We do not speak about the French Civil War of 1789 or the American Civil War of 1776. When armed thugs of the Mubarak regime attacked peaceful demonstrators recently in Tahrir Square, no one called it the Egyptian Civil War. It would be equally wrong to call the conflict in Libya a “civil war.” ~Paul Wolfowitz

Just like that, Wolfowitz has made sure that we can ignore the rest of his column. That’s a good thing, but I still find it amazing that Wolfowitz thinks that the best way to start his argument is to argue that we should not describe the Libyan civil war with the right words. What doesn’t make sense is that Wolfowitz understands the definition of civil war. He just wants to pretend that this doesn’t apply to Libya:

Scholars generally define civil war as a conflict between organized groups within a country that aim to take power at the center or in a region.

That’s right. Doesn’t the Libyan opposition claim to be an organized group with the aim to take power in Tripoli and to establish a new government for the entire country? That it is a badly-organized group isn’t the point. They purport to be the legitimate government of all of Libya, and they seek to replace the existing government. During the the war of 1861-65, which most Americans conventionally refer to as the Civil War, the Confederacy never made such a claim on the North.

The Egyptian example is irrelevant to this discussion. Clearly, we have seen large popular protests in Cairo and other Egyptian cities from January 25 until today calling for Mubarak’s removal and then for continued political reform. If one wished to be premature, one could go so far as to call it a revolution, but at the very least it was a movement for political and civil rights. The protesters sometimes resisted against police brutality and the use of hired thugs, but on the whole they responded non-violently to the regime’s attempts to crack down on them.

When something similar happened in Libya, the protesters armed themselves and launched an insurrection against the government. One can sympathize with them, one can say that they are justified in what they’re doing, but what one cannot do is say that they are not fighting a civil war. They are seeking to overthrow the existing ruler and seize control of the government of Libya by force, and they are fighting against their fellow countrymen (as well as foreign mercenaries) to do this. That is very much consistent with the definition of a civil war as opposed to a war of secession or a violent popular revolution.

No one calls the French Revolution the French Civil War because the revolutionaries won and succeeded in defining the events of 1789-99 on their terms. Had the outcome of the internal struggle in France, especially in the Vendee, been different, that period of political struggle might be remembered very differently. Indeed, among many people in that region of France, the revolution has been remembered very differently. The war in the Vendee has sometimes even been referred to as a “Franco-French genocide,” and the revolutionaries were the ones engaged in much of the slaughter, but this was the product of a war between groups of French citizens, which is to say a civil war. Wolfowitz doesn’t mention the Russian example, but it was certainly the case that a revolution led to a prolonged armed struggle over control of the state that the Bolsheviks ended up winning. No one would claim that this was not a civil war.

The American War for Independence certainly contained elements of armed violence by one group of citizens against another, especially in certain colonies where Loyalists had greater numbers. Technically, ours was a war for independence in which some of our citizens sided with the British government, but especially in New Jersey and South Carolina there were all the hallmarks of a society sharply divided between loyalists and rebels. Obviously, a more relevant example would be the armed struggle between King and Parliament in England in the 1640s, which was both a revolution in its challenge to the authority of the monarchy and a civil war in that it was an armed conflict over control of the state. This is sometimes referred to as the English revolution, or even in some books the “Puritan revolution,” but it is much more commonly known as the English Civil War. What is happening right now in Ivory Coast is the beginning of a civil war, and it is proving to be no less gruesome and horrible than what is happening in Libya, except that in this case it is the successful rebel side endorsed by most of the governments in the world that is carrying out mass atrocities.

Civil war is the appropriate, more neutral description of an armed conflict over control of a state between two factions. Revolution may be the appropriate word to describe sudden political change, but much of the time it is chosen for propaganda purposes to make outsiders more sympathetic to a particular cause. Wolfowitz would prefer it if Westerners adopted the word that the Libyan rebels have chosen to describe their cause. This isn’t because civil war is an inaccurate description of what is happening. It is because civil war is all together too accurate, and it is making it harder to promote a more aggressive U.S. policy in Libya, because Americans are appropriately more wary of inserting the U.S. in the middle of someone else’s civil war. It is inconvenient for Wolfowitz that the description that is more useful to the Gaddafis politically also happens to be the more accurate description.

