By all accounts, the decision for the U.S. to facilitate a U.N. resolution on Libya came during a Tuesday meeting in the White House when Obama was persuaded by advocates of humanitarian intervention, namely Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power. The collapse of the rebels’ position and the impending fall of Benghazi spurred the administration to take last-minute action that they had been publicly resisting for weeks before that. Up until then, everyone (including and especially officials at the Pentagon) was working under the assumption that the U.S. would not be intervening. Josh Rogin described this process last week:

At the start of this week, the consensus around Washington was that military action against Libya was not in the cards. However, in the last several days, the White House completely altered its stance and successfully pushed for the authorization for military intervention against Libyan leader Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi. What changed?

The key decision was made by President Barack Obama himself at a Tuesday evening senior-level meeting at the White House, which was described by two administration officials as “extremely contentious.” Inside that meeting, officials presented arguments both for and against attacking Libya. Obama ultimately sided with the interventionists. His overall thinking was described to a group of experts who had been called to the White House to discuss the crisis in Libya only days earlier.

“This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values,” a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself. The president was referring to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.

This is why I referred to Obama’s “unexpected about-face” on Libya intervention in my latest column. Ben Domenech believes that I have a “profoundly exaggerated” view of Obama’s role in shaping the U.S. response. Domenech argues that “wars don’t merely occur at the whim of the president, nor are they always prosecuted by his design.” I’ll grant Domenech the second part of that, but the Libyan war is as close to a case of a war occurring at the whim of the President as one can find. Obviously, Obama’s decision didn’t occur in a vacuum. There were some loud calls for U.S. intervention coming from members of Congress, and Obama’s decision is inexplicable without referring to the officials in the administration that argued in support of intervention, but it was Obama who abruptly sided with interventionists at that meeting and it was Obama who made possible the process of organizing a Security Council resolution last week.

As a matter of process, what I referred to as Obama’s “about-face” was the critical event without which it is doubtful that the resolution or military action would have happened. Obama wasn’t and isn’t the only actor who matters in all of this, but without Obama’s endorsement of the intervention the Libyan war wouldn’t be happening, or at the very least the U.S. would not be directly involved in it. When I referred to Obama’s decision to intervene as a combination of the worst traits of Bush and Blair, I was referring mainly to the substance or to the results of the decision. As I explained in the column, Obama’s decision was a hybrid of the worst of Bush and Blair because it combined executive usurpation with the impulse to engage in humanitarian interventionism.

Like Bush, Obama has claimed sweeping presidential authority in a matter of national security, in this case the authority to start wars without authorizaiton, even if he and his advisors refuse to call the war by its proper name. Like Blair in Kosovo, he has responded to another country’s political crisis by treating it as an opportunity to enforce a new norm of liberal internationalism. I could have gone beyond that to say that Obama is engaging in executive usurpation because he has launched a war of humanitarian intervention (and a “time-limited” one, no less), which according to administration officials does not require him to receive Congressional authorization. Obama’s Blair-like policy has led him to take Bush-like actions.

Josh Rogin put together a useful table listing the governments making military contributions to the Libyan war and comparing the current war with past military actions from Desert Storm through the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As Rogin explains, the Libyan coalition is the smallest of them all. In fact, Rogin’s table somewhat overstates the support that the coalition has, because Turkey’s military contribution is strictly limited to naval support in enforcing the arms embargo. The Turkish government has stated repeatedly that it will not participate in enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya. Turkey’s participation is taking place partly under protest from Ankara and partly as a way of keeping the intervention from escalating.

As Sarkozy has started complaining that the token NATO hand-off threatens to undermine the value of token Arab support, it’s worth saying a few things about the nature of the coalition that is attacking Libya. The almost total lack of support from the countries that were once praised as “New Europe” is a useful reminder that the support for invading Iraq that came from these countries was an expression of gratitude/sucking-up for recent or prospective NATO expansion and a desire to prove that they were useful allies. It was also the result of Washington’s pressure to use that support to create the impression that there was broad, international backing for its policy. When Washington is not cajoling and bribing its weaker central and eastern European allies into backing a bad policy, they are no more inclined to plunge into unnecessary conflicts than anyone else.

