interested in talking about these things publicly even if he had the option.

Romney’s religion became a subject of discussion partly because Romney wanted to dwell on themes of generic faith and “values” in his speeches, but he had no interest in saying anything more specific about his faith. His campaign never figured out a good way to manage this tension. Huntsman’s solution is to make no pretense of appealing to evangelicals and social conservatives, and the voters he hopes to reach are those with much less interest in a candidate’s religion or in religious observance itself. Huntsman expects to do best with secular and moderate Republican voters, and for most of these voters Huntsman’s Mormonism is irrelevant or at most a curious biographical detail. In that respect, Huntsman’s religion may be less politically relevant than Romney’s, but it is still going to be a problem for him.

When I saw that Robert Costa had written up an interview with Sen. Marco Rubio on foreign policy, I thought it would be annoying, but I hoped it would be informative. Unfortunately, it was annoying, and not very informative at all. It mostly confirmed my worst suspicions about Rubio, and did nothing to make me think that he knows very much about the subject.

Rubio is for American exceptionalism, which he insists isn’t just a talking point (but I couldn’t confirm that from the interview), but he is against “isolationism” because it has never “worked.” One would have to believe that America had practiced “isolationism” at some point in the past to determine this, which tells me that Rubio doesn’t know as much about U.S. history or foreign policy as he wants everyone to think. Presumably, “isolationism” for Rubio simply means neutrality in foreign conflicts, and by never “working” he means that neutrality has successfully kept the U.S. out of a lot of unnecessary wars. To answer Greg Scoblete’s question, what Rubio seems to mean by “withdrawing” from world is that the U.S. would cease bombing and invading other countries on a regular basis. I suppose you could call that a kind of withdrawal. Other people would call it remaining at peace with other nations.

Rubio doesn’t believe Americans should “go around and settle every dispute in the world,” but as we all know he is one of he leading advocates of recognizing the Benghazi leadership as the Libyan government and he wants to endorse regime change in Libya as U.S. policy in a Senate resolution. If determining the outcome of a civil war in Libya isn’t a sign of a foreign policy dedicated to settling every dispute in the world, I’m not sure what would be. At least he says he isn’t in favor of “confrontation for the sake of confrontation.” Is that supposed to be reassuring? That’s a bit like saying, “Yes, I believe in militarism, but not crazy militarism.”

Finally, we are reminded that Rubio defines his view of the world through the experience of the late Cold War and his Cuban exile background. That’s understandable, but it confirms that Rubio keeps thinking of U.S. foreign policy in outdated terms. More than that, he basically admits that he judges arguments on post-Cold War foreign policy issues on the basis of whether or not they resemble Cold War-era arguments:

Rubio recalls how the U.S. was unabashedly involved in a variety of regions. “We were engaged in Nicaragua, we were engaged in El Salvador, and against Cubans in Grenada. We were engaged all over, even in Poland, when they were standing up to the Russians.”

Remember, Rubio says, “many of the same people who are now asking us to mind our own business, to accept this new order in the world where America is not influential, are the same people who were telling us more than 20 years ago to stop talking about the Soviets, that we had to deal with them as equals, that we cannot be the cops of the world.”

“Well,” Rubio grins, “Ronald Reagan didn’t listen to them.”

Neither will Rubio.

So there you have it. Rubio espouses a view that is almost a caricature of hawkish interventionist foreign policy based on the faulty assumption that if the U.S. did something during the Cold War and if Reagan supposedly did it, it is the sort of thing that the U.S. should be doing now in an entirely different world. It’s as if Rubio’s thinking on this issue remains frozen in the mid-1980s. That might not be so important if Rubio were mostly interested in entitlement reform or tax policy or any number of other issues, but foreign policy issues are supposed to be his main interest, and there is scant evidence from this interview or elsewhere that Rubio has very much to say about them.

Of course, Reagan did deal with the Soviets as political equals on a number of issues, because that is what the situation sometimes demanded. Whatever its other flaws might have been, the Reagan Doctrine is a good example of the U.S. not acting as “the cops of the world.” Not only were American soldiers typically not “policing” foreign conflicts under Reagan (and the one time they were Reagan realized soon enough that it had been a mistake), U.S. policy was aimed more often at stoking civil wars for reasons of anticommunism rather than bringing them to an end. The “cops of the world” probably wouldn’t be doing that. The practical question of whether or not the U.S. should be the “world’s policeman” wasn’t relevant or feasible until after the Cold War and several years after Reagan left office. These people saying that we had to “stop talking about” the Soviets would have had to be around “more than 20 years ago,” because the Soviet Union ceased to exist twenty years ago this December.

