Obama turned his back on a million protesters in the streets of Tehran, with bizarre promises not to “meddle,” coupled with vague apologies about American behavior more than a half-century ago. A golden opportunity to help topple a vicious anti-American theocracy was turned into a buffoonish effort to appear multiculturally sensitive. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Greg Scoblete rejects this:

Er, no. What does “multicultural sensitivity” have to do with it? President Obama kept mum because he thought interjecting the U.S. into Iran’s uprising would do more harm than good. You can agree or disagree with that reasoning – but it was the reasoning. “Multicultural sensitivity” had nothing to do with it.

Greg is correct. This “multicultural” charge has been a stand-by of Hanson’s columns for the better part of the last two years. It seems to be based on nothing more than the desire to describe Obama’s decisions on Iran as misguided, and so he attaches a label that refers to something he dislikes. There are perfectly good reasons to be critical of multiculturalism, but multiculturalism is something that is primarily a domestic phenomenon that relates to how many Americans believe we should be interpreting American history, defining national identity, and relating to new immigrants and minority groups. It shouldn’t be made into a catch-all term to refer to whatever one happens to find objectionable. What Hanson mistakenly refers to here as “multicultural sensitivity” is what the rest of us would call diplomatic use of language and an awareness of Iranian sensitivity to the perception of foreign interference in their political life. What Hanson would like to claim is that Obama is a cultural relativist, but this simply isn’t the case. If I never hear Obama use the phrase “universal rights” again, it will be too soon.

Hanson’s claim gets something else important very wrong. There was no “golden opportunity” to topple the Iranian government. Had Obama said or done anything more in support of the Green Movement, that wouldn’t have ensured the success of the Green Movement, and it certainly wouldn’t have toppled the Iranian government. It isn’t just that Hanson laces what might otherwise be a legitimate criticism of Obama foreign policy with tendentious nonsense, but he conjures up pure fantasies about what is happening in the world and what the administration is doing in response. If you are convinced that the Iranian government was on the verge of being overthrown in the summer of 2009, and you are confident that the U.S. could have effectively tipped the balance in favor of the supposed revolutionaries, Obama’s muted response must be baffling, but that is because you are inhabiting an alternate reality that has nothing to do with the way things are.

Andrew notes that some prominent conservatives and Christians have been flacking for Laurent Gbagbo. These include Glenn Beck, Pat Robertson, and Sen. Inhofe, among others. This is unfortunate, but not primarily because it shows their “Christianism” or anti-Islamic sentiments. It is most unfortunate because Americans must get out of the misguided, dangerous habit of picking and taking sides in other nations’ internal conflicts. This is misguided whether or not it has policy implications, but it is especially dangerous because this tendency to choose sides can have an effect on how the U.S. eventually responds. That means refraining from both cheering and booing Gbagbo, because the Ivorian civil war is none of our business.

When Americans choose sides in a conflict they barely understand, they are going to latch onto the most superficial things or the things they recognize in one of the warring parties. Sometimes this will lead to straightforward identity politics and a decision to side with the people most like themselves. I don’t think it follows that these few conservative defenders of Gbagbo prove that “[t]he GOP has now completed its transition from anti-Communism to anti-Islam.” Anti-communism and anti-jihadism do seem to produce some of the same misjudgments, such as the tendency to support deeply flawed leaders in the developing world who seem to be engaged in part of the same struggle. As the significant support from the Republican political and foreign policy elite for the Libyan war should show us, the GOP is a long way from being anything like a consistently anti-Islamic party.

It’s not any better when Americans choose the side that is significantly different from themselves in terms of religion or politics. There was no special virtue when mostly Christian Americans chose to side with Muslims in the Balkans. It was still a case of interfering in conflicts that didn’t concern Americans. Oikophobia isn’t a more attractive trait than identitarianism.

We need fewer passionate attachments in general, and the less we project our domestic political quarrels and preoccupations onto foreign conflicts the better it will be for all concerned. Gbagbo is a thuggish ruler who has taken his country to the brink twice now, but he has a significant constituency in Ivory Coast, and the political problems of the country aren’t going to be resolved simply because he is driven from power. Indeed, because he has refused to leave voluntarily, the country is suffering from civil war conditions that will make stabilization after he leaves very difficult. The situation is still unsettled, the refugee population is already enormous, and the potential for a humanitarian catastrophe remains great.

