Eric Martin explains why the argument that a Libyan war will deter authoritarian crackdowns elsewhere and re-align the U.S. with popular political movements doesn’t make sense:

Let’s grant Shadi’s premise for the sake of argument: US support for brutal autocratic regimes in the region has fostered resentment and, at times, a virulent strain of anti-Americanism that has produced violent manifestations.

But if that’s the diagnosis, how exactly would launching military attacks on Libya provide the cure? After all, Qaddafi’s is most definitely not one of the autocratic regimes that the US has funded, armed and otherwise helped to maintain power. Quite the opposite.

A similar argument was made in anticipation of the invasion of Iraq, with a similar logical disconnect separating premise and conclusion. Again, Iraq’s was not a regime supported by the United States (at least, not since the 1980s, after which the US fought a war and maintained a no-fly-zone and other punitive measures), so how would its ouster convince denizens of the Middle East that the United States was not conspiring with autocracies when it suited US interests?

If anything, it reinforced this notion by stressing the disparate treatment certain regimes received (Iraq) under the putative justification of spreading freedom and democracy, while US client-states remained in good favor despite their blatant disregard for human rights and democratic norms (not even so much as a reduction in aid or other forceful ultimatum requiring reforms).

Similarly, our muscular action in Libya, while we turn a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s activities in Bahrain (at the Bahrain regime’s request and with its assistance), and events in Yemen, will drive home the point that “friendly” dictators will continue to receive US support, even if less accommodating regimes will be targeted in furtherance of our highly malleable and selective (though universal?) support of “freedom and democracy.”

This is one of the many reasons why the strategic argument for a Libyan war is so unpersuasive. The argument is twofold: authoritarian regimes throughout the region have to know that there are consequences for brutal crackdowns, and the U.S. has to be seen re-aligning itself against authoritarian governments and on the side of popular uprisings throughout the region. Because of the nature of the political coalition behind the intervention and because of the arbitrary nature of the intervention, the Libyan war achieves neither of these. If intervening in Libya is intended as a gesture of support to popular movements in the region, it will have the effect of serving as a diversion from demands for internal reform. The GCC positions on Bahrain and Libya are diametrically opposed, but from the perspective of the GCC governments they make sense: distract Western attention and resources, divert public outrage at their Bahrain intervention, and align the GCC with the rebels of Libya, and strike at a Libyan ruler they all hate anyway.

Judging by the administration’s actions, the U.S. seems to be playing along with what GCC members want, or it could be that the administration is actually trying to work at cross-purposes with them and happens to be doing a supremely bad job. Regardless of whether the administration wants this outcome or not, what seems likely to happen is that largely peaceful political protests in some strategically significant countries are going to be suppressed with minimal protest from Washington while the U.S. and allied governments expend considerable resources to produce a stalemate or prolonged civil war on behalf of a violent rebellion in a strategically unimportant country.

To the extent that the administration’s public rhetoric and the arguments of Libyan war supporters associate this policy with the vindication of popular protest movements and the “Arab spring,” they seem likely to repeat some of the mistakes of proponents of the “freedom agenda” in the previous decade and will end up linking support for democracy to ongoing civil strife in yet another Arab country. Just as the Iraq war’s connection with democracy promotion set back the cause of internal political reform throughout much of the region, the Libyan war seems likely to reinforce suspicions that pro-democracy rhetoric is matched with actions only in historically anti-Western states and that Western interventions are aimed at weakening or dividing Arab states.

Keeping popular protest movements alive is what democratist supporters of the Libyan war say that they want, but the price of the Libyan war seems to be allowing those movements to be stifled elsewhere in exchange for backing a poorly-understood armed rebellion that could end up fragmenting Libya. Just as it is a mistake for humanitarian interventionists to link their cause with the bad idea of a Libyan war, supporters of democracy promotion are likely to look back on their encouragement of Libyan intervention with deep regret for what the war cost the political movements they said they wanted to support.

If U.S. interests really dictated that supporting Arab authoritarian governments needs to end, we could debate how to best go about ending that support, but essentially what Libya interventionists are arguing is that the U.S. should use action in Libya as a proxy to send a message about what it could do in allied countries, but which it has no intention of doing anywhere except Libya. The U.S. can’t or won’t pressure the Gulf states and Yemen more than it has, and relations with many of these governments have already deteriorated badly on account of their perception that Washington abandoned Mubarak, but somehow we’re expected to believe that starting a war against Libya is supposed to make up for the lack of pressure in these other states. I submit that this is a fantasy.

