The U.S. military dramatically stepped up its assault on Libyan government ground forces this weekend, launching its first attacks with AC-130 flying gunships and A-10 attack aircraft, which are designed to strike enemy ground troops and supply convoys, according to senior U.S. military officials.

Their use, during several days of heavy fighting in which the momentum seemed to swing in favor of the rebels, demonstrated how allied military forces have been drawn deeper into the chaotic fight in Libya. A mission that initially seemed to revolve around establishing a no-fly zone has become focused on halting advances by ground forces in and around Libya’s key coastal cities. ~The Washington Post

It’s worth noting that this is not only the opposite of what senior administration officials and the President have been leading the public to expect, but it also goes against the very sensible recommendations that CNAS’s Exum and Hosford offer here. They recommend that the U.S. halt direct military operations as part of an effort to pressure Gaddafi to accept exile if possible, but to render humanitarian assistance to the population, and to be willing to accept an outcome that leaves Gaddafi in place if necessary. One might quibble here or there, but their recommendations seem very reasonable, achievable, and designed to reduce U.S. involvement as much and as quickly as possible.

One of the more refreshing parts of the analysis Exum and Hosford present is their critique of the nonsensical idea that Obama took too long to decide on intervention in Libya. Exum stated this well in aseparate post earlier today:

When the administration went to war in Libya, it did so without talking through the crisis of Libya, its possible responses to the crisis, and the consequences for action or inaction. As a result, nine days into the intervention, we are at war without a clear policy, clearly defined goals, or stated assumptions. Instead, we are at war with a laundry list of activities — things we are doing, but things untethered to a broader framework.

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. The debate on whether or not we should intervene in Libya was a debate carried out in the highest echelons of the administration but without much outside consultation or opportunity for others to question the validity of the administration’s assumptions. And though humanitarian/liberal interventionists and neo-conservatives were, perhaps correctly, warning of dire consequences of immediate inaction, the administration did not go to war following a careful discussion of interests, strategic goals and assumptions about the environment and our capabilities.

Because you showed on the map just a minute ago Afghanistan. You know, we asked our allies, our NATO allies, to go into Afghanistan with us 10 years ago. They have been there, and a lot of them have been there despite the fact they were not attacked. The attack came on us as we all tragically remember. They stuck with us.

When it comes to Libya, we started hearing from the U.K., France, Italy, other of our NATO allies. This was in their vital national interest. The U.K. and France were the ones who went to the Security Council and said, “We have to act because otherwise we’re seeing a really violent upheaval with a man who has a history of unpredictable violent acts right on our doorstep.” So, you know, let, let’s be fair here. They didn’t attack us, but what they were doing and Gaddafi’s history and the potential for the disruption and instability was very much in our interests, as Bob said, and seen by our European friends and our Arab partners as very vital to their interests. ~Hillary Clinton

If we took this seriously, it seems to me that this would be yet another argument against the continued existence of NATO. NATO allies have been supporting U.S. efforts in Afghanistan to varying degrees, but this was done under Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty on the grounds that our allies had treaty obligations to the U.S. if the U.S. came under attack. The solidarity and support were and are much appreciated, but there is no reason for NATO forces to be in Afghanistan over nine years after 9/11. Invoking NATO support in Afghanistan as a reason to go to war with Libya just draws attention to how pointless it is for NATO allies to be in Afghanistan and how pointless it is for the U.S. to be attacking Libya.

The U.S. keeps them around partly for burden-sharing, and partly to exaggerate the multilateral nature of the Afghanistan war. In Libya, things are reversed: the most aggressive European governments want the U.S. involved to make waging the war possible, which it would not have been without U.S. involvement. Our NATO allies aren’t legally obliged to be in Afghanistan, but they do so to win American goodwill. Libya is an even worse case of coming to the aid of allies, since a defensive alliance in no way obliges the U.S. to aid European governments if they start a war of their own.

Whatever one wants to say about the U.S. continuing to be in Afghanistan, it is absurd to expect Europeans and Canadians to make military contributions at this point as part of their responsibilities within NATO. They stuck with us, and a majority of most allied nations would say that this has been a mistake that needs to be corrected as soon as possible. It is an indication of how lousy the case for the Libyan war is that administration officials have to play the allied solidarity card. The administration is saying that the U.S. needs to show solidarity with European allies, but most of those allies aren’t contributing anything and many of them are outright opposed to the action.