Like the Libyan civil war, the Ivorian civil war is one in which Americans genuinely have no stake. There are no straightforward heroes or villains in this story (as there usually aren’t in political contests that turn violent), but Gbagbo looks worse because he is clinging to power when the entire region and the world accept that he lost the election, and because he relies on ginning up hostility towards foreigners and second-generation Ivorians who fail his test of “Ivoirité.” Gbagbo’s youth militias and thugs have reportedly committed more of the atrocities in Ivory Coast so far, but Ouattara’s forces are hardly paragons of virtue:

Human Rights Watch documented serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law in recent weeks by armed forces fighting for Ouattara in Abidjan, including reprisal killings of civilians and extrajudicial executions against detained pro-Gbagbo forces. While Ouattara and Guillaume Soro, the former head of the Forces Nouvelles who is now Ouattara’s prime minister, have officially denied a connection to the fighting forces in Abobo, sources in Abobo and inside the Ouattara camp acknowledged the strong presence and role in Abobo of Forces Nouvelles soldiers under the Ouattara side’s control.

Pro-Ouattara forces now exercise complete authority in large sections of Abobo and the town of Anyama, operating dozens of checkpoints in the area. That level of control, combined with the Ouattara government’s declaration of being the legitimate state power, means that such forces – and the Ouattara government to the degree it controls the forces – should be held accountable for violations of human rights and humanitarian law in these zones. The past week gives disturbing indications of human rights violations and war crimes being committed there, Human Rights Watch said.

There is no reason for Americans to take Ouattara’s side or Gbagbo’s side. The U.S. has recognized Ouattara as the winner of the election, as have all the relevant regional and international institutions, but that doesn’t mean that Americans have a stake in Ouattara’s victory.

Nikolas Gvosdev made an intriguing argument about what the Libyan war means for the future of NATO:

However, Moscow’s lack of existential concern over the Libya mission and Warsaw’s cool reaction to it are more understandable when we consider that both Russia and Poland sense the operation may prove to be a turning point in the future direction of the North Atlantic alliance.

For NATO, however, this could be a “Tilsit” moment. Just as Napoleon Bonaparte reached an accord with Tsar Alexander in 1807 that stopped France’s eastern advance, permitting Paris to focus more time and attention on the empire’s southern flanks, the Libya mission could be the alliance’s first step toward formally abandoning any further eastward expansion. By this argument, the stabilization of the Baltic basin has been accomplished: Europe’s natural frontiers in the east have been reached at the Vistula and the western shore of the Black Sea, and now it is time to look south.

In doing so, NATO would effectively acknowledge that the status quo achieved in the borderlands between Europe and Russia is likely to last, with Ukraine under President Viktor Yanukovych assuming a “neutral” status marked by the pursuit of a balanced approach to both Moscow and the West. Tilting the axis of NATO away from an East-West divide and toward a North-South bridge diminishes the relevance of Western “beachheads” across the Black Sea: If the future of the alliance is the Mediterranean basin, not the Eurasian plains, a NATO-aspirant country like Georgia becomes far more distant and peripheral to the alliance.

If Gvosdev is right, there could be some small silver linings to the Libyan war in that Russia might start to perceive NATO as less of a threat, expansion of the Alliance to the east would drop off the agenda entirely, and would-be NATO members would be stymied. Then again, I would point out that it was just five years after Tilsit that Napoleon invaded Russia, so it may not be so encouraging for Russia or the U.S. to think of the Libyan war this way. Put Gvosdev’s argument together with what Gideon Rachman was arguing last week, and things look a bit different. If Libya is the “last hurrah” of Western-led humanitarian interventionism, perhaps it will also be NATO’s last “out-of-area” operation and mark the last time that several major NATO governments will be willing and able to coordinate military action outside Europe.

Americans have been mostly preoccupied with the question of how much the U.S. can actually extricate itself from the Libyan war and “hand off” the war to NATO, but it can’t be stressed enough that NATO as an alliance has even less business in Libya than any of its member governments do. For almost two decades now, NATO has become an enforcer of certain U.N. missions and also a useful forum for bypassing the U.N. when necessary, but it is supposed to be a purely defensive alliance. Member states have no political or legal obligations to those allies when they choose to take military action for any reason except retaliation against an attack. The idea that the U.S. “owes” it to other members of NATO to continue participating in the Libyan war for the sake of the Alliance’s credibility is not convincing.