There’s no one saying that the U.S. should accept a situation in which America is “not influential.” Even if we wanted America to be entirely lacking in influence, which we don’t, it won’t be happening for quite a while. What many critics of current foreign policy are saying is that America is going to become relatively less influential as other states become more so, and that this is a natural, unavoidable and in some ways useful development. The critics also say that there is no point fighting against this or trying to reverse the process by force, and those who would try to restore U.S. global influence and power circa 1991 or circa 2002 are going to hasten the deterioration and exhaustion of U.S. power through pointless shows of military strength. No one was saying this more than 20 years ago, because the realities to which these arguments refer did not yet exist.

It could be useful to ask any politician who publicly rejects “isolationism” to offer three examples of conflicts in the modern world that they think the U.S. has no significant role in resolving. There are quite a few “frozen” and ongoing conflicts around the world, so it should be easy to name three. My bet is that Rubio’s instincts would prevent him from being able to name even that many.

P.S. I had forgotten to mention that Rubio lists some of his recent reading material, and it included books by Marc Thiessen and Michael Oren, and George W. Bush’s Decision Points. It would have been difficult to make up a list that is more consistent with a caricature of Republican hawkishness than this.

Update: I appreciate Kevin Derby’s response. I take his point that Rubio’s campaign was largely concerned with domestic and fiscal issues, and it is understandable that his office would mostly be sending out announcements about budget matters during the recent and ongoing budget debates. If we take this interview seriously, however, Rubio is claiming that he aspires to have influence similar to that of Jesse Helms, whom he considers his “model.” Costa introduces Rubio’s remarks by saying, “But in the Senate, foreign policy has become his passion.” Later on, Costa adds, “But foreign policy is Rubio’s calling.” Passion and calling are fairly strong words.

Perhaps “main interest” overstated how much time and attention Rubio gives to foreign policy, but since he has been elected he has made a point of co-signing a letter calling for a delay on the ratification of the New START, he has been an outspoken advocate of recognizing the Benghazi leadership as the government of Libya, and he has repeatedly and pointedly, if predictably, criticized administration policy on Cuba. Judging from his first few months as a Senator-elect and Senator, it is fair to say that foreign policy is certainly one of Rubio’s main interests, and he seems intent on making it something he wants to be known for in the Senate.

Jonathan Bernstein has made very solid arguments that Michele Bachmann can’t win the Republican nomination, but he’s on much shakier ground when he says that she can’t possibly win the Iowa caucuses:

Compared to Huckabee, Michele Bachmann is an altogether different sort of candidate. Since 1972, no candidate in any way similar has run a competitive campaign. The only three members of the House who had plausible shots at winning—Mo Udall in 1976, Jack Kemp in 1988, and Dick Gephardt in 1988 and 2004—were all senior members with leadership positions, legislative accomplishments, or both. No, Bachmann belongs in a different category, with other sideshow acts who may attract attention but have no real chance to win the nomination. And even in allegedly crazy Iowa, those candidates rarely impress on caucus day.

We need to remember that Mike Huckabee was also widely regarded as a long-shot, no-hope candidate when he was running in 2007. The arguments against him seemed persuasive, and they were borne out over the course of the primary season, but Huckabee became the national figure he is today because of his victory in Iowa, which propelled him on to some success in other contests (mostly in the South) where he could also rally evangelical voters behind him. Despite being governor of Arkansas for 10 years, the conventional wisdom held that he couldn’t be taken seriously because his social conservatism was too extreme, his organization was lacking, and he couldn’t raise any money. In short, Huckabee was dismissed in much the same way that Bachmann is being dismissed now. Bernstein has a point that Bachmann is much less qualified to be President than Huckabee was or is, but that isn’t the same thing as saying that she is less electable in Iowa. The more we look at how Huckabee won in Iowa and compare it with Bachmann’s strengths, the more we have to take seriously the possibility that Bachmann could pull off the same surprise upset that Huckabee did.