One thing that is noticeable about the European military contributions to the war is how few governments have contributed compared to Iraq and Afghanistan. This is partly because NATO and the EU are divided about how best to respond to the crisis in Libya, and partly because many of the new NATO members don’t have the capabilities to make sustained military commitments overseas. This points to the military weakness of many new NATO allies, which raises the question of what value the last two rounds of expansion have added to the Alliance. More than that, it shows that most European members of NATO want nothing to do with the military action that it supposedly “vital” to Europe.

Let’s also be honest in acknowledging that none of these states’ vital interests demanded starting a war with Libya. Having let the civil war end on Gaddafi’s terms would have been much more in the interest of Italy, which has the largest stake of all of our allies in Libya. The main reason why the French and British governments staked out a different, aggressive position on Libya is that Sarkozy wanted to erase the embarrassment of ties with the Tunisian regime, and the British government wants to back the rebels now because under Blair it was instrumental in rehabilitating Gaddafi and now finds this terribly embarrassing. One could argue that Washington is doing political favors for Sarkozy and Cameron, but it is quite a stretch to say that the national interests of France and Britain are being served in the process.

How can the administration confirm that the “responsibility to protect” is a dubious pretext for military action in Libya rather than a legitimate justification? By making absolutely clear that it doesn’t want Libya to serve as any sort of precedent:

The U.S. intervention in Libya won’t set a precedent for taking action elsewhere in the region where pro-democracy protests are challenging governments, Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser, said

Each case is “unique,” McDonough said at a briefing. Libya “doesn’t set a precedent that should create any expectations” for other interventions in the Mideast or elsewhere.

This is a belated bid to try to minimize the damage that the Libyan war could do by encouraging expectations of outside support in other countries, and it may be intended to contradict Sarkozy’s crazy rhetoric that Libyan intervention does set a precedent and should create expectations elsewhere.

It’s important to remember that it was exactly for its deterrent and precedent-setting effects that many humanitarian interventionists, including officials in the White House, wanted to take action in Libya. This was what made the Libyan crisis so much more important and required a prompt U.S. response. Now that the U.S. has intervened, there is a concerted effort from the administration to deny all of this, lower expectations, and tell everyone that the supposed norm-enforcing intervention is a one-time thing. Arguments that intervention would deter crackdowns elsewhere and keep the Arab Spring alive were all right for pushing the U.S. into war, but suddenly don’t matter quite so much to the administration now that the war has started.

In an excellent argument against humanitarian interventions, Damir Marusic points out a key flaw in the liberal interventionist position:

Nevertheless, even a stated intent to massacre an opposition in defeat shouldn’t be cause enough for military intervention. In the case of Libya, intervening as we have before Qaddafi did his worst leaves us justifying our policy with all sort of weak, second-order arguments about Qaddafi’s threat to his neighbors and to the Arab Spring.

As we are seeing now, the administration doesn’t put much stock in these other arguments, and it clearly wants to limit the extent of its commitments now that it has foolishly plunged into Libya. The effect of deterring dictators from killing protesters was not going to happen anyway, but the administration has confirmed that it never believed this. The administration line is that the Libyan crisis was so exceptional that it required a special response. The only problem is that there isn’t very much exceptional about the conflict in Libya. It is not terribly different from many of the other internal conflicts around the world, which forces us to ask once again why the U.S. is involved in Libya’s civil war.

What unites these arguments is a belief that foreign policy must be Hippocratic: First, do no harm. But the advocates of moral consistency cannot stomach this moral minimalism so they cloak it in moral maximalism: Rather than arguing against humanitarian war anywhere, they argue for it everywhere, which is a less honest way of saying the same thing. ~Peter Beinart

As one of Beinart’s “moral minimalists,” I have to say that he gets this wrong. Beinart describes the minimalist view fairly well:

Terrible things happen in distant societies but we do not really understand them, and so our efforts at amelioration either prove futile or actually make things worse. We think that because our motives are pure we can violate the norms of sovereignty that we guard jealously when it comes to our own affairs, but in so doing we open—or reopen—the door to a predatory imperialism that can do even greater harm.