Juan Cole posed the following questions to Glenn Greenwald, but I will try to answer:

So my question is whether, given that NATO allies such as Britain and France were so insistent on meeting their UN obligations with regard to Libya and on bringing NATO allies into the effort, would it have been worth breaking up NATO and destroying America’s longstanding alliances in order to stay completely out of Libya? Note that even Turkey, which initially opposed NATO involvement, in the end acquiesced in it and even offered to patrol Libyan ports as part of its obligations to the organization.

Britain and France were insistent on crafting U.N. authorization for a military action they were already prepared to take. France didn’t want to bring NATO into it at all, because it claimed that this might alienate Arab governments and didn’t want to yield control to the Alliance because Sarkozy feared it would hamstring the operation by bringing in governments that were opposed to toppling Gaddafi. At the same time, Italy would not allow its bases to be used for the war unless NATO were involved. This was a way to give Berlusconi political cover to take an action that he doesn’t really want to take by saying that he was doing it for the sake of the Alliance. Some other NATO governments, notably Norway, insisting on participating only as part of a NATO mission.

Britain also favored shifting the operation to NATO control, but this was a matter of practicality more than anything else. Germany pointedly refused to support the NATO mission directly, but didn’t want to harm its relations with other allied governments, and instead agreed to shift resources to Afghanistan to free up other governments’ forces for the Libyan campaign. Turkey isn’t fulfilling its obligations to NATO by enforcing the arms embargo; it is enforcing that part of the U.N. resolution that calls for an arms embargo on Libya. Turkey remains opposed to participating in the enforcement of the no-fly zone, and will have nothing to do with the bombing missions directed at Gaddafi’s forces. Bringing the war under NATO’s control became an acceptable compromise for Turkey, because Erdogan wants to make sure that the intervention does not escalate beyond its original mandate. Sarkozy opposed NATO control for the same reason.

After the passage of UNSCR 1973, France and Britain didn’t need NATO to do what they’re doing. They did need the U.S. for the initial strikes on Gaddafi’s forces. Switching to NATO control is a political decision mainly to provide cover for Italy to continue supporting the mission and for the U.S. to reduce its role in the conflict. Without U.S. participation in Libya, it is hard to see why or how NATO would have become involved as an organization. Absent U.S. involvement, France and Britain would have undertaken the mission largely on their own.

Had the U.S. stayed out of Libya completely, it is doubtful that the U.S. would have pressed for passage of UNSCR 1973, and France and Britain would have had to decide whether they wanted to proceed with an attack on Libya without U.N. authorization. In the event that the U.S. had supported the resolution, but refused to participate in the mission, this might have put some modest strain on the relationships with France and Britain, but this would have been temporary. Had the U.S. not been so heavily involved in the early weeks of the war, it is unlikely that NATO as an alliance would have been called upon to participate at all.

There was no question of fracturing or breaking NATO through U.S. inaction in Libya. The far greater danger to the Alliance from the Libyan war is handing over responsibility for the war to it. NATO was already very divided over intervening in Libya, and the longer that the mission drags on the greater the strains on the Alliance. Essentially, three of the major NATO governments gambled the future of the Alliance on a North African civil war that posed no real threat to the security of the Alliance’s member states. If we look at things as they are, we will see that it is participation in the Libyan war that threatens the unity and future of NATO. Arguments that the U.S. had to intervene for the sake of the Alliance gets things backwards. NATO would never have been involved without the U.S., just as the credibility of the U.N. would never been put at stake had the U.S., France, and Britain not insisted on pushing for a resolution on Libya. It is NATO allies that are doing the U.S. a favor by taking over the operation from the U.S., so the idea that the U.S. is “supporting” them in repayment for their presence in Afghanistan is very hard to take seriously.

The top general for Libya’s rebels lashed out at NATO forces for not doing enough against Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi and threatened to take his complaint to the U.N. Security Council.

“I would like to say to you people that NATO did not provide to us what we need,” Abdul Fatah Younis said at a news conference in the rebel capital, Benghazi. ~The Los Angeles Times

Younis’ complaint is valid up to a point. The official justification for attacking Libya is to protect the civilian population, the civilian population in Misurata is suffering from the ongoing civil war as Gaddafi’s forces attack Misurata, and NATO has had difficulty halting these attacks. Because the official justification for attacking Libya is the protection of civilians, NATO has adopted extremely restrictive rules of engagement that have prevented air strikes on Gaddafi’s forces in built-up urban areas where the chances of civilian deaths are greatly increased. The ideological reason for intervening in Libya makes it impossible for NATO to take actions that the Libyan rebels demand the Alliance take, and the serious political opposition within NATO to the entire enterprise seems likely to ensure that the restrictive rules of engagement are not going to be loosened.

