For myself, I’d split the difference and say the ideal scenario would have been for the Egyptian military to enter Libya and take out Gaddafi as the Vietnamese did to remove Pol Pot. But of course, this would mean that the Arabs would be masters of their own destiny, and that simply cannot be allowed. ~Jack Ross

If the Egyptian army invaded Libya, they would not be doing it as “masters of their own destiny” but because they had been told that this was the price of continued subsidies from Washington. To the extent that the military rulers of Egypt are actually setting Egyptian policy on their own, they are against any direct military intervention in Libya, and they have good reasons. This is because they properly worry about the fate of Egyptians still in Libya, and because they are not so foolish as to think that being drawn into a neighboring country’s civil war will work to their advantage. This would only be an ideal scenario if we weren’t talking about what would be best for Egypt and Libya. Ideal or not, this scenario isn’t happening, since the Egyptian military has rather more pressing problems and doesn’t need to be launching an unprovoked invasion of a neighbor. I can also think of few worse things for the political chances of Egyptian liberals than for Egypt to sink its resources and energy into settling the Libyan civil war.

I can’t account for why some otherwise sensible people would support this Libyan foolishness, but I can tell you why Al Jazeera is all for it: it is doing what it is told. Qatar has committed a few planes to the effort, and the GCC has endorsed the mission, so Al Jazeera dutifully provides approving coverage of the war that its overseers have urged Western governments to start.

At the end of an op-ed defending Obama’s handling of the war (such things apparently do exist), Lawrence Korb writes this bizarre concluding sentence:

But given the way Obama has handled it, U.S. strategic interests and prestige are likely to be enhanced, even if Libya becomes another Lebanon.

By “another Lebanon,” does Korb mean that U.S. strategic interests and prestige will be enhanced by our contribution to the fueling of the beginning of a fifteen-year civil war? Wouldn’t the collapse of Libya into a prolonged civil war be laid at the feet of the outside powers that kept Gaddafi from defeating the rebels? Isn’t it possible that intervening may create the conditions for ongoing conflict that will take many more lives than would have been lost otherwise? Or does Korb mean that this will go down in history as the sort of remarkably stupid meddling in the internal affairs of a country torn by civil war that Reagan did in 1982-83? Were U.S. strategic interests and prestige enhanced by that experience? If Obama has drawn the U.S. into another Lebanon-like situation, the only word to describe that would have to be disaster.

One point that Korb overlooks is the contradiction between what the U.S. and our allies are authorized to do and the goals that several of our allies (and perhaps the administration?) appear to have. This is the contradiction that David Rieff criticizes. Korb is effectively defending Obama’s policy on the assumption that the policy is more or less the one that Rieff would endorse: a purely defensive action designed to protect civilians against massacre. The problem with Korb’s defense, as Rieff’s protest shows, is that this is not actually the policy of the U.S. and our allies as it is being implemented. As Cato’s Benjamin Friedman has pointed out, the coalition is using defensive tactics, but it has offensive goals. Friedman wants the U.S. to get out of the war, but argues that whichever government continues to prosecute it should acknowledge what it is actually doing in Libya:

If we can disengage and leave the bombing to the Europeans, I hope we do so. But whoever is taking the lead should acknowledge that they are sponsoring rebels aiming to overthrow Qadaffi and adopt a policy that does more than defend them.

One problem with the war is that it is just enough of a “responsibility to protect” intervention that some of its supporters will not want to see it turn into a war for regime change, but it has already morphed into just enough of a war for regime change that it cannot be limited by its original “responsibility to protect” justification. “Responsibility to protect” is a doctrine that justifies initiating hostilities, but it has no way to restrain the forces that starting a war unleashes. This makes it a doctrine that is easy for interventionists to invoke to get into a conflict, and equally easy to ignore once the conflict begins.

Rieff writes:

But from the beginning it has been clear that while this intervention has been couched in the language of humanitarianism and of the global good deed, invoking the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the U.N.’s new doctrine that is supposed to govern those instances when outside powers must step in militarily to prevent tyrants from killing their own people, the more important goal has been to support the insurgency, which is to say, to bring about regime change.