Naturally, Michael Gerson is pleased that Obama is advancing the “responsibility to protect” doctrine by setting a precedent of enforcing it in Libya. Anything that can combine smug moral posturing with the use of military force against other nations wins Gerson’s approval every time. I’ve never quite understood how people combine humanitarian impulses with the vicious willingness to support armed attacks on people who have done nothing to you and yours in decades (or perhaps ever). What is even more strange is just how oblivious humanitarian interventionists are to the perverse and unintended consequences of strengthening the “responsibility to protect” norm and undermining the protections of state sovereignty against outside military attack.

The states that enforce the norm tend to be in North America and western Europe, and the more powerful governments everywhere else in the world regardless of their type of regime usually look askance at anything that could compromise state sovereignty. That doesn’t rule out the possibility that some of them will be willing to adopt the rhetoric and legal pretexts of the “responsibility to protect” when justifying actions that Western states view with alarm. What I find amazing in the debate over intervention in Libya is how incredibly short everyone’s memories are. I’m not talking about Kosovo or even Iraq. Doesn’t anyone remember what happened in Georgia just two and a half years ago?

When Georgia escalated the conflict with South Ossetia, this gave Ossetian militias the chance to expel Georgians from South Ossetia and it gave Russia the opportunity to repel Georgian forces and engage in punitive attacks on the rest of Georgia. Certainly, Russia had some justification in retaliating against the escalation when its forces in South Ossetia came under attack, but from the extent of the campaign that followed we can all understand that Georgia had given Russia the provocation it had been wanting. Moscow turned the bogus Kosovo claims of genocide around on a pro-Western government, and used the logic of humanitarian intervention to support the cause of separatists against Georgia and to expand its influence in the Caucasus at the expense of the U.S.

The Russian response wasn’t just payback for Kosovo. It was also intended to imitate and mock the Kosovo intervention at the same time. A major power may not be seeking payback for the intervention against Libya in the future, but we have to assume that another major power will follow the Libyan example and take advantage of internal political crises in neighboring countries by claiming that it is helping to protect the population against an abusive government. The claims may or may not have any merit, but the Libyan precedent will give these governments significant political cover when they opt to pick sides in an ongoing civil war.

Back in 2008, the inviolability of state sovereignty suddenly became very important for Georgia’s patrons in the West. Many of the people who like to talk about how governments forfeit their sovereignty when they attack their citizens have also been some of the most vocal supporters of Georgia before and after the 2008 war. The point here isn’t to dwell on the hypocrisy of these people, but to remind everyone that justifying military action against a state in these terms is something that can and will be exploited by other states to serve other ends. Weakening the protections of state sovereignty may seem like a necessary thing to prevent regimes from committing atrocities, but the states that will benefit most from this are the states that are already powerful enough to deter interventions against them for their abuses and the states that want to expand their influence over their neighbors.

David Gibbs takes apart the myths of the “successful” Kosovo intervention:

Another myth regarding Kosovo is that bombing improved the human rights situation. In reality, it made things worse, and augmented the suffering. Prior to the Nato campaign, the total number of people killed on all sides in the Kosovo conflict was 2,000, approximately half of whom were killed by Serbian forces. After the bombing began, however, there was a huge spike in Serb-perpetrated atrocities, which caused almost 10,000 deaths, combined with widespread ethnic cleansing. The Serbian forces were furious that they could not stop the Nato air attacks, so they took out their frustration on the relatively defenceless Albanians, causing a huge increase in the number of killings. The Nato bombing itself directly killed at least 500 civilians. When viewed from a humanitarian standpoint, Nato intervention was a disaster.

Gibbs does a good job demolishing the distortions and falsehoods that liberal interventionists and neoconservatives have woven around the Kosovo war. There are obvious similarities between interventions in Kosovo and Libya, and it’s important to remember the consequences the last time that the U.S. and NATO allies inserted themselves into another country’s internal conflict. The Kosovo intervention is also what first made me as critical and skeptical of U.S. foreign policy as I am. It is the war that pushed me in the direction of non-interventionist foreign policy arguments, because the only people making any sense when the Kosovo war was going on were non-interventionists. Unfortunately, it was the people circulating the myths who defined the legacy of the Kosovo war, and it is partly because those myths prevailed that humanitarian interventionism has survived in the U.S. and Britain as a viable foreign policy position.