According to a report in The Daily Telegraph, three-quarters of sorties on Monday had to return without launching any strikes because Gaddafi’s tanks had taken up positions in civilian areas. Well, that is exactly what one would expect him to do when NATO’s purpose is supposed to be preventing civilian deaths, since NATO’s reason for attacking Libya would be fairly quickly discredited if NATO strikes directly caused significant numbers of civilian deaths. Ultimately, Younis’ complaint is based on the apparent belief that NATO should be intervening to aid the rebel cause, rather than to prevent mass killing.

The new analogy of choice these days is to call Misurata a Libyan Sarajevo. Of course, Sarajevo suffered from being a besieged city and a war zone, which is unfortunately what sometimes happens in wars. The prolongation of the Libyan conflict by outside intervention has encouraged the rebels such that they continue to make maximalist demands, and they are refusing any cease-fire that does not achieve their final political objective. Intervention may have simply prevented the end of most of the fighting in Libya, and by preventing that U.S. and allied forces are partly responsible for prolonging a conflict that could end up consuming many more lives as it drags on indefinitely.

Of course French interventions abroad have not usually gone well. Napoleon came to grief in Egypt. Now Sarkozy, his diminutive successor, is following in his path. He seems to be going bonkers. What will follow the intervention in the Ivory Coast? Is France trying to reconstitute its former empire? ~Jacob Heilbrunn

I enjoyed Noah Millman’s argument that the international politics of humanitarian intervention resembles medieval Icelandic justice: there is no central authority to enforce rules, so outlaw states are exposed to attack with impunity. As far as collective security arrangements are concerned, I think this makes sense. It doesn’t work quite as well for humanitarian interventions. The main cases of humanitarian intervention from Kosovo until now don’t involve states that are acting as international outlaws. As far as Libya’s neighbors and the West are concerned, Libya’s worst days of promoting rebellions, invading, intervening on behalf of other dictators, and sponsoring terrorism are in the past. Gaddafi wields outsized and corrupting influence on many African governments, but he is hardly unique in that kind of behavior. Likewise, Milosevic’s crackdown in 1998-99 on the KLA was an entirely internal matter. As a matter of international security, neither of these states was a serious outlaw at the time that they were targeted for sustained attack. This isn’t a case of exposing international outlaws to punishment, but one of targeting isolated former outlaws on account of bad behavior in the confines of their territory.

Let me turn to Heilbrunn’s question. One could say that Sarkozy is reconstituting a version of the French colonial empire in Africa, except that this was done a long time before Sarkozy ever came to power. This has changed some since the Rwanda genocide in 1994, but the French military presence in a few African states continues. The French were already in Ivory Coast since the 2002 civil war there, and they still regularly intervene in Francophone Africa when it suits them:

French military interventions into African hot spots, especially in francophone countries, are backed by military agreements signed with the former French colonies before independence. But critics of French interventions in Africa have argued that the military alliances were not really alliance but a means for France to remain in control in their former colonies. They argue, for example, that French interventions have not maintained a consistent policy but act at random depending on French interest and not the interest of the African country.

The CFR report on French military presence in Africa confirms this:

As France’s former colonies in Africa gained their independence in the early 1960s, most signed bilateral treaties pledging various degrees of military cooperation and support. Most of these treaties exist today, though some remain state secrets.

Johann Hari wrote a devastating report on French misadventures in the Central African Republic four years ago that is worth reading in light of Sarkozy’s eagerness to intervene in Libya:

They explain in this blackness that the French-backed troops began firing and the French military began bombing in March for one reason: the desperate locals had begun to rise up against President Bozize, because he had done nothing for them. People here were tired of the fact that “there are no schools, no hospitals, and no roads”. “We are completely isolated,” they explain. “When it rains, we are cut off from the world because the roads turn to mud. We have nothing. All the rebels were asking was for government help.” As I stumble around Birao, I hear this every time: the rebels were simply begging for government help for the hungry, abandoned people. Even the bemused French soldiers and the Bozize lackeys sent to the area admit this privately. Yet the French response was with bombs against the rebels’ pick-up points.