Wolfowitz’s insistence that we not call the Libyan civil war what it is leads up predictably to yet another call to recognize the Transitional National Council as the Libyan government. In other words, after arguing that the conflict in Libya is not a civil war, he wants us to align the U.S. officially with the weaker side in the civil war. If calling things by their proper names helps to keep the U.S. from compounding the error of intervention, that would be good, but we should strive to use the correct names for things whether or not this advances our preferred policies.

Though the signs were clear from the start of the Libya operation that people hadn’t clearly thought through the consequences of intervention, it took a tweet from Anne-Marie Slaughter (the recently-departed Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and one-time author for our magazine) to crystallize just what a mess we’re really in. She wrote: “To all who represent Libyan opposition. Pics of slapping terrified prisoners on [Anderson Cooper’s AC360 program on CNN] does not reflect values you are fighting for.”

I was struck by more than just the tone (though the thought of one of our doyens of foreign policy presuming to lecture members of a beleaguered militia on how to properly behave is galling enough). It’s that this brief late-night missive captured precisely how liberal interventionists misunderstand reality. ~Damir Marusic

The rest of Damir’s critique is well worth reading, but I would like to focus on this claim of the “values” for which the rebels are supposed to be fighting.

As an article in Der Spiegel noted, some of the Council’s official rhetoric also sounds weirdly antiquated and Soviet. For example, the first page of the website declares:

The council derives it legitimacy from the decisions of local councils set up by the revolutionary people of Libya on the 17th of February.

Why not just make their slogan, “All power to the majalis!”?

On a more serious note, as their websitehelpfully tells us, the National Transitional Council in Benghazi affirms many of the right things, which is apparently good enough for McCain and Lieberman to advocate recognizing them as the Libyan government. It doesn’t follow that the Council’s statement is widely shared, and it isn’t clear that the Council has much real authority, but it’s important to recognize here that Libyan rebels fighting against Gaddafi may have a very different idea about the values they’re defending. When rebels talk about dealing out “revolutionary justice” to “traitors,” they likely don’t see that as a betrayal of their values, but rather as an expression of them. Robespierre didn’t see the use of terror as a compromise of virtue, but as the enforcement of it.

What I find amazing about Slaughter’s tweet is the belief that an armed insurrection against what everyone acknowledges to be a brutal regime will adhere to international standards for the treatment of detainees and non-combatants. It isn’t going to make that much difference what the political views of the opposition’s nominal leadership are. The terrible weakness and indiscipline of the rebels make them ill-suited to waging the sort of campaign against the guerrilla tactics now being used by Gaddafi’s adapting forces, and this exposes the civilian population to greater harm.

For the rebels, this is an existential fight against a vastly superior enemy, and popular support for that enemy is evidently not as weak as their Western boosters would have liked to believe. That doesn’t excuse the rebels for anything they do to their detainees and suspected regime loyalists. Acknowledging this is to take seriously that supporting these rebels could lead to other atrocities. When liberal interventionists urged the U.S. to take sides in this conflict, they were urging the U.S. to lend support to a rebel force it couldn’t control and doesn’t understand. Tweeting disapproval of rebel detainee treatment from the other side of the planet when you have been a leading figure in demanding outside support for those rebels is rather precious. One of the reasons that I have made a point of drawing attention to reports about rebel mistreatment of detainees, arbitrary detentions, and rhetoric about “revolutionary justice” meted out to traitors is that there should be no illusions about what it means to back armed insurgents against their own government.

