Why should anyone in Europe or America care about what happens in Libya? Well, the country has the longest shores in the Mediterranean. As a failed state it could become a haunt for terrorists and pirates, a larger Somalia facing Europe. Remember that the notorious medieval pirate Kheireddin Barbarossa operated from what is now Libya. ~Amir Taheri

When I read that last line, I was puzzled. First of all, people who flourished in the sixteenth century aren’t usually called “medieval,” and to the best of my knowledge the bulk of his career was split between launching attacks from Algiers and serving as an admiral in the Ottoman navy. Besides, why fall back on this example? If Americans know anything about Mediterranean piracy, they know about the pirates that sparked the Tripolitanian War, and obviously Tripoli was a center of piracy in the past. Of course, that was a war fought to end attacks on American ships rather than an unprovoked war that seems almost designed to create conditions in which future piracy can flourish.

It might be worth pointing out that the thing that has driven Libya to the point where it is in danger of becoming a failed state is the military intervention that did just enough to fracture the country into two parts. Where was all this concern about the Somalification of Libya a month ago when people were calling for turning it into another Somalia by attacking Libya? Escalating the Libyan war and toppling Gaddafi isn’t going to make the Somalification of Libya less likely, but will in all likelihood guarantee the disintegration of whatever political order remains. The U.S. and NATO are in their current predicament because too few people in charge of making decisions paid attention to unintended consequences and worst-case scenarios. Now would be a good time to fix that bad habit.

Taheri continues:

Islamist terrorists from al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the al-Shabaab insurgency in Somalia have already started arriving in the country. According to my sources, they have set up shop in a number of places, including Yafran, Nawfaliyah and Sabha.

In other words, the security vacuum that the U.S. and our allies have created is being filled by the very sort of people the U.S. has actively tried to keep at bay for years, and in a matter of weeks the security cooperation of years is being undone because of a total failure to think through the consequences of attacking Libya. Having attacked a government that was opposed to terrorist groups that the U.S. considers security threats, we are now faced with the problem that this has made it easier for those groups to operate, we are directing our efforts at weakening the government’s hold on Libya (which these groups are only too happy to see), and we are possibly given them some fresh recruiting material to boot. If the U.S. and our allies escalated the war and actively pursued the overthrow of Gaddafi, does anyone think that this will make Libya a less attractive battleground for al-Shabaab and AQIM? Of course not. It will simply make Libya that much more of an inviting target and space in which to operate.

By contrast, the rebels insist on maximalist aims while consistently retreating to a north-eastern rump where they are vulnerable to the colonel’s predations. National Council members who urge realism and call for the consideration of political options are dismissed as defeatists. Last week, gun-toting youths on Benghazi’s docks chased away a ship carrying ambulances and humanitarian aid from Turkey, on the grounds that its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was using the country’s NATO membership to limit the military alliance’s bombardment of the regime’s forces [bold mine-DL]. ~The Economist

Consider the absurd situation in which the U.S. and NATO have put themselves. NATO officials repeatedly and correctly say that there is no military solution in Libya. Everyone except the rebels seem to understand that a negotiated settlement is the only way that the fighting is going to be brought to an end anytime soon, and an end to the fighting most benefits the rebels and the civilian population, as they are the ones suffering the most as long the fighting continues. The rebel-controlled areas are the part of Libya that is suffering heavily while the fighting is going on, and the rebel-controlled east is probably more desperate for supplies than the areas controlled by Gaddafi. Naturally, then, the rebels are the ones taking an uncompromising stance on the terms of a temporary cease-fire, they refuse to treat with any available mediators because they are seen as biased, and they are the ones chasing away some relief ships because they object to the policy of the sponsoring government.

The rebels’ own political interests and the best course of action for making humanitarian relief available to the population dictate that they agree to a cease-fire, so, of course, they are the last ones that will agree to a cease-fire unless they achieve all of their political goals immediately. As far as I can tell, their Western patrons are encouraging them in this self-defeating course of action, because these patrons are no more inclined to make a deal with Gaddafi than the rebels are. Of course, Gaddafi could implement a unilateral cease-fire, but he has no incentive to do that under the current circumstances. While the fighting continues, he stands to gain against the hapless opposition, and halting his attacks is the one bargaining chip he has that he might conceivably be willing to offer that the other side wants. The rebels are acting as if time is on their side, when they are under more pressure in terms of dwindling resources than Gaddafi’s forces are. One wonders how long anti-Gaddafi solidarity is going to last in the east when people are no longer getting paid and can’t find enough food.

