The White House would forge ahead with military action in Libya even if Congress passed a resolution constraining the mission, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during a classified briefing to House members Wednesday afternoon …Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), who asked Clinton about the War Powers Act during a classified briefing, said Clinton and the administration are sidestepping the measure’s provisions giving Congress the ability to put a 60-day time limit on any military action.

“They are not committed to following the important part of the War Powers Act,” he told TPM in a phone interview. “She said they are certainly willing to send reports [to us] and if they issue a press release, they’ll send that to us too.” ~TalkingPointsMemo

Via Andrew

This is an outrageous statement, but it’s entirely consistent with what the administration has been illegally doing for the last 12 days. They seem to believe quite seriously that, as long as they don’t call it a war, it doesn’t fall under any laws regulating war powers or the Constitution. The sliver of good news in all of this is that Obama and his officials are showing such contempt for American law and institutions that they are exposing themselves to a serious political backlash. War supporters won’t be able to hide behind the conceit that the war is legal. As far as U.S. law is concerned, it has never been legal, and only people making the most maximalist claims of inherent executive power can believe otherwise. Anyone who continues to support the war from this point on will be revealed as being either a blind Obama loyalist, an ideological liberal interventionist, or a devotee of the cult of the Presidency.

This is as good an occasion as any to make a few observations about the loaded language of “values” in the Libya debate. As the debate has unfolded, opponents of the Libyan war have framed our arguments most in terms of national interests and repeatedly demonstrated that the Libyan war doesn’t serve any vital or significant interests. Those are important arguments, and they’re necessary for showing why the war is wrong and unnecessary, but no less important is what the war says about American “values.” War supporters would very much like to make the debate over war an argument between people who support democracy and human rights (their side) and people who couldn’t care less about them (the other side), but what they have missed is that it is the backers of humanitarian intervention who are assaulting some basic American republican and democratic political principles. As David Rieff said the other day:

Why Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, or David Cameron feel that who rules Libya is any of their affair, and why they were more intent on securing the (grudging) assent of the Arab League than the assent of their own legislatures, shows just how misguided the doctrine of humanitarian intervention really is. These leaders are more intent on imposing democracy by force than in honoring the democratic judgment of their parliaments at home.

So, yes, this is an argument over “values” as well as interests, and the supporters of the war are willing to sacrifice concrete interests and jeopardize fundamental American values for the sake of intervening in another country’s civil war for what are very debatable humanitarian reasons. Americans are being asked to choose what we value more. Do we actually value self-government, the rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, and constitutional republicanism, or are we content to let all of those things be trashed on the whim of a relative handful of people for the sake of ideology and good intentions? Do we believe that the President must act within the law, or do we believe he is above it? Will we resist “angelic Caesarism” (as Rieff put it) or fall in line like the passive subjects the administration expects us to be?

After having been driven back from the town of Bin Jawwad on Tuesday, the rebels retreated through the oil hubs of Ras Lanuf and Brega on Wednesday en route to the strategic city of Ajdabiya, fighters reported. Rebels in a motley assortment of vehicles raced eastward on both lanes of the coastal highway toward Ajdabiya after coming under shelling in Brega from the more heavily armed Gaddafi forces, witnesses said. ~The Washington Post

Time has an interesting item on Bin Jawad from earlier today:

Bin Jawad, however innocuous it may seem in the sunshine, is not a town that Gaddafi intends to lose. And indeed, it may prove to be a trickier battle zone than the previous towns the rebels have conquered. The reasons may run deeper than Gaddafi’s heavy weapons. “Bin Jawad didn’t want to support us from the beginning,” says Fayez Mohamed Zwei, a fighter from Ajdabiyah. “The whole east was with us except Bin Jawad.”

Indeed, Bin Jawad may be the first town in the rebels’ westward push where many of the townspeople are not on their side.

It seems it was just the other day that pro-rebel enthusiasts here in the West were celebrating the rebel advance. Oh, right, it was just the other day, because the rebels cannot hold territory once they come under attack.

