Andrew is understandably appalled by Obama’s arbitrary decision to commit the U.S. to military action in Libya, but it’s worth revisiting Obama’s record on military intervention to understand why this horrible decision isn’t really a very surprising one. Except for Iraq, there isn’t a single U.S. military intervention abroad that Obama has not endorsed. He specifically cited the Balkan interventions in his Nobel Peace Price acceptance speech as examples of humanitarian intervention he supported. It isn’t just U.S. military action that he has routinely supported. As a Senator, he supported a resolution endorsing the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, and as President-elect he approved of Operation Cast Lead.

Though it is no longer online, there is an article for Culture11 that I wrote published the day after the 2008 election that described what Obama was likely to do in office. Obama has done many of the things I expected him to do in foreign and domestic policy, and I expected him to do them because these were the things he said he would be doing that were consistent with his record:

Bearing all of this in mind, what is an Obama administration therefore likely to do?

It will move to reduce the number of soldiers in Iraq, but it will be very gradual and constrained by the candidate’s commitment to tie withdrawal to “conditions on the ground,” which promises a halting, frequently interrupted departure of combat troops and the maintenance of a large number of “residual” forces that may number as many as 80,000.

The administration will make gestures toward Iran and Syria to determine what negotiations, if any, are possible, but will persist in taking the bipartisan hard-line against Iran’s nuclear program, thus steadily increasing the danger of conflict with Tehran.

Obama will likely send additional brigades to Afghanistan, which will be buffeted by increasing instability from a near-bankrupt Pakistan, whose government will regard Obama warily on account of his stated disregard for Pakistani sovereignty.

Supporting the expansion of the size of the Army and Marine Corps, Obama will also back additional deployments and missions for the military as a whole. Following Vice-President Biden’s advice, Obama will establish no-fly zones in Darfur under auspices of NATO, and as the situation in the Congo deteriorates he may also call for participation in a peacekeeping force. Deployments for humanitarian interventions will be remarkably frequent given other obligations.

Obviously, the specifics of this last paragraph were wrong, but the basic assumption that the administration would be willing to put additional strains on an overburdened military to satisfy humanitarian interventionist impulses has unfortunately been proven correct. It is small consolation to say that Obama has not been quite as cavalier in his use of force as Clinton was or as reckless in intervening as McCain would have been. Obama’s view of the Kosovo war has been a reliable indicator of this, and it is no accident that this intervention depressingly bears a striking resemblance to that deeply misguided, unjust intervention of twelve years ago. For several weeks, it seemed possible that Obama’s caution and reluctance to insert the U.S. into political movements in Arab countries would prevail over the incessant clamoring for war, but in the end Obama remains far too wedded to ideas of American “leadership” and exceptionalism, and to the mistaken belief that our values and interests can be aligned through the use of force.

The U.S. prepared to a launch a missile attack on Libyan air defenses, but American ships and aircraft stationed in and around the Mediterranean Sea did not participate in initial French air missions Saturday, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the unfolding intervention.

One official said the U.S. intends to limit its involvement — at least in the initial stages — to helping protect French and other air missions by taking out Libyan air defenses.

An attack against those defenses with Navy sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles was planned for later Saturday, one official said. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of military operations. ~Houston Chronicle (AP)

If all goes as planned, this is how the U.S. will enter yet another arbitrary, unnecessary, unjust, and unconstitutional war. This war breaks every rule of the Powell Doctrine. This is a war fought neither as a last resort, nor is the U.S. prepared to use overwhelming force. Based on the mismatch between what the U.S. and our allies are authorized to do and what we have set out to do, mission creep is as inevitable as it is undesirable.

Lexington notes that there has been no meaningful public debate prior to the U.S. and allied commitment to intervene in Libya:

But there is no escaping the fact that this new entanglement was decided upon behind closed doors at the UN and with very little public debate here in the United States. None of this will matter if the end comes quickly. But if things go wrong and America is drawn deeper in, the domestic consequences for the president could be far-reaching.

Unfortunately, there is very little accountability from the public for terrible foreign policy decisions. This may be one reason why all administrations can make as many bad decisions as they do without suffering immediate political backlash, and why there is no political incentive for showing restraint in the exercise of American power. One reason for this is that U.S. foreign policy is remarkably independent of public opinion. There are overwhelming majorities that not only don’t support U.S. military action in Libya, but don’t believe that the U.S. has any responsibility to respond to what happens in Libya, but this makes no difference to the people setting policy.