Mr. Obama’s notification letter does not satisfy the constitutional requirement that Congress approve military action, says Lou Fisher, former researcher with the Congressional Research Service and an expert on war powers. Mr. Fisher also raised objections to Mr. Obama citing United Nations authorization in his letter.

“It’s impossible for Congress to take its war powers and give it to the U.N.,” Mr. Fisher said. “Other than defensive actions—and there’s no defensive actions here—this has to be done by Congress.” [bold mine-DL]

The president, with his letter, appeared to meet the requirements of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which says only that in cases where the president doesn’t seek prior approval from lawmakers, the president must notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action and puts a 60 day deadline on such actions. ~The Wall Street Journal

Weigel has the text of Obama’s letter to Congress here.

None of this would matter if this were a humanitarian intervention to stop a massacre. But that is not what is happening in Libya today [bold mine-DL]. There would have been a cruel repression after a Gadhafi victory, and it would have been necessary to help rebels and dissidents escape and to make sure that they had a place to go. Watching the repression wouldn’t be easy (though we seem to be having no difficulty doing that in Bahrain and Yemen). But the overthrow of tyrants and the establishment of democracy has to be local work, and in this case, sadly, the locals couldn’t do it. ~Michael Walzer

Something that puzzles me about the way the U.S. has joined this war is that the U.S. in particular has explicitly defined the intervention in terms of the “responsibility to protect” and acted accordingly, but it has gone about it in a way that seems almost designed to make it politically very difficult for any future administration to follow its example, and it has done so in a country where invoking the “responsibility to protect” doesn’t seem all that appropriate. Michael Lind has written a strong critique of the unconstitutionality of U.S. participation in the Libyan war, and he notes that the lack of Congressional authorization reinforces the perception that supporters of working through international institutions believe that these institutions are more important than national institutions:

By taking part in a war unrelated to American defense on the basis of a U.N. Security Council resolution, without asking the House and the Senate for a joint resolution as the basis of his authority, President Obama has validated the fears of the critics that U.S. participation in the United Nations would informally amend the Constitution, by transferring authority to initiate all kinds of wars from Congress to the president.

The enforcement of R2P relies heavily on the United Nations as the appropriate institutional framework for authorizing interventions to protect civilian populations, but despite the Security Council’s approval of UNSCR 1973 a Libyan intervention threatens to undermine both the doctrine and the institution politically even if the intervention succeeds in its basic goal of protecting civilians in rebel-held areas. The way that the administration has committed the U.S. to this conflict will reinforce American distrust of international institutions, undermine the domestic political legitimacy of commitments made to and through those institutions, and sour the American public on their brand of humanitarian intervention by pushing it through in an unconstitutional way that shows no respect for the American public or American institutions.

Apart from removing a legal objection to continued U.S. participation, the value of Congressional debate and authorization to proponents of intervention should be obvious. Humanitarian interventionists are already laboring under the political burden that the war they are supporting has nothing to do with U.S. security interests, and most of the public opposes U.S. involvement in Libya, but how much worse is it going to be for them and the “responsibility to protect” if they don’t submit the intervention to significant Congressional and public scrutiny? If you think the “freedom agenda” has acquired a bad reputation, just wait until “responsibility to protect” becomes more firmly linked in the public mind with unconstitutional warfare and executive overreach.

Mark Leon Goldberg has acknowledged that the Libyan intervention will be perceived as vindicating or damaging these ideas:

People in the human rights community, UN supporters and advocates of “the responsibility to protect” have a great deal riding on the success of this intervention in Libya. The Obama administration has basically followed the script: pursue non-military measures to deter a mass atrocity; then when those measures are exhausted use the United Nations to confer the legal and political legitimacy to the intervention; finally, assemble a coalition to keep the American footprint as light as possible.

As Walzer argues, however, they have followed the script in a situation where the “responsibility to protect” doesn’t really apply. This is what doesn’t make sense. If this were an exceptional case where the “responsibility to protect” applied, it might be easier to understand why the administration acted this way. To proceed in this way for the sake of intervening in Libya’s civil war is to do significant political damage in the U.S. to the international institutions on which the “responsibility to protect” as a doctrine depends. Non-interventionists and realists are bound to be skeptical of most humanitarian interventions, but advocates of the “responsibility to protect” should be very concerned that the misguided application of R2P arguments in Libya will do for the “responsibility to protect” what the war in Iraq did for the idea of democracy promotion.