After all, it wasn’t particularly because Huckabee was a multi-term state executive that Huckaee was able to ride a wave of evangelical caucus-goers to victory in 2008. Huckabee won because he could appeal directly to evangelical voters as someone who shared their beliefs and experiences and spoke their language. His lack of campaign organization was less important in Iowa, because he was able to mobilize informal networks of evangelical church-goers. As Sean Scallon’s TAC profiile of Bachmann explained, she comes from a similar religious background, she has a long record of social conservative activism, she has family roots in Iowa, and she spent part of her childhood in Waterloo.

When Huckabee started, he wasn’t all that well known outside of Arkansas. By comparison, Bachmann is probably among the best-known Republican members of Congress nationwide, and she already has a following and a significantfund-raising network in place. Her appearances in Iowa have been quite well-received among activists, and she is using many of the same themes that Huckabee used to build up his following in Iowa. This isn’t proof of Iowan “craziness,” but of Bachmann’s ability to appeal to the sorts of conservative activists she needs to win over if she is going to compete seriously and possibly win in Iowa.

Over the years, I have had great fun making fun of Angela Merkel. Now deadly earnest Libya war supporters are managing to steal even this simple pleasure from the rest of us by making ridiculous criticisms of Merkel’s response to Libya. When she was backing into her first electoral victory despite her best efforts to sabotage the Union’s electoral chances, I was very critical of her. When she was carping on the sidelines when Stoiber was the party leader and making all the right “Atlanticist” noises in support of the Iraq war, she was an embarrassment. Back in 2007, Der Spiegel was writing up her shift in German foreign policy in a decidedly pro-U.S. direction as something that was startling and different:

It is virtually unprecedented in German history for a chancellor to be so unreservedly aligned with the US. Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany, saw America as a guarantor of freedom, but also perceived it as an occupation force. Helmut Schmidt and Willy Brandt, both Social Democratic (SPD) chancellors, were pro-American but innately skeptical.

Merkel, on the contrary, wants to expand Germany’s close ties with the United States and is on the verge of making a pact with America the cornerstone of her foreign policy. Indeed, the resoluteness with which she has pursued this goal stands in conspicuous contrast with her government’s lack of political progress back home in Germany.

As Roger Cohen would have it, this never happened, and Merkel’s response to Libya represents some horrible break with past German practice. It’s simply not true, and what should give all of us pause is how Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama managed to push the most reliably pro-American Chancellor of the last two decades into the camp of the abstaining governments. If Libya has divided traditional allies, isn’t the burden for the rupture on the governments that started the war? If Libya has driven Germany into the opposition camp, why are we blaming the Germans rather than the French and British?

In his previous column, he was claiming that Adenauer would be spinning in his grave because of German abstention on the Libya resolution, but this is little more than nostalgia substituting for argument. It’s no better than the Republican over-reliance on invoking Reagan or the Tory habit of invoking Thatcher regardless of the situation or the historical record. Adenauer was instrumental in bringing West Germany into NATO, but I have a hard time believing that he thought it should ever be the purpose of NATO to launch offensive wars on other continents for any reason. Merkel could plausibly argue that she is resisting efforts to turn NATO into something that it shouldn’t be. Viewed that way, she has a far better claim on Adenauer’s legacy than war supporters appropriating his name to justify a blunder.

Today Cohen compares 2011 Germany to the Germany of ten years ago, as if Schroeder’s obvious electoral opportunism in opposing the Iraq war had never happened. The accusation that Merkel was aligning German policy with German public opinion isn’t a very damning one anyway, but it’s simply silly to contrast what Merkel is doing now with some mythical “solidity” and “direction” that Germany previously had and now lacks. Merkel’s foreign policy has largely been a repudiation of Schroeder’s far more “pro-Russian” and “anti-American” approach, but Libya was one ill-conceived blunder too far even for Merkel.

Cohen says that Merkel should acknowledge her Libyan error, but it is not at all clear that it is she who has made the error. As each days goes by, the decision to attack Libya looks worse and worse. The worst thing one can say about Merkel under these circumstances is that she did not try harder to dissuade her allies from their folly. Of course, it is because Merkel doesn’t want another rupture with the U.S. that Germany did not actively oppose the Libyan war as it opposed Iraq under Schroeder. It is because she wants to preserve the Franco-German relationship that her government has gone out of its way not to criticize any of its allies directly. It is because Merkel wants the Atlantic alliance to survive that she hasn’t made Libya into a much bigger issue when it would be extremely easy and popular for her to do so. If Merkel were the opportunistic, pandering “maneuverer” that Cohen says that she is, she could have been creating a lot more trouble for the governments that started the Libyan war.

