We stand at a high point in French postwar diplomacy and a nadir in German. There were strong arguments on either side of a Libyan intervention, but with a massacre looming in Benghazi, Germany had to stand with its allies [bold mine-DL]. Angela Merkel has proved herself more a maneuverer than a leader. Germany often conveys the sense that it now resents the agents of its postwar rehabilitation — the European Union and NATO. ~Roger Cohen

One of the more strange things in the Libya debate has been the fairly frequent pro-war recourse to the Dolchstoss accusation against the German government for its failure to endorse starting an international war. I’m not the one introducing the pernicious post-WWI language of betrayal that German nationalists leveled at their government after 1918. I believe it was Timothy Garton Ash, a columnist for The Guardian, who deserves that dubious honor. Early on in the Libyan war, Ash was pouting like a new Donald Rumsfeld:

But how could Germany not support a UN resolution backed by its principal European partners, the United States and the Arab League? Worse still, Westerwelle recently cited doubts expressed about the extent of the military action by the Arab League to defend the German abstention: “We calculated the risk. If we see that three days after this intervention began, the Arab League already criticises [it], I think we had good reasons.” While French and British pilots risk their lives in action, the German foreign minister is virtually encouraging the Arab League to make further criticism. A word that springs unbidden to my mind is Dolchstoss (stab in the back).

Of course, it doesn’t spring unbidden. Ash bids it come forth. It’s the sort of loaded, despicable term that hard-liners and authoritarians have deployed against the “enemy within” for a long time. It is the language that warmongers use to accuse people who take a different, entirely reasonable position on foreign policy of being treacherous villains. Ash thought of the word, typed it, and then published it. How could Germany not support a resolution that authorized an attack on Libya? Perhaps the German government concluded that attacking Libya was a mistake, or that it would make things worse, or that Germany did not want to be associated with starting a war under these circumstances. The idea that Germany is obliged to support the folly of its allies no matter what it is remains as foolish and insidious as it was in 2002.

Coming back to Cohen, I am impressed by how quickly liberal writers can adapt all the standard tropes of Iraq war supporters when it comes to Libya. We have heard something like this before: regardless of the substance of the policy, it is the duty of allies to fall in line blindly behind ruinous policies that they correctly see as mistakes. Strong arguments on both sides of a question do not permit the possibility of strong political differences over a particular issue. The governments that favor non-intervention or some approach other than the use of force must yield to their more aggressive allies for the sake of good relations, but this demand for reciprocity and solidarity doesn’t apply to the aggressive allies. “Failure” to fall in line like mindless drones is oddly enough taken as evidence of a “failure” of leadership, whereas eagerness to jump on a pro-war bandwagon is proof of wisdom and virtue. One small problem with all of this is that it is utter nonsense.

Allied governments are not required to endorse their allies’ decisions automatically, nor should they be expected to do so. This is especially true when it is an issue that does not directly concern the security interests of any allied government. If France faced a threat to its security, and Germany was indifferent, that might be the time to complain about disloyalty. When France is keen to pick a fight with a government that has done nothing to France, Germany has no obligations to support France in its warmongering. Despite very similar rhetoric praising the leadership of the likes of Aznar and Kwasniewski and deploring the cynicism of Chirac and Schroeder, we should remember that the governments that sided with the U.S. and Britain in 2002-03 hardly covered themselves in glory. For the most part, they came to regret their involvement, and tried to minimize their role as soon as they could.

Does French support for the Libyan war really mark a “high point in French postwar diplomacy”? One would have to have an extremely poor opinion of postwar French diplomacy to think that the Libyan misadventure has been a high point. One would also need to be measuring these things very strangely. Arguably, French involvement in Libya is as dim-witted as French involvement in Suez, but at least in Suez France was conceivably fighting for something that mattered to French interests. Westerwelle is in no danger of presiding over a golden age of German diplomacy, but he has certainly been better than the awful Joschka Fischer, who was overseeing German foreign affairs during the last unnecessary NATO bombing campaign. As far as I can see, the German government’s “flop” is a result of heeding the will of its electorate, which is what one supposes democratic governments are supposed to do on matters as important as war. Sarkozy’s adventurism is a belated, desperate gamble to demonstrate firm leadership. He’s acting like Urquhart in Cyprus, and gullible Europeans and Americans are eating it up.