The difficulty that Rieff’s position creates is that it is doubtful that Libya’s civil war qualified for a “responsibility to protect” intervention, but more important it is hard to see how any government could intervene just a little and then resist the apparently inevitable push for escalation. If Rieff is disgusted by the ongoing Libyan war, he should also question his assumption that it would have been the wrong thing to stay out of Libya’s civil war entirely. When we started hearing the first calls for a no-fly zone, I was one of many observing that these “simple” solutions had a way of getting out of control:

No-fly zones are the sort of easy-sounding response to an immediate problem that can turn into an endless policy. If the reason for the no-fly zone is to halt Gaddafi’s assault on civilians, it probably won’t be long before the no-fly zone evolves into an air war against Gaddafi’s ground forces to achieve the same end, and that might escalate into a new war for regime change.

All of this is already coming to pass much more quickly than I thought possible. If opposing the first step in that process of seemingly inevitable escalation represents “foolish consistency,” I would rather be foolish and not at war with Libya than wise and sucked into a Libyan civil war with no plan and no reason to be there.

Brendan O’Neill and Adam Garfinkle have written the two most impressive, utterly damning indictments of this absurd war. First, here is O’Neill:

This is not the return of the politics of empire or a re-flourishing of Western colonialism in north Africa, as some have claimed. Rather it is the barbarism of buffoons. This is an act of violence driven not by clear geopolitical interests but by the utter failure of modern Western governments to work out what their geopolitical interests are, and to act accordingly. In the rubble of various compounds and airfields in Libya, we can spy the incoherence of the Western political elites, and their elevation of the reckless, narcissistic politics of short-term gain over anything resembling a strategy or aim.

O’Neill explains very well just how arbitrary and unmoored from discernible interests the Libyan war is. He continues:

Never in the history of mankind has such a collection of know-nothings and narcissists led a military excursion into a sovereign state’s affairs.

I don’t know if it has never happened (Kosovo and Iraq do spring to mind), but a war based to a large degree on the ideas of Benard-Henri Levy and Samantha Power is exceptional for being one of the most ill-conceived and dim-witted exercises of military power in my lifetime.

O’Neill finishes his withering criticism with the conclusion that the entire Libyan war has been a desperate bit of political image-burnishing by the governments involved:

Driven more by short-term desperation than the “long view”, more by a desire for quick and painless political pay-offs than by a careful weighing up of interests and consequences, Western governments have turned Libya into a stage for a politically shallow yet deeply destructive form of moral posturing.

Garfinkle’s long post is worth reading in full, but this conclusion sums up his main objections:

What is crazy, however, is the consequences-be-damned argument for war on humanitarian grounds that the President has apparently embraced, and the utter vacuum of strategic thinking that seems to be its handmaiden.

P.S. It’s telling that both O’Neill and Garfinkle see the Libyan war as complete folly. They advocate two radically different remedies to the current predicament, and I certainly agree with O’Neill’s call to cease the war now, but it is striking how some of those who believe ousting Gaddafi is what must be done regard the entire thing as an unnecessary debacle from the beginning.

The 47% of Americans approving of the action against Libya is lower than what Gallup has found when asking about approval of other U.S. military campaigns in the past four decades. ~Gallup

It’s interesting that both approval and disapproval were slightly higher for Kosovo (51/45%) and Haiti (54/45%). That was probably the result of a much longer build-up to the intervention, more extensive coverage in the weeks leading up to it, and televised presidential addresses in primetime announcing the beginning of the operations. One out of four respondents doesn’t have a firm view, and over time those undecided Americans are unlikely to drift into the supporting camp. As the intervention drags on, support is going to ebb. Right now, support for the Libyan war comes disproportionately from Republicans (57/31%), and more independents disapprove than approve. Compared to most past wars, Democratic support for military action in Libya (51/37%) is fairly weak considering that it is being waged by a President of their party.