As the CFR report explains, French support has been major factor in keeping Bozize in power. Bozize was just recently sworn in for his second term as president after an election result that the opposition refused to recognize.

Hari described the rise of Bozize to power:

From being a poor man, Bozize suddenly had the money to run a huge presidential campaign. He ran, and he lost. So in October 2002, he paid for a vast private mercenary army (you might wonder – with whose money?) to invade the CAR from neighbouring Chad, depose the sitting president and install himself as the supreme ruler. Since then, he has “won” a disputed election he arranged for himself and bathed in French approbation.

“France sees the CAR as a colony,” Maka says. “The presidents are selected by France, not elected by the people. The presidents do not serve the interests of this country; they serve the interests of France.” He lists the French corporations who use the CAR as a base to grab Central African resources. This French behaviour is, he reasons, at the root of the wars currently ripping apart the north of the country. Whoever becomes president knows his power flows down from Paris, not up from the people – so he has no incentive to build support by developing the country. Rebellions become inevitable, and the president crushes them with the house-burnings and French bombs I learned about in Birao.

Update: The person who wrote this AP report has to be kidding:

Analysts say the extraordinary turnaround may be rooted in a revival by President Nicolas Sarkozy of traditional French notions of high-minded interventionism [bold mine-DL], as well as an attempt by the French leader to ease Europe away from its longtime dependence on the U.S. security umbrella.

I know that Judah Grunstein has argued that Sarkozy’s Libya position shows that he has re-discovered his “inner idealist,” but Sarkozy’s purported idealism and his appointment of Kouchner to be foreign minister in the past can be taken as meaningful only if we agree that there were no significant “traditional notions of high-minded interventionism” as far as French foreign policy was concerned. My point here isn’t to quarrel over whether French foreign policy should be more “high-minded” (whatever that might mean), but to challenge very strongly the idea that the sort of intervention Sarkozy and Kouchner found so appealing has much to do with French foreign policy tradition. Of course, in light of what France has been doing in the Central African Republic (see above), it is hard to take seriously any of Sarkozy’s campaign rhetoric of abandoning “Francafrique.” As Elizabeth Dickinson pointed out this past December, Francafrique is still alive and well under Sarkozy:

What happened? In short, the embassy analysis concludes, Sarkozy annoyed African leaders with his rhetoric, enraged them with his clamp-down on immigration policy, and then proved that he wasn’t terribly serious about actually abandoning Francafrique with his guestures to big man African leaders.

That afternoon in the Situation Room vividly demonstrates a rarely stated fact about the administration’s responses to the uprisings sweeping the region: The Obama team holds no illusions about Colonel Qaddafi’s long-term importance. Libya is a sideshow. Containing Iran’s power remains their central goal in the Middle East. Every decision — from Libya to Yemen to Bahrain to Syria — is being examined under the prism of how it will affect what was, until mid-January, the dominating calculus in the Obama administration’s regional strategy: how to slow Iran’s nuclear progress, and speed the arrival of opportunities for a successful uprising there. ~The New York Times

If this is correct, the administration has been applying David Frum’s standard for judging regional policy decisions:

Every regional decision has to be measured against the test: Is this moving us closer to — or further from — a positive change in the Iranian political system?

As it happens, I think this is a misguided goal to be pursuing. The administration’s standard measures the success or failure of U.S. policy in the region based on whether it not it facilitates changes in Iranian policy and the Iranian political system, when the prospects of either one are currently remote (partly because of the attack on Libya). It has already set itself up to be judged a failure, because it seems likely that ongoing regional instability will increase Iranian influence.

By their own account, the administration sees Libya as a sideshow, which raises the question of why the U.S. should be diverting any resources and distracting its attention with an ongoing war for the sake of a “sideshow.” If the administration has been examining its decisions on the basis of whether or not they help to slow Iran’s nuclear progress, it’s fairly significant that the decision to attack Libya seems to be a disastrous setback to their Iran policy. As Doug Bandow argued most recently, attacking the one authoritarian state that gave up its nuclear weapon ambitions in the recent past marks the end of serious non-proliferation efforts around the world, including in Iran:

Nonproliferation long has been an American and European priority. Best achieved peacefully, the U.S. government nevertheless views the objective as important enough to warrant war. Even today Washington refuses to forswear military action against Iran and North Korea. Until now, Libya was used to showcase the policy of peaceful nonproliferation. But the West’s attack on that nation has turned the Libyan example inside out. The allies have effectively destroyed the chance of persuading any state at odds with the West from acquiring a nuclear bomb. No government which imagines itself in Washington’s gunsight is likely to ever again voluntarily give up the one weapon capable of deterring America.

