Here’s my question: can someone explain why the United States should stay on the sidelines when an international consensus wants to forcibly resist a despot’s brutal crackdown? Does that make strategic sense? ~David Shorr

It might make a lot less sense if the “international consensus” were meaningful and extended beyond a handful of NATO governments, a few small non-permanent members of the Security Council, and an opportunistic Arab League. If non-intervention meant ignoring most of the world’s governments when they were pleading for support, that would be something to take seriously, but that is almost the opposite of what happened. Instead, the U.S. has once again sided against most of the world, and once again supporters of the intervention try to console the American public with the fiction that there is broad international backing.

The Libyan intervention just barely cleared the hurdle of Security Council approval, but it is misleading to think that this means that there ever was broad consensus in favor of this action. The strategic wisdom or folly of the Libyan war doesn’t depend solely on this, but the genuine lack of international consensus behind the intervention has to be taken into account in determining whether intervention or non-intervention made more sense. As useful as it is to the case for the Libyan war, the U.S. was not dragged into this by an “international consensus.”

To the extent the U.S. was dragged into the war at all, it was dragged in primarily by France and Britain, both of which had their own reasons for wanting to throw their support to Gaddafi’s enemies. Likewise, most Arab League governments were eager to have Western governments strike at Gaddafi for them. This way they could be rid of an old antagonist, and they wouldn’t need to take the risk or do much of the work. It made things a little easier on them at home by allowing them to side with popular opinion on an intervention that posed no real threat to them. The question to be asked is whether it served some larger U.S. strategic goals to join the Anglo-French adventure with the blessing of Arab League governments eager to divert their publics’ attention elsewhere.

Honestly, I don’t see what those goals might be, but that is what we should be discussing. Would the U.S. relationship with two major European allies and a number of Arab allies have been greatly harmed had the U.S. stayed out? I don’t think so. In retrospect, the British and French might start wondering why we helped them to leap into this Libyan mess. Allies are sometimes more valuable when they keep a government from doing something impetuous and foolish than they are in supporting it no matter what it wants to do. Whatever their reasons, France and Germany were better allies to the United States in 2002-03 by trying to stop the U.S. from attacking Iraq than were Britain, Spain, and Italy in lending support to the attack. There are times when allies need to be restrained for the sake of their own best interests, and in Libya I suspect we are going to find that we served our British and French allies poorly by not trying to hold them back.

We’ll get nowhere if we keep arguing over whether or not the U.S. should have remained on “the sidelines” (i.e., not started a war) when an “international consensus” was calling on the U.S. to take action. When two permanent Security Council members plus the largest democracies in Europe, Latin America, and Asia are against a course of action, there is no “international consensus” in support of it. Had the U.S. aligned itself with the abstaining governments on the Security Council, the U.S. would have been aligning itself with the real consensus of most of the world’s governments to stay out of Libya’s civil war. Another question we should ask is whether it serves larger U.S. strategic goals for our government to participate in an attack on another country when most governments, especially most major governments in the world, think the attack unwise or unnecessary.

Most of the other governments in the world never wanted this intervention, but Libya was so strategically irrelevant and Gaddafi so isolated diplomatically that none of them was willing to incur the displeasure of the intervening governments to try to stop it from happening. Had the U.S. not thrown its support behind the intervention, it wouldn’t have been possible diplomatically, and the abstaining governments wouldn’t have had to balance their desire for good relations with the U.S., France, and Britain. As it is, the abstaining governments have not lost anything by staying on the sidelines, and it is doubtful that the U.S. would have lost anything by joining them there.

It isn’t a fact that a “surprising international consensus called for the intervention.” A somewhat surprising consensus of Arab governments called for the intervention. Beyond that, there simply isn’t much support for the intervention other than the usual Euro-Atlantic suspects.