Can anyone really doubt that this affair will be perceived by people around the world as a United States-led operation, no matter what we say about it? ~Stephen Walt

Some people in the U.S. will insist on doubting this, just as Bush partisans and Iraq war supporters will maintain to this day that the “coalition of the willing” reflected the broad, multilateral nature of a principally U.S.-British invasion. At some point in the next few weeks or months, the U.S., France, and Britain are probably going to interpret the mandate of UNSCR 1973 in terms that no other government accepts and conclude that they have authorization to topple the Libyan government. They will engage in the sorts of torturous, tendentious misreadings of the text that war supporters used to wrap themselves in UNSCR 1441 all those years ago. Meanwhile, outside the U.S. and the few countries actively involved in the war, everyone will see this as a U.S.-led war despite the lengths to which the administration went to create a different impression.

Few Iraq war opponents seem to want to remember it now, but the Bush administration wanted to make its obsession with Iraq seem as if it were a reflection of the will of the “international community,” too. That was why Bush went through the procedural motions at the U.N., and it was why Powell was sent out to give that preposterous presentation, and it was why war supporters kept pretending that the war was principally a matter of eliminating Iraqi WMDs. As much as Bush and his allies may have loathed certain aspects of the U.N., they did grasp that the only pretext they had for starting a war against Iraq was under the auspices of enforcing U.N. resolutions.

Yes, there is a difference between then and now. Obviously, the initiative for the Iraq war came from Washington, and it could never have happened without the Bush administration’s decision to start a war, and on Libyan intervention the initiative came from elsewhere. If the U.S. is still going to be bearing a large part of the burden, and if that relatively large U.S. role is going to make the rest of the world associate the outcome in Libya with the U.S., I don’t understand how the lack of American initiative makes it any better for America. When Poles, Italians, and Spaniards lost soldiers in Iraq because their governments followed Bush’s lead against the wishes of their citizens, it wasn’t much consolation that their leaders had not been the prime movers behind the conflict. When Madrid commuters were blown up as a result of Spanish involvement in Iraq, it didn’t make it any better that Aznar had been only a bit player in the war coalition.

It is still American military resources that are being wasted, and it is still America’s reputation that is on the line. Of course, the U.S. is far more than a bit player in all this, and it is certain that the war would not have been possible politically or militarily had Obama not chosen it. It is their status as unnecessary wars of choice that the comparison between the wars in Iraq and Libya is strongest. It is a commonplace for politicians that plunge their governments into unnecessary wars to say that they did not seek the conflict, but whether they “sought” it or not they most definitely chose war.

Via Scoblete, Judah Grunstein makes a surprisingly weak argument for the Libyan intervention. Grunstein takes on the criticism that intervening in Libya is arbitrary, selective, and ignores more significant humanitarian and/or political crises elsewhere in the world:

To begin with, it’s worth noting that the use of force was raised as a possibility in the immediate aftermath of Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to relinquish power in Côte d’Ivoire. It was subsequently shelved due to a lack of resolve and consensus among the African stakeholders, regionally and continent-wide. Even more relevant to the current debate, the election that Gbagbo has refused to abide by was the exit phase of a negotiated, U.N.-enforced ceasefire to that country’s civil war. What’s more, U.N. peacekeepers are already in the country and have already “intervened” to the extent that they protected the internationally recognized president Alassane Ouattara from Gbagbo’s forces in the days following the election. But the biggest difference between the two situations is that Gbagbo is firmly in control of an armed force that successfully prosecuted a long and bloody civil war, whereas Gadhafi’s grip on power seemed shaky as recently as three weeks ago. So the likelihood of a decisive outcome, though far from guaranteed in Libya, is almost certainly impossible in Côte d’Ivoire.

It is typical that Grunstein reduces international action in response to a crisis to the use of force. Obviously, the question is not whether outside governments should launch military action in Ivory Coast as opposed to launching it in Libya, but why the Libyan civil war takes precedence over an Ivorian crisis that might still be salvaged before it does far more damage to the surrounding region. Interventionists have discovered that the rhetoric and legal loopholes provided by “responsibility to protect” are useful tools for starting new wars, which is why they conveniently forget that conflict prevention is part of any “responsibility to protect” position. If Ivory Coast descends into civil war and affects the rest of the region, it would be most unwise for outside forces to jump into the middle of the conflict at that point, but unlike Libya’s sudden collapse into conflict the Ivorian crisis has been going on for months and the situation has been gradually deteriorating. There is probably much more good that could be done by working to reduce political tensions there than can be achieved by escalating a civil war into an international conflict.