Another reason for this is timing. Foreign policy blunders and disasters don’t always appear so to the majority of the public right away. It takes considerable time for the full consequences of horrible policy decisions to be realized, and by then the people responsible for making those decisions may already be out of office. Intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was a horrible decision, and it has had unfortunate consequences for Kosovo and other nations beyond the Balkans, but the people responsible were on their way out the door, and most of these consequences didn’t happen until years later. It took three years, thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of American wounded, and mass slaughter taking place in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities before the majority of the public was moved to punish the party of the President responsible for the Iraq debacle, and to this day there is still no evidence that the party understands why it actually lost.

Other times, horrible foreign policy decisions may greatly harm other nations, but they may have only a minimal, temporary effect on the U.S., in which case the public shrugs off the mistake, forgets about it, and never even notices it. While recognizing Kosovo’s independence and pledging eventual Georgian membership in NATO set the stage for the tensions that erupted in August 2008 with Georgia’s escalation, hardly anyone in the U.S. knew or cared that administration decisions had contributed to that disaster, and because it was mainly a disaster for Georgia and South Ossetia there was no public reaction. Likewise, the Kosovo war itself was disastrous for Serbia, and the political aftermath has proved to be very bad for the inhabitants of Kosovo, but even though the public was divided over Kosovo, and even though Congress only debated it after it had been going on for weeks, it had no major effect on Clinton’s popularity or the election prospects of his Vice President.

The greatest political danger to Obama doesn’t come from what happens in Libya, but from the perception that he is unduly concerned with foreign affairs. Even Presidents widely considered to be successful in their foreign policy efforts don’t enjoy sustained political benefits from that at home. As long as the economic recovery remains slow, Obama’s attention to foreign affairs, whether it is unavoidable or not, may start to be seen as coming at the expense of focusing on domestic concerns. Unfortunately, Obama will probably not be punished politically for the terrible decision to intervene in Libya. For that to happen, the U.S. and our allies would have to make such a hash of things that they end up presiding over a completely failed mission, and no one in the U.S. and allied countries wants to see this happen.

Update: U.S. missile strikes have begun.

Second Update: Michael Lind also objects to the unconstitutional Libyan war, and has some choice words for the nature of the multilateral support for UNSCR 1973.

When discussing whether or not the U.S. and allies should be intervening in Libya, many people seem to be operating under the assumption that an air campaign will be sufficient to do what the resolution has authorized, namely protecting the civilian population in rebel-controlled areas. Robbert Haddick writes that this is not the case:

The coalition should reckon with Qaddafi’s likely responses. Although they are helpful, he does not need his tanks and artillery to regain control of Libya’s cities. Once coalition aircraft begin attacking conventional military targets, Qaddafi will switch to irregular warfare techniques. His soldiers and mercenaries will abandon their uniforms and travel by bus, accompanied by civilians, refugees, and friendly media for shielding against air attack. Once inside cities like Benghazi and in close quarters with the rebels, Qaddafi’s infantry will similarly be immune from air attack, especially if the coalition is prohibited from deploying ground troops as forward air controllers.

Finally, Qaddafi is a particularly unscrupulous and ruthless adversary with long experience using terrorism as a strategic weapon — Libya was a large source of suicide bomb volunteers during the Iraq war — so members of the coalition should expect terror retaliation in various forms.

Although his overseas bank accounts have been seized, Qaddafi already has the necessary money, troops, weapons, and ammunition to sustain a low intensity but brutal campaign against the rebels. The investigation begun by the International Criminal Court has left him and his sons with little choice but to fight on. The United Nations has authorized the wide-ranging use of air power against his regime. Air power will be enough to escalate this war but not enough to win it. Although prohibited for now by the Security Council, “boots on the ground” will eventually be required to remove Qaddafi and his sons from Libya.

The similarities with Kosovo are eerie, and that is a very bad sign for the people living in eastern Libya. Perhaps the only thing worse than intervening in a civil war in which the U.S. and our allies have nothing at stake is to intervene and then opt for those tactics that will do just enough to commit us to the fight without protecting the people our forces are supposed to be protecting. Quite apart from the outrageous harm done to both Albanian and Serb civilians in the prosecution of the air campaign, the war in Kosovo facilitated and caused the mass refugee exodus from Kosovo that it was officially trying to avert*. The U.S. and our allies weren’t going to be responsible for what happened to the people in eastern Libya, but our governments have now assumed responsibility for them.