Once we move beyond the immediate, weak justification for the Libyan war, we see a degree of strategic ineptitude in the decision to attack Libya that is truly remarkable. New nuclear weapons states and proliferating states such as North Korea are more satisfied than ever with their decision to seek weapons, and they have a new example of why holding on to nuclear weapons is very much in their interest. Disarming North Korea was not all that likely at the best of times, but now it is unthinkable. Iran has an additional incentive to press ahead with its nuclear program, and it now has even less reason to accept any bargain that the U.S. might offer. We have just confirmed in the minds of every paranoid, authoritarian, and anti-American regime that Gaddafi’s mistake was that he was insufficiently paranoid and too trusting of the West. As long as “counter-proliferation” remains a priority, the U.S. has starting edging closer to armed confrontation with these states. The Libyan war needs to be judged on its immediate consequences, but to the extent that it is making conflict with Iran more rather than less likely the long-term damage to U.S. interests from attacking Libya has to be assessed accordingly.

The administration would like to say that making an example of Gaddafi by showing off U.S. military might could also make the Iranian government want to make a deal, but what they have actually done is to make any “carrots” seem designed to trick Iran into giving up its weapons to make it easier to attack. Not only has the treatment of Gaddafi shown the folly of negotiating away nuclear weapons, because it will not guarantee security and non-interference in the future, but Iran will conclude correctly that the Libyan war would not be happening if Gaddafi had not made his deal. Iran is vulnerable to attack from the U.S. or other governments only so long as it does not develop a deterrent, and we have shown the only authoritarian ruler to abandon pursuit of such weapons to be a sucker.

Other recent decisions may or may not advance the cause of pressuring Iran, but judged by this standard many of them seem to be very odd decisions. U.S. acquiescence in the GCC intervention in Bahrain, pulling the plug on Saleh in Yemen, and seeming to react rather mildly to Syria’s crackdowns might make sense in each individual case, but taken together they seem to be working to the overall advantage of Iran. The heavy-handed GCC intervention is explicitly anti-Iranian and anti-Shi’ite in focus, but that may end up benefiting Iran in the long run by providing more of an opening for its influence among Gulf state Shi’ites where it was previously not as great. Giving up on Saleh could end up keeping Yemen from spiraling more out of control, or it could backfire badly by leading to the splintering of the country or inviting Saudi intervention. Despite the mild response to Assad’s crackdowns, the policy of engaging Syria would appear to be dead for the time being. As long as Assad and his regime remain in power in the wake of these crackdowns, that would seem to rule out any attempt at pulling Syria out of Iran’s orbit for the foreseeable future.

If the U.S. has been silent about the GCC intervention in Bahrain because relations with the Saudis have deteriorated badly on account of the treatment of Mubarak, that would seem to damn Washington’s handling of Mubarak as well. Washington has had to muzzle itself when it has more reason to speak out, because it spoke out during the Egyptian protests when its public position was not as important to the outcome. It seems clear enough that the fall of Mubarak was a boon for Iran and its allies, and to the extent that the U.S. is now forced to go along with Saudi and Gulf state overkill in Bahrain to make up for giving up on Mubarak that makes the decision to push for his removal that much more questionable when judged by the administration’s Iran standard. If Saudi and Gulf state overkill works to Iran’s benefit, we are seeing a chain reaction set in motion by the decision to push for Mubarak’s removal that is unwittingly aiding the growth of Iranian influence, and the attack on Libya will give Iran another important reason to pursue nuclear weapons.

The nature of both representative democracy and complex modern societies requires us to put a high degree of trust in those to whom we delegate responsibility. We know that they’re generally smarter about their subject matters than we are, simply because that’s what they do. By no means does that mean we should suspend skepticism or meekly accept judgments that strike us as wrong. We should ask questions and diversify the range of expert opinions we consult. The greater the risk, the more skepticism and less deference is due. But starting with the proposition that those whom we reason to trust are probably doing the right thing is reasonable enough. ~James Joyner

James was responding to Kevin Drum’s posts on trusting Obama’s judgment. In his second post, Drum says that trusting Obama’s judgment requires trusting him even when he disagrees with him, and I agree that this is what trusting someone else’s judgment would have to mean.