Skeptics of intervention aren’t the ones who need to explain their reluctance to become involved in either the Libyan or Ivorian situation. Humanitarian interventionists need to explain why a political crisis that has not yet degenerated into full-scale civil war isn’t receiving their attention, and why they are intent on having their government participate in what is already an ongoing civil war. More to the point, they might explain how their support for prolonging and intensifying a civil war is actually consistent with the official concern for minimizing loss of life. It is all the more strange that one strategically irrelevant crisis has taken precedence over another when the Ivorian political crisis has already created a much larger refugee problem with more of a potentially disastrous impact on an unstable region. There are many more people in Ivory Coast and the surrounding region, and many more lives at stake from the resumption of armed conflict there. The reason that no one is paying attention to that situation is that Ivory Coast is just as strategically unimportant to major powers as Libya is, but Ivorians did not have the good fortune for their crisis to be related to and to begin in the wake of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. Intervening in Libya is as arbitrary as it is accidental and ill-considered.

Cynics might argue that the GCC and Arab League have been willing to support the intervention in Libya for precisely that reason, to keep the West distracted from their own depredations. ~Marc Lynch

Well, count me as a cynic then, because it seemsobvious that this is the main and perhaps only reason why many of the member states of these organizations endorsed a no-fly zone. Now that the strikes have started and the U.S., French, and British governments are committed in Libya, the Arab League leadership is free to try to have it both ways by facilitating the intervention and then denouncing military action when it happens. Some minimal contribution to the Libyan campaign by Qatar and the UAE will make it difficult for the U.S. to oppose continued GCC intervention in Bahrain as long as Washington insists on keeping some Arab governments on board with the enforcement of the no-fly zone. Of course, Washington may not see a problem with continued GCC intervention in Bahrain. .

Lynch continues:

It should surprise nobody that the bombing campaign has triggered anger among a significant portion of the Arab public, which is still powerfully shaped by the Iraq war and aggrieved by perceived double standards (one of the most common lines in Arab debates right now is “where was the No Fly Zone over Gaza?”).

Obviously, no policy is ever going to please everyone, but it is worrying that an intervention that is supposed to be a “new beginning” with Arab and Muslim publics is unpopular with a significant part of those publics. This is why it is mistaken to set U.S. policy almost entirely on the basis of winning future goodwill in a region where the U.S. will continue to be resented for many other things besides support for authoritarian regimes. The hope that the U.S. can somehow get on the “right” (i.e., popular) side of these changes ignores that the U.S. isn’t going to be abandoning many of the policies that are still deeply resented in the region. Whatever goodwill that a Libyan intervention might conceivably win in Libya, we should not expect the same results anywhere else. This confirms what I was arguing last week:

People who claim that there can be a “new beginning” if the U.S. gets behind enough popular uprisings are overlooking all those policies that still generate resentment and hostility, and they are making the same mistake of thinking that an intervention on behalf of a Muslim population in one country will win sympathy elsewhere.

Instead of “aligning” values and interests, which is what Obama reportedly thinks a Libyan war will do, the administration appears ready to pursue a “values”-based policy towards Libya, where the U.S. has no interests, and to apply relatively little pressure on allied governments when they engage in similar behavior. In other words, the administration isn’t deterring “brutality across the region” with its Libya intervention, and that may be by design.

Lynch wrote earlier in the post:

If Gaddafi succeeded in snuffing out the challenge by force without a meaningful response from the United States, Europe and the international community then that would have been interpreted as a green light for all other leaders to employ similar tactics.

What is being most clearly interpreted as a green light for other leaders to employ these tactics is the more or less tacit acceptance of similar tacticscurrently being employed by other leaders. Unlike in Bahrain and Yemen, the Libyan opposition has turned into an armed rebellion, and it is the armed rebels (or rather their uprising and subsequent collapse) that have won international intervention. That can’t be a good thing for the future of protest movements in other countries.

The effect of this may be to promote the idea that the only way for political opponents of a regime to win significant, direct Western support is to take up arms and provoke the regime into using its military forces to suppress them. Intervening in Libya may have little effect on the calculations of authoritarian rulers elsewhere, as they already have strong incentives to use violence to crush dissent, but it will send a message that the way to get other governments to take the side of a political opposition is to resort to violence. The model of largely peaceful political protest provided by Tunisian and Egyptian protesters will be competing with the Libyan model of opposition, which is the model of violent resistance that is already quite familiar in the region.