Cohen claims that “Germany has entered a new era of ambivalence and nationalist calculation.” Ambivalence about what? Using military means to kill foreigners that have done them no harm? One should hope that they are simply opposed to this rather than ambivalent. What is the nationalist calculation here? That German interests are served by doing something other than starting wars? One would think that this is the sort of “nationalist calculation” that we should want the largest, wealthiest European state to make. Does Cohen believe that there was no “nationalist calculation” in the French decision to try to change the subject from Tunisia by attacking Libya?

Cohen praises Sarkozy for “intuiting” three things:

First, the democratization of the Arab world is the most important European strategic challenge of the decade. Second, it was time “to take the training wheels off,” in the words of Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund, and have Europe rather than an overextended America lead in Libya. Third, the U.N. cannot always be an umbrella that folds when it rains. If its “responsibility to protect” means anything, it must be when an Arab tyrant promises to slaughter his people.

Yes, Sarkozy “intuited” the first one right after one of France’s closest cronies was ousted despite Paris’ wishes to the contrary. His response to this strategic challenge has been to start a war in the one country where a popular uprising has turned into a civil war. Even if Sarkozy’s general intuition was correct, his reaction has been clumsy and heavy-handed. By taking the “training wheels off,” Cohen means that France pushed to start a war against Libya rather than waiting for the U.S. to start it.

Finally, the “responsibility to protect” has become one of the most abused, poorly-understood concepts in this debate. The “responsibility to protect” takes it as a given that non-intervention is the norm:

4.11 The starting point, here as elsewhere, should be the principle of non-intervention. This is the norm from which any departure has to be justified. All members of the United Nations have an interest in maintaining an order of sovereign, self-reliant, responsible, yet interdependent states. In most situations, this interest is best served if all states, large and small, abstain from intervening or interfering in the domestic affairs of other states. Most internal political or civil disagreements, even conflicts, within states do not require coercive intervention by external powers. The non-interference rule not only protects states and governments: it also protects peoples and cultures, enabling societies to maintain the religious, ethnic, and civilizational differences that they cherish.

4.12 The norm of non-intervention is the equivalent in international affairs of the Hippocratic principle – first do no harm. Intervention in the domestic affairs of states is often harmful. It can destabilize the order of states, while fanning ethnic or civil strife. When internal forces seeking to oppose a state believe that they can generate outside support by mounting campaigns of violence, the internal order of all states is potentially compromised. The rule against intervention in internal affairs encourages states to solve their own internal problems and prevent these from spilling over into a threat to international peace and security.

Part of what the “responsibility to protect” means is that intervention is justified only in the most extreme and exceptional cases. The reality is that Libya didn’t and doesn’t come close to being one of those. Sarkozy wanted to attack Libya anyway, which should make supporters of the “responsibility to protect” very skeptical of the Libyan war, and it should make all of us even more skeptical of pro-Sarkozy liberals who are doing their best impression of conservative admirers of Tony Blair.

By raising Lazarus from the dead before Thy passion, Thou didst confirm the universal resurrection, 0 Christ God! Like the children with the branches of victory, we cry out to Thee, O Vanquisher of Death: Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!

Less than a month into the Libyan conflict, NATO is running short of precision bombs, highlighting the limitations of Britain, France and other European countries in sustaining even a relatively small military action over an extended period of time, according to senior NATO and U.S. officials. ~The Washington Post

James Joyner makes the best case one can that Libya has shown NATO to be relevant and effective, but it seems to me that the steady drip of one story after another reporting both the deep political divisions and the military inadequacy of the non-U.S. allies is eroding whatever positive effects the Libyan war is having on the alliance.

The Libyan war is supposed to be an experiment in burden-sharing to get European governments to carry most of the load in responding to a regional conflict, but mostly it is showing everyone why in the near term burden-sharing isn’t feasible. The original plan was that the U.S. would facilitate eager European allies in attacking Libya, but it would not dominate the campaign after a certain point. This is what Nikolas Gvosdev has aptly referred to as the “just enough” doctrine. Gvosdev observes:

The consensus assessment is that this has not worked out according to plan. The Gadhafi regime did not fold after the first wave of airstrikes. The Libyan opposition to Gadhafi that was assumed to lurk even in the capital Tripoli was not emboldened to come out and topple a dictator, even one targeted by allied bombs. And the rebel groups have not shown much prowess on the battlefield. So now the president is besieged by calls from all quarters to “do more.”