Where things become a bit murkier is the reason why Drum trusts Obama’s judgement so much. As Drum said in his original post, Obama based his appeal to Democratic primary voters partly on his claim to having better judgment than Clinton. The main piece of evidence Obama could cite to back this up was his early opposition to the war in Iraq. It’s important to remember that Obama’s claim to superior judgment relied heavily on his opposition to the Iraq war in 2002 shortly before his presidential rivals were casting votes in favor of the authorization resolution. This seems to have been an important factor in Drum’s decision to trust Obama:

I was one of many who ended up voting for Obama on the grounds that his judgment seemed a bit sounder. Maybe not as toughminded as Hillary, but just as smart and, in foreign affairs, seemingly a little more willing to look at the world with fresh eyes and resist the siren call of intervention at every turn.

It’s this last part that I have a hard time understanding. Obama hasn’t opposed a single U.S. or allied military action in the last twenty years except for the Iraq war, and on Iraq one can argue that he happened to get lucky to oppose what turned out to be a disaster because he was playing to a Democratic audience in a blue state. Perhaps some people regard that as an encouraging track record, as Iraq was by far the most disastrous for the U.S. of any of the interventions during this period, but I don’t see how anyone could conclude that Obama would be willing to “resist the siren call of intervention at every turn.”

Obama told voters during the campaign that he was a liberal interventionist, and he staffed his administration with many other liberal interventionists, but it seemed as if the demands on the military from Afghanistan and Iraq would preclude him from ever acting on this. There wasn’t much reason to expect that Obama would be willing to resist the “siren call” except for practical and political constraints imposed by the ongoing wars. Put another way, we already knew that Obama’s judgment on this question was not very good, but there was a good chance that circumstances would make it impossible for that poor judgment to result in a new war. Despite all that, Obama plunged into Libya.

The troubling thing about Obama’s judgment on many foreign policy and national security issues is that he tends to take the same positions as more reliably hawkish and authoritarian figures, and he takes longer to get there. This holds out the possibility that Obama might come to a better decision, and then rips it away. This is what happened on Libya. Hawks and authoritarians not only largely get the policies they want, but they get to present Obama’s final decision as proof that it was because of their merits that their arguments won the day, when it was simply a matter of Obama coming more slowly to the position that he was always going to take. If it were just one or two issues where this happened, I suppose an Obama supporter would have reason to keep trusting his judgment, but when it becomes a fairly consistent pattern of reaching wrong or questionable major decisions it would have to be hard even for Obama’s voters to conclude that his judgment merited the trust that they put in it.

The New Republic recently asked an intriguing question about the U.S. intervention in Libya: Why isn’t Obama getting credit for preventing an atrocity? The answer is obvious when you think about it: because he prevented the atrocity. It’s hard to get credit for avoiding a disaster when it’s impossible to prove the disaster would have happened without you. ~Michael Grunwald

Another reason that Obama isn’t getting much credit is that the people who accept the administration’s claim still have an enormous reservoir of trust in Obama that the rest of us don’t have, and for the rest of us the reality that Obama plunged the U.S. into a new war makes it impossible to accept administration claims at face value. Worse still, the administration has proceeded in a way that almost seems designed to intensify public distrust and skepticism. It’s even harder to get credit when the claim that the intervention prevented a major atrocity is so strained and difficult to believe. Steve Chapman made the following observation over the weekend:

In his March 26 radio address, Obama said the United States acted because Gadhafi threatened “a bloodbath.” Two days later, he asserted, “We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi — a city nearly the size of Charlotte — could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

Really? Obama implied that, absent our intervention, Gadhafi might have killed nearly 700,000 people, putting it in a class with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. White House adviser Dennis Ross was only slightly less alarmist when he reportedly cited “the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred.”

But these are outlandish scenarios that go beyond any reasonable interpretation of Gadhafi’s words.

Like Benjamin Friedman, Chapman bothered to pay attention to Gaddafi’s words and noticed that they were directed at armed rebels, rather than the civilian population in rebel-controlled areas. Chapman noted:

He said, “We will have no mercy on them” — but by “them,” he plainly was referring to armed rebels (“traitors”) who stand and fight, not all the city’s inhabitants.