Be that as it may, it’s quite something to see the White House briefing reporters that the President took these decisions quite so recklessly and without knowing, by his aides’ own admission, anything about much of what might happen in Libya. Some process! ~Alex Massie

Brooks’ defense of Obama’s decision is interesting, because in the same column in which he reports on the recklessness of the decision Brooks claims that it was also “thought-through.” Obama is bold, but also careful. Supporters are pleased that he has assembled a broad (but actually very narrow) coalition, but others among them are even more pleased that he intends to pursue a policy that most of that coalition opposes. Thanks to the confusion surrounding the war’s goals, war supporters don’t quite know how to defend the Libyan war. For some, the limits of the intervention are what make it wise, and others can rest assured that Obama and his advisors are not so foolish as to be constrained by those limits. Advocates of the “responsibility to protect” congratulate themselves on the humanitarian goals of the war and the international legality of the enterprise (while carefully ignoring all of the apparent violations of the resolution they are touting), and advocates of regime change content themselves with the knowledge that the administration isn’t going to be limited by anything so unimportant as the authorizing U.N. resolution that allowed them to launch the war in the first place.

If the war escalates, the former will be able to say later, “Well, of course, all I wanted to do was save Benghazi, but Obama and his people got out of control.” This will sound and be very much like the Iraq criticisms of liberal hawks after the invasion of Iraq had already begun. Then you heard things like, “I supported deposing Hussein, but not like this!” or “Invading Iraq is fine, but we need Security Council approval!” Competence became their watchword. Unprovoked invasions and occupations were fine, so long as they were run by competent people. For many of the liberal interventionists who opposed or turned against the Iraq war, their objections were overwhelmingly procedural. If the Libyan war turns into a stalemate-preserving action, the more aggressive supporters of the war will claim that they have been vindicated, saying, “This is why we should have made an all-out effort!” This will be comparable in spirit to those neoconservatives and “super-hawks” who claimed that the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq stemmed not from being too aggressive, but for being too restrained in its willingness to use force to crush insurgent resistance and attack Iraq’s neighbors.

In another part of his column today, Brooks wrote:

President Obama took this decision, I’m told, fully aware that there was no political upside while there were enormous political risks. He took it fully aware that we don’t know much about Libya. He took it fully aware that if he took this action he would be partially on the hook for Libya’s future. But he took it as an American must — motivated by this country’s historical role as a champion of freedom and humanity — and with the awareness that we simply could not stand by with Russia and China in opposition.

Greg Scoblete mocks this:

In other words, the president made a momentous strategic decision on matters of war and peace that his own spin doctors admit he knew nothing about but which he understood could potentially hamstring the U.S. for years to come…. just to be different than China and Russia.

It’s actually worse than that. It is how an American must act, except for all those times when we don’t and mustn’t act that way. It is how an American must act, as if Americans have no choice in the matter.

Just replace Russia and China with the names of the rising democratic powers that also abstained on the resolution, and see how silly Brooks’ last sentence becomes. Can anyone imagine saying, “we simply could not stand by with Brazil and India in opposition”? The two largest non-American states in NATO opposed military action in Libya, but Brooks didn’t write, “We simply could not stand by with Turkey and Germany in opposition.” Why not? Why couldn’t the United States just once recognize that its best interests and the views of most governments in the world are actually on the same side?

It’s not as if the allied governments actively involved in the Libyan war are really fighting on behalf of “freedom and humanity.” The freedom and humanity of Libyans or Tunisians were hardly priorities in Paris and London (or Washington) before January. Until about ten weeks ago, Sarkozy was quite content with things as they were in North Africa, and until six weeks ago Saif al-Gaddafi was the “reforming” toast of the British political and business classes. I don’t hold that against them. At the time, those policies made sense for the respective governments and their definitions of national interests, but what I do find preposterous is the claim that they have suddenly discovered the importance of using force to vindicate “freedom and humanity” in Libya.

