Seven days from now will be the twelfth anniversary of the illegal war against what was then still called Yugoslavia. It had neither U.N. authorization nor Congressional approval, and it did not have the slightest legal or moral justification, and in almost every respect except for Security Council authorization the war that is about to begin against Libya is very much like it. In the next few days, allied governments and presumably the U.S. along with them will embark on an unnecessary war against a government that has done nothing to any of our citizens or countries to merit the use of force.

The American people through their representatives have not consented to this, and they evidently do not want the United States involved. If Obama decides to have U.S. forces participate in this war, he will be doing so without a clearly-defined goal or exit strategy, and there will be absolutely no public consensus that it is necessary for American security. If Congress does not support a declaration of war against Libya, it will also be unconstitutional. Even if the U.S. is not directly involved in the fighting, Obama will own part of the Libyan war, because he and his administration facilitated it and helped give it legal and political cover.

Based on everything we know right now, a war against Libya is not wise for any of the states that intend to join in an attack on Libya, and it is obviously not necessary for the security of the Gulf states that may participate in the attack. Judging by the criteria of just war theory, a war against Libya is not a just one. Even if we grant that there is right intention, there is no just cause. Libya’s current government has not wronged any of its would-be attackers, and there are no present injuries that any of these states have suffered that require or justify the use of force. It does not meet the standard defined in the Catholic Catechism’s definition of just war that holds that “the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain.” The international institution that is supposed to be dedicated to international peace and security is deliberately turning a civil war into a much broader, international conflict. It is hard to think of examples of small wars that were made better through escalation.

If the Security Council authorizesintervention in Libya, Obama deserves a significant share of the blame, and blame is the appropriate word. Years ago, I concluded that Obama’s instincts tended to favor military intervention overseas, which was why there was no U.S. intervention that Obama opposed except Iraq, but more recently I had started to think that I had emphasized this too much in the past. It seems that I was right the first time. I had started to think that the people in the administration couldn’t possibly be so dense as to become entangled in a Libyan civil war in any way, but clearly I overestimated them.

Outside military action in Libya is a bad mistake. If it is mainly European and Arab governments making that mistake, that relieves the U.S. of most of the burden, but it will still be folly. Even though it was carried out by a regional government, Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia to install the U.N.-approved government of Somalia has proved to be ruinous for Somalia and harmful to regional security. Military “solutions” to other states’ internal conflicts typically don’t solve those conflicts, but simply give them another dimension. The U.S. is still a moving force behind the resolution that will apparently authorize such action, and that makes us partly responsible for whatever comes next.

U.N. authorization gets around one of the technical legal objections to U.S. participation in yet another unnecessary war. It does not get around the fundamental problems that most Americans want no part of this war, it has nothing to do with the United States, and it is an inexcusable waste of limited resources that will strain the military even more. There must not be any U.S. involvement in military action against Libya unless Sen. Lugar’s conditions of a full debate and vote on a declaration of war are met. The American people are weary of endless warfare. If two-thirds of them no longer believe that the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting, which is arguably the only remotely justifiable war the U.S. has fought in the last twenty years, I fail to see how they will ever support the War for Sarkozy’s Bad Conscience (or perhaps it should more accurately be called the War for Sarkozy’s Desperate Damage Control).

Looking at the list of supporting governments on the Security Council, one will be hard-pressed to find any state other than the U.S, Britain, and France that wields significant political clout. It is telling that every other major and rising power currently on the Council is expected to abstain. Along with Russia and China, India, Brazil, and Germany are all expected to abstain, which is a remarkable vote of no-confidence from two major strategic allies of the U.S. and the leading democracy in Latin America. The success of going through the Security Council in this instance will simply encourage interventionists to push for military action in more situations than before in the hope that the Council will confer some measure of legitimacy on their latest obsession.

Update: As expected, UNSCR 1973 was just adopted 10-0 with five abstentions.

Second Update: Andrew Exum reacts to the news:

It really does seem like we are going to go to war with another country in the Arabic-speaking world. I should be thankful for the broad international coalition we have put together, but I mainly just have a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.

None of this means that America should act militarily in Libya. But it is frustrating that everyone on the political spectrum from Pat Buchanan to Brent Scowcroft only begin to throw up their arms and curse American foreign policy when it involves engagements for which a humanitarian case can at least be made. ~Isaac Chotiner

Right, because “everyone” from Buchanan to Scowcroft only criticize American foreign policy commitments that have a humanitarian dimension. When he put those names down, was Chotiner trying to sabotage his own argument? Scowcroft was the most well-known and senior member of the first Bush administration to oppose the Iraq war. I hope Chotiner isn’t going to claim that a real humanitarian case could still be made for the Iraq war at this point.

There are few on the right, or anywhere in American foreign policy debate, who have consistently criticized U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War more than Buchanan. This has been especially true in the last 10-12 years. Back in 1999-2000, I can remember that Buchanan was already inveighing against the immorality and futility of Iraq sanctions, and he had been warning about the dangers of blowback from the U.S. presence in the Near East for years before 9/11. Buchanan opposed bombing Serbia in 1999, which might be what Chotiner is referring to here, but he also opposed NATO expansion that preceded and followed it, and he objected to provoking Russia with continued proposals for expansion in the last decade. During the Bush years, there was hardly anything in U.S. foreign policy that Buchanan didn’t criticize.