Along with the many other doctrines and ideas that the Libyan intervention is damaging, the idea that U.S. allies should and can take up more security responsibilities in their regions may be the one that will take the biggest hit.

The truth is that NATO provides political cover to the more aggressive member states to abuse the alliance’s reputation and resources for wars of their choosing. An alliance filled with members that fight with extremely limiting caveats or not at all is an alliance that will not be able to manage very well in anything more demanding than the small humanitarian wars in areas close to NATO states. For all the talk of the value of interoperability and cooperation that the alliance offers, the immediate problem that the major non-U.S. members are facing is that they are running low on precision munitions, and as far as French and British fighters are concerned the munitions the U.S. has available don’t fit on their planes. The European governments that are doing the bulk of the fighting can’t rely on U.S. resources to resupply their air forces, and the governments whose planes are compatible are contributing small numbers of planes or prohibiting them from launching strikes at all. As the Post reports:

European arsenals of laser-guided bombs, the NATO weapon of choice in the Libyan campaign, have been quickly depleted, officials said. Although the United States has significant stockpiles, its munitions do not fit on the British- and French-made planes that have flown the bulk of the missions.

Britain and France have each contributed about 20 strike aircraft to the campaign. Belgium, Norway, Denmark and Canada have each contributed six — all of them U.S.-manufactured and compatible with U.S. weaponry.

One can call this a “wake-up call” if one wants. It is going to make a lot more people question why the U.S. entered a war with the promise that direct U.S. involvement would be limited when it should have known its allies couldn’t fight largely on their own.

James claims that NATO confers greater legitimacy on an operation:

In truth, however, the political value in a NATO operation is that the alliance’s name is a stand-in for the developed world and operating under its name confers a legitimacy that national flags don’t.

This is partly true. Some of the governments participating actively in attacking Libya wouldn’t be there if this were simply a “coalition of the willing” led by France and Britain, but if operating under NATO’s name confers legitimacy that national flags don’t why is it that only six non-U.S. governments are directly participating in the war? Together with the U.S., just one-quarter of the alliance is actually involved in striking targets in Libya. NATO’s legitimacy is enough to keep Italy and Norway on board with the war in one way or another (though Italy’s relatively large number of air-to-ground attack aircraft won’t be launching any attacks for political reasons), but it can’t get most of the alliance’s members to participate fully in the war. Perhaps this is because they are understandably unclear on why a defensive alliance is waging an offensive war outside Europe.

That is what makes Libya different from Kosovo or Afghanistan, and that is why there is more reason to question the alliance’s future on account of Libya. Kosovo could be (weakly) rationalized as something NATO had to do because Kosovo was in Europe. The argument was that it would have been a political embarrassment to appear unable or unwilling to intervene in a European conflict, despite the fact that it was an internal conflict. After 9/11, involvement in Afghanistan made a certain amount of sense as a matter of supporting an ally that had been attacked. However, the “out-of-area” character of Afghanistan naturally put significant strains on non-U.S. allies whose publics had good reason to ask why their soldiers were risking their lives in Central Asia to serve U.S. interests unrelated to them. Libya is an “out-of-area” mission that involves attacking another government because of its internal affairs. It is every bit as much at odds with the alliance’s purpose as Kosovo, and has little to do with European security as most European governments understand it. This doesn’t show that NATO is adapting to new conditions so much as it is a reminder that NATO has long since served its purpose.

Libya is in some ways an attempt to make good on some of the rhetoric of a “global NATO” at the same time that it is trying to force Europeans to take up more of the burden for regional security. The alliance might bear up under the strains of both of these, but probably not without a greater U.S. role. More than likely, the U.S. will be pulled back into a more active role in Libya because the non-U.S. allies can’t or won’t bear the burden, and when that happens we can be sure that supporters of the Libyan war are going to invoke the importance of preserving NATO. “We cannot let NATO fail!” Of course, if the non-U.S. allies were not in danger of failure according to the standard set down by Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy yesterday, Americans wouldn’t have to worry about this, but they are.