Qatar and the UAE have managed to spare some jets for supporting the no-fly zone, presumably because they were not needed to suppress Bahraini protesters. They and the Saudis have more than enough forces on the ground to do that. Of course, if they can get the U.S. and other governments to do the heavy lifting to attack a ruler they hate, and we are stupid enough to take the bait, they are simply advancing their goals at minimal cost. Even better, they can position themselves to be on the side of “the people” while doing all that they can to keep their own people in line.

Before rising democracies became confident in asserting their own foreign policy views, it was a bit easier for pro-war advocates to claim to be on the side of “freedom and humanity.” This was based on the rather childish idea that if Russia and China are against something, it almost has to support “freedom and humanity,” but at least there was a certain logic to it. Now that several of the largest democracies in the world are in the same camp with Russia and China, it becomes even harder to take seriously that starting wars against governments that have done nothing to us has much to do with “freedom and humanity.” The rise of influential democracies in other parts of the world that are not automatically inclined to interventionist policies undermines the idea that Americans have some imperative to act based on our political values. Their rise also means that the U.S. and our handful of allies in Libya will find the U.N. path to future interventions blocked. As Gideon Rachman wrote earlier this week, Libya is likely not the beginning of a new era of humanitarian interventionism (thank goodness), but rather its last gasp:

But the reality is that the Libyan war is more likely to mark a last hurrah for liberal interventionism than a new dawn. For the brutal truth is that the western powers that are the keenest promoters of the idea will not have the economic strength or the public backing to sustain many more overseas interventions. And the rising economic powers – China, India, Brazil and others – are deeply sceptical about the whole concept.

Indeed, the opportunistic and over-eager way in which the intervening governments used the “responsibility to protect” doctrine to justify jumping into Libya’s civil war, which is not what R2P was created to address, will almost certainly destroy the nominal international consensus in support of this doctrine and give it the appearance of yet another pretext for Western wars against governments they wish to overthrow.

The policy the administration publicly describes is constricted and implausible. The multilateral force would try to prevent a humanitarian disaster from the air, but then it remains maddeningly ambiguous about what would happen next: what our goals are; what our attitude toward the Qaddafi regime is; what an exit strategy might be.

Fortunately, the policy the Obama administration is actually implementing is more flexible and thought-through. ~David Brooks

This is the “clever hypocrisy” defense: Obama’s stated policy is nonsense, which is how we know that the stated policy can’t possibly be the real policy of regime change, because no one could possibly buy into the stated policy. No one, that is, except for all of the defenders of “limited war” and the “responsibility to protect” that have bought into it. Oh, and the officials in charge of NATO, and several NATO member governments. And the Arab states participating in the mission. Other than that, nobody could possibly believe it. All right, so what is the real policy? As Spencer Ackerman put it yesterday, hope is the military’s plan. Specifically, the hope is that Gaddafi’s supporters will just give up and turn on Gaddafi:

While defining the military mission as “limited,” he expressed confidence that “political and economic measures” can lead to Gadhafi’s downfall. Under pressure, Gates conceded that a “stalemate” wasn’t an acceptable solution for U.S. policy in Libya. So for good measure, he contended that continued allied airstrikes — not conducted by U.S. pilots — can batter Gadhafi loyalists until they face “a very different set of choices and behaviors in the future.” In other words: hoping the commanders quit and kill Gadhafi.

As you can gather from Ackerman’s reporting and the expressions of disbelief that greeted Gates’ testimony in the Senate yesterday, this isn’t actually a very convincing approach if the goal is to remove Gaddafi from power. Gates doesn’t believe that the rebels have any chance of winning, but he believes stalemate is unacceptable, which rules out the cease-fire that the authorizing U.N. resolution demands, and it doesn’t seem to include the negotiated solution that the Turks have been floating since before this began. That’s what makes Brooks’ credulous defense of the real policy so painful to read. Brooks writes:

There are three plausible ways he might go, which inside the administration are sometimes known as the Three Ds. They are, in ascending order of likelihood: Defeat — the ragtag rebel army vanquishes his army on the battlefield; Departure — Qaddafi is persuaded to flee the country and move to a villa somewhere; and Defection — the people around Qaddafi decide there is no future hitching their wagon to his, and, as a result, the regime falls apart or is overthrown.