There is no appetite in most of Europe for another “out of area” war, and once again we see just how meaningless the “New Europe” conceit really is. The lack of military contributions from almost all new post-1996 NATO members is also a reminder that NATO expansion has added almost no value to the Alliance’s military strength. While NATO control of the Libya operation required the consent of all member states, there is much less support for military action against Libya within NATO than there has been for Kosovo or Iraq.

In cutting out Congress, Obama has overstepped even the dubious precedent set when President Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo in 1999. Then, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel asserted that Congress had given its consent by appropriating funds for the Kosovo campaign. It was a big stretch, given the actual facts — but Obama can’t even take advantage of this same desperate expedient, since Congress has appropriated no funds for the Libyan war. The president is simply using money appropriated to the Pentagon for general purposes to conduct the current air campaign. ~Bruce Ackerman

Ackerman’s article is well worth reading, and it’s a valuable corrective to the usual nonsense being offered by Casey and Rivkin this week. Casey and Rivkin have never seen an executive action for which they could not invent some contorted, twisted legal defense. Their latest offering is remarkably weak even by their standards. Yes, they do their usual song and dance that whatever it is that Obama has done is grounded in “the Constitution’s text and history,” but they cannot actually explain why that is the case. Essentially, they say that military action is permissible because of U.N. authorization and because the Libyan government committed hostile acts against the U.S. decades ago. Seriously, this is the best the apologists for the imperial Presidency can do?

During the Bush years, Casey and Rivkin could always be counted on to discover that whatever the President had done it was completely consistent with the Constitution and legal precedent, because apparently they cannot imagine that there is anything pertaining to national security or war that the President as Commander-in-Chief is not allowed to do. Is indefinite detention without trial permissible? Of course. Warrantless wiretapping? Naturally. Torturing detainees? No problem. To cite Casey and Rivkin as reliable authorities on interpreting the extent of executive power is a joke, but for some reason this is what Jacob Heilbrunn does today.

Obama’s decision to attack Libya is outrageous for many reasons, but one of these is that it reflects Obama’s apparent belief in sweeping inherent executive powers to start and prosecute wars arbitrarily. As Ackerman writes later:

The president’s insistence that his Libyan campaign is limited in its purposes and duration is no excuse. These are precisely the issues that he should have defined in collaboration with Congress. Now that he claims inherent power, why can’t he redefine U.S. objectives on his own? No less important, what is to stop some future president from using Obama’s precedent to justify even more aggressively unilateral actions?

Earlier this week, I noted that there weren’t very many Tea Partiers and constitutional conservatives speaking out against the Libyan war. I found this disappointing, because the Libyan war seems the perfect opportunity for them to translate their critique of Obama’s other policies and their opposition to him into a foreign policy position on a new, significant issue. Red Phillips objected:

I have actually been encouraged by the conservative response. The best way I can think of to describe the conservative reaction to Libya is all over the map. No it hasn’t been the universal condemnation that we would like, but that would be expecting too much. But neither has there been near universal approval as there was for Iraq.

From what I have been able to gather, Phillips is correct that the reaction is all over the map. This is confirmed by anecdotal accounts I’ve heard, and it appears to be supported by the most recent polling. According to Rasmussen, conservatives are slightly less likely to support the Libyan war than the public as a whole: 39% support it, 41% are against it, and 21% are unsure whether they support it or not. So, yes, that is an improvement from the two-to-one conservative support that the Iraq war continued to receive up until now, and as the Libyan war continues it is possible that most of the remaining 21% will turn against the war.

Even so, opposition to the Libyan war should be much greater. Everything that conservatives dislike about Obama is on display here, the war serves no national interest, and the manner in which Obama is waging the war is practically designed to rile the American right with its emphasis on U.N. authorization, the “responsibility to protect,” and the willingness to let other governments publicly lead the effort. There is virtually no other action that Obama has taken that wins the support of almost 40% of conservatives, but Iraq and the Bush years have had such a corrosive effect that a war that even some apologists of the Bush Doctrine find reckless gets considerable backing from conservatives.