I have made some version of all of these arguments in the past, and this sums up many of my main objections to humanitarian intervention. These are much stronger arguments than charging interventionists with inconsistency, and it is telling that Beinart spends the rest of his column carefully ignoring them. He cites Kosovo as a success, but it was a perfect example of how intervention made things worse for the civilian population, led to the creation of a statelet run by criminals, and provided a model for another major power to support separatists in a smaller, neighboring state and eventually impose a de facto partition on the smaller state. The Kosovo war had largely negative consequences for virtually all parties on the ground, it didn’t avert a disaster, and it actually created one, but Beinart is counting on most people not remembering that.

Beinart knows that the consistency argument is weaker, which is why he focuses all of his attention on refuting it. While it is weaker, the consistency argument is perfectly appropriate to use against humanitarian interventionists when they are saying that the Libyan war is supposed to serve as a precedent and a warning for other regimes. Humanitarian interventionists claim that they are enforcing a norm, and so it is a legitimate question why they have chosen to act in one internal conflict and have refused to do so elsewhere. Critics of the Libyan war aren’t demanding military intervention in Ivory Coast at all, much less for consistency’s sake, but we are questioning the priorities and judgment of humanitarian interventionists when they decide that a small-scale civil war in Libya takes precedence over an Ivorian crisis that displaces a million people and has far more worrying warning signs of the potential for mass killings fueled by ethnic hostilities. Libya interventionists are anxious to prevent another Rwanda, so it is worth pointing out that something much more like another Rwanda may be unfolding in West Africa while they are fixated on a much smaller crisis in Libya.

It’s true that Western governments can’t and won’t intervene everywhere, which means that the effectiveness of intervention will depend to a large degree on the wisdom and judgment of the interventionists. They have to be able to convince the rest of us that they know how to select the right crisis and that they have come up with the right response. The arbitrary selection of Libya justified with a lot of weak rationalizations after the fact and the quick resort to escalating the military conflict with air power suggests that humanitarian interventionists aren’t very good at this and haven’t become any better since 1999. More than most, they are susceptible to the CNN Effect and they seem to set their priorities on the basis of whatever happens to be receiving the most coverage. If interventionists are applying their own standards so arbitrarily and mistakenly, why should skeptics take their justifications seriously?

The credibility of humanitarian interventionists rests heavily on their claim that they do understand enough about the conflict into which they are inserting the U.S. and allied forces. They also must have generally good judgment to weigh correctly the relative importance of different foreign crises, and the public would need to have confidence that they are able to recognize when there is “demonstrable need” for constructive outside intervention and when that intervention would make things worse. Simply saying “where we can, we must,” which is the heart of Beinart’s argument, shows that humanitarian interventionists fall short on all three. The Libyan war shows humanitarian interventionists are treating the “responsibility to protect” as a loophole rather than a standard designed to require action to avert genuinely dire humanitarian crises. If their knowledge, judgment, and discernment can’t be trusted, that makes humanitarian interventions as dangerous and misguided as preventive wars based on shoddy and manipulated intelligence.

The humanitarian case for the Libyan war gets weaker the more one thinks about it. As Benjamin Friedman put it the other day:

Nor is it clear that bombing Libya serves humanitarian ends. True, absent outside intervention, the Libyan government would likely have reasserted its authority in the east, killing rebellious civilians. But the civil war that intervention prolonged will probably kill more. In his March 18 speech justifying war on humanitarian grounds, Obama quoted Qaddafi’s promise to show “no mercy and no pity,” but failed to note that the dictator was threatening rebel fighters, not civilians, and explicitly excluded rebels that surrendered. The point is not that we should bank on such promises but that the path to minimizing violence is uncertain.

If the Libyan war is justified under the authority of a “responsibility to protect” doctrine, as the supporters of the war claim it is, it is up to them to explain why the Libyan intervention qualifies despite the relatively small scale of the humanitarian crisis. If Friedman is right, the catastrophe that the administration claims was averted may not have happened at all, or at least nowhere on the scale that required emergency intervention by outside forces. It is for the advocates of this intervention to explain why concentrating international efforts and attention on escalating and intensifying an internal conflict with outside forces improves rather than worsens the situation for the civilian population in Libya, and it is then for them to explain why those efforts wouldn’t have been much better directed at conflict prevention and protection of the civilian population in Ivory Coast.