Sorry, did I say rebel advance? I meant to say glorious triumph of the “liberation movement.” When I see someone write enthusiastically about a foreign “liberation movement,” I ask myself what he is trying to sell me, because there are few more loaded and propagandistic ways to describe an insurrection than that. There are few words in political discourse more abused than liberation, especially when it comes to rebellions. Just eight years since we heard endless cheers for the “liberation” of Iraq, I cannot believe that otherwise reasonable people would resort to such language. When some war supporters use this language, it does help to distinguish between the people who approve of the original purpose of the intervention as authorized by the Security Council to protect civilians against attack and those that are intent on having the U.S. and our allies prolong and escalate the conflict (which the Security Council did not authorize) to achieve a certain political result. There is no satisfaction to be taken from any of this. It is a reminder that outside governments plunged into an internal conflict on the losing side without a plan.

The Bin Jawad anecdote caught my attention. There has been a fairly concerted effort on the part of supporters of Western intervention to minimize the extent of support for Gaddafi and/or neutrality among most of the Libyan population. The Libyan civil war isn’t so much a civil war between competing factions, they want to tell us, but an uprising of “the people” against “the regime.” One side is assumed to have broad backing, and the other very limited popular support. Of course, if that assumption is wrong, almost everything else about the case for intervention collapses. The rebels are presumed to possess some greater political legitimacy because they are opposed to Gaddafi, but that doesn’t follow at all.

Certainly, Bin Jawad is just one small town. It may not be representative. What continues to amaze me is the confidence that war supporters have that people in eastern Libya who hail from a different region than Gaddafi and have more reason than most to hate Gaddafi are representative of most Libyans. Do most Libyans want a less repressive and brutal government? That seems clear. Do most of them want to achieve that end through armed violence backed by outside governments? That’s much less certain.

Meanwhile, we should be very wary of applauding anyone in this conflict. Here is another part of Bin Jawwad report on the “liberators”:

The rebels did not take chances with a town they could no longer trust. After pushing back into Bin Jawad on Tuesday afternoon, the rebels quickly set about searching the streets and homes of the town for hidden troops, mercenaries and traitors. “Alley to alley, house to house,” shouted one man at the fighters as trucks veered down Bin Jawad’s unpaved, bumpy side streets. He used Gaddafi’s own words — an infamous threat from an earlier speech that is often repeated in the rebel-held east. It’s meant to mock the Colonel; it’s even graffitied on the walls. But as the rebels tread into unwelcome territory, they seem to mean it in much the way Gaddafi did — in a kind of unrelenting and paranoid door-to-door campaign to rout their enemies. “Search the houses,” another man shouted, as fighters ran down Bin Jawad’s alleys and took up position behind walls. Gunfire and the explosions of rocket-propelled grenades reverberated from within the town. At least one house was set on fire after rebels located a suspected Gaddafi loyalist there [bold mine-DL].

Brutal reprisals are part of many civil wars, but what I still don’t understand is why the U.S. should want to be associated with any of this.

Now that our government has been needlessly entangled in this conflict, it would be far better to halt military operations and seek a negotiated settlement. Perhaps using Turkish or African Union mediation, it is worth exploring whether a cease-fire and amnesty for rebels could be negotiated. The alternative is a military stalemate enforced by our planes and a prolonged conflict that will continue to displace and harm civilians.

Update: It appears that the rebels have begun retreating from Ajdabiya as well.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, continuing her drumbeat of criticism of President Obama’s policies and priorities, ripped his rationale Wednesday for intervening in Libya, arguing that it isn’t justified by any compelling national interest.

The Tea Party stalwart, riding a wave of national attention since aides said she may be on the cusp of a presidential run, also said she opposes giving military assistance to the rebels fighting Libya strongman Moammar Gadhafi, saying she believes al Qaida fighters have infiltrated their ranks.

“I would not have gone in” to Libya, Bachmann said on NBC’s “Today” show.