Haddick makes a credible argument that the limited action that the U.N. just authorized will not be enough to achieve even those limited objectives set out by Obama yesterday, to say nothing of the much more ambitious goal of toppling Gaddafi. Leaving aside the inevitable drumbeat for escalation and regime change that was bound to happen anyway, U.S. and allied governments are going to feel compelled to go beyond what the current resolution authorizes. All of the talk of so-called international consensus and regional support is not going to last when the intervening governments decide to push for regime change.

* Anyone interested in a good analysis of the NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo should look at this 1999 paper by Christopher Layne from the Cato Institute. As Layne explained:

Before the onset of NATO’s air campaign, Belgrade’s objective was not to forcibly expel ethnic Albanians from Kosovo but rather to remove them from KLA strongholds, thereby depriving the KLA of its base of support.Once the bombing began, however, the Serbian campaign in Kosovo intensified as Belgrade moved (apparently according to a previously formulated contingency plan) to crush the KLA and to expel large numbers of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

The campaign triggered the mass expulsions from Kosovo. NATO made the entire civilian population of Kosovo a target of retaliation by intervening on the side of the KLA. Had Milosevic not backed down, U.S. and NATO would have had to invade to expel the Serbian forces or accept the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo as a fait accompli. If someone invokes Kosovo in defense of the new Libyan war, this is the campaign they are idealizing.

And this is yet another way Libya bears little resemblance to Iraq. As I argue in a recent Foreign Policy piece, where, in Iraq, we stood alone calling for war while most of the world opposed it, the dynamic, this time, was reversed. The United States – along with Russia, China, and Germany among the major powers – stood increasingly alone in opposing the emerging Arab and international consensus favoring intervention. ~Shadi Hamid

Shadi Hamid and I aren’t going to convince each other on our different definitions of American interests anytime soon, but I wanted to say a few things about this claim of “international consensus favoring intervention.” My point here isn’t to insist on an analogy with Iraq, because the better analogy is with Kosovo, which is already bad enough, but I don’t agree that there is a broad international consensus for intervention in Libya. There does seem to be less intense international hostility to intervening in Libya, but that is bound to change if the conflict escalates. According to Marc Lynch, the support in Arab governments and countries for this intervention is fairly shallow and may not endure a prolonged mission:

While Arab public opinion should not be the sole consideration in shaping American decisions on this difficult question, Americans also should not fool themselves into thinking that an American military intervention will command long-term popular Arab support. Every Arab opinion leader and Libyan representative I spoke with at the conference told me that “American military intervention is absolutely unacceptable.” Their support for a No Fly Zone rapidly evaporates when discussion turns to American bombing campaigns.

Does Lynch have that wrong? If he doesn’t, I am underwhelmed by the fact that the GCC wants intervention in Libya. There is something a little curious about mentioning past U.S. support for Arab authoritarian regimes as the mistake that needs to be corrected in the same breath that Hamid cites the support of those same regimes for intervening in Libya. Some of these governments are also eager to strike at Iran, but I don’t think very many are arguing that we should take their advice on that score. Typically, the foreign policy goals of these regimes and the views of the nations they rule over are not closely aligned, and sometimes they are diametrically opposed.

The Arab League and the GCC have provided the U.S. and our allies political cover for intervention, but presumably this will be at the price of allowing them to crush dissent in their own countries. What if building a coalition for intervention requires making a bargain in which the U.S. allows allied Arab governments to go back to ignoring demands for reform? Suppose winning the support of these governments on Libyan intervention leads to the continued stifling of protest movements throughout the region? On Hamid’s terms, would it still be worth doing?

When we look at the rest of the world, the picture is hardly more encouraging. In addition to Russia and China, India, Brazil, and Turkey have not supported taking military action in Libya. Along with Germany, the largest democracies in Asia and Latin America abstained on the recent resolution. In many respects, the international consensus against invading Iraq has been reproduced almost exactly. Many of the members of the pro-war coalition in 2002-03 are reprising their role, as Denmark and Spain have agreed to participate and Italy will allow its bases to be used. Earlier, the Polish government expressed skepticism about intervening, and it remains to be seen what, if anything, they would contribute to the mission. NATO appears to be as divided now as it was then. The only major power that opposed invading Iraq and now favors intervention in Libya is France, and I’m sure we all understand that this is a belated gamble on Sarkozy’s part to try to make everyone forget how much support France had given to Ben Ali.