Political capital, international support, time, military resources, and attention are all limited. Humanitarian interventionists insist that their cause should receive a large amount of all of these at a time when our government is already overburdened with commitments, but in practice they seem inclined to fritter them all away on the crisis du jour rather than conserve them and apply them to avert genuine, large-scale loss of life. If we were talking about any other area of policy, this indiscriminate and wasteful approach would badly damage interventionists’ credibility, but because it involves the exercise of American power abroad they are allowed to be as careless and wasteful as they please. The problem isn’t that humanitarian interventionists are being inconsistent. It is that they are proving to be incompetent according to their own standards.

Credibility rationales for wars suffer two crippling deficiencies. First, there is little evidence credibility travels much. Second, even if it did, fighting limited wars of questionable value seems likely to damage one’s perceived willingness to fight elsewhere. Western intervention in Libya may encourage Middle-Eastern dictators to crush dissenters rather than accommodate them. ~Benjamin Friedman

Friedman and the others at National Interest‘s The Skeptics blog have been doing great work debunking many of the arguments for the Libyan war. In his latest post, Friedman exposes the emptiness of the core pro-war claims, and he is making an argument very similar to those I have put forward against what we might call the “dictator deterrence” claim. The brutal repression we have been seeing in Syria is currently showing this claim to be false. At present, Syrian security forces have been shooting protesters and killing them by the dozens, and it seems that so long as dictatorships rely on police, irregular militia, and hired thugs to suppress dissent their violence does not cross the arbitrary line that the administration drew in Libya. Dictatorships can adapt to this fairly easily with a combination of regular police brutality and thuggery along the lines of the Basij in Iran.

I hadn’t thought of this before, but it occurs to me now that the Libyan intervention is something of a gift for other authoritarian governments. Even more than before, authoritarian governments are going to be able to portray dissenters in their countries as being in league Western powers, and they will be able to point to Libya’s fate as an example of what demands for political reform can cause. While the administration seems to be very keen to align itself with certain popular movements in the region, they are lending credibility to authoritarians’ arguments that internal dissent is intended to weaken a country and that dissent invites outside attack.

How better to help authoritarian governments to conflate political opposition with “seditionists,” as the Iranian government likes to call Green movement activists, than for Western governments to identify with a political opposition in Libya that is actively engaged in genuine sedition and armed insurrection? This isn’t going to fool determined opponents of the regime, but it would probably drive political fence-sitters in these countries towards supporting their regimes. There would then be even more suspicion that protest movements are collaborating with foreign governments or that they serve as unwitting pawns of foreign powers, and a larger percentage of the population will share these suspicions. This is the flip side of the perverse incentive to encourage protest movements to take up arms and start hopeless rebellions. The Libyan war sets several precedents, but there isn’t much reason to think that any of them are constructive.

The plunge into Libya has put the U.S. and our allies in a position where they are actually unable to follow through on the implied threat to intervene against other governments that commit atrocities against their population, and the manner in which the administration facilitated and led the Libyan war makes it extremely unlikely that the conditions that made the Libyan war possible can be repeated again.

This story from Bloomberg confirms that:

Clinton said the elements that led to intervention in Libya — international condemnation, an Arab League call for action, a United Nations Security Council resolution — are “not going to happen” with Syria, in part because members of the U.S. Congress from both parties say they believe Assad is “a reformer.”

That last line raises a question. Suppose that Gaddafi’s son Saif had already been in charge, but responded to protests in Libya more or less exactly as his father did. Would there have been humanitarian interventionists seriously arguing at that point that Saif’s “reformer” credentials ruled out intervention? Last month, Saif’s “reformer” reputation was declared dead as soon as he sided with his father and the regime and against the opposition, so why is Assad’s alleged “reformer” reputation still secure?