P.S. As a thought experiment, consider how much worse for NATO Kosovo would have been if the U.S. had taken a backseat role after two weeks, and Clinton, Blair, and Schroeder then declared that the operation would continue until Milosevic stepped down from power. As it was, the bombing took 78 days, which was approximately ten times as long as the allies originally expected it to take. Milosevic remained in power until October 6, 2000, and his eventual fall was under entirely different conditions of domestic political opposition when the country was not under attack. How long do you suppose Milosevic might have tried to hold out against NATO if the alternative to resistance was removal from office? Libya is more limited in what the allies are willing or allowed to do militarily, NATO has relatively fewer resources available, and the war is much more ambitious in what it is trying to achieve politically. Kosovo wasn’t really the success many humanitarian interventionists claim that it was, but NATO was trying to achieve much more modest goals than it is now.

Update: This morning’s story about a munitions shortage reminded me that during the Kosovo war NATO governments experienced the same problem. The USAF relied heavily on precision munitions in Kosovo and started running out of their pre-war supply. The British have been through this before:

But the UK troops suffered a “critical munitions shortage”. Had the air campaign continued, Britain would quickly have run out of weapons, specifically precision guided munitions for the RAF.

The BBC article on this from 11 years ago includes some commentary that seems very relevant today:

Professor Michael Clarke, director of the centre for defence studies at Kings College London, said: “It has been an open secret for some little time now that our stocks of precision guided missiles are very much lower than they would need to be.”

He added: “Many in the military say that we have been very lucky so far, from the Falklands onwards.

“To make good these deficiencies will be pretty expensive, but many would argue that if we don’t make them good then the British will just walk themselves into an operation that will go seriously wrong.”

Success for NATO now requires the exit of Qaddafi and his sons from Libya. NATO and its partners have, thus far, been unable to assemble enough coercion to make this happen. The rebel army is stuck in Ajdabiya, attempting to fend off pro-Qaddafi attacks from Ras Lanuf. Further to the west, rebels in Misrata are under siege. NATO aircraft are succeeding in their attacks against Qaddafi’s tanks. But pro-Qaddafi infantry long ago abandoned their military vehicles and NATO attempts to target the civilian vehicles in which they now move have occasionally ended up killing rebels instead.

NATO leaders hope that political and economic isolation will eventually compel Qaddafi to fold. But if playing for time is the strategy, it is not clear that NATO has the advantage. Squabbles over political strategy within NATO, combined with a looming humanitarian crisis in Libya’s west, may pressure Britain and France to relent well before the Qaddafis feel any real pressure to back down.

When in a stalemate, the first instinct is to simply intensify the effort in the hope of achieving a breakthrough. Thus the call by British and French leaders at the Berlin conference for more strike aircraft over Libya. But Qaddafi’s undestroyed tanks aren’t the problem. The real issue is that NATO has reached the limit of what its strike aircraft can accomplish, given the understandably cautious rules under which they operate [bold mine-DL]. ~Robert Haddick

NATO was already being asked to do the near-impossible when it was called on to protect civilians solely through the use of air power, which they could use sparingly because of the danger of causing civilian casualties in the course of attacking Gaddafi’s forces. Now that the governments that started the war have defined success in terms of Gaddafi’s fall, NATO’s task has become even more difficult than it was. While it is a significant sign of deep political divisions among allied governments that just one-quarter of the alliance is providing aircraft authorized to strike ground targets, it isn’t clear that more planes from more governments would change very much. Haddick’s assessment seems to be right. If more NATO governments started contributing planes and authorized them to attack Gaddafi’s forces, they would still be subject to the same strict rules of engagement that make NATO aircraft far less effective.

Barring the (re-)introduction of low-flying U.S. planes, which the administration understandably and correctly appears unwilling to approve, the U.S. and our allies have limited themselves to fighting a war that by their own definition of success they are not going to be able to win anytime soon.