How do we reconcile Gallup’s result with polls showing up to 70% of the public approving of the no-fly zone in Libya? I’m not sure. Based on previous polls that asked a series of questions on Libya, my guess is that many respondents don’t fully appreciate that there cannot be a no-fly zone without military action. Once the question is phrased in terms of taking military action against Libya, which is what the U.S. and allied governments have been doing, support plummets.

P.S. For British public opinion, here’s the YouGov survey that Tisdall mentioned. The question to which Tisdall referred was phrased this way:

How much do you trust the following to tell the truth about what is happening in the military action in Libya?

47% of respondents distrust Cameron, and 51% distrust Obama, and just 43% and 38% trust the two respectively. Incidentally, British respondents overwhelmingly trust their military, but have much less confidence in ours. The British public is against a ground deployment 69-21%. Overall, there is 45-36% support for the Libyan war in Britain, and that is coming mostly from members of the coalition government parties. Labour support is at 45% against 39% opposition. A war that just a minority of the public supports received an overwhelming 557-13 vote in Parliament.

My new column on Libya for The Week is online.

Britain and France are facing a rising torrent of international criticism over military intervention in Libya, with Russia and China leading calls for an immediate ceasefire. Just as a majority of Britons distrusts their government’s motives [bold mine-DL], according to a new YouGov poll, many, if not most, countries around the world also view the action as risky, self-interested, and duplicitous. ~Simon Tisdall

Thank goodness this war has nothing in common with the experience in Iraq. During the Iraq war, far fewer governments viewed the action as risky, self-interested and duplicitous. Invading Iraq was a disastrous, appalling decision without justification, and it quickly became almost universally reviled, but it was one that had the formal support of a few dozen governments at the start and for several years afterwards. One looks in vain for other governments that support the Libyan war apart from the handful engaged in military action and six of the seven non-permanent members that voted for the resolution. One of the resolution yes votes, South Africa, suddenly discovered that a no-fly zone and authorizing “all necessary means” involve bombing military targets. Perhaps South Africa would have been another abstention if its government had understood what was going to happen.

When all of the major powers opposed to intervention abstained on the resolution, supporters of the war were encouraged by this, but those abstentions were really votes of no-confidence. Germany was as adamantly against the Libyan war as it was against the Iraq war, but this time the permanent member opponents were willing to let Western governments plunge ahead without a lengthy, protracted debate and the threat of veto in the Security Council. After all, why should they jeopardize their relations with Western governments by opposing the Westerners’ folly? Brazil and Turkey have already experienced the unpleasant political consequences of trying to do the right thing by Western governments by opposing misguided Iran sanctions, and others probably learned from that episode that there is nothing to be gained by getting in between Western governments and their targets. Germany probably doesn’t want to repeat its Iraq war experience by damaging the relationship with the U.S. to save Obama from making a mistake. Abstaining allowed all of them to get out of the way, but they are still able to criticize the mission and berate intervening Western governments that they knew it was a bad idea all along.

As Michael Lind wrote the other day:

In any event, the claim that the international community supports the war cannot be sustained, in the face of the opposition of the BRIC’s plus Germany.

Obama has launched an unconstitutional war that serves no discernible American interest. This wastes military resources on a conflict that poses no threat to the U.S. at a time when U.S. forces are stretched in two other wars, and it commits U.S. forces to the enforcement of a U.N. resolution without any meaningful debate here at home. The public was not clamoring for this. This is the epitome of policy made by establishment figures without regard for American public opinion. If ever there were a time for populist American nationalists who can’t stand Obama and claim to venerate and narrowly interpret the Constitution to protest, this would be it. Of course, this is not what’s happening. Weigel explains:

There are individual Tea Party leaders, like Williams or Rand Paul, who wince at a military intervention undertaken like this. The Tea Party is libertarian in plenty of ways. But if it has one defining characteristic, it’s that it’s nationalist. If there’s a way to remove Qaddafi decades after he aided the Lockerbie bombers, then that’s more important than a debate over the deep thoughts of the founders. In a Saturday interview with Fox News, Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., one of the most popular politicians to win the support of the Tea Party, explained that his problem with the intervention was about grit, not the Constitution.