“We have left the way open to them,” he said. “Escape. Let those who escape go forever.” He pledged that “whoever hands over his weapons, stays at home without any weapons, whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected.”

Chapman turns to Alan Kuperman and Paul Miller to support his appropriate skepticism. First, Kuperman:

The rebels, however, knew that inflating their peril was their best hope for getting outside help. So, Kuperman says, they concocted the specter of genocide — and Obama believed it, or at least used it to justify intervention.

Miller also finds the administration’s disaster scenario implausible:

When I contacted Miller, he discounted the talk of vast slaughter. “Benghazi is the second-largest city in the country, and he needs the city and its people to continue functioning and producing goods for his impoverished country,” he said.

Defenders of Obama’s decision might say that it is better to be safe than sorry, but this is not a justification for intervention on the basis of the “responsibility to protect.” The “responsibility to protect” doctrine is a doctrine that effectively eliminates the protections of state sovereignty under certain circumstances, and for that reason the vast majority of internal conflicts can’t and shouldn’t qualify for it. Despite what some people may be saying now, it was not intended as justification for preventive war, but represented a formal international consensus that there could be extraordinary cases where evidence of systematic crimes carried out by a state or with a state’s acquiescence merited outside intervention. As Miller wrote earlier:

Qaddafi has certainly committed crimes against humanity in this brief war, but R2P was designed to stop widespread, systematic, sustained, orchestrated crimes. If Qaddafi’s barbarity meets that threshold, the administration hasn’t made the case yet, and I’m not convinced.

The argument for the Libyan war rests entirely on the claim that it prevented large-scale loss of life in Benghazi, and this claim looks very shaky. This is not just politically inconvenient. The shakiness of the administration’s primary reason for intervening undermines the overall legitimacy of what it and allied governments are doing in Libya. If saving civilian lives was the true goal all along, a policy that prolongs the Libyan civil war that continues to take civilian lives in Libya is the definition of a failed intervention. The longer that the civil war drags on, there is a greater danger of a large-scale loss of life as a result of the intervention. Instead of preventing a disaster, the Libyan war may very well be creating one before our eyes.

Yet Romney was silent on Libya, where the U.S. And its NATO allies are enforcing a no-fly zone as rebels try to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi from power.

Asked after his speech what his position is on Libya, Romney refused to take questions from reporters. Instead he and his wife Ann walked away and escaped up an escalator at the Venetian hotel-casino where the event was held.

“I’ve got a lot of positions on a lot of topics, but walking down the hall probably isn’t the best place to describe all those,” Romney said as he walked away with half a dozen journalists trailing him. ~Las Vegas Review-Journal

There were several ways that Romney could have handled this that wouldn’t have made him look ridiculous. He could have invoked the need to support a President in “kinetic action”-time: “When the President commits our military forces in a time-limited, scope-limited action, it is inappropriate to play politics with an issue that has nothing to do with vital U.S. national interests.” He might have staked out the increasingly conventional Republican hawkish line that Obama’s policy creates an unacceptable stalemate in Libya. He could have followed the lead of Rand Paul and Michele Bachmann in challenging the decision to attack Libya as unconstitutional or unwise. He could have very easily linked a critique of Libya policy to his standard demagoguery about Obama’s foreign policy by saying that Obama had neglected more pressing, strategically important issues. Instead, he had nothing specific to say about it at all, and wouldn’t address questions on Libya when they were posed to him. Romney seems unable to stake out a foreign policy position until after the Republican consensus has formed, and he then adapts himself to whatever that consensus happens to be.

This does save him from the acrobatics required to maintain an anti-Obama position when Obama switches from restraint to starting a war, but it is just another reminder that Romney doesn’t hold foreign policy positions so much as he mimics those who do. There was fairly broad agreement in the GOP that the arms reduction treaty was flawed. It didn’t matter whether the criticisms were valid or not. Romney saw an opportunity to become a vociferous critic of the treaty to ingratiate himself with most of the party. Libya is a contentious issue, and the party is evidently split over which position to take, so Romney predictably cannot take one. For someone who is so fond of mocking Obama’s leadership or lack thereof, it is revealing that when Romney has to stake out a position one way or the other on a controversial question he is unable to show any leadership at all.