Bachmann said what she calls the “Obama doctrine” provides a misguided rationale for the United States “to enter into one country after another.” ~Minneapolis Star-Tribune

I don’t have any illusions that Michele Bachmann is antiwar as such, but this is exactly the sort of thing that Tea Partiers and Tea Party-aligned members of Congress needed to be saying from the beginning. It remains the case that there aren’t very many of them saying this, but it is encouraging that one of the better-known House members connected to Tea Party activists has decided to speak out against this war. Along with Rand Paul, Bachmann has become one of the more outspoken Tea Party Republican critics of Obama’s decision. As I have said before, the Libyan war is everything that Tea Partiers claim to loathe: it is unconstitutional, it is unnecessary, it serves no national interests, it could end up lending support to jihadists, it is a war waged to enforce a U.N. resolution, it has weak public support, and it is a war fought partly to strengthen a doctrine that subverts national sovereignty. If there is any military intervention that Tea Partiers absolutely should oppose, it is this one.

Bachmann has a reputation for occasionally saying inflammatory or misinformed things, and she may be staking out this position simply to oppose what Obama is doing, but what should give supporters of the Libyan war pause is that Bachmann is making far more sense on this issue than Obama and many of his defenders.

P.S. Sean Scallon’s profile of Michele Bachmann from the May issue of the magazine is well worth reading to understand Bachmann’s background and her relationship to the Tea Party movement.

There was no mad rush to war, and certainly no master plan to invade Libya to grab its oil. The administration resisted intervening militarily until they had no choice, preferring at first to use diplomatic means and economic sanctions to signal that Qaddafi’s use of force would not help keep him in power. The military intervention came when those had failed, and when Qaddafi’s forces were closing in on Benghazi and he was declaring his intention to exterminate them like rats. ~Marc Lynch

Supporters of a military action are always supremely confident that the administration responsible for taking that action did not rush to war and had no other choice. It’s important to point out that these are not impartial observations or balanced descriptions of the situation. They are rhetorical devices designed to make outrageous, reckless, controversial decisions seem well-reasoned, careful, and unavoidable. When opponents of the war in Iraq described Bush’s relentless push to attack Iraq as the “rush to war,” advocates of the invasion emphasized how long, careful, and well-aired the period before the invasion was. Compared to Libya, those defenders of the Iraq invasion have a point.

Critics of both Iraq and Libya have likewise emphasized the hastiness of presidential decisions, but when wars are unnecessary the decision to go to war will always appear hasty. After all, if there is no just cause for war, any decision for war will seem impetuous and ill-considered. What needs to be emphasized here is that the decision to intervene in Libya really was hasty and ill-considered. I’ll quote Exum again:

Although some of the administration’s most vociferous detractors have claimed the president “dithered” on Libya, the reality is that the administration deliberated and then acted on Libya in too hasty and too closed a manner.

Obama reportedly changed his mind on the evening of Tuesday, March 15. The war started on March 19. For a war that has nothing to do with repelling or retaliating against a sudden attack, that’s pretty hasty no matter how you look at it.

The claim that the administration had no choice is just not true. This may be the least necessary, most arbitrary foreign war in U.S. history. Obviously, the President concluded that intervening as Gaddafi’s forces were approaching Benghazi was the right choice, but one of the reasons this is so questionable is that the decision seems to have been reached with little or no concern for the consequences beyond the immediate goal of preventing the fall of Benghazi. One of the reasons there seems to have been little or no concern for these consequences is that the decision was a hasty one driven by a mixture of panic about what might happen and guilt over things that happened in the ’90s during the Clinton administration.

Lynch continues:

It [Libya] did matter more to core U.S. national interests because the outcome would affect the entire Middle East.

As far as I can tell, this is a conviction that doesn’t seem to have much to support it. Granted, Libya was receiving extensive coverage, and “the whole Arab world was watching,” but the effect of not intervening simply wouldn’t be as powerful as supporters of the war claim. Besides, are we seriously accepting the assumption that the United States government should make its policy based on Al Jazeera’s editorial decisions regarding which political crisis it chooses to cover the most? When assessing the importance of Libya to core U.S. interests, there also needs to be more attention to costs as well as purported benefits. As Exum and Hosford write:

In contrast to its neighbor, Egypt – a country of 83 million people – Libya has just 6.5 million people, barely three percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and has never been a bellwether in the Arabic-speaking world. The interests the United States does have in Libya, such as protecting civilians and providing momentum to the revolutionary fervor sweeping the broader region, come at a potentially high cost by exposing the United States to considerable risk of protracted and resource-intensive conflict.