Maybe international consensus and strong regional support are overrated, but neither of these seems to exist as far as American military action in Libya is concerned, or at least they are not significantly greater than they were in 2002-03. The difference this time is that there are no major powers intent on blocking authorization of a limited Libyan war. If the conflict escalates and some Western governments insist on pressing ahead with toppling Gaddafi, whatever consensus that does exist will almost certainly break down.

P.S. I don’t agree that the U.S. would be blamed for “letting Libyans get slaughtered.” The comparison with the Iraqi uprisings in 1991 is a misleading one, because in this case the Libyan rebels originally had no reason to expect U.S. support. The things that have understandably generated the most ill-will towards the U.S. have been those active interventions in the countries of the region through support for authoritarian governments and military action. The only way that I see a military action in Libya not contributing to general distrust and resentment of the U.S. is if Gaddafi actually accepts the cease-fire and the fighting in Libya doesn’t escalate. If that is what happens, that will be a very lucky outcome for the U.S., but we shouldn’t be making foreign policy decisions that rely so heavily on lucky breaks.

Update: Christopher Caldwell makes a similar observation about the lack of international consensus:

One must say “western” because the consensus for action against Libya extends only to a North Atlantic order that John Foster Dulles would have recognised. The five countries that abstained from the resolution vote – Brazil, China, Germany, India and Russia – account for almost 3bn of the world’s people and are the core of tomorrow’s global economy.

Second Update: Mark Thompson explains the dissatisfaction at the Pentagon on Libya, and also mentions that regional support for intervention isn’t as great as supporters of the war are saying:

There remains concern in the Pentagon that the U.S. has little idea who these rebels are, and whether or not U.S. firepower should be enlisted in their support. There is also distress that despite the support of the Arab League for action against Gaddafi, the two most important Arab states — Egypt and Saudi Arabia — are opposed.

Of these two, Egypt’s opposition seems the most significant. Of course, the Egyptian authorities are concerned for the safety of Egyptians still in Libya, but it undermines the notion that there is broad regional support for this military action when Libya’s most important neighbor is unwilling to participate and the Arab governments most supportive of it are the ones farthest away from Libya.

The Libya intervention is also complicated by the trends in the rest of the region. There is currently a bloody crackdown going on in U.S.-backed Bahrain, with the support of Saudi Arabia and the GCC. The Yemeni regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh is currently carrying out some of its bloodiest repression yet. Will the Responsibility to Protect extend to Bahrain and Yemen? This is not a tangential point. One of the strongest reasons to intervene in Libya is the argument that the course of events there will influence the decisions of other despots about the use of force [bold mine-DL]. If they realize that the international community will not allow the brutalization of their own people, and a robust new norm created, then intervention in Libya will pay off far beyond its borders. But will ignoring Bahrain and Yemen strangle that new norm in its crib? ~Marc Lynch

Lynch indirectly confirms my view that there aren’t very good arguments for any outside force to intervene in Libya. If one of the strongest arguments for intervening in Libya is that it will affect how other governments act, shouldn’t the focus of international attention be on those other governments and their ongoing crackdowns? If we want to discourage crackdowns in Gulf states and Yemen, presumably there is a more efficient way of doing it than attacking Gaddafi’s forces. If intervening in Libya is supposed to create a deterrent against brutal crackdowns by authoritarian governments, doesn’t this deterrent lack credibility when many of the governments calling for intervention in Libya are currently engaged in crackdowns as well?

If intervention in Libya is distracting the U.S. and other states from what is happening in Bahrain and Yemen, surely that is an argument against Libyan intervention. It’s not as if the UAE and Qatar are urging action in Libya because they are trying to deter Bahrain from attacking protesters in Manama. The UAE and Qatar have endorsed Bahrain’s repressive tactics, and then backed them up with soldiers. Doesn’t all of this show the “Libyan war is necessary to create anti-authoritarian demonstration effect” argument to be completely hollow? After all, intervention in Libya doesn’t show that “the international community will not allow the brutalization of their own people,” but that only in fairly rare cases of universally reviled leaders will there ever be enough of a consensus to authorize action against a repressive government. Instead of strengthening a new norm, Libyan intervention will confirm that the enforcement of the “responsibility to protect” usually occurs only in those exceptional cases when a government has no reliable and powerful allies left. We already know that it won’t apply in Bahrain, and the presence of troops from the neighboring Gulf states tells us why.