If there is a war that American nationalists ought to find undesirable, it would have to be one undertaken for the sake of something called “the responsibility to protect,” which is a doctrine premised on the ability of international institutions to overrule national sovereignty in certain cases. Back in the ’90s, anti-Clinton conservatives didn’t have much in the way of a consistent foreign policy critique, but one thing most of them could agree on was that they couldn’t stand the idea of sending U.S. forces on missions for the U.N. Evidently, as long as the U.S. military gets to fire missiles at a dictatorship, many of them seem to have overcome their aversion to globalism.

The standard attack on many of Clinton’s interventions back then was that they seemed to be chosen on the basis of how little they had to do with U.S. security interests. This was actually reasonably accurate. Conservatives were hardly non-interventionists in the ’90s, but they would at least object to many of Clinton’s interventions as distractions from “real” threats. They may not have been any less hawkish and usually complained that Clinton was too “weak” on Iraq and Iran, but most could agree that Clinton used the military in conflicts in which the U.S. had no stake.

I didn’t expect a great outpouring of antiwar sentiment from Tea Party-aligned Republicans in Congress, but opposing the Libyan war is a fairly easy call. It doesn’t require a full embrace of Ron Paul’s foreign policy views. It just requires some minimal adherence to their professed beliefs. The Libyan war represents everything Tea Partiers are supposed to dislike about Obama and Washington, and it should offend their nationalist and constitutionalist sensibilities. The first real test to see what a “Tea Party foreign policy” might be is here, and with some honorable exceptions Tea Partiers and the members of Congress they have supported have proved that they are indistinguishable from the hawkish interventionists that have dominated the GOP’s foreign policy thinking for the last decade and more.

Update: Sen. Mike Lee has criticized the Libyan war as unconstitutional, and has questioned the underlying policy as well, so we can add him to the small (but growing?) group of Tea Partier critics of the war.

Based on these missteps, I propose five principles to guide humanitarian intervention, all of which apply to Libya:

•Do not intervene on humanitarian grounds in ways that benefit rebels unless the state’s retaliation is grossly disproportionate. This policy discourages both rebel provocation and state reprisals against civilians. In Libya, we should intervene no further unless Gadhafi’s forces massacre civilians.

•Deliver purely humanitarian aid — food, water, sanitation, shelter, medical care — in ways that minimize the benefit to rebels. The United States admirably is delivering supplies to Libyan refugees across the border in Tunisia and Egypt. But we should ensure that relief sites do not become rear bases for Libya’s rebels. If local governments are unwilling to patrol the refugee encampments, we should organize multilateral policing.

•Expend substantial resources to persuade states to address the legitimate grievances of non-violent domestic groups. Ironically, Obama has applied little pressure on Yemen and Bahrain, which slaughtered peaceful protesters, but he bombed Libya for responding to armed rebels. This sends precisely the wrong message to the Arab street: If you want U.S. support, resort to violence [bold mine-DL].

•Do not coerce regime change or surrender of sovereignty unless also taking precautions against violent backlash — such as golden parachutes, power-sharing, or preventive military intervention. If the White House insists on Gadhafi’s departure, it should guarantee asylum for him and a continuing share of power for his senior officials and allied tribes. Simply demanding regime change could drive him to genocidal violence as a last resort, while the international community lacks the will for a preventive deployment of ground troops.

•Do not falsely claim “humanitarian” grounds for intervention driven by other objectives. If Obama is
intervening because of Gadhafi’s past misdeeds, rather than recent humanitarian offenses, he should say so publicly. Otherwise, the White House encourages further rebellions that aim to lure U.S. intervention by provoking retaliation. ~Alan Kuperman

I had cited Prof. Kuperman’s article on the moral hazard of humanitarian intervention last week, and this op-ed applies the lessons from that article to the situation in Libya. This last principle is the one that seems the most important, and it is also the most difficult one for governments to follow, and many of the reliable supporters of humanitarian interventions have many other goals. Many hawkish American supporters of humanitarian intervention support these interventions in large part because it is an exercise of American power and “leadership” regardless of the merits of the case. Whether interventions serve other purposes or not, simply using U.S. power in ostensibly moral and high-minded ways reaffirms their ideological convictions that defending “values” automatically serves U.S. interests. If intervention worsens the humanitarian crisis, this doesn’t particularly concern them, because humanitarian crises serve as opportunities for military action and the expansion of U.S. influence in a given country.