Haddick concludes:

With air power having reached its limit and ground intervention ruled out, NATO has no choice but to wait until the ground combat power of Libya’s rebels improves to the point where they will become a threat to Qaddafi’s hold in Tripoli. But that could take years, which may be exactly what Qaddafi is counting on.

The war of “days, not weeks” is beginning to look as if it may drag on much longer than the 78-day war against Yugoslavia. As Micah Zenko wrote on March 28, we should remember how it is that the Kosovo war “succeeded”:

The first myth is that the combination of NATO airpower and a Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) ground offensive drove Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic out of Kosovo in 1999. Today, proponents of intervention in Libya, such as Max Boot at the Council on Foreign Relations and Peter Juul at the Center for American Progress, have advocated replicating this supposed success. They argue that Libyan rebel forces, fighting with close air support from Western fighter planes, could wage an effective ground offensive all the way to Tripoli and force Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi from power.

But a U.S. Air Force review of its precision airpower campaign in Kosovo revealed a much darker picture than NATO’s glowing initial assessment: 14 tanks were destroyed, not 120, as previously reported; similarly, 18 armored personnel carriers, not 220, and 20 mobile artillery pieces, not 450, were eliminated. During the campaign, the Serbian military quickly adapted to NATO’s operations by constructing fake “artillery” from logs and old truck axles, and “surface-to-air missiles” made of paper.

Furthermore, the KLA failed to mount a credible and sustained opposition to the disciplined, ruthless, and better-armed Serbian ground forces. Ultimately, it was NATO’s escalation of air strikes against the Serbian military and the civilian infrastructure in Serbia proper — combined with Russia’s withdrawal of its support for Serbia — that caused Milosevic to capitulate.

One of the advantages that NATO had in bypassing U.N. authorization in 1999 was that it was never limited by a U.N. resolution in what it could attack. This was one of the reasons why there were as many civilian casualties and inflammatory incidents (e.g., bombing the Chinese embassy) from the bombing campaign as there were, but it also gave NATO more options as the campaign dragged on. Having placed so much emphasis on the importance of U.N. authorization and the legality of the mission, intervening governments are going to be hard-pressed to justify dramatically escalating the war beyond what the resolution authorizes. Arguably, they have already done so, but even the intervening governments acknowledge that pushing for regime change would require a new resolution.

It’s interesting to see how accountable, representative governments function:

Conservative and Labour members said that the Prime Minister’s statement – made jointly with Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy – showed that the Libyan mission had moved from its original humanitarian purpose and was now about regime change.

——-

David Davis, a former shadow home secretary, said Mr Cameron needed MPs’ approval for the new Libyan mission. “Parliament did not authorise the next phase. To go to the next phase he has to get parliamentary authority,” he said.

If these MPs get their way, the British Parliament will have had two debates on the Libyan war before the United States Congress has managed to do or say anything on the subject. Of course, the first vote in Parliament was overwhelmingly supportive of the war, but that was a vote on military action officially taken to protect the civilian population. There will probably be less support the second time around. Whether or not Parliament continues to support Britain’s involvement in the Libyan war, the crucial thing is that they have already been permitted to debate and vote on the matter, and there is some pressure to demand more debate and another vote before Cameron can proceed. Americans will be lucky if there is so much as a vote on a non-binding resolution in the Senate. It is President Obama’s war, and the rest of us are just paying for it.

Contra Lexington, the triumvirate’s op-ed published today does mark a significant change in official policy. The op-ed clearly links the continuation of the war with Gaddafi’s hold on power:

However, so long as Qaddafi is in power, NATO must maintain its operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds.

This is a confirmation of the “real” Libya policy that David Brooks found so satisfying. As Spencer Ackerman observed:

For the first time, NATO leaders have tethered the war to Gadhafi’s departure, a line that U.S. generals have been loath to cross.

This is a major difference from what the intervening governments argued before the vote on the resolution, and it represents a significant change from what Cameron and Obama told their respective publics. Some British MPs and the French government understand this. Do members of Congress realize that the U.S. and our allies have just escalated our commitment in Libya with an op-ed?

Update: The Canadian government won’t make any additional commitments on increasing its involvement in Libya until after the general election in May when it can be approved by a new Parliament. It’s almost as if they think that Canadian citizens should have some say in what their government does.