Unfortunately, the political effect of this split is to force Tea Party groups and Tea Party-aligned politicians not to stake out strong positions in opposition to the war, because there are large constituencies that support and oppose attacking Libya. Instead of being the perfect opportunity to stake out a principled, consistent critique of at least certain forms of interventionist wars, the divisions on the right make strong positions either way politically controversial and risky. At a moment when the country needs forthright criticism from conservatives against Obama’s outrageous decision, we are likely to get a muddled, weakened response.

There is another encouraging sign: 62% of conservatives agree that Obama should have sought Congressional approval, which is far higher than among most other groups except Republicans (63%). We can’t tell how much of the 41% conservative opposition to the war stems from Obama’s failure to seek Congressional authorization rather than an objection to the decision to intervene as such, and we can’t know how much of this is a genuine objection to unconstitutional behavior and how much of this is simple partisanship, but it’s something. One thing that Obama’s arbitrary decision to start a new war may do is to force conservatives to think more seriously about the dangers of unchecked executive power. If the Libyan war can get more people on the right to challenge outrageous claims of inherent executive powers, it will have had one good effect on political debate here at home.

Finally, we should remember that anything done to Qaddafi is being done to someone who had given up terrorism. 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 [bold mine-DL]. 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. ~Paul Pillar

Prior to the start of the Libyan war, I frequently said that the U.S. had nothing at stake in Libya, and I still think that’s basically correct. However, Pillar correctly points out that turning against Gaddafi will have some significant security costs for the United States that could have been avoided. This isn’t just a matter of direct blowback from the Libyan war in the form of Gaddafi-sponsored attacks or attacks by jihadists inspired to strike by the intervention in Libya. The costs also come in the form of all the opportunities for anti-terrorist and non-proliferation efforts that have been squandered by targeting the chief example of a rehabilitated proliferator and terrorist sponsor with military action and eventually regime change.

Gaddafi’s example will not only give authoritarian rulers every incentive to seek a nuclear deterrent, but it will convince those that have active nuclear programs that they should not bargain away their ability to create one. The attack on Libya will also encourage authoritarian rulers that cannot afford to build a functioning nuclear program to pretend that they are for the sake of strategic ambiguity, so we can expect many more regimes to engage in elaborate bluffs to create the fear among Western governments that they are developing unconventional weapons to deter attack. Hard-liners in every regime will cite Libya as an example of why Western governments cannot be trusted, and why their governments should not engage in appeasement of the West. They will reckon that negotiating disarmament or the repudiation of nuclear weapons opens their countries up to outside attack that will be justified on ideological grounds. The Libyan war will have significant, negative consequences for U.S. policies elsewhere whether or not the war is a success.

Update: Dr. Jeffrey Lewis at ArmsControlWonk has noted the North Korean reaction to the Libyan war.

As for Yemen, it is an ungovernable snakepit, home to rival tribes, secessionists and a local branch of al-Qaeda. Nobody in his right mind would intervene there. ~The Economist

Of course, “intervening” in Yemen wouldn’t have to mean attacking Saleh’s regime or anything nearly so stupid. The U.S. might just stop supplying the Yemeni government with weapons, or at least suspend such supplies until Saleh stops using force against protesters. The argument that a Libyan war will keep protest movements in the region alive is a weak one to start with, but it gets even weaker when there is minimal effort to pressure allied governments to ease up on violent crackdowns at the same time that the U.S. is helping to escalate and intensify a conflict in Libya.

What exactly is the difference between Yemen and Libya? If Yemen is such an “ungovernable snakepit” in which no sane outsiders would ever intervene, what makes Libya any better? By all accounts, it is home to home to rival tribes, secessionists and al-Qaeda sympathizers. Far from providing a compelling defense of the war, this argument drives home that the war in Libya remains arbitrary, accidental, and ill-conceived.

For one thing, the fight is intensifying, not dropping off. On Sunday, the U.S.-led coalition flew 60 sorties over Libya; Monday it flew nearly 80; on Wednesday it flew 175. At this moment, American pilots are bombing and shooting at Gadhafi’s armor and artillery units on the outskirts of Libyan cities. Off the shores of Libya, a bevy of Navy ships and subs have launched over 160 Tomahawk missiles.