The open secret behind all of this is that the Transitional National Council cannot make a credible deal that is binding on its fighters, because it doesn’t actually have any authority or legitimacy, either. It is a makeshift organization that represents the rebels only in the sense that they are currently willing to defer to it, but if it were to make a cease-fire agreement that enough of them rejected it would become expendable. The moment that it appears to flag in its anti-Gaddafi zeal, it could lose what little control it has and become a target for zealots on the rebel side.

P.S. The more immediate problem is that the people in the east might feel compelled by basic needs to give up on the rebellion. The Daily Telegraph had this report from earlier in the week:

“I can see a humanitarian crisis coming and the minute people starve they will raise Gaddafi’s green flag,” Mr Ben Moussa said.

“Morale is still good and people are ready to die for the revolution – but they are not ready to see their children die for it. We have a few weeks’ supply of staple food supplies, but it is not looking good and I am getting worried.”

U.S. leaders should use every available opportunity to distance themselves and the nation from any of these religiously driven attitudes, which should have died with the Peace of Westphalia. ~Paul Pillar

Pillar and I agree that nothing good will come from taking sides in foreign political contests for religious reasons. I think it best to urge Americans in and out of government to avoid taking sides in foreign political contests for any reason whenever possible. Even so, I found Pillar’s closing remark a little strange. Whether confessional identities or religiously-driven attitudes should have died with the Peace of Westphalia or not, the Peace of Westphalia was a political settlement that took for granted that the attitudes weren’t going anywhere. What the peace settlement determined was that as far as state policy was concerned it was a matter of indifference what the prevailing confession was in other states. This actually reduced the space for religious toleration within many post-1648 European states, and led to intra-state policies pushing religious uniformity, but that was seen as an acceptable price in exchange for maintaining the general peace. State interests had always been a major driving force in the “wars of religion,” but they now became the overwhelming factor in matters of diplomacy and war such that old confessional hostilities were entirely subordinated to strategic concerns.

That indifference was more easily managed in an era before mass democracy, and it was practiced among those states that were predominantly Christian. This official indifference vanished when it came to predominantly non-Christian polities, especially if they had Christian minorities as their subjects. Historically Christian powers had other reasons to take an interest in the territories of the Ottoman Empire, but the status of Christians in the empire became a useful pretext for interference and a tool for extracting concessions from the Porte. The status of Christians in the empire was regrettable, but it is worth remembering that the treatment of Christian minorities steadily worsened during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as outside powers used their grievances as occasions to interfere in Ottoman affairs and impose humiliating settlements. The greatest losers in the entire story of outside agitation on behalf of Ottoman Christians were mostly the Ottoman Christians (along with the Rumelian Muslim population). Sometimes the best thing that an outsider can do for a foreign group with which he sympathizes is to leave them alone.

As Western governments have become more secular and post-Christian, democracy and human rights have become a new quasi-religious cause that its advocates believe justify interfering in the affairs of other states and using as a bludgeon against them. In extreme cases, it becomes the justification for military intervention in other countries. American Christian sympathizers with Gbagbo are making the same fundamental error that democratists make all the time: they are supporting a foreign political cause because they believe it represents their beliefs or ideals, but it really has nothing to do with them and shouldn’t be their concern. Instead of being reasons to take an interest in the conflict, these beliefs or ideals become excuses to interfere in something that is not their business.

The Ivorian case offers some important lessons for practitioners of religious identity politics and democratic universalists. Gbagbo is a perfect example of how politicizing religious and ethnic identity can directly conflict with respect for basic democratic norms, and how politicians endanger their own communities by mobilizing these identities to maintain their hold on power. Christian sympathizers with Gbagbo show that they are no more discerning than universalist sympathizers with “color” revolutions and popular uprisings, and they rely on the same superficial markers of apparent similarity to base their simplistic accounts of who the “good” and “bad” guys are in complicated conflicts in countries they can’t begin to understand fully. Far from stabilizing some societies, electoral democracy can mobilize and intensify tribal, ethnic, and religious divisions, which in turn feeds the brand of identity politics that Gbagbo practiced.