The regimes targeted for humanitarian intervention are selected not because of the scale or gravity of their crimes, but because they are regimes led by figures that the intervening governments loathe for a number of reasons. What distinguishes Gbagbo from Gaddafi is not the use of force against political opponents, but Gaddafi’s past record and notoriety as a sponsor of terrorism and as a would-be nuclear proliferator. What has pushed Libya inexplicably to the top of the international agenda is not the scale of humanitarian crisis, as significant as the refugee population fleeing Libya is, but that it is associated with the popular uprisings throughout the region and it is taken for granted that Gaddafi’s victory would undermine uprisings elsewhere.

Almost as soon as Gaddafi’s crackdown began, we started hearing arguments that Western governments had to step in to keep Gaddafi from discouraging protest movements and encouraging authoritarians to use force to respond to protests, and this claim is central to the argument that a Libyan intervention serves U.S. strategic interests. The claim doesn’t hold up and the U.S. has no strategic interests in Libya, but it has been clear from the beginning that preventing large-scale loss of life has actually been ancillary to the political goal of propping up the rebels, who serve as the Libyan proxies for uprisings throughout the region, and the desire to align the U.S. with popular protests. This is why the U.S. and allied governments have intervened directly in the civil war in order to prolong and intensify the conflict, which will ultimately result in the deaths of more civilians.

As Prof. Kuperman explains in the op-ed, and as I have been saying, intervening directly on behalf of armed rebels while doing little on behalf of unarmed protesters sends the message that violent resistance and provoking massive repression are the keys to winning outside support.

Judah Grunstein has responded to my earlier post and one of Greg Scoblete’s arguments, and he clarifies that he was analyzing and not defending the respective prospects of success for military interventions in Libya and Ivory Coast:

I’m not an interventionist, and I was specifically addressing the issue of why a military intervention in Libya and not in Côte d’Ivoire. In previous posts, I have argued for political and non-military humanitarian approaches in Libya as well.

I take the point, and I regret misinterpreting and misrepresenting his earlier argument. Over the last few weeks, I have become accustomed to seeing advocates of intervention define “doing something” as taking military action and the exercise of restraint as “sitting idly by,” and I was reacting to Grunstein’s comparison with that in mind.

Grunstein is right that there are relatively low barriers to exiting Libya right now, but pressure continues to build for a more ambitious mission that involves toppling Gaddafi. British and French political leaders seem to take it for granted that this is the objective. If Obama does not publicly commit the U.S. to achieve this, there is still a way out, and Obama should take it. The U.S. may be able to hand off running the no-fly zone to another government or to NATO. This is uncertain at the moment, but it may happen. The U.S. could then fairly quickly end its participation in the war before it escalates.

It is possible that there could be some effort to broker a political settlement, but I am skeptical that the rebels, the administration or most of the American political class would be satisfied now with a negotiated deal that leaves Gaddafi in place. A negotiated exile might have been possible once, but now that Gaddafi knows he will be pursued by the ICC he has every reason to stay. If it were possible to change that and create an incentive for Gaddafi to agree to exile, that might be the best alternative. For his part, Gaddafi has no reason to settle as long as he believes he has a chance of winning outright, and no reason to give up power if he believes he will be put on trial, and so escalation still seems difficult to avoid now that the intervention has begun. I would very much like to believe that the intervention will remain limited and can be ended quickly, but now that Obama has yielded to the demands to take military action it is hard to see how or why he is going to resist the incessant push for escalation.

P.S. Greg has another response to Grunstein:

It’s true that removing Gaddafi from power is a more limited goal than transforming Libya into a model democracy in North Africa, but I don’t see how the president has given himself much room to maneuver toward a political settlement. Obama’s opening position is that Gaddafi loses power. Gaddafi’s opening position is that Gaddafi stays in power. Unless one side backs down, it’s a zero-sum standoff.