I find it interesting that the demonstration effect that advocates of intervention believe a war will have is often the exact opposite of the one that the war produces. That should make us extremely wary of military action based on speculation about the positive echo effects it might have elsewhere in the world. For its advocates, the invasion of Iraq was supposed to result in the creation of a democratic Iraq that would serve as a model to the region and usher in regional transformation. Indeed, Iraq became a model of sorts, or at least a cautionary tale, and for many years the reputation of democracy promotion was and to some extent still is inextricably tied up with the chaos, violence, and destruction of the war. Instead of becoming a democratic beacon, Iraq helped to discredit democracy, at least when promoted by the U.S., as a political model. Suppose that a Libyan war sends a very different message from the one that its supporters want to send. Instead of sending a message to authoritarian governments around the world that they must not use violence against protesters, suppose that it sends the message that authoritarian rulers need to clamp down even more right now and react even more violently when protests erupt.

Imagine that you are a despotic ruler who wishes to remain in power. Up until now, you are probably already convinced that using coercive and brutal methods to suppress opposition to your rule is often effective, and you have been using some of these methods on a regular basis for years. So far you have seen significant protests in at least five Arab countries governed by authoritarians and monarchs, the rulers have stepped down in two, and so far the rulers have more or less continued to hold on in three of them.

Gaddafi appeared to be on the ropes in Libya, but made a quick comeback, but he wasn’t able to crush the rebellion against him before outside forces pledged to intervene. What do you, the despotic ruler, conclude from this? What you would probably conclude is that Gaddafi’s mistake was in being caught off guard and being slow in recovering control over the country, and not that his mistake was in triggering international intervention through brutal repression. Had Gaddafi crushed the rebellion in a week or two, there would have been no time for any outside governments to agree or to act against him, and it would have seemed pointless for them to try. As a despotic ruler, you resolve not to be as complacent and easily surprised as Gaddafi was, and you decide that when protests erupt you won’t be so disorganized and slow in your response.

For the moment, at least, the resolution seems to have had a positive effect; Libya’s foreign minister has said that country will declare an immediate ceasefire. But the situation remains extremely uncertain. It isn’t clear how rebel forced might respond, nor is it clear how durable a ceasefire might prove in the absence of an occupying force.

And having involved itself here, it’s not clear how the mobilising powers will be able to avoid action elsewhere in the Middle East. ~Free Exchange

The resolution called for a cease-fire and the grounding of all aircraft, and this appears to be what the Libyan government just agreed to do. The intervening governments may have caught a lucky break in that Gaddafi’s desire for self-preservation has given them a way out of going through with the folly of attacking Libya. This is temporarily a good outcome for Libya’s rebels, but there are several reasons why this may still prove to be bad for the U.S. and our allies. Intervening governments that have committed to providing defense for civilian areas in Libya and enforcing a no-fly zone are now stuck with that commitment for the foreseeable future. That could tie up military resources for as long as the conflict continues, and there’s no telling how long that might be. We can expect to see a lot more agitation from hawks here and in Europe that Gaddafi cannot be allowed to remain in power, and they are likely to see Gaddafi’s acceptance of a cease-fire as an unacceptable maneuver to buy time. Interventionists sold a Libyan war primarily on humanitarian grounds (“saving” Benghazi, etc.), but they will not be satisfied at all by a cessation of hostilities.

The more significant problem is that this has set a precedent that the states that were prepared to intervene in Libya will be expected to do the same in many more cases. An arbitrary, rather odd decision to treat the Libyan civil war as the greatest political crisis in the world will create the expectation of foreign support in other internal conflicts. That is likely to encourage rebellions and civil conflict. If a group believes it can win foreign support and political concessions by provoking a sufficiently brutal crackdown, that will make it more likely to rise up against its government, which may lead to humanitarian catastrophes that the “responsibility to protect” is supposed to prevent. As Alan Kuperman has argued (via Michael), the “responsibility to protect” creates a moral hazard:

The emerging norm, by raising hopes of diplomatic and military intervention to protect these groups, unintentionally fosters rebellion by lowering its expected cost and raising its likelihood of success. Intervention does sometimes help rebels attain their political goals, but it is usually too late or inadequate to avert retaliation against civilians. Thus, the emerging norm resembles an imperfect insurance policy against genocidal violence. It creates a moral hazard that encourages the excessively risky behavior of rebellion by members of groups that are vulnerable to genocidal retaliation, but it cannot fully protect these groups against the backlash. The emerging norm thereby causes some genocidal violence that otherwise would not occur.