Strictly speaking, the U.S. and allied forces have no authorization to try to topple Gaddafi, and attempting to do so remains illegal as far as most of the world is concerned. Inducing a soft coup by means of non-American bombing is still regime change forced from the outside, no matter who it is that removes Gaddafi. All of the talk of international consensus, regional support, and enforcing the norms of humanitarian intervention will be badly discredited, and you can pretty much forget ever getting other major states to acquiesce in an ostensibly humanitarian intervention in the future. The Libyan civil war did not qualify for the conditions of the “responsibility to protect,” but because the intervention was done in its name the “responsibility to protect” will become synonymous with the cynical exploitation of a foreign political crisis to install a new government. Good luck getting support to stop genuine humanitarian catastrophes after abusing the principle to meddle in a civil war. The legitimacy and international legality that war supporters have been celebrating for the last two weeks will begin to vanish as it becomes clear that the U.S. and our allies have exploited the resolution’s authorization of force to try to force regime change.

In the end, Brooks doesn’t have much confidence that the “three D” plan will work:

It may turn out in the months ahead that we simply do not have the capacity, short of an actual invasion (which no one wants), to dislodge Qaddafi. But, at worst, the Libyan people will be no worse off than they were when government forces were bearing down on Benghazi and preparing for slaughter [bold mine-DL]. At best, we may help liberate part of Libya or even, if the regime falls, the whole thing.

This claim in the middle is obviously not true. The Libyan people as a whole are going to be worse off than they were when this began almost two weeks ago. A large percentage of the Libyan population remains in areas firmly under Gaddafi’s control, and they will bear the brunt of food, medicine, and fuel shortages that prolonged conflict will cause. If their country continues to be under aerial assault, fragmented by civil war, and suffering from supply shortages, the Libyan people (especially those outside rebel-controlled areas) will certainly be worse off. The disorder and violence during and after an invasion would only add to this.

Brooks ends with an anecdote from an article in which an American reporter is told that ” everyone wants Qaddafi to go.” If if were true that “everyone” wanted him to go, we wouldn’t be discussing any of this right now. He would already be gone. Clearly, quite a few Libyans for various reasons seem willing to let Gaddafi stay, and for whatever reason more than a few of them seem willing to fight on his behalf.

So Gates disclosed that “we have made provisions to have our strike aircraft available on a short period of time,” should NATO be unable to stop an unfolding humanitarian disaster. The AC-130s and A-10s — and, possibly, U.S. warplanes — will be “sort of on a standby.” McCain still characterized that as the U.S. “abdicating its leadership role.”

Gates pushed back. Within NATO, he said “everyone understood the United States would come in heavy and hard in the beginning,” and then pull back to a supporting role.

But Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said the U.S. should stay in “heavy and hard until we have won this thing.” His GOP colleague, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said she couldn’t understand how to get rid of Gadhafi without “putting our full might in.”

That set Gates off. “When you say putting the full might of U.S. involved, that’s another full scale war in the Middle East,” he said. Gates moved to shut the rhetorical door Adm. James Stavridis opened to a post-Gadhafi NATO peacekeeping mission, noting that the United Nations resolution authorizing the war might consider it an illegal occupation — and besides which, it would be “nearly impossible” for NATO to agree on that mission.