Four lessons of Libya may be drawn by now. The first has been known for years: “humanitarian intervention” is a pernicious concept which provides the equivalent of the “Polish army attack” on the Gleiwitz radio station to a would-be aggressor. It undermines the concept of collective security and it undermines international law as a system of commonly respected norms that are binding upon all states. Its arbitrary nature is evident in the failure of its most vocal practitioners to invoke it when the violator is too powerful (e.g. North Korea subjecting its people to famine and terror), or too insignificant (various African despots, in Sudan, Congo, etc.), or considered a partner (NATO ally Turkey’s war against the Kurds in the 1980s and 90s took the lives of at least 30,000 civilians). Far from being “moral,” humanitarian intervention is inherently a tool of situational morality. ~Srdja Trifkovic

The arbitrariness of the Libyan intervention has been one of its defining features, but what hasn’t been emphasized enough is its potential to subvert any and all norms governing relations between states. The principle of state sovereignty is something that could only be seen as a major problem by people who have enjoyed so many decades of general peace. Instead of being satisfied with the relative lack of international warfare, interventionists have to keep finding new reasons to initiate wars, and at some point this disrespect for other states’ sovereignty may end up affecting allies more significant than Georgia. Believing that it is acceptable and even mandatory to attack another state on account of its internal conflicts is truly dangerous. It is a constant invitation for the U.S. to enter conflicts it has no reason to join, and it creates an opening for many other governments to exploit when it suits them. In practice, such interventions make it harder for small and weak states to preserve their territorial integrity, and it invites larger and stronger states to exploit their neighbors’ weaknesses and divisions to their advantage.

I would like to believe that Dr. Trifkovic is correct that the U.S. can be extricated from this blunder, and it may be that a de facto partition of Libya is now the least of all evils, but I find it hard to believe that France, Britain, and the U.S. could go this far and then settle for a cease-fire that leaves Gaddafi in place. When confronted with similar stalemates in the past, interventionists have pushed governments towards escalation. As the rebels’ position continues to deteriorate slowly in the east, they may be willing to accept a cease-fire, but it’s not clear that Sarkozy or Obama can politically afford to have launched such an inconclusive war.

There is a New York Timesarticle today that covers that “odd couple” of Sarkozy and Obama in Libya. For the most part, it’s not a bad analysis of the roles of the two politicians in the attack on Libya, but there was one sentence that read like an especially crude bit of propaganda:

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen offers a persuasive case for protecting Benghazi.

No, it doesn’t. No matter which versionone reads, French declarations of rights have no more to say about the appropriate role of foreign governments in another country’s internal conflict than the American Declaration of Independence or Bills of Rights does. One can find justifications for what the anti-Gaddafi rebels are doing in these texts, but they have nothing to say about justifying armed intervention on behalf of rebels elsewhere or intervening to prevent another government from putting down a rebellion. These declarations don’t make the case for protecting Benghazi (or any other endangered foreign population), because they are concerned with entirely different questions.

At most, such declarations encourage the belief that armed insurrection against a government can be a desirable and laudable thing under certain circumstances. They lead people who believe that universal rights exist to sympathize with insurrections, and as a result universalists pick up the bad habit of endowing any and all armed uprisings with political virtues that they associate with their own revolutions. The argument for starting a war for humanitarian reasons when such an insurrection is on the verge of failure requires a lot more than a belief in universal rights, which is why skepticism about such a war extends far beyond those who reject universalism.

The article ends with a forced, stupid question:

Could it be, then, that French fries deserve to be called “freedom fries” after all?

No! This isn’t because the French hate freedom, as some of the temporarily anti-French supporters of invading Iraq claimed, but because it was always ridiculous to change the customary name of something to suit the ideological obsessions of the moment. Today the ideological obsession has changed, and the French are now supposedly idealistic and heroic. In 2002-03, the French government’s motives were perceived as utterly cynical and corrupt when it argued against starting a war. It is now taken at its word when it invokes human rights in order to start a war. If the French government happens to be willing to launch unprovoked attacks on Libyan conscripts and kill people who have done nothing to France, that doesn’t mean that French foreign policy has suddenly become idealistic. Then again, if we measure idealism by a willingness to kill foreigners that have done us no harm, we desperately need a different sort of idealism.