One reason why intervention is not going to happen in Syria is that Arab League governments are probably never going to go along with another intervention of this kind ever again. They certainly don’t intend to create a precedent or enforce a “responsibility to protect” norm. Libya is a special case for them. The organization’s internal politics make it unthinkable that they would expel Syria as they did Libya, and without the political cover of Arab League support it is unlikely that there would be an intervention resolution for Russia or China to veto. What that means is that Assad could conceivably carry out another Hama-style massacre that makes anything Gaddafi has done so far pale in comparison, and it would become immediately clear that the “responsibility to protect” doesn’t mean anything. If enforcing the “responsibility to protect” is the ideological reason for the Libyan war, doesn’t it show how pointless the Libyan war is when the administration’s top officials are acknowledging that it is not repeatable?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has warned all Arab rulers that they risk Libya-type intervention if they cross a certain line of violence against their own people. ~EU Observer

When confronted with the vastly worse humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ivory Coast, supporters of the Libyan war repeat some version of the standard line, “we can’t intervene everywhere, but where we can, we must.” On the one hand, Libyan war supporters accept that giving Libya priority over more serious humanitarian and political crises elsewhere is basically arbitrary and dependent on special circumstances. Libya’s humanitarian crisis, while serious, is not exceptional, nor does it actually demand outside intervention justified under the “responsibility to protect,” but it is an opportunity that is too good to pass up. One might say that the Libyan civil war is a crisis that humanitarian interventionists can’t let go to waste.

At the same time, advocates of the “responsibility to protect” intend for the attack on Libya to deter other authoritarian regimes from resorting to violence against protesters, which implies that there is a willingness to intervene in like manner again and again if necessary. Intervening in Libya will aid protesters in other countries, so we are told, because other governments will conclude that the risks of violent crackdown are too great. Sarkozy is explicitly saying that Libya is just the first of many such interventions:

Every ruler should understand, and especially every Arab ruler should understand that the reaction of the international community and of Europe will from this moment on each time be the same [bold mine-DL]: we will be on the side of peaceful protesters who must not be repressed with violence.

As Sarkozy understands, the reaction “from this moment on each time” will not be the same, and it cannot be the same. The “responsibility to protect” doctrine is not nearly so broad as what Sarkozy is making it out to be here. Sarkozy is expanding what the doctrine means to encompass every instance of regime violence by the military against the population. This is not only an impossible doctrine, but it is one that directly undermines the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” by applying it to numerous situations for which it was never intended. Pledging intervention in reaction to every instance of regime violence makes a promise that Western governments and the U.N. will never be able to keep.

International political conditions may permit a Kosovo or Libya once every so often, but such actions are fortunately rare. Indeed, the one credible defense Libya interventionists have for choosing Libya as the test case for the “responsibility to protect” is that conditions for intervening anywhere else are supposed to be worse and that Libya is the only crisis that currently commands sufficient international consensus. In other words, it becomes much harder to defend the Libyan war as a precedent-setting, norm-enforcing action when one of the chief arguments in favor of the Libyan intervention (as opposed to focusing on different, more important crises) is that most other crises have too many other complicating factors to permit intervention.

The danger from all of this talk of setting a precedent is that some people around the world might just be foolish enough to take it seriously. Sarkozy can issue warnings to “every ruler” all he likes, but we should all understand that neither he nor any of the other governments now intervening in Libya will be able or willing to challenge every ruler who resorts to violence. Indeed, Gbagbo seems to be taking advantage of the focus on Libya to escalate the conflict in Ivory Coast. The Libyan intervention itself has been sudden, confused and controversial enough that many of the participants will be less inclined to plunge into the next crisis. Other authoritarian governments are taking some solace that Libya will sour Western governments on this sort of intervention for several years or even longer. Samantha Power once lamented that Iraq had killed the possibility of humanitarian intervention for a generation, but the arbitrary and ill-conceived way in which Obama has involved the U.S. in Libya seems likely to make such intervention even more politically toxic in the future. The war to revive humanitarian interventionism may very well end up discrediting it for a long time, which means that there isn’t much chance that it is going to set a meaningful precedent. As far as I can see, that means that the central ideological argument for this war is utterly false.

That doesn’t mean that protest movements won’t start expecting outside help. Such movements are bound to be encouraged by international intervention in Libya, and they are going to confront their governments in the hope that other governments will protect them. When that happens, Sarkozy’s high-flown rhetoric will be nowhere to be found, and Sarkozy himself may well be out of power after elections next year, but the false promise of protection will lead to new uprisings and brutal crackdowns. Because there is no broad public consensus in support of humanitarian interventionism in any of the Western countries engaged in the Libyan war, there is not going to be any continuity in policy, nor will there be anything like consistency in applying these principles. Even if there is a “successful” intervention in Libya, there will likely be many other uprisings inspired by the Libyan intervention that will be crushed without much outside protest.