Our duty and our mandate under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 is to protect civilians, and we are doing that. It is not to remove Qaddafi by force. But it is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Qaddafi in power. The International Criminal Court is rightly investigating the crimes committed against civilians and the grievous violations of international law. It is unthinkable that someone who has tried to massacre his own people can play a part in their future government. The brave citizens of those towns that have held out against forces that have been mercilessly targeting them would face a fearful vengeance if the world accepted such an arrangement. It would be an unconscionable betrayal. ~Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy

Impossible! Unthinkable! Unconscionable! Of course, this is normally the language of the hard-liner and the fanatic. The main governments behind the Libyan war have endorsed maximalist political goals for their war, which makes a negotiated or political settlement in the near term equally impossible and unthinkable. This encourages the self-defeating maximalism of the rebels.

It also guarantees that whatever support the Libyan war had around the region and elsewhere in the world is going to shrink fairly quickly. France has acknowledged that its stated goal of regime change has not been authorized by UNSCR 1973, and it has said that another resolution would be needed. If the abstaining governments allowed UNSCR 1973 to go through for humanitarian reasons, they are not going to let a resolution explicitly authorizing regime change to pass.

What that means in practice is that the fighting that endangers civilians will drag on much longer than it would otherwise, the humanitarian crisis for displaced and besieged civilians will get progressively worse before significant aid will be able to reach them, and a war waged in the name of the “responsibility to protect” will continue until the regime has been defeated. There are no obvious incentives here for the western tribes still allied with Gaddafi to break with him. Despite a vague reference later in the op-ed to “an inclusive constitutional process,” the intervening governments have given every indication that they are going to treat the Benghazi leadership, which is dominated by members of eastern tribes, as the legitimate or preferred leadership in Libya. That effectively closes the door to a negotiated end to the fighting in the near term, and it gives Gaddafi’s allies no incentives to abandon him.

Update: Scoblete has more criticism of the op-ed:

Nowhere in the article, however, do they explain how they intend to bring about his downfall. The leaders state that unseating Gaddafi was not the point of the mission, but then declare that the NATO mission will not end unless and until Gaddafi steps aside. So it’s only natural for people to point out that there is a rather glaring mismatch between means and ends here. Why harp on the fact that the goal is Gaddafi’s departure if you’re not going to take the necessary steps to hasten him to the door?

This isn’t simply incoherent, it’s dangerous. It is obviously foolish to try and unseat Gaddafi – the U.S.and NATO are completely unprepared to police and stabilize a post-Gaddafi Libya. But by publicly affirming that the goal is regime change, Western leaders are ultimately committed to doing so down the road.

Ackerman has more on the mismatch of means and ends.

It’s quite clear that this debate will never be settled. But the back-and-forth does point to the difficulty of making preemptive humanitarian into a doctrine or consistent policy: successful prevention is rarely seen as an overall success and may make intervention the next time around that much more difficult. ~David Bosco

Bosco and Stephen Walt recently wentback and forth over the question of what would have happened in Benghazi absent outside intervention. Bosco quoted Human Rights Watch’s Tom Malinowski to offer another view:

All we have and ever will have is the evidence of Qaddafi’s past behavior, before the decision was made, as well as the threats he was making. And that gave rise, we think, to legitimate concerns about what might happen — including arrests and killings of opposition supporters — had he taken Benghazi and the other towns and cities east of Benghazi where large numbers of people rose up against him, or defected from his ranks. I also think that as a practical matter it would have been extremely hard for him to reestablish his authority in the east without large scale repression (given the size of the rebellious population relative to the number of security forces Qaddafi could have deployed there permanently).

Yes, that’s all we have. That’s a real problem for defenders of the Libyan intervention and advocates for preventive humanitarian intervention in general. Preventive humanitarian intervention depends on having good judgment and evidence about a regime’s intentions, which is comparable to having reliable intelligence for preventive wars for “counter-proliferation” purposes. Preventive wars for the sake of “counter-proliferation” can’t be justified even on the terms of their advocates if intelligence is unreliable, lacking, or manipulated. Likewise, armed, preventive humanitarian interventions can’t be justified on their advocates’ terms if “all we have” is evidence of past behavior and stated threats.