While he ran a campaign that was not focused on foreign policy, in 1999, Bush spoke out against Clinton policies in Kosovo, expressed his opinion that troops shouldn’t be committed to stop ethnic cleansing in non-strategic interests, given a thorough speech on his views on defense spending and technology, shared his thoughts on a number of treaties, and given interviews on his views on Russia and China. ~Ben Domenech

That sounds good, except that the part about Kosovo is completely wrong. As I said the other day, Bush staked out a conventional position supporting Clinton’s war. This was the standard internationalist consensus at the time, and Bush went along with it. He not only supported the war, but followed McCain’s lead in saying that introducing ground forces should not be ruled out. I went looking for more on what Bush did have to say on Kosovo, and discovered that we was largely echoing Clinton’s arguments for attacking Yugoslavia. To the extent that he offered any criticism, Bush was mostly copying what McCain had already said up to that point.

Here’s an old story dated April 9, 1999, which was originally published in The Houston Chronicle:

Gov. George W. Bush, undergoing his harshest national criticism yet for the vagueness of his policy on the Balkan crisis, Thursday sharpened his position to say that NATO’s use of military force should restore Kosovo to its native ethnic Albanian population.

“I would define the mission as to restoring Kosovo so the Kosovoians can move back in and at the same time teach Mr. (Slobodan) Milosevic that NATO and its allies and the United States will not tolerate genocide,” said Bush, a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

The United States and NATO have been trying to halt the campaign of “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovars by Milosevic, the Yugoslavian president, with airstrikes against Yugoslavia and the Serb army.

In his strongest and most extensive comments yet on the 2-week-old bombing campaign, Bush said, “I’m concerned that a thug like Milosevic, if left unchecked, would set a bad example for other ‘ethnic cleansers’ or other people willing to commit ethnic genocide.”

Bush has been widely criticized for being slow to adopt a position on Kosovo and then for making vague statements on the subject.

Newsweek said of Bush: “GOP front-runner equivocates over bombing. Make up your mind, Nacho Man!” And the conservative Wall Street Journal called Bush’s original stance on Kosovo “so vague and tepid as to be almost Clintonian.” Numerous other pundits have chimed in with similar remarks.

Bush shrugged off such criticism Thursday.

“Not at all. I took a very measured approach. I took my time in making what I thought was a very important statement,” Bush said. “I’m going to get criticized. I understand that. But I’m going to speak on my timetable and nobody else’s.”

On Candidate Bush and Kosovo, Domenech is just wrong on the position that Bush took. As we can see from the article, Bush received some criticism for being slow to articulate a position, but he had already announced the formation of his exploratory committee the month before, and he was widely considered to be the front-runner with few serious rivals.

To date, hardly any of the “candidates” Domenech has been criticizing for their silence on foreign policy issues have formed exploratory committees, and it remains to be seen whether many of them ever will. One would look in vain for substantive statements from then-Gov. Bush on the Balkans or almost any other major foreign policy issue prior to March 1999, and it’s strange to expect politicians to make detailed statements about these issues before they have started their campaigns. There aren’t very many official candidates yet, so it makes no sense to expect them to behave as Domenech thinks candidates should. If Mitch Daniels announces his candidacy, that’s when his critics can reasonably start demanding that he give more substantive answers on other areas of policy. The same goes for the rest of the 2012 field.

If 90 percent of Colombian exports already enter the United States duty free, how is the FTA really going to increase jobs in Colombian export industries? In fact, it’s not going to create many jobs for Colombians. Actually the deal may well destroy a lot of Colombian jobs. Recall that U.S. exports are projected to grow by $1 billion. I already noted that that’s not a lot for the U.S., but it’s a pretty big increase in imports for a tiny economy like Colombia’s, and the bulk of it would be in agricultural products.

Now think about NAFTA and how that FTA was supposed to create jobs in Mexico and reduce illegal immigration into the United States. Well, one downside of NAFTA has been that subsidized U.S. agriculture such as corn, sugar, and cotton growing has been given easy access to the Mexican market and devastated smaller-scale Mexican peasant farms. The result has been a severe hit on the Mexican economy and an increase in illegal immigration along the U.S. southern border.