And again:

But the military operations in Libya are also incurring opportunity costs. As the United States once again intervenes militarily, competing spending priorities, both foreign and domestic, are ignored. Such operations shift the U.S. focus away from countries like Iraq and Afghanistan (which still include over 130,000 U.S. troops), South and East Asia, and other strategically and economically critical regions. This leaves many
to question why the United States and its allies are devoting resources to a country of relatively low strategic importance in North Africa.

Finally, as I have mentioned before, Paul Pillar reminds us of the security costs the U.S. is already incurring and may continue to incur in the future:

Much has been said about what lessons other authoritarian regimes in the region will draw if the Libyan ruler is allowed to use force to stay in power. We also should think about the lessons that will be drawn if someone who gave up not only terrorism but also his unconventional weapons programs in return for normal relations and acceptance in the international community is made a target for regime change. The lesson that the mullahs in Tehran and others will draw is that it would be useless to reach any agreement with the West about terrorism or nuclear weapons because the West is really interested above all in regime change and, regardless of any agreements that may have been reached, will seize the first opportunity that comes along to try to realize that goal.

Weighing all of these costs against the possible benefits of intervention, which are as vague and ill-defined as the mission, one would have assumed that the U.S. had no choice but to stay out. Of course, there is always a choice, and Obama made the wrong one.

The Libyan rebels were well on their way to marching on Tripoli, until Obama’s dithering at the United Nations gave Gaddafi time to drive them back to the gates of Benghazi. ~Marc Thiessen

Anyone paying the slightest attention to the military capabilities of the rebels over the last few weeks knows that this is nonsense. Despite over a week of bombing and strikes on Gaddafi’s ground forces, the rebels have been unable to hold any territory once they face a counter-attack, and they are already losing the ground they “took” in the last few days. Each time the rebels have encountered stiff resistance, they have faltered, and as soon as Gaddafi’s forces go back on the offensive they flee in pell-mell retreat. This is understandable, as they are for the most part not trained soldiers, and their adversaries are significantly better-armed and trained. The idea that they were “well on their way to marching on Tripoli” is a bad joke, and if there’s anything more outrageous than the misguided policy Obama has chosen it is the lie that an earlier intervention would have secured rebel victory. As we are seeing, the Libyan rebels are not capable of obtaining victory without U.S. and allied forces eliminating most of Gaddafi’s forces for them.

The part where the president pointed out that we are not China. We cannot afford to remain who we are and take some detached, uber-realist view of the world. We do not just let atrocities happen. (Well, we do. But it’s true that it offends Americans, in our psyche, to stand aside when atrocities are taking place.) Values matter to the United States — even when our interests are unclear. We act on our perceived values and do not always take the kind of cold, calculating approach to things that some foreign policy analysts (myself, often, included) wish we would take. ~Andrew Exum

The more I think about this “America is different” argument, the more it drives me up the wall. It’s not just that it is a bad excuse to do the wrong thing (i.e., start a war). It’s not true! It didn’t offend most Americans in their psyches or anywhere else when Georgian forces launched Grad rockets on Tshkinvali’s sleeping civilian population, and it didn’t offend most of them in their psyches when Lebanon was treated as a bombing range in 2006, and it never even crossed their minds to feel anything when the Krajina Serbs fled from an advancing army that was committing atrocities against them. Considering that these actions were all carried out by U.S. allies, and in some cases using arms and training provided to them by the U.S., there should have been more offended American psyches rather than fewer, but this was not the case.