There was nothing all that extraordinary about the Libyan case, and nothing that really set it apart from other conflicts around the world, and the willingness to intervene helps to enforce the norm Kuperman describes. Having set the bar very low for what qualifies a conflict for humanitarian intervention in Libya, it will be harder to reject intervention in the future. Our willingness to take military action against Libya probably isn’t going to deter other governments from cracking down brutally, as the lesson they will learn from this is that they need to quash rebellions more quickly. It is going to encourage rebels around the world to expect foreign support. Supporters of UNSCR 1973 are making an implicit commitment to countless groups around the world that they will side with them if their governments are violently oppressing them, and it is a commitment that these governments will not be able and are not going to honor.

The arguments against military intervention struck me as surprisingly weak and almost entirely dependent on raising the spectre of Iraq and Afghanistan. ~Shadi Hamid

This is a good example of how advocates for either side are probably not the best judges of the strength of the arguments for and against a war. Hamid thought anti-war arguments were surprisingly weak, which I suppose he would. Obviously, he wasn’t persuaded by them, and instead he supported starting a war against Libya early on.

On the other side, I found pro-war arguments to be painfully poor. Wieseltier’s arguments, one of which Hamid refers to as a “moving must-read,” were probably the worst of all. The idea that the U.S. or any other government could end up going to war with the support of such poor arguments seemed almost impossible, and then I remembered that the arguments for invading Iraq and bombing Serbia were no better. I also remembered that policy debates often aren’t won by the people with the better ideas and arguments. One of the advantages that pro-war arguments have is that they don’t need to be very good. Even though the burden of proof is on the people who want to start a war, they are never actually required to prove their case. The bias in our government over the last twenty years has been in favor of foreign intervention of one sort or another, and governments often don’t go to war because there is a well-reasoned rationale, but instead they concoct some half-baked justification that fits their impulse to “do something.”

One would think that “raising the specter” of Iraq and Afghanistan when both wars are still ongoing would be sufficient to give intelligent people pause and force them to reconsider what they’re saying, but if it wasn’t the argument against a Libyan war was hardly limited to that. There were three main points that remain central to the case against the war as far as the U.S. is concerned: 1) the U.S. has no interests at stake in Libya, and no stake in the outcome of the Libyan civil war; 2) the Libyan government has done nothing in over a decade to the U.S. or any ally that justifies the use of force; 3) The Libyan civil war is an internal conflict that doesn’t concern outside states. As far as I can see, all of those are still true. The first point seems hard to contest unless one re-defines interests as broadly as possible. Pro-war arguments skip over the second point, because war supporters realize that they have no argument against this except to go back and revisit old grudges that were supposedly settled eight years ago.

Hamid continues:

I would love to hear how doing nothing in Libya was going to help U.S. security interests.

For a start, Libya would be draining U.S. military resources even more, distracting the U.S. from the far more significant and important (to the U.S.) political situation developing in the Gulf, and potentially creating blowback against the U.S. and allied governments involved in the intervention. If we’re talking about actual U.S. and allied security interests, rather than nebulous and elusive “credibility,” it is clear that doing nothing, or at least not taking military action (which isn’t the same as doing nothing) would have served those interests. If military action in Libya does not end with Gaddafi’s overthrow, what is to stop him from returning “to supporting terrorism and wreaking havoc in the region”? His recent threats to target civilian traffic in the Mediterranean may be mostly bluster, but how better to ensure that Libya will be “wreaking havoc” in the region than by turning an internal conflict into an international war?