Update: Westerwelle has rejected Sarkozy’s position:

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle says it is “dangerous” to threaten military action against other autocratic Arab leaders after, a clear swipe at Sarkozy, my colleagues in Berlin tell me.

“I am very concerned by the latest public remarks, including from European partners, that we are not just talking about Libya but also about other Arab leaders,” Westerwelle tells a Berlin radio station.

“I warn against having a discussion in Europe about the possibility of military intervention everywhere in North Africa or the Arab world where there is injustice.

“I see this as a really dangerous discussion with difficult consequences for the region and for the Arab world as a whole.”

This script is playing out again in Libya. Western air power can easily annihilate Moammar Gaddafi’s modest air force and prevent him from using massed armor and artillery in the open. But once the dictator’s forces move into populated areas and resort to fighting among the civilian population, the utility of air power diminishes rapidly. Especially when the multilateral action is based on protecting civilians, rather than defeating one side, a dictator willing to mix ruthless fighters with innocent noncombatants poses serious challenges to limited applications of precision air power [bold mine-DL]. ~Stephen Biddle

One of the other problems that Biddle doesn’t mention is that air campaigns of this kind run out of targets long before the other government is willing to give up. This became a significant problem during the Kosovo war, as this account reminds us:

It took 11 weeks, in which NATO ran out of targets, sending pilots back again and again to “bounce the rubble” of military sites they had already destroyed. Civilians were killed in strikes that went wrong, and NATO solidarity was battered.

Libya’s government says dozens of civilians have already been killed, though its claims so far are impossible to verify.

“You can always get ‘lucky’ with air power — a strike that kills Gadhafi, for instance,” said Nikolas Gvosdev, professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College.

“But increased reliance on air power raises the costs, particularly the chances of collateral damage.” Faulty intelligence or an errant allied missile could destroy a school, a hospital or a mosque, killing dozens.

It’s important to remember that NATO succeeded in Kosovo because Milosevic finally capitulated, and not because the Alliance destroyed Serbian forces in Kosovo. Supporters of the current war like to compare this action to the combination of air power and the KLA on the ground that happened in 1999, but the reality is that NATO didn’t facilitate a KLA military victory. The Alliance did help the KLA achieve its political goal of driving out Serbian forces, but this was the result of Milosevic’s decision, which came as a surprise when it happened and only happened once allied governments began seriously considering a ground invasion. Thanks partly to Russian pressure, Milosevic agreed to withdraw.

Biddle explains why a Libyan stalemate is likely to develop:

The result could easily be a drawn-out, grinding stalemate. Libyan geography makes this more likely than usual: Vast expanses of open desert separate its urban centers, making it difficult for either side to move force over a distance and use it to take and hold enemy territory far from one’s base. Gaddafi has the transport but cannot safely move logistical convoys over miles of exposed roadways with coalition aircraft overhead. The rebels are safe from air attack but lack the organization, equipment or logistical capacity to project such power themselves over such distances. This could produce a deadlock in which neither side can prevail — but where the West is committed to flying apparently endless, apparently fruitless sorties while Gaddafi crushes any remaining opposition in the cities he controls and the rebels cry out for assistance from their sanctuaries.

The news today is that Ajdabiya has fallen to the rebels, but we’ve seen the rebels make successful advances before. What they have proven to be bad at so far is holding territory that they have taken, so it remains to be seen if they can successfully defend against concerted attacks from Gaddafi’s forces. If Gaddafi’s forces are prevented from launching attacks because of U.S. strikes on ground targets, that seems likely to create the stalemate Biddle describes.

Robert Haddick reaches a similar conclusion:

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, the guidance for Operation Odyssey Dawn, is almost surely too restrictive to permit a decisive air campaign against Qaddafi. As frustration mounts in the days ahead, coalition policymakers will likely seek to expand the target lists drawn up by their air planners. They may even look to Warden’s theory for an easy way out of the Libya conflict. But they won’t find enough there to avoid a looming stalemate.