Nor can NATO agree on a command structure that will get the U.S. out of the lead of the war. Obama might want to hand off command responsibility to a different, multinational entity, in order to keep the scope of the U.S. commitment limited. He just lacks a plan to do so.

It’s true that not every application of military force is a war. Reasonable people can disagree, but when Saddam Hussein’s removal of weapons inspectors in 1998 prompted four days of U.S. and British bombs and missile strikes, that didn’t quite rise to the level of a whole new war. By contrast, the concerted, open-ended multinational application of naval and air power to enforce a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to forcibly change the political behavior of a head of state — that’s something that Carl von Clausewitz would recognize in an instant. Call it smart, call it stupid, but please don’t call it anything besides war. ~Spencer Ackerman

I don’t entirely understand the impulse that government officials have to tell blatant, easily exposed lies to the public. Yes, they’re trying to manage how their actions are perceived, but usually the dishonesty is so obvious that no one apart from embarrassing partisan loyalists will fall for it. The administration officials claiming that the U.S. is not at war with Libya can’t actually believe what they’re saying, so what is the purpose? Is it just a bit of media spin? They must have concluded that an “Obama starts Libyan war” story would not be desirable, so they’re trying to pretend that the war the U.S. is waging against Libya is something else. Is it a bid to provide themselves with legal protection? Perhaps some of them think that the government is free to take military action at Obama’s discretion if they don’t call it a war. Perhaps they are guessing that once they call it a war they will be unable to wage a limited war, and will be forced in the end to expand the U.S. role rather than reduce it. Whatever the reason, the unwillingness to call the Libyan war what it is gives us another reason why the U.S. should halt its participation at once. If the administration cannot even acknowledge what it is doing right now, Americans should have no confidence that it has any clear plan of what it is going to do in the future.

But some of those same tactics appear to be creeping into the efforts of the opposition here as it seeks to stamp out lingering loyalty to Kadafi. Rebel forces are detaining anyone suspected of serving or assisting the Kadafi regime, locking them up in the same prisons once used to detain and torture Kadafi’s opponents.

For a month, gangs of young gunmen have roamed the city, rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies.

Over the last several days, the opposition has begun rounding up men accused of fighting as mercenaries for Kadafi’s militias as government forces pushed toward Benghazi. It has launched nightly manhunts for about 8,000 people named as government operatives in secret police files seized after internal security operatives fled in the face of the rebellion that ended Kadafi’s control of eastern Libya last month.

“We know who they are,” said Abdelhafed Ghoga, the chief opposition spokesman. He called them “people with bloodstained hands” and “enemies of the revolution.”

Any suspected Kadafi loyalist or spy who does not surrender, Ghoga warned, will face revolutionary “justice.” ~Los Angeles Times

It isn’t surprising that the rebels are seeking retribution against members of the regime, and the harassment and detention of blacks and migrant workers that is taking place is one of the ugly aspects of a civil war in which Gaddafi has been relying on foreign mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa. As we all understand, “revolutionary justice” is an old code for extra-judicial killings that are usually based on little more than suspicion. It may be that some of the people the rebels have captured really are working for Gaddafi, and it is also possible that these people are carrying out old vendettas or taking out frustrations on people that are even more vulnerable than they are. The story continues:

Human Rights Watch has described a concerted campaign in which thousands of men have been driven from their homes in eastern Libya and beaten or arrested.

Unfortunately, this sort of indiscriminate retribution and score-settling is a common feature of civil wars, but that just makes it that much harder to understand what purpose is served by reinforcing a rebel movement that we don’t understand in a country whose civil war is of no concern to us. Kristof was boasting that the rebels are receiving arms shipments from abroad, because supporters of the Libyan war continue give priority to the political cause of the rebels over the humanitarian needs of the population. It is clear that the major intervening powers are going to look the other way as the arms embargo is violated, but that makes sense mainly if they want to keep the civil war going, which has very little to do with helping the civilian population.