And as someone who ran last time and lost, he fits the the Republican pattern of being next in line for the nomination—a party habit that helped the elder George Bush, Robert Dole, and John McCain to the GOP nomination. But if 2010 established anything, it is that such “rules” no longer apply. And even if they did, they don’t in this situation. While Romney did mount a well-funded challenge for the presidency in 2008, he wasn’t actually the GOP runner-up. That title belongs to Mike Huckabee, who won in Iowa and received more votes and delegates than Romney. ~Jonathan Tobin

I’ve made the same claim about Huckabee in the past. It’s technically true, but it’s still somewhat misleading. Huckabee finished second in delegates because he stayed in much longer than Romney. It’s not true that Huckabee won more votes. Romney received more votes overall and he won more individual state contests. Huckabee had every incentive to remain in the race, especially after Romney concluded that he couldn’t win the nomination. Had Romney wished to fritter away more of his fortune beyond early February 2008, it is probable that he would have been the runner-up.

Republicans almost never nominate relative unknowns or insurgents for presidential elections. On the one occasion when they have done so since WWII, they have suffered landslide defeat. If there is one thing that Republican voters want more than the repeal of Democratic health care legislation, it is the defeat of Obama at the polls. It seems likely that enough of them are going to choose the nominee they believe to be the most electable. It’s possible that Romney doesn’t fit that description, but most of the arguments against his chances don’t cite his inability to compete in the general election. They cite his problems with conservative primary voters. If the final field just includes most of the people who seem to be seriously considering a run in 2012 (Gingrich, Bachmann, Johnson, Paul, Pawlenty, Trump, Barbour, Cain and, last and least, Roemer), the conservative vote is going to be split at least six or seven ways. The presence of Huckabee and/or Palin would probably split the vote even more. The larger the field is, the better Romney’s chances of eking out one victory after another.

It’s not clear how the 2010 election has changed the pattern of nominating the “next in line” or made this “rule” obsolete. Presumably, because establishment candidates were defeated in many primaries, we cannot assume that Republican primary voters are going to fall back on traditional patterns of selecting a presidential nominee. That doesn’t take account of the Senate races in Delaware, Nevada, and Colorado where insurgent candidates were nominated and proceeded to lose otherwise winnable races. It ignores the Senate races in Illinois and Indiana where establishment and moderate candidates won nomination handily before going on to win in the fall. Even if 2010 seemed to challenge the traditional Republican nominating pattern, the results of promoting insurgents were mixed, and savvier primary voters may be aware that the 2012 electorate is going to be a lot less hospitable to a conservative insurgent nominee than the 2010 electorate was. All of this helps explain why Romney probably will be the nominee. It doesn’t mean that Romney is a desirable or good nominee, but there hasn’t been a Republican nominee that really satisfied conservatives for a very long time. Thanks to McCain in 2000, Bush was able to cloak what was actually a fairly moderate Republican campaign in conservative rhetoric and get away with it. There’s no obvious reason to expect something dramatically different this time.

How could this best of the “good European” countries turn its back on France and England, let alone the U.S., and choose to side instead with the likes of Russia and China? ~Russell Berman

At first glance, this is a stupid question. On reflection, it is also insulting.

It is stupid because “good European” countries can and will differ on contentious foreign policy questions. For good or ill, there is not one line on foreign policy that defines a nation as a “good European” nation. That is what pro-war propagandists tried to do in 2002-03 when “old Europe” was identified as the corrupt “bad Europe” in contrast to the new EU and NATO members that were supposedly motivated by principle and idealism to launch an unprovoked invasion of another country. Inevitably, the governments that dissent from the pro-war line are tarred as cowardly or treacherous or some combination of the two. The idea that Germans would be getting lectured because it refused to authorize an attack on another country that had done nothing to them is quite bizarre. In light of modern European and especially German history, the notion that a willingness to start wars (for whatever reason) should be taken as the standard for judging a state worthy of the name “good European” is twisted.

The insult comes in linking a position consistent with support for maintaining international peace to “the likes of Russia and China,” as if the choice is between starting unprovoked wars or imitating authoritarian governments. Germany also chose to stand with “the likes of India and Brazil,” and Poland and Turkey, among others, and yet for some reason critics often forget to mention that all of these democratic governments were firmly against military action in Libya. Their reasons varied, and some of them were acting out of direct self-interest, but we still have many of the more significant democratic governments in the world taking a different position on Libya than the U.S. and a few western European governments.