This is especially true when past behavior in this case includes putting down two rebellions in Benghazi without massacring the population, and apparently recapturing towns held by rebels without massacring the population this time as well. The February 17 movement derived its name from the date of the 2006 rebellion that Gaddafi put down, and one of the would-be military leaders of the rebels is Gen. Heftar, who led the failed 1996 rebellion against Gaddafi before fleeing to the U.S. The 2011 uprising was broader and more significant than either of these, but what exactly about Gaddafi’s behavior in putting down these earlier rebellions would lead us to believe that he was going to massacre civilians? That doesn’t mean that Gaddafi isn’t committing crimes in the course of fighting the rebellion, but that the scale and nature of the crimes he’s committing make Libya a lousy case for humanitarian intervention.

If we’re relying on a government’s stated threats, it doesn’t help when there is significant disagreement about what a government was threatening to do and whom it was intending to target with “no mercy.” It should be said that HRW has reported that Gaddafi’s forces are targeting some civilians in Misurata. Obviously, these are outrageous, illegal tactics, but what is striking is that the same report says that there have been 257 fatalities and 949 wounded in Misurata since fighting began there in late February. It is possible that the report does not account for all of the dead and injured in Misurata. Even so, the city was under siege for weeks before the intervention began, and it is hard to believe that a government bent on massacring opponents would have killed so few when it was able to act before the imposition of a no-fly zone and without the threat of Western bombs.

Bosco made an interesting point last month when the Libyan war was starting:

I’ve got no quibble with this rationale, although the scale of the killing and atrocities in Libya remains somewhat murky. But it does raise an interesting question: can a low-tech army fight a civil war, particularly in urban areas, without regularly violating the laws of war and endangering civilians?

Imagine for a moment that a poor country is fighting a civil war with a low-tech and spottily trained army. Imagine further that the government leaders have no intention of abusing civilians but are determined to prevail against the rebels, most of whom don’t wear uniforms. Is this kind of army even capable of conducting operations that don’t fall well afoul of the rules of war? It may be that developments in the laws of war and changing norms have made lawful war almost impossible for all except the most advanced militaries, blessed with precision weapons and enormous budgets.

This raises an important question: how do outside governments distinguish between deplorable acts that take place in the context of a civil war fought by low-tech forces and the sorts of extraordinary crimes that could justify outside intervention? There would be difficulties involved in making that distinction, but one way to start is not to go out of our way to conflate the two as if they are all the same thing.

Alan Kuperman remarks on all of this in an op-ed citing this report:

If bloodbath was unlikely, how did this notion propel US intervention? The actual prospect in Benghazi was the final defeat of the rebels. To avoid this fate, they desperately concocted an impending genocide to rally international support for “humanitarian’’ intervention that would save their rebellion.

On March 15, Reuters quoted a Libyan opposition leader in Geneva claiming that if Khadafy attacked Benghazi, there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda.’’ Four days later, US military aircraft started bombing. By the time Obama claimed that intervention had prevented a bloodbath, The New York Times already had reported that “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda’’ against Khadafy and were “making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.’’

It wasn’t just the rhetoric and inflated claims of the rebels that pulled the U.S. into Libya. One of the major claims in support of the Libyan war is that we can assume we know what Gaddafi would have done because of his public rhetoric. Supporters of the Libyan war are annoyed whenever anyone makes comparisons with Iraq, but there is one thing that the two wars definitely have in common: both of them initially relied very heavily on how the respective dictators wanted their enemies and the rest of the world to perceive them. Both wars are the product of taking dictatorial bombast and saber-rattling as if they are reliable indicators of future behavior. Despite having no WMDs, Hussein wanted to cultivate the suspicion and fear that he did have them to exaggerate his government’s power. It is conceivable that Gaddafi was engaged in a similar bluff. As in Iraq, outside governments may have reacted to an empty threat.