P.S. The rebels may be receiving arms from abroad, but if their record over the last few weeks is any indication these may not be very useful:

To date the Shabaab has wasted at least three times the ordnance than it has fired in anger by shooting into the air in celebration of often non-existent victories. It has blown up guns by using the wrong type of ammunition, crashed its few tanks into each other and shot down two of its own planes.

As time goes by, the Libyan war begins to seem more like a bad remake of Stargate than anything else.

Update: The New York Times has a story on the weaknesses of the rebels:

After the uprising, the rebels stumbled as they tried to organize. They did a poor job of defining themselves when Libyans and the outside world tried to figure out what they stood for. And now, as they try to defeat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s armed forces and militias, they will have to rely on allied airstrikes and young men with guns because the army that rebel military leaders bragged about consists of only about 1,000 trained men.

Michael Cohen comments:

What this suggests to me is that unlike the situation in Afghanistan in which the US was able to work hand-in-hand with a proxy army to dislodge the Taliban from power, there simply isn’t a rebel force on the ground in Libya that has the military chops to unseat Gaddafi.

But let’s not forget that a humanitarian catastrophe has been averted for now and that this intervention looks much less like the 2003 invasion of Iraq than the successful 1991 gulf war to rescue Kuwait from Iraqi military occupation. ~Nick Kristof

Why is that exactly? I understand that Kristof believes the Libyan war is the right thing to do, and for that reason he is going to identify it with another modern “good war” that most people support and reject comparisons with the “bad war” most people now regard as a disaster, but what about this intervention resembles the Gulf War in any way?

The Gulf War began approximately six months after the invasion of Kuwait, it was a response to international aggression in keeping with the principle of collective security that was the reason why the U.N. was created, and the Security Council authorized the expulsion of Iraqi forces from the country they were occupying. The international coalition Bush assembled included diplomatic, financial, and military support from dozens of nations around the world. This war has nothing in common with that. It has been the result of a panicked, last-minute decision, it is a limited mission of civilian protection authorized by the Council, there is minimal international support, the conflict is a purely internal one, and intervention has been justified on the basis of a relatively new concept to which U.N. members committed to support in just the last decade. The chief similarity between the two are that they have begun with air campaigns by U.S. and allied forces against a politically isolated foreign government.

Saying that the war has averted a humanitarian catastrophe is an extremely useful claim, and there’s no obvious way to disprove it. Outside governments intervened, and a humanitarian catastrophe hasn’t happened, and supporters of the war take it for granted that one would have happened otherwise. Of course, this is why they supported the war, but this points to the dilemma that humanitarian interventionists have. If they intervene in a timely fashion and don’t make the situation drastically worse in the process, there is nothing concrete they can point to that vindicates the decision.

Unlike a preventive war designed to eliminate another country’s arsenal of unconventional weapons, preventive humanitarian interventions can’t be discredited by a lack of physical evidence. If a humanitarian crisis doesn’t happen, there will always be uncertainty about whether the intervention was ever really necessary. Kristof speaks of the certainty that “Libyan civilians would be dying on a huge scale,” but what gives him this certainty? What makes Kristof’s certainty in this case more credible than the certainty of Iraq hawks that Hussein still had WMDs that he was hiding away somewhere? What Kristof calls certainties are actually his beliefs or suspicions. Very much like the 2003 Iraq war, the Libya interventionists have had to emphasize the past record of the dictator and make claims about his intentions on the basis of the public blustering of a megalomaniac, which is hardly the best evidence.

The more serious problem for humanitarian interventionists is that their interventions can make things drastically worse. They can create humanitarian catastrophes where they wouldn’t have existed otherwise. The growinghumanitarian crisis in Misurata isn’t the fault of the intervening governments, but to the extent that intervening governments prolong the civil war they are contributing to the conditions that will create humanitarian crises around the country. If Libyan civilians begin dying “on a huge scale” partly because outside governments chose to prolong the conflict, bolstered the losing side in a civil war, and made it more difficult for the civilian population to receive food, water, and medicine, what war does Kristof think Libya will look like then?