The danger for Colombia (and the United States) is similar. Big, subsidized U.S. agriculture will have free run of the market. Far from finding new licit jobs, displaced Colombian small-scale farmers may well be forced to find more illicit jobs in coca growing and cocaine making. ~Clyde Prestowitz

Despite some improvements on labor protections that the administration has negotiated with the Colombian government, this remains the main problem with the Colombian free trade agreement. The U.S. will receive negligible benefits from this deal if it benefits at all, but the cost to Colombia in the displacement and impoverishment of small-scale farmers will be significant. The greater social and economic stratification that this will likely produce will undermine Colombia’s political stability. I can understand why certain U.S. agribusinesses and large Colombian landowners would want the agreement passed. I can even see why the Colombian government is eager to reach a deal, since small-scale farmers are hardly the Colombians whose interests Santos is most interested in serving. What doesn’t make sense is why it should be U.S. policy to flood the Colombian market with our subsidized agricultural products when this seems likely to ruin the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Colombians, potentially destabilize Colombia, and exacerbate political tensions in a country that has suffered from decades of conflict and political violence.

NATO acknowledged Friday that its airstrikes had hit rebels using tanks to fight government forces in eastern Libya, saying no one told them the rebels used tanks.

British Rear Adm. Russell Harding, the deputy commander of the NATO operation, said in the past, only forces loyal to Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi had used heavy armored vehicles. ~Seattle Post-Intelligencer (AP)

Mistakes are unavoidable in any military effort, and friendly-fire incidents take place even within well-organized armies, and NATO is being asked to do the impossible in Libya. Granting all of that, this does stand out as an impressive failure to acquire the most basic information about the forces that NATO is trying to support. It’s also hard to believe the specific claim that NATO officials didn’t know this. No one told them? Didn’t anyone attempt to find out?

There have been reliable reports that the rebels possessed tanks circulating for weeks. Granted, those reports tended to be dismissive and pointed out that the rebels didn’t know how to use them very well or at all, but that they had tanks was something that informed observers knew about the rebels. The Los Angeles Times published this report nine days ago:

At an army base in Benghazi, Yahya Abdulsalam, a rebel guard, said nine captured government T-72 Soviet-made tanks inside the garrison could not be operated because rebels didn’t know how to turn on the engines.

“We’re trying to find some soldiers who know how to use these tanks, but the only tanks they know are the older ones,” Abdulsalam said.

If someone closely following the news out of Libya could be aware of this, how is it that the people in charge of running the Libyan war weren’t?

Update: Mark Thompson is being a bit too generous in his assessment:

This was bound to happen: U.S. military officials, at least, have gone out of their way to say they are not in contact with the rebels, so how would NATO know when the rebels snared some of Gaddafi’s tanks?

Reading news accounts might have helped.

There is a lot that is very wrong with Paul Johnson’s tedious column in Forbes today, but this passage was probably the worst:

These forces are provided at huge expense by the American taxpayer and are staffed by thousands of dedicated young American men and women whose express purpose is to protect civilization from barbarism.

Er, no, their express purpose is to defend the United States and the Constitution against their enemies. One might like to believe that this has something to do with protecting civilization, but that isn’t why Americans serve in the military and it isn’t what they’re called on to do when they join. It’s a good thing, too. Providing for the common defense of the United States and the defense of those allies with which the U.S. has defense treaties is already quite demanding enough, and there are more than a few Americans always eager to keep adding to the list of commitments that the U.S. should take on. If the U.S. military’s “express purpose” were protecting civilization from barbarism, it would have an impossibly grand purpose that it could never fulfill, but it would exhaust itself and bankrupt the nation in the process. Unfortunately, this rhetoric of protecting civilization that Johnson deploys here is just a bad ideological excuse to cover up for starting a war against a government that had not attacked us and posed no threat to us. I don’t pretend to understand a definition of civilization that includes approving the starting of wars without just cause.