It’s also worth pointing out that the German government “failed” to support or join in the attack on Libya because it was reacting to very strong public opposition to military action. Germany’s “failure” to support the war was a reflection of what its electorate wanted. Democratists never tire of telling us about the pacific virtues of democratic government, but as soon as any democratic government offers them some supporting evidence for this by refusing to start a war they are scandalized and horrified at how treacherous and weak that government is being. In the end, the Union-FDP coalition’s efforts to appeal to antiwar and anti-nuclear sentiment ahead of state elections proved to be a flop electorally, but there’s no question that the governing coalition would have fared worse had it approved or participated in bombing Libya. Unlike 2002-03, Germany was very circumspect in not denouncing its allies for what they doing, and it went out of its way not to impugn their motives. There was no way Germany was going to be able to participate in the Libyan war, but it did everything else that it could not to get in the way of the states that were intent on war. Instead of respecting Germany’s position, there has been considerable whining about German perfidy in the countries involved in attacking Libya.

The use of NATO’s name, in Libya, is a fiction. But the weakening of NATO’s reputation in Libya’s wake might become horribly real. ~Anne Applebaum

It is very strange for me to say this, but for once Applebaum is right. I wrote something very close to this for my new column on Libya:

Libya is distracting NATO from its sole legitimate purpose, which is to provide for common European defense, and it is alarming new members in eastern Europe by consuming allied resources and attention in a conflict that has virtually nothing to do with European security. The opposition of major allied governments to the Libyan war shows that many allies understand and fear the consequences of Libya for the future of NATO. Libya promises to give the alliance a reputation of an organization goaded into unnecessary war by its most aggressive members, while at the same time giving it the appearance of being unable to prosecute a war effectively because of the deep political divisions among its members. That is bound to be damaging to the NATO’s political future, and its credibility as a defensive alliance.

Skeptics might say that I want NATO dissolved starting at least fifteen years ago and haven’t ever had much to say in its favor, so Atlanticists won’t care what I say. Unlike me, Applebaum is a longtime supporter of continued NATO expansion and a confirmed Atlanticist. It’s no surprise that she sees the use of NATO in Libya as an abuse of the alliance, because many member governments take the same sensible view that a defensive alliance dedicated to protecting Europe against external threat has no reason to be involved in an offensive war in North Africa. NATO also really has no business in Afghanistan, but at least the alliance’s involvement there was originally justified as part of collective defense in support of a member state.

Something I keep coming back to when discussing the Libyan war is how it seems almost perfectly designed to discredit all of the things it is supposed to be representing. War supporters have been eager to point out how legal the war is under international law. Of course, winning Security Council support and then appearing to exceed that mandate, as many of the abstaining states and one supporting Council member have claimed, may do more damage to the effective functioning of the Security Council than bypassing it all together. If other members of the Council conclude that the institution’s authority has been abused during this intervention, it will likely be much more difficult to win support for authorization in other situations. Humanitarian interventionists have cheered the application of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, but by intervening in Libya they have applied the doctrine in a type of conflict for which it was never intended, and they have tied it to a war that the administration acknowledges will not be repeated again. This makes R2P look like the pretext for war that its critics feared and its supporters opposed.

Liberal interventionists congratulate the administration on how very multilateral the war is. Leaving aside the small size of the coalition of states that actually allow their forces to open fire on Gaddafi’s troops, the formal multilateralism of this war masks the complete lack of consensus within the main multilateral organization tasked with overseeing the war. This creates the illusion of international consensus for the war, when no consensus exists. Furthermore, the Libya experience seems sure to pull the alliance in two directions. New member states will conclude that their security interests are being subordinated to Anglo-French adventurism, and they are more likely to try to keep NATO from being co-opted in the future.

My new column on Libya for The Week is online.

Muammar Gaddafi accepted an African Union plan to end the Libyan civil war but rebels said on Monday there could be no deal unless he leaves power, and there was no sign of a let-up in the fighting. ~Reuters

The rebels have good reason to view anything the AU offers with suspicion, but the same might be said of Turkish attempts at mediation, or indeed any diplomatic solution that does not hand the rebels their major political objectives. The main objection to the AU plan is that it leaves Gaddafi and his sons in place for the time being and might allow Gaddafi to hang on or remain free in Libya even if he hands over control to one of his sons. The rebels are acting as if they are in a position to gain more by refusing a deal right now, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It is the rebels that need time to organize, train, and acquire the means to sustain “Free Libya” for the foreseeable future, and as long as the fighting continues and keeps going badly for their side they won’t be able to do that. There is every reason to doubt that Gaddafi would honor a cease-fire if one were negotiated, but a cease-fire would buy the people in Misurata some time, it would stop the attacks on the city for the time being, and it would allow more significant relief efforts to supply the besieged city.