“The last thing this country needs is another exercise in nationbuilding,” Gates warned. “The future of Libya, the U.S. ought not take responsibility for that.” Gates essentially pleaded for patience from the Senate, for NATO warplanes to pound loyalist forces until the military turns on Gadhafi. ~Spencer Ackerman

It’s tempting to feel sorry for Gates in all of this. After all, he did his best in public to make the idea of intervening in Libya seem as unnecessary and foolish as possible, he has made a point of correctly telling people that Libya is unimportant to the U.S., and he seems intent on making sure that the U.S. isn’t dragged into a commitment beyond what Gates initially believed would be happening. Regardless, this is partly Gates’ responsibility and partly his fault. He must know as well as anyone that once the U.S. was involved, it wasn’t going to matter whether it formally became a NATO operation or not, and he had to know that the expectation would be that U.S. forces would be expected to do most of the work for as long as the war lasted. After years of trying to get European governments to do more in Afghanistan, Gates should have known better than anyone that there was no political will and not many military resources for European allies to rely on in a Libyan campaign.

Adam Garfinkle referred to intervening in Libya as going down the rabbit hole, and it certainly has the feeling of going through the looking-glass. Garfinkle also wondered how Gates could do anything but resign now that the war had started. 12 days in, we’re still wondering.

There are weird, inverted resemblances to Iraq that most Libyan war supporters want to pretend aren’t there. Instead of the reckless, unprepared Pentagon pushing for an invasion over the objections of more cautious State Department officials, we have the reckless, unprepared State Department officials insisting on a war the Pentagon sees as pointless. In other words, the people whose expertise was most relevant and should have been heeded were deliberately sidelined, and the people who had no idea what they were getting into prevailed.

The roles and political positions of the American and British governments are reversed. Where Britain was dragged along behind Bush into Iraq by Blair supposedly to keep the “special relationship” intact, Obama has given the impression that he and his administration have been dragged along behind Britain (and France) by Cameron for the sake of allied solidarity. Cameron’s Cabinet is the one staffed with rather neoconservative ideologues (e.g., Fox, Gove, etc.), and Obama has become the trendy center-left political leader who tries to reassure a skeptical world that the latest stupid war is actually necessary and good.

We also have in Gates a skeptical member of Obama’s Cabinet who enjoys a good reputation for competence, but someone who is nonetheless forced to go out and defend a policy that he has to know is profoundly ill-advised. Like Powell, Gates has remained in place despite the fact that he obviously wanted no part of this Libya business. What makes Gates’ failure to resign over this so puzzling is that he is already on his way out the door. The attack on Libya would have given him an easy way to leave now, and he could have washed his hands of the policy decision he had tried to get Obama not to make. Perhaps if Obama had seriously thought he might lose Gates with all the bad publicity and controversy that would entail, he might have given the matter much more thought before he plunged into the middle of this.

Marco Rubio has sent a letter to Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell on Libya, and he reminds us why we shouldn’t take him seriously on foreign policy:

I am writing to seek your support for bringing a bi-partisan resolution to the Senate floor authorizing the President’s decision to participate in allied military action in Libya.

Furthermore, this resolution should also state that removing Muammar Qaddafi from power is in our national interest and therefore should authorize the President to accomplish this goal. To that end, the resolution should urge the President to immediately recognize the Interim Transitional National Council as the legitimate government in Libya.

Shorter Rubio: Let’s compound our horrible mistake by breaking international law, and imitate the most impulsive, foolish decisions of the French.

While Congress absolutely should and must vote on Libya, escalating things with a Libyan Liberation Act or something of that sort and recognizing a ramshackle rebel leadership as the government of Libya would make a horrible Libya policy even worse. By some accounts, the National Council is rapidly losing the confidence of eastern Libyans, and it is extremely generous to claim that it is functioning as a government of anything right now. As John Lee Anderson reported:

What they are not is organized. No one can explain how the Benghazi council works with the National Council. Last week, another shadow government, the Crisis Management Council, was announced in Benghazi; it was unclear how its leader, a former government planning expert named Mahmoud Jibril, would coördinate with Jalil, or whether he had supplanted him.