Having made this preposterous claim, Johnson continues:

That, as they see it and have been taught to see it, is precisely what America stands for; it is the principal moral justification for their nation’s immense power and riches.

As hard as it is for some people to accept, America doesn’t have a mission civilisatrice. Nor does America have some sort of noblesse oblige that it has acquired on account of its power and wealth. The U.S. should not abuse the power and wealth it has acquired, nor should Americans pretend that all of the land-grabs and displacements of whole peoples that are part of our history are somehow justified after the fact if we devote ourselves to global moral uplift. There could be rare, extraordinary cases when American intervention becomes necessary, but that simply underscores how unnecessary and inappropriate intervention is most of the rest of the time.

The idea that America came to “the rescue of civilization” in 1917 by entering WWI is bizarre. One could argue that civilization was far past the point of being rescued in Europe; it had been destroyed. Regardless, it is a strange, very antiquated idea that American involvement in WWI rescued anything except for the Allied war cause. Plunging the U.S. into WWI has some part in creating the conditions for the “Carthaginian peace” imposed on Germany after the war, which had rather unhappy consequences for the world. Tipping the balance in favor of the Allies may have facilitated the consolidation of Bolshevik control in Russia, which the Allies then belatedly, half-heartedly tried to undo. Wilson’s role in breaking up the Austrian empire created a vacuum filled by fanatical nationalisms that plagued central Europe, and which continue to plague some parts of Europe to this day. Far from coming to the “rescue” of civilization, Wilson unwittingly contributed to its practical annihilation in many parts of the world.

As more time goes by and Daniels shows little interest in the presidential race, it becomes harder to believe that he has any intention of running. If he isn’t running, there’s no reason to expect that he would say anything about foreign policy issues. If he is going to run, he would have a strong incentive not to stake out too many positions before he organized a campaign and took some time to study the relevant issues. I would rather have competent candidates who know that they still have a lot to learn about policy subjects they haven’t worked on very much in the past. There are already more than enough Republicans spouting half-truths and demagoguing foreign policy issues they don’t understand. We don’t need to add more.

Ben Domenech doesn’t like this:

Perhaps worst of all, it is profoundly disturbing that Mitch Daniels, a darling of the intellectual right, has as far as I can tell been completely silent on the matter – just as he has been nearly entirely silent on every foreign policy issue over the past several months. His comment in response to a question on Egypt in January was simply jaw-dropping: “I don’t have a lot to say about it. I’m just a provincial governor out here.” This is fine if one is interested in staying a provincial governor, but it is an unacceptable dodge from anyone interested in becoming Commander in Chief.

As I recall, when the 2000 Republican presidential field was starting to take shape in the spring of 1999 during the Kosovo war, George W. Bush wasn’t making many statements on the war, and he was the front-runner, establishment favorite, and almost default nominee at the time. Unless I have forgotten something, Bush’s response to Kosovo was a very conventional, cautious expression of support for the military operation, and he didn’t have much else to say about it. The most important reason why holding his tongue was the right thing to do was that Bush didn’t know anything about foreign policy, and during the campaign he avoided saying anything that Condi Rice hadn’t told him to say. Unfortunately for him and the rest of us, Bush became much more involved in foreign policy-making after he became President without correcting this flaw.

Gingrich has been outspoken in attacking Obama on Libya, but this is because Gingrich acts more like a pundit than a serious presidential candidate. The more Gingrich says about ongoing controversies, the more likely it is that he won’t run or that he will prove to be the horrible candidate we all expect him to be. Romney is most deserving of criticism. This isn’t just because he is the leading Republican candidate with the best chance at the nomination, but because he has made a point of attacking the administration’s foreign policy decisions and pathetically pandering to national security hawks whenever he can. He hasn’t relented from making these attacks in recent months despite giving every indication that he doesn’t really disagree with Obama on Egypt or Libya.