From a purely Realpolitik perspective, Qaddafi also gives the U.S. a Muslim foe who—unlike even Saddam Hussein—is not particularly beloved by the Arab street, much less Arab leaders. Which explains why, unlike the war in Iraq, this military intervention is truly multilateral. ~Jason Zengerle

Zengerle’s right that Gaddafi has been targeted because of the extent of his international isolation. As I’ve said before, this is why one of the lessons other authoritarian regimes will probably draw is that Gaddafi’s mistake wasn’t his brutal repression of opposition, but rather his failure to cultivate stronger ties with states that wield significant influence and aren’t concerned about how he governed his country. The attack on Libya sends the message to authoritarian states that engagement and security cooperation with Western governments provides no guarantee against attack in the future, and it makes cultivating ties with one or more of the abstaining major and rising powers much more attractive.

Gaddafi has as many enthusiasts and backers in African Union states as he has detractors and enemies in Arab countries, but the AU isn’t very important in the scheme of things and its governments have been largely ignored during this crisis. It’s understandable that intervening governments that were looking for a green light from a regional organization would look to the group made up of governments that mostly hate Gaddafi. It’s also a reminder that the “truly multilateral” nature of the intervention depended to a large degree on privileging the Arab League’s position over that of the AU.

As Rogin reported yesterday:

Bosco also said Obama was practicing “a la carte multilateralism” by trumpeting the endorsement of certain regional international organizations, such as the Arab League, while dismissing the opinions of other groups, such as the African Union, which strongly opposed the intervention.

“There’s a legitimacy shopping exercise that’s going on here,” Bosco said.

The more we dig into it, the more we see that the “truly multilateral” boast is not very meaningful. Apart from providing political cover, Arab League support doesn’t amount to anything concrete. Two of the Arab League states that border Libya, Algeria and Sudan, resisted the call for outside intervention, so the “unanimity” of the League’s request exaggerates the degree of support for the intervention among those states that will be more directly affected by continued fighting in Libya. If the war drags on, it wouldn’t be surprising if Algeria and Sudan covertly helped reinforce Gaddafi. Algeria has denied earlier reports that it was doing this, but Bouteflika has every reason not to want another nearby dictatorship to collapse. It has been Libya’s neighbors in North Africa that have been the most reluctant to intervene, and none of them is directly participating in the intervention, which makes the war seem more like the invasion of Iraq than its backers would like to admit.

The handover of no-fly zone operations to NATO control is not going to mean a significant change to U.S. involvement in strikes on ground targets:

A NATO decision to take charge of a no-fly zone over Libya does not include conducting air strikes against Muammar Gaddafi’s ground forces, a mission that will remain in U.S. hands until a new command deal is reached, Vice Admiral Bill Gortney said on Friday.

If the Libyan air force has now been destroyed, handing over the no-fly zone to NATO control isn’t terribly meaningful. Spencer Ackerman has more in his report:

Gortney said he expected the “coming days” to bring clarity — as it’s now being reported that NATO is set to take on the whole spectrum of the Libya war, down to appointing a Canadian general, Charles Bouchard, to run it. Apparently that’s not been settled yet. Gortney showed reporters charts listing “TBD” — to be determined — for when NATO will take control of the no-fly and if it’ll take control of the no-drive.

Here is another detail from The New York Timesstory from this morning:

Effectively, that means that planes from NATO countries will fly missions over Libya with little fear of being shot down since Tomahawk missiles, most of them American, largely destroyed Colonel Qaddafi’s air defenses and air force last weekend.

But NATO and American officials said NATO had balked at assuming responsibility, at least for now, of what military officials call the “no-drive zone,” which would entail bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s ground forces, tanks and artillery that are massing outside crucial Libyan cities, and doing so without inflicting casualties on civilians.

Late Thursday night a senior Obama administration official insisted that NATO had agreed to assume responsibility for the no-fly and “no-drive” zones but said the details remained to be worked out. The official’s statements appeared to contradict those of the secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who said in Brussels earlier Thursday that NATO was still considering whether to take on “broader responsibility” for the war.

As the story explains, the obstacles to this are Germany and Turkey, which do not accept that attacks on Gaddafi’s ground forces are authorized by UNSCR 1973. German abstention on the resolution and Turkish opposition to military action from the beginning seem likely to become enduring headaches for the coalition so long as the U.S. insists on making the Libyan war a NATO operation. One can see why Sarkozy has been eager to minimize the NATO role in all of this, because he sees that involving NATO will impose limits on how the war against Libya can be waged. In meantime, despite what some might have hoped, the U.S. will be left shouldering the burden for most of the attacks on Gaddafi’s forces.