This isn’t because Americans are morally callous or indifferent to human suffering, but partly because all of these outrageous acts were usually presented to the American public as self-defense, or as an unfortunate but necessary action, or as a regrettable but understandable overreaction against the real “bad guys.” In some of these cases, many Americans might not have heard anything about it until much later once their opinions about the conflict had already formed and hardened, but even those that were aware of the harm that was being done to civilians during these operations either denied that they happened, blamed the victims, or shrugged them off. The point isn’t just that there are double standards for what allied governments do, which is obvious, but that Americans don’t have any greater impulse to prevent atrocities than any other nation, and the belief that “it offends Americans, in our psyche, to stand aside when atrocities are taking place” is another expression of that self-congratulation I was criticizing earlier today.

When government officials, journalists, and pundits present a situation as an atrocity or an atrocity-in-the-making, most of the public usually accepts the story. The story may be true or not, but what matters is how it and the relevant actors are presented to them. The less familiar they are with the situation, the more likely they are to believe the story. Gaddafi is someone the public already knows about, so it is easy for everyone to assume the worst. As Paul Pillar points out:

The overdrawn picture of how much blood of innocent Libyans would be shed if the regime had been allowed to proceed unmolested by foreign air power is, despite Qaddafi’s track record, only worst case speculation.

Did we remain “who we are” while “letting” those things happen in South Ossetia, Lebanon, and Croatia? I think we did. Perhaps if we had a less exalted opinion of “who we are,” we wouldn’t be so anxious about minding our own business and leaving other nations to sort out their internal affairs. I continue to hope that what “we” are doing in Libya is definitely not a reflection of who we are as a people. Perhaps if we had less ambition to vindicate our “values” around the world whenever possible, we might do a better job of securing our interests and otherwise leaving other nations in peace.

No, we aren’t China, but there are a lot of perfectly decent governments that aren’t China, either, and they don’t feel the need to meddle in every crisis that shows up on television. Notice that no one ever says, “We aren’t India,” because someone might wonder what would be so terrible about being a large democracy that refrains from plunging into wars even when it has cause to do so. We are always asked to choose between hyper-active “values”-saturated empire or Chinese amorality. Now that’s a false choice.

Judah Grunstein didn’t think much of Obama’s speech, but he believes it accomplished a few things:

What the speech did accomplish, however, is to reset the criteria by which that outcome will be judged. In this, Obama was making up for his initial mistake of letting the rhetoric of regime change outstrip his willingness to use force to achieve it. By distinguishing the limited military objectives from the long-term political goal, Obama successfully realigned the two arms of policy. This, then, is the post-Iraq version of Cold War containment: We’re willing to live with leaders we don’t approve of, but not with behavior we don’t approve of. We’ll use politics to address the former and multilateral military force to address the latter.

There are caveats, of course, and the part of the speech that articulated them hewed pretty closely to the “When We Can” standard I defended last week. But Obama also offered a compelling “Where We Must” corollary to respond to those who, like Daniel Larison, continue to narrowly define American interests, and those who, like Andrew Exum, worry that we can no longer afford to assume even Obama’s limited version of “bear any burden.”

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t find Obama’s case for humanitarian intervention compelling at all. On the contrary, his commitment to stalemate in the speech last night obliges the U.S. to devote resources to an indefinite “containment” policy that was entirely unnecessary, and this will probably make living conditions in much of Libya much worse. This is the outcome that Exum and Hosford have described as the most dangerous outcome:

A stalemate in Libya would effectively result in a de facto partition of the country with a severely undergoverned and disorganized safe haven in eastern Libya for the rebels that could provide refuge for various militant and criminal groups capable of exporting violence and instability to other countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Such a scenario would prolong U.S. and allied military intervention as only a major Western investment in developing the independent governance, economic and security force capacity of eastern Libya would be likely to forestall this outcome. However, such an investment is highly unlikely due to the overarching fiscal constraints facing the United States and NATO countries and competing priorities.

We’ve seen something like this form of “containment” before during the ’90s as it was applied to Iraq, and it was both pointless and immoral in light of the effects it had on the civilian population. If what we can expect in Libya is a repeat of that policy, the decision to intervene will have likely contributed to a much worse overall humanitarian crisis for the entire population of Libya. Benghazi may have been saved, but the Libyan people could easily end up paying more dearly over time than if outside governments had not stepped in.