I don’t take Barbour seriously as a presidential candidate, but all that Barbour did was ask the question, “Why are we in Libya?” This is a question that the administration hasn’t answered very well or convincingly (and certainly not to the satisfaction of anyone not ideologically committed to humanitarian interventionism), and it’s perfectly appropriate to ask that question. If this is all it takes to be labeled an “isolationist,” Domenech may be surprised to find just how many “isolationists” there are in this country. Barbour also raised the issue of nation-building. Libyan war supporters are very keen to reassure everyone that the U.S. will have nothing to do with this, but that’s a promise that’s more easily made than kept. Of all of the states where the U.S. has intervened in the last twenty years, Libya is probably the one in the greatest need of “nation-building,” especially in the event that the war succeeds in driving Gaddafi and his sons from power. It doesn’t follow that this will have to be something that the U.S. will be suckered into doing, but that was what many of us assumed about intervening in Libya. In the end, the tiresome and wrong “where we can, we must” argument tends to prevail.

Like Barbour, Bachmann is hardly an “isolationist,” and it’s a measure of how bizarre the Libyan war debate has become that someone can be tagged as an “isolationist” for opposing intervention in another country’s civil war. Domenech complains that Bachmann didn’t offer a solution for Libya, but why would she have offered a solution? She has argued that intervening in Libya does not serve U.S. interests, and by pretty much any objective measure she is correct. How does it become the responsibility of possible presidential candidates who oppose American involvement in a foreign crisis to offer solutions to a political problem that interventionists appear clueless to solve?

But while all hoped for Gaddafi’s early departure, the price already has been very dear. Libya devoured leadership oxygen from what truly mattered: the upheavals in the rest of the Mideast (where, unlike in Libya, the United States has truly vital interests), and America itself, where future generations perish slowly in neglected public schools that offer no hope, where working Americans are thrown from their unaffordable homes into the streets, and where millions of Americans will never have jobs. Already, more than half a billion dollars they deserved for their survival has gone to Libya instead. ~Leslie Gelb

Part of this very good, and the other part is a bit of reach in Gelb’s attempt to link the Libyan war to the current budget debate. It’s clear that Libya has become a major distraction that has consumed time, money, resources, and attention that could have been used more productively addressing a number of more pressing matters. It’s definitely true that the Libyan war serves no American interest, and meanwhile American interests are being neglected partly because of the Libyan war. The Libyan war is a good example of how overextended and overly involved the U.S. is in international affairs, and one would think that it is the sort of thing that all those “isolationist” Millennials in the Democratic Party are talking about when they agree with the statement, “The U.S. is too involved in global affairs and should focus on more issues at home.” By the standards of the Brookings Institute, this is an “isolationist” view. Of course, it has nothing to do with “isolation” as opposed to engagement, and everything to do with priorities. Gelb is right that supporters of the Libyan war have their priorities all wrong.

There is a relationship between the budget debate and the Libyan war, but it isn’t quite as straightforward as Gelb says. Of course, the looming shutdown would prevent personnel supporting the attack on Libya from being paid, but that’s just part of it. Congress has appropriated no money for the Libya mission, so the war continues to be fought even without so-called “implicit authorization,” which was the bogus excuse the Clinton administration used to claim that the Kosovo war was legal. As a result, the war is being funded out of money already appropriated to the Pentagon, which is eating up funds that were intended for other military purposes. This is money that was already going to military spending, but on the basis of the continuing resolution that has kept Pentagon funding at 2010 levels. Meanwhile, the coincidence of the undeclared Libyan war and the expiration of the continuing resolution means that the Senate will not start debate on Libya until after the budget is finished.

We have on display right now two of the worst traits of modern American government: executive usurpation and Congressional abdication on war powers, and massive dysfunction in handling the most basic task of passing a budget. By unhappy coincidence, continuing failure to resolve the budget impasse is preventing Congress from even considering the matter of Libya, to say nothing of authorizing it or funding it. The consequences of this won’t affect people here at home as much as they will adversely affect other parts of the military, but in Congress’ ongoing failure to fulfill some of its most significant responsibilities all Americans are being very poorly represented and served.