The rebels barely have a fighting force, and it is doubtful that most Libyans outside of Cyrenaica would accept a government based in Benghazi propped up by Western support. Rubio is proposing that we follow the example of international support for the Somali Federal Transitional Government, which controls Mogadishu and a few other pockets and wouldn’t even control most of that without Ethiopian intervention. Worse than our own South Ossetia, which is at least theoretically independent from Georgia on its own terms, the U.S. would have to pretend that the Benghazi Provisional National Council is the Libyan government and that it has sovereign claims over the rest of the country. Once the U.S. recognizes the council, we will find that this obliges us politically to keep them from failing. This would not hasten Gaddafi’s departure, but it would fracture Libya and start the U.S. down the long, excruciating path to partitioning Libya. This would almost certainly mean that the rebel council would come to be seen as lackeys of Western powers, and most Libyans in the areas controlled by Gaddafi might conclude that keeping Libya together is more important than removing Gaddafi.

Advocates of the Libyan intervention have invoked the “responsibility to protect” to justify the campaign. But R2P is narrowly and specifically aimed at stopping genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity on a very large scale. It does not give the international community an excuse to pick sides in a civil war when convenient [bold mine-DL]. 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. If R2P justifies Libya, then it certainly obligates us to overthrow the governments of Sudan and North Korea and to do whatever it takes to prevent the Taliban from seizing power in Kabul. ~Paul Miller

It is encouraging to see someone elsemakingthisimportantpoint. It’s worth adding that supporters of the Libyan war have conveniently identified their cause with the one part of the “responsibility to protect” that calls for armed intervention, but have very carefully ignored the responsibility to prevent conflict over the last few months in Ivory Coast. If Secretary Gates has anything to say about it, the U.S. will have nothing to do with the responsibility to rebuild, which is the third part of the doctrine.

I can think of few things more damaging and discrediting to the cause of mobilizing international action to respond to genuine cases of genocide and systematic regime crimes than a misguided intervention in a civil war that has nothing to do with the “responsibility to protect.” The Libyan war could very easily do for the “responsibility to protect” what the Iraq war did for the reputation of democracy promotion and U.S. non-proliferation policy. In Iraq, democracy promotion became the excuse for why the U.S. was in Iraq after the WMDs were not found, and democratization became associated with the massive carnage of Iraq’s sectarian violence. One wonders what the new justification for Libya will be after most people realize that the original justification was bogus.

Administration officials are obviously haunted by Rwanda, but as Miller says this civil war has nothing in common with what happened in Rwanda. Meanwhile, humanitarian interventionists aren’t just fighting the last war (i.e., Bosnia), so to speak, but they’re fighting the last war that didn’t even happen the way they remember it.

P.S. There’s also the related problem that intervening governments that want to arm the rebels would be going far beyond what the resolution actually authorizes, which would make it much harder in the future for the Security Council to agree on how to respond to other crises. The continuation of the Libyan war has the potential to damage both R2P and future international cooperation through the U.N. Score two for those far-sighted “progressive internationalists.”

The Independent has another account of the “liberators” in Bin Jawad:

Some local resentment has also been fuelled by the rebels’ hunt for “fifth columnists” supposedly colluding with the Gaddafi forces. In Bin Jawad, The Independent witnessed around 220 men, either members of the Hosseini clan or people associated with them, being dragged out of their homes, beaten up and taken away. The “arrests” took place as the rebels traded fire at the gates of the town with regime troops. Residents, already frightened, saw doors being kicked down by Shabaab fighters who also fired at windows where they claimed to have seen snipers.

One danger of any rapid political change justified in terms of overthrowing a tyrant is that revolutionaries tend to see anyone not actively working with them as potential enemies, and once collaborating with a tyrant has been defined as treason, as many of the rebels seem to define it, the logic of slaughtering those collaborators becomes more powerful. One of the problems with endorsing the cause of the weaker party in a civil war is that any government that does so has probably just aligned itself with the side that will be more desperate and possibly less inclined to use restraint in handling detainees and suspected “traitors” than the more powerful side. The less effective that the rebels are against Gaddafi’s forces, the more they may take their frustrations out on those people, whether suspected regime loyalists or unfortunate migrant workers, who happen to be in their power. Valorizing and cheering for one side in a conflict we don’t fully understand creates serious blind spots, and so does relying on overwrought mythology about previous interventions.