That said, what we’re talking about isn’t that much like “Cold War containment.” It’s a much more aggressive, intrusive policy than that. Cold War containment normally implied that the government being contained was largely free to do what it wants to do inside its borders, so long as its domestic activities didn’t relate to threats against other nations. Soviet crackdowns were awful, but as long as they happened in one of Moscow’s satellites the U.S. wasn’t going to take military action. So what we’re talking about here isn’t containment, but a sort of updated, limited form of rollback doctrine expressed in terms of the “responsibility to protect” that stops short of regime change.

The entire purpose of intervention in Libya is to dictate to Gaddafi what he can and cannot do inside Libya’s borders. Libya posed no serious threat to any other state when it was attacked, so it is hard to see how “containment” of Libya will be anything other than an ongoing, indefinite violation of Libyan sovereignty. Unlike Iraq in the ’90s, there was no recent act of international aggression preceding this ongoing violation of Libyan sovereignty, so it will be interesting to see how long the other major and rising powers in the world go along with this “containment.”

Greg Scoblete noticed a Brookings Institute survey of the foreign policy views of 1,000 Millennial leaders (defined as people who “already have the “Washington bug” and have set themselves towards a career in politics and policy.”) He cited this section from their report:

Isolationism, not globalism, is winning out. Fifty-eight percent of the young leaders think that America is “too involved” in global affairs and should instead focus more on issues at home. This level of isolationism, forged by growing up in the time of 9/11, Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, doubled the number recently seen in adult survey results. Indeed, contrary to the idea of young, globally minded Obamacrats vs. inward-looking Tea Partiers, young Democrats are actually more likely to hold isolationist attitudes than young Republicans.

I’m not sure how much significance to attach to a result that shows a majority of Millennial leaders thinks America is “too involved.” They might still be quite internationalist in their views and still reach that conclusion. The extent of U.S. involvement abroad has been increasing for their entire lives, and they could easily see involvement at this level as being excessive and unsustainable. Since members of this generation started to be born, the U.S. has launched at least seven significant military interventions or peacekeeping operations not including the new war in Libya (which hadn’t happened yet when this survey was taken). By comparison with any other period in U.S. history, this frequency of military intervention overseas is very unusual, and it would be bizarre if the generation that has grown up with all of this wouldn’t be a little weary of it by now. It is probable that some of them dislike elements of the bipartisan consensus in favor of economic neoliberalism, so the “experience of globalization” may not automatically incline them to favor neoliberal policies.

For the Brookings analysts to define this “too involved” response as “isolationist” is just another example why “isolationist” should probably just be abandoned as a term in foreign policy debates. The contrast between “globally-minded Obamacrats” and “inward-looking Tea Partiers” is ridiculous for many reasons. This reproduces the conceit that interventionists are very well-informed about the world and cosmopolitan in outlook, and that only “inward-looking” people could possibly be skeptical about the importance and necessity of extensive American involvement abroad. It is normal and unremarkable for people who identify as Democrats to prefer to pay more attention to domestic problems. Notice how the statement is phrased: “The U.S. is too involved in global affairs and should focus on more issues at home.” This is a fairly common refrain on the left.

Believing domestic issues should receive more attention and resources than they do right now is hardly incompatible with being “globally-minded,” and it is odd that people at Brookings would want to make them seem incompatible. Nor does it follow that one is “inward-looking” if one wants to devote more resources to domestic problems. Anyone who gives serious thought to America’s economic competition around the world will recognize that the U.S. is missing many opportunities by devoting so many resources and so much time and political capital to conflicts that need to be coming to an end and conflicts that should never have started in the first place.

What puzzles me is what the other 42.4% could be thinking. After seeing the consequences of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, almost ten years of war in Afghanistan, and the perpetual “war on terror,” four out of ten “young leaders” believe that the U.S. has struck the right balance or has actually neglected international issues. I would like to assume that they haven’t been paying attention, but they were chosen for this survey because they do pay attention.