It’s not as if the rebels have endless resources. Despite possessing access to oil production and export, they are having difficulty selling the oil, and they cannot gain ready access to Libya’s frozen assets. If the current conditions are wreaking havoc with the Libyan government’s finances, they are likewise exhausting the limited resources available to the rebels in the east:

The head of the opposition’s central bank last week warned that the eastern part of the country could run out of money within weeks.

There are other shortages in the east that are becoming very serious:

As well as cash, Benghazi is running out of staples such as pasta, cheese, tuna, milk and children’s food. A slump in the value of Libyan currency, coupled with a rise in insurance costs and shipping fees, has caused the price of some foods to double in recent weeks.

A short-term deal that halts the ongoing fighting and allows for humanitarian relief to reach the civilian population in rebel-controlled areas is one that makes sense for the rebels’ interests. By accepting a cease-fire now, they are not making any concessions about Libya’s political future of Gaddafi’s place in it. A cease-fire isn’t going to resolve the conflict, and it could end up making the civil war last longer than it otherwise would, but as far as the rebels are concerned that is better than a faster resolution in which they are on the losing side. The rebels’ new best friends in Paris and Rome should explain to them that a cease-fire helps their cause far more than it helps Gaddafi. If their leaders insist on a self-destructive all-or-nothing position, they will be proving that the Transitional National Council is as politically inept as its fighters have proved to be inept in war.

It’s a good thing that attacking Libya has had that powerful deterrent effect on other authoritarian regimes that war supporters said it would have. The Postreports:

Violent protests continued to roil Syria on Sunday as human rights activists reported that President Bashar al-Assad was using soldiers and tanks for the first time against demonstrators and sealing off the port city of Baniyas.

There was never any reason to believe that attacking Libya would discourage other authoritarian governments from using massive violence to counter protests. It was always just as likely to teach authoritarian governments to react more quickly and with even greater violence. Be that as it may, it is important to remember that this was repeatedly cited by advocates of the Libyan war as an important reason to intervene in Libya. Evidently, someone forgot to tell Assad that the Libyan war was meant as a message for him. According to Marc Lynch, discouraging other regime crackdowns was “one of the strongest reasons” to intervene. Shadi Hamid argued something similar:

By contrast, if Libya fails, Qaddafi stays in power, and the rebels are crushed, it will mark the end of what’s left of the Arab spring. It will send a dangerous message to autocrats: if you want to stay in power, do what Qaddafi did.

Of course, authoritarian rulers already knew that this is what might be required to stay in power, and they haven’t been waiting on a conclusion to the Libyan crisis to reach this conclusion. What is remarkable is how quickly and thoroughly the pro-democracy argument for the Libyan war has been discredited by events. The forced pro-democracy argument for attacking Libya has been repudiated in a matter of weeks as it was bound to be, because it was a strained effort to cloak an ill-advised military intervention in democratic rhetoric.

At the risk of repeating myself, I want to point out that the “where we can, we must” argument for humanitarian intervention directly contradicts and undermines all of the arguments claiming that attacking Libya will set a precedent, enforce a norm, or create a deterrent against similar regime violence elsewhere. If we believe the “where we can, we must” argument, it doesn’t matter that circumstances make intervention in other crises impractical or impossible, because that isn’t an argument against intervening where it is possible. However, the precedent-setting or deterrent-creating argument holds up only if Libya is not a special case. For authoritarian regimes to take seriously a threat of outside intervention that would discourage them from cracking down violently on protests, there has to be the possibility that the Libyan intervention can be repeated. As many of the supporters of the Libyan war already acknowledge, and according to the standard Obama laid out in his March 28 speech, the conditions that made the attack on Libya possible are unlikely to occur again.

That doesn’t mean that Libya isn’t going to create unrealistic expectations among protest movements. Giving weak opposition movements an incentive to pick fights with their governments they cannot hope to win on their own is an effect that the Libyan war very well might have. Since there is little chance that the coalition that organized intervention in Libya will come together again in other situations, that creates the potential for giving opposition movements false hope and makes the resort to ineffective armed rebellion appear like a short-cut to achieving political goals. That gives peaceful political protest the appearance of a foolish, hopeless way to oppose a regime, and makes armed resistance seem much more effective, which is pretty much the opposite of what all of the sympathizers of the “Arab Spring” say that they want.