Der Spiegelreports on the atmosphere of distrust and paranoia in Benghazi:

No one dares to go out at night, as rounds of machine gun fire thunder through the empty streets. National Council members are no longer seen in public and they’re hard to reach for interviews. “There are death squads on both sides,” [bold mine-DL] says Nasser Buisier, who fled to the US when he was 17, but has returned for the revolution. Buisier’s father is a former information minister, but was also a critic of Gadhafi, and his son doesn’t have much that’s positive to say about the new leadership. “Most of them never had to make sacrifices, they were part of the regime and I don’t believe they want elections,” Buisier says. He believes the National Council is on the verge of collapse [bold mine-DL] and once that happens, he’d rather not be in Benghazi.

When Westerners say that they want to arm the rebels, I don’t think they mean that they want to arm people to organize death squads in Benghazi. There is something genuinely quite odd about some of the liberal enthusiasm for the rebels’ cause. If someone could go back and tell the same people 25 years ago that they would one day be cheering direct U.S. military support for a group of Libyan contras, they would have probably laughed at him, but that is what is happening. The news today was that Gaddafi’s foreign minister and former intelligence chief fled to Britain. That’s interesting, but if one had to bet on which crumbled first one would probably choose the National Council instead.

The report from Der Spiegel continues:

Around 100 regime loyalists have recently been imprisoned. Armed young men are searching houses and also arresting sub-Saharan Africans, anyone they assume to be mercenaries and all those they simply refer to as spies, locking them up in the same prisons once used to hold opposition members. They are then shown off to busloads of journalists. The prisoners sit in dark cells that stink of feces and urine. They say they’re from Mali, Chad, Sudan, that they’re construction workers and were dragged out of their houses.

The rebels’ mood, exuberant and lighthearted in the beginning, has shifted. Their rhetoric is becoming increasingly tense and they dismiss any criticism as propaganda. One former air force commander — now “spokesman for the revolutionary armed forces” — says, “anyone who fights against our revolutionary army is fighting against the people and will be treated accordingly.”

Another man, also a member of the National Council, talks about “enemies of the revolution” and declares that anyone who doesn’t join the rebel side will get a taste of revolutionary justice: “We know where they are and we will find them.”

These are the same threats, word for word, that Gadhafi uses to scare his opponents.

One can correctly argue that they have learned all of this from Gaddafi, and that he is responsible for so debasing the political culture in Libya and inflicting so much brutality on his people that he is partly responsible for how they imitate him when they retaliate against him and his followers. It still doesn’t help explain why so many Westerners are eager to increase the flow of weapons into Libya and help bring about the day when these rebels might have the strength to do to loyalists in Sirte and Tripoli what they are doing to migrant laborers and detainees in eastern Libya right now.

Update: NATO governments seem to recognize the potential for rebel attacks on civilian populations, and have warned the rebels accordingly:

Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, according to senior military and government officials.

As NATO takes over control of airstrikes in Libya and the Obama administration considers new steps to tip the balance of power there, the coalition has told the rebels that the fog of war will not shield them from possible bombardment by NATO planes and missiles, just as the regime’s forces have been punished.

“We’ve been conveying a message to the rebels that we will be compelled to defend civilians, whether pro-Qaddafi or pro-opposition,” said a senior Obama administration official. “We are working very hard behind the scenes with the rebels so we don’t confront a situation where we face a decision to strike the rebels to defend civilians.”

This would be appropriate and consistent with the resolution. It doesn’t make the intervention any more necessary or wise, because it guarantees that the civil war will be prolonged, more people will be displaced, and ultimately more people will end up dying, but at least it suggests that the U.S. and our allies are not going to be actively aiding the rebels no matter what they do.