Update: Simon Jenkins sums things up nicely:

Most members of Nato and the EU are absent from the Libyan imbroglio. This is not, as the western media incant, because they are wimpish, small-minded and, as the New York Times grandly puts it, parochial. It is because they are not stupid.

Behold, the Bridegroom is coming at midnight. * Blessed is the servant He shall find awake. * But the one He shall find neglectful will not be worthy of Him. * Beware, therefore, O my soul! Do not fall into a deep slumber,* lest you be delivered to death and the door of the Kingdom be closed to you. * Watch instead, and cry out: * Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, O God. * Through the intercession of the Theotokos, have mercy on us!

Blogging will be very light during the rest of Holy Week, but I do want to say a few things in connection with Nicolas Pelham’s very thorough report on Libya in The New York Review of Books. Pelham gives a good summary of the last month’s events, and it is generally a very balanced account. It should also make war supporters reconsider the virtues of a cease-fire.

One of the first claims that supporters of intervention in Libya made is that the country wasn’t really split, and it was wrong to call this a civil war. It was simply a popular uprising against the ruler and his family. Interventionists said that the overwhelming majority of the country was against Gaddafi. If that was ever true, it does not appear to be so now. Pelham writes:

And while the rebels have had much Arab support, the Great Leader continues to win backing further south. Central Libya’s tribes, including the Oulad Suleiman and the Warfalla, which hitherto stood on the sidelines, have now actively intervened to prevent the rebels from pushing west [bold mine-DL]. The migrants from Chad and Mali on whom Qaddafi long ago bestowed passports are also repaying his favor with their loyalty.

With both sides increasingly dependent on foreigners to fight their battles, the war is incrementally burgeoning from an intra-Libyan struggle to a war of north versus south. The towns on the Libyan coast that seek allies against Qaddafi from across the Mediterranean are increasingly at war with a hinterland seeking to tighten its ties in Africa across the Sahara.

One of the assumptions that backers of the Libyan war have been making is that Gaddafi’s part of Libya can be starved of resources and his support will melt away as a result. While sanctions are undoubtedly making things much more difficult, Gaddafi’s neighbors have no great interest in seeing him fall, and it seems likely that they are not going to make much effort to enforce sanctions. Transitional Council claims that Algeria is funneling mercenaries and fuel into the country may or may not be true, but it certainly makes sense in light of Algeria’s strong opposition to the intervention. If Algeria is actively aiding Gaddafi, he has a better chance of outlasting NATO than most people seem to assume. The countries that border Libya and have the most at stake there have always been skeptical of or hostile to outside intervention. To find significant “regional” support for attacking Libya, one has to go quite a distance from Libya’s own region.

Pelham’s entire account is worth reading, but one detail he includes that I have not seen anyone discuss very much is the factor of weather that will limit NATO operations severely in the coming months:

The sandstorm season in Libya is fast approaching, and with it the prospect of protection from NATO bombing. Under its cover, the colonel could yet send his pickup trucks, disguised with rebel flags, into Benghazi. Diplomats who had earlier said they were coming to stay are making contingency plans to flee within an hour’s notice, waving goodbye to free Libya.

According to this travel guide, sandstorm season begins in May and continues through June. As far as I can see, the only good news about this for NATO and the rebels is that the sandstorms during this time of year are reportedly so bad that “they curtail all outdoor activities.”

Pelham mentions the approaching sandstorms to argue that Western governments should do more to secure a cease-fire, and he reports that there are some in eastern Libya eager to see more Western support for a cease-fire:

Some who had fumed against any accommodation with Qaddafi now ask why Western powers are not more vigorously pursuing a cease-fire, or even some form of reconciliation, which might let them preserve their current holdings in the east.

The rebels certainly have the most to gain from a genuine cease-fire, and this is what the rebels’ Western patrons should be trying to achieve. Turkey is probably the best mediator for such a deal. As a NATO member that still has diplomatic relations with Libya, Turkey is a better mediator than any of the other likely candidates. A cease-fire would allow more humanitarian aid to reach Misurata, and it would give the rebels a respite from being attacked there and in the east. Supporters of the Libyan war have taken for granted that time is on the side of NATO and the rebels, but looking ahead to the next few months that doesn’t seem to be the case.