For all the nations that cannot rely on armies that refuse to use force against protesters, and that may be quite a few of them, the lesson of the Libyan intervention is that Western powers will be moved to aid opposition forces only when there is a chance of a large-scale massacre. The intervention creates an incentive for provoking governments to commit large-scale atrocities by launching armed rebellions against them. This isn’t going to guarantee future interventions, but it may help create the conditions for future massacres. For many reasons, Western powers are not always going to be so quick to intervene, but the Libyan intervention creates the expectation that other governments will feel compelled to step in if the rebels’ situation is dire enough. That is likely to encourage rebel movements that are militarily and politically weak and have little chance of succeeding on their own, but which are just strong enough to create a crisis that will lead to calls for another intervention. We can’t know how much political instability and violence the implied promise of future interventions may cause, but it is a horrible precedent to set.

Libya is part of this bigger strategic picture. People have warned that applying the “responsibility to protect” in cases where autocracies massacre their own citizens could set a precedent. But that is precisely the point – it should set a precedent. ~Shadi Hamid

Of course, Kosovo should have already set this precedent. Gaddafi seems not to have noticed. It seems unlikely that abusive, repressive governments will conclude from the new Libya precedent that they risk provoking military intervention if they crack down brutally on protesters and rebels. They will wager correctly that Serbia and Libya became targets of intervention not because their actions were especially heinous, but because their leaders were easily vilified and diplomatically isolated. Authoritarian rulers will make a point of cultivating major and rising power patrons to protect themselves against future intervention. The Burmese junta is secure against outside intervention because it has cultivated relationships with China and India. The “responsibility to protect” largely carried out by Western governments will give authoritarian governments new incentives to build stronger ties with those governments that are uninterested in enforcing this norm.

The precedent that it will set is that humanitarian intervention is not only permitted but demanded by fairly low-intensity civil wars, which is what we have been watching unfold in Libya for the last month. By watering down what one considers a humanitarian crisis, the concept is devalued, and it may lead to policies that are ill-suited to the situation. David Bosco described the dangers of this very well earlier this month:

The danger of thinking of the crisis almost exclusively in humanitarian terms is two-fold. First, this perspective could generate pressure for outside action that is ill-conveived and unsustainable. As the international experience in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 demonstrated, intervening to avert humanitarian crisis–but without a clear political or military goal–can be disastrous. Perversely, military action designed around humanitarian need can be less effective in addressing those needs than intervention designed to achieve a decisive military victory. More broadly, a profligate use of the term “humanitarian crisis” may devalue the concept, making it hard for the public to distinguish between a situation in which hundreds of thousands are at risk and less grave, but still serious, episodes.

One of the reasons why opponents of a Libyan war mention the other humanitarian crises around the world that have not triggered intervention is that many of them are far better candidates for international action on the terms of the “responsibility to protect.” There is as much, or as little, international consensus on what to do in Ivory Coast as there is on Libya, as ECOWAS and the AU endorse Ouattara as the legitimate president. The humanitarian crisis is already much greater in terms of the number of refugees, and Ivory Coast’s neighbors are in much greater danger of destabilization on account of their own recent civil wars. There is no agreement on action here because no major powers have chosen to make it a priority. That doesn’t mean that there is an obvious U.S. role in Ivory Coast, either, but if what we’re talking about is intervening where outside governments can be most effective in preventing humanitarian catastrophe Ivory Coast makes a lot more sense than Libya. Ivory Coast is no more and no less strategically important in enforcing certain political norms than Libya is. Forcing Gbagbo to honor the results of a free and fair democratic election could be very constructive not only for Ivorian politics but for the practice of democratic politics throughout Africa. I should also add that neither conflict meets the standards that R2P advocates have previously set up to determine when international intervention is appropriate and necessary.

To their credit, advocates of R2P did not originally set low standards for what would qualify a crisis for outside intervention. A Libyan intervention in the name of the “responsibility to protect” badly debases the standards that are supposed to apply. As in Kosovo, there has been an assumption that escalating the conflict will avert large-scale loss of human life, but it seems more likely to intensify the conflict and contribute to the loss of life and massive displacement of population that interventionists intend to prevent. Another problem with an R2P-justified intervention in Libya is that the governments will be hiding behind the R2P arguments, but they will actually be pursuing a policy of regime change, which they have hardly kept a secret. This is directly in conflict with one of the basic R2P principles, which insists on “[a]cceptance of limitations, incrementalism and gradualism in the application of force, the objective being protection of a population, not defeat of a state.”