If we don’t want havoc in the region, why should the U.S. be helping to create more havoc? Doesn’t Hamid see how heavily his argument relies on currently non-existent threats? Hamid’s strategic argument raises the specter of Libyan WMD programs and the export of terrorism sometime in the future. Right now, Gaddafi may or may not respond to renewed pariah status by pursuing these things. Once Gaddafi is targeted with outside military action, he has every incentive to pursue both. The argument for war in Libya says that we should ignore the significant threats that intervention might help create for the sake of settling an internal conflict.

It isn’t all that ironic that the Arab League and GCC have called for action in Libya. Many of their governments hate Gaddafi and want to use this as an excuse to act against him, and perhaps they see it as a way to demonstrate solidarity with protesters, provided that they are far away and have nothing to do with their countries. It’s a way to keep the world’s attention on Libya, and to distract U.S. attention from what the GCC is doing in Bahrain. It is possible that any GCC member participation in enforcing UNSCR 1973 will come at the price of continuing to tolerate the GCC military presence in Bahrain, which does rather more damage to America’s reputation because it involves active complicity in what allied governments are doing. If we’re going to talk about strategic interests, perhaps it was time that we focused on countries where the U.S. actually has some. Libya isn’t one of them.

And I should add that just because I think the intervention is ill-considered doesn’t mean I think it’s going to end in a calamity (although it clearly could). There’s no reason to believe the U.S. can’t deliver a beating to Gaddafi’s thugs and force them away from the rebel strongholds without having to intervene on the ground. But unless the Obama administration articulates some clear red-lines about the scope of American involvement, we’re on a clear path toward regime change in Libya. For better or worse. ~Greg Scoblete

It depends on what we mean by calamity. As I see it, waging war against a government that has done nothing to the U.S. in decades is a calamity in itself. If we mean “the campaign turns into a bloody debacle for American forces,” maybe not, but why take the chance? As for the “clear path toward regime change,” it’s important that we all stop for a moment and look at what the resolution actually authorizes. Yes, it is a significant escalation of outside involvement in what had been a purely internal Libyan conflict, but the resolution’s language limits the authorization to a no-fly zone and basically defensive operations for securing the civilian population of eastern Libya and other centers still controlled by anti-Gaddafi forces. The relevant section reads as follows:

4. Authorizes Member States that have notified the Secretary-General, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, and acting in cooperation with the Secretary-General, to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory, and requests the Member States concerned to inform the Secretary-General immediately of the measures they take pursuant to the authorization conferred by this paragraph which shall be immediately reported to the Security Council;

Greg is right that enforcing the resolution is going to put the U.S. on the path to regime change in Libya, but one problem is that the path is still anything but clear. As of right now, the Security Council hasn’t authorized anything like a campaign to destroy Gaddafi’s forces in the rest of Libya, except insofar as it involves enforcing a no-fly zone. This won’t involve a concerted attack on the centers of his power in Tripoli and elsewhere. The war that many Libya hawks want is apparently not the one they’re going to get, at least not yet, but it raises the question of why the U.S. and our allies are going to start a war with Libya for the sake of essentially freezing the conflict more or less as it is and turning rebel-held zones into our protectorates. It’s as if the entire thing were designed to play into Gaddafi’s propaganda that outside governments want to divide Libya.

The cease-fire and political settlement language incorporated into the resolution was the result of Russian amendments to the original draft, which may help explain why Russia and China were content to abstain on this resolution. They haven’t signed off on foreign military action to topple Gaddafi or anything close to it, and it’s still likely that they won’t in the future. Having gone this far down the road with U.N. authorization, it is doubtful that the Obama administration would press ahead with more aggressive measures without similar consensus. The administration appears to have committed the U.S. to a mission that requires our military to maintain a stalemate in a civil war that is none of our business and whose outcome is irrelevant to our interests by entering into a war against Gaddafi’s government with no obvious conclusion.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war….A war
based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear –
I suffer no illusions about Muammar Gaddafi . He is a brutal man….He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Libyan people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Gaddafi poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or
to his neighbors, that the Libyan economy is in shambles, that the Libyan military a fraction of
its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be
contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

That’s what Obama might have said in response to the Libyan civil war, and he would have been right. It’s remarkable how little one has to change this part of Obama’s 2002 speech against the Iraq war to fit the current situation. I would say that it’s surprising that Obama’s response to Libya has so little in common with his criticism of invading Iraq, but I know that it isn’t. When there was political pressure in Chicago to speak out against a new war, that was what he did, and now that the pressure in Washington has been building to start a new war that is what he intends to do.