To compensate for the relative weakness of his position exposed by the uprising, he may have used threatening and intimidating rhetoric to mislead his domestic opponents and other governments into believing that he was stronger than he really was. In both cases, the bluffs didn’t work, because outside governments took the dictators’ self-presentations so seriously that they attacked. Perhaps one of the reasons we find ourselves in wars based on dubious, uncertain, and false claims is that we invest far too much importance in the public rhetoric and deliberately misleading behavior of megalomaniacs who misrepresent reality as a matter of course. If there were reliable intelligence or real evidence that supplemented this, that would be one thing, but we don’t have any of that. We’re not being asked to take our government’s word for what would have happened in Benghazi. We’re being asked to take Gaddafi’s word at face value, and largely on the basis of that our government has started a war.

The result is that NATO is riven by various factions. It’s starting to resemble the old joke about the Holy Roman empire, which is that it was neither holy nor Roman. ~Jacob Heilbrunn

One could say that it began resembling that joke as soon as it started expanding eastwards. When an Atlantic alliance starts debating the merits of incorporating countries that border on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, something has already gone awry, but once an alliance organized for collective defense started attacking other countries over their internal affairs it became the opposite of what it was supposed to be. This didn’t start with Libya, but began in the Balkans sixteen years ago. As long as the Balkan interventions were isolated cases, and interventions were limited to Europe, the strains within the alliance might have been more manageable. Now that NATO is being saddled with an African war started by some of its more over-eager members, those strains are becoming impossible to conceal.

When we talk about the effects of Libya on NATO, it is important to remember that NATO has been seriously divided over major questions in the past, and the result was a similar political paralysis. The proposed next round of NATO expansion exposed similar rifts, except that France and Germany were both skeptical about continued expansion and the U.S., Britain, and Poland were strongly in favor of it. In that case, failure to reach consensus meant that NATO avoided making an unwise commitment to bring in new members in 2008, and that may have saved itself from risking a major international war or a major humiliation. Despite the lack of consensus on Libya, NATO has been stuck with a small international war while still risking major humiliation.

Insofar as there’s any attempt to cover actual policy, it concerns Senator McCain’s stance on Libya, and his approach to foreign interventions generally. Thus the failure to actually interrogate McCain’s position with any kind of depth or sophistication is the article’s most disappointing failure, and the aspect that most vexed me. ~Conor Friedersdorf

I can understand Conor’s frustration with the Kurtz piece he’s criticizing. Kurtz takes McCain’s such meaningless utterances as “I don’t think he [Obama] feels strongly about American exceptionalism” as if they were something other than rehashed talking points. This is supposed to be the core of McCain’s serious critique of Obama’s leadership on Libya, which is the issue around which Kurtz organizes the entire story, and this is what he has to show for it.

Kurtz goes on:

McCain is taking some serious shots: he says Gaddafi would be gone had Obama started the bombing sooner, and that the president should never have relinquished control of the mission to NATO.

Yes, McCain says these things, but these are not “serious” shots. They are the definition of pot shots. He takes whatever Obama has done, and said, “Nope, shouldn’t have done that.” This is Gingrichism with a war record to back it up. Essentially, McCain is saying, “Obama should be more like me!” This drives home that McCain is not a serious when it comes to foreign policy decisions. His impulse is always to intervene, escalate, or throw the U.S. into a fight where it has no business. Did Kurtz ask how McCain knows that Gaddafi would have crumbled had the bombing started sooner? Evidently not. Did McCain volunteer how he knows this? No. He just knows that an even hastier resort to military action would have been successful, because he is confident that this is always the right answer.

Kurtz doesn’t just coddle McCain. Kurtz is busily deceiving the public on McCain’s behalf:

McCain, who insists on visiting Iraq and Afghanistan twice a year, often favors a muscular approach to projecting U.S. military power but is wary of entanglements with no exit strategy [bold mine-DL].

This is just obviously false. Conor picks up on part of this, but there is more that needs to be said. During the 1999 war in Kosovo, McCain was among the first to call for threatening to invade Yugoslavia with ground forces. He had no exit strategy. Indeed, American soldiers are still in Kosovo. He supported the invasion of Iraq from the moment the Bush administration started considering it, where there was no real exit strategy. In 2008, he declared that we are all Georgians, and gave the impression that if it had been up to him the U.S. would have lent some kind of direct support to Georgia during its war with Russia. On Libya, he wanted a no-fly zone almost immediately, and he has been outspoken in his desire to arm the rebels before anyone had a clue who they were.