I have a short response to Obama’s Libya speech at The Daily Beast. Suffice it to say, I didn’t like it, and I don’t think it did any of the things Obama needed to do to reassure the public that he and his advisors have a clue what they’re doing. My contribution to the responses published last night had to be brief, so there is still much more to say.

As many others have noted, Obama defined the Libyan war as an expression of Americanism. For years and contrary to all the evidence, many opponents of Obama have denied that he accepted American exceptionalism, and they have tried to interpret everything he has done according to this completely false assumption. These people will have no idea what to make of Obama’s speech. What I didn’t emphasize often enough when correcting these misinterpretations was that we shouldn’t want Obama to embrace American exceptionalism if it means that we are going to have put up with foreign policy idealism and recklessness.

One of the most obnoxious arguments that interventionists have used over the last month is that “America is different” when it comes to intervening in other nations’ conflicts. If that is true, and I don’t accept that it is, this is a flaw to be repaired rather than a virtue to be praised. As far as I can tell, it isn’t true. Americans aren’t any more likely to want to intervene on the other side of the planet to prevent atrocities, but it’s also misleading to conflate refusal to intervene in another country’s conflict with indifference or obliviousness to atrocities. There is something twisted in the idea that the chief way for a nation to express moral concern and compassion for people under attack is through the use of armed violence.

There is a pretense that humanitarian interventionists care more about different nations’ shared humanity, but in practice they seem to have less awareness of shared humanity when it comes to urging military action against foreign governments and their supporters. Once the “bad guys” have been identified, humanitarians suddenly turn into hard-liners for the other side of the conflict and start mimicking the collective punishment arguments that other hawks routinely employ. It was officials in the last humanitarian interventionist administration that enthused about “crushing Serb skulls,” but the attitude today seems to be much the same. What began as a mission to save Benghazi is turning into an occasion for Americans to start rooting for major assaults on Sirte and Tripoli. What seems to concern them most is that the rebel forces aren’t capable of launching those assaults. Sirte may be a Gaddafi stronghold, and people there may be remaining supportive out of tribal loyalties, vested interests, fear, or some combination of the three, but if the U.S., allied and rebel forces end up doing to Sirte what U.S. forces did to Fallujah it will be inexcusable.

Praising a willingness to launch humanitarian interventions as an expression of American uniqueness is no less irritating than any other form of self-congratulation. It is a bit more incoherent when the intervention in question is one that Obama has been at pains to portray as anything other than American-led until last night. Even when it seems that the administration might be trying to extricate itself as quickly as possible from a conflict it mostly wanted to avoid, we still hear the same tedious refrains about “leadership” and America’s special role.

Last night was a liberal expression of the same impulse that drives some people to insist that America is the greatest country in history. Where many mainstream conservative enthusiasts of American exceptionalism define that exceptionalism in terms of being the freest, most prosperous country or the one with the greatest social mobility, some liberals want to define it in terms of superior idealism or morality. It doesn’t make it any better if Obama conceives of this as a struggle to make America more idealistic and moral. In fact, it makes it worse in some ways. It’s one thing to recognize past American mistakes and crimes and vow never to do such things again, but it’s something else entirely to see the use of military force as an appropriate means to expiate past national sins.

Beinart’s response took a particularly odd turn when he wrote this:

That’s what makes his Libya decision powerful. He knows that there are good reasons for Middle Easterners to fear when they see American planes overhead. And yet he is acting to show that it does not have to be that way.

Leaving aside the geographical confusion*, these are very strange sentences. Right now, if you’re a Libyan and you’re not on the side of the rebels, you have some good reasons to fear American planes overhead. Even anti-Gaddafi civilians in cities controlled by Gaddafi’s forces are going to have reason to be afraid of the gunships and tank-killers buzzing overhead. Restrictive rules of engagement, precision weapons, and training notwithstanding, all of the people living in Sirte and Tripoli have good reasons to be afraid. The ease with which humanitarian interventionists seem to forget that they are cheering on the deliberate killing of people who have done nothing to them and theirs is bad enough, but the notion that America is making great moral progress if it uses force to kill the right sorts of people for the right reasons, and especially when the conflict has nothing to do with us, is simply evil.