A lot of Cold War Republicans may or may not still endorse a lot of the dubious alliances the U.S. had during the Cold War, but since the end of the Cold War some of them have become much more skeptical of the value of such alliances. Part of this is a result of reconsidering these alliances and their consequences, and part of it comes from no longer believing that U.S. interests require the extensive alliance and base structure that the U.S. built up during the Cold War.

Obviously, mainstream conservatives and Republicans have generally been anything but critical of U.S. foreign policy, unless it is by way of saying that it has ceased being aggressive and confrontational enough over the last two years. If these are the people Chotiner is talking about, he needn’t be quite so frustrated, since most of them seem to be disproportionately supportive of taking some sort of military action in Libya. Unlike Ross, who has been somewhat chastened by the results of the Iraq war, a great many of these people on the right continue to believe that the Iraq war was not only right, but that it was also largely successful and has contributed to the uprisings we are seeing today. These views are ludicrous, but they have nothing to do with being critical of U.S. military engagement abroad. I would have thought that signs that some Iraq war supporters have learned something and are now less inclined to start wars would be welcome, rather than a cause of frustration.

If the administration believes that waging war against Gaddafi is in America’s national interest, then it should do so irrespective of UN sanction. If the administration does not believe that waging war against Gaddafi is in America’s interest, it should not do so anyway simply because the UN has authorized it. Having the UN Security Council authorize punitive measures against Gaddafi’s regime doesn’t suddenly transform the conflict from a peripheral interest to a central one. ~Greg Scoblete

I admit that I don’t entirely understand the administration’s approach, either, but I think it is trying to do one of two things. It doesn’t appear to believe that waging war against Libya is in America’s interest, which is why it has been keen not to volunteer, but it may have concluded that a Libyan intervention led and fought by other states is acceptable. When it lends rhetorical support to harsher measures against Libya, it may be trying to appear to be on the side of taking action against Gaddafi while supporting a resolution including measures that makes its passage even less likely than a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone. Instead of the Bush administration’s efforts to go through the motions at the U.N. in 2002-03 while always intending to attack Iraq anyway, this could be an attempt to use the procedures at the U.N. to run out the clock in order to avoid intervention.

The alternative is that the administration is willing to support a U.N.-authorized mission in Libya, and therefore wants the authorization to be as broad as possible, but it wants the U.S. to be only in a supporting role with European and Arab states undertaking the action and bearing most of the burden. Since the Libyan civil war is overwhelmingly one that concerns the interests mainly of European and Arab states, and the U.S. has essentially nothing at stake in Libya, this would be better than a predominantly American effort. This is Leslie Gelb’s interpretation of what Obama is trying to do, but I am doubtful. Politically, it would be an unsatisfying compromise all around. It would still implicate the U.S. in some fashion in a Libyan intervention. It would offend antiwar supporters of the administration and give endless fodder to critics that want to portray Obama as nothing more than an internationalist drip, but it wouldn’t satisfy Libya hawks because it would not be a sufficiently “robust” (code for militaristic) response.

Perhaps one reason that there is some confusion about the administration’s position is that no previous administration has successfully moved other states to take up these sorts of collective security responsibilities without major U.S. participation. We don’t quite know what we’re watching, because previous administrations haven’t seriously tried to encourage burden-sharing. It’s possible Obama isn’t doing this, but it would help make sense of what he has been doing.

If the U.S. stayed out of a conflict in the past, other states for the most part weren’t clamoring to enter it, but if the U.S. were intent on entering a conflict it was able to bring along other states in support. Regardless of more public reluctance on the part of the U.S., there is much more clamoring for action from some European and Arab states where Libya is concerned, so it may be that the U.S. is trying to facilitate action by others, or it may be that the U.S. is willing to give the clamoring governments enough diplomatic rope with which to hang themselves.

If the European and Arab governments that are demanding action won’t take action for something they insist is imperative, the message may be that the U.S. isn’t going to solve the problem for them. The experience of the ’90s has led most people to assume that regional states will not take action to address regional security problems without U.S. direction, and this is a dependence that many U.S. hegemonists don’t really want to end. We could be seeing an attempt to try to break that dependence by refusing to dominate the response to the Libyan civil war.

On a related note, I find it odd that so many interventionists are citing support from the Arab League and the GCC in their arguments for attacking Libya. This would be the same Arab League that includes all of the members of the GCC, which is presently engaged in a crackdown on behalf of Bahrain’s government. The GCC would be doing this whether or not there were a debate about intervening in Libya, but it’s a useful reminder that multilateral intervention doesn’t have to be only on the side of rebels and oppressed groups. People who want to trash the principle of state sovereignty when it is convenient are helping to make this sort of outside interference by authoritarians on behalf of authoritarians more common in the future than it needs to be. Comparisons with 1848 have become popular, and there is some merit to them, so it’s appropriate to remember that the Russians intervened on behalf of the ruling dynasty against liberal revolutionaries in Hungary. Protections against intervention are just as important for protecting nascent democratic and developing states as they are barriers to taking action against dictators. The GCC forces happen to be in Bahrain by invitation of the Bahraini government, as one would expect, but once liberal interventionists make a regular habit of ignoring state sovereignty it’s easy to imagine scenarios in which major and rising powers will make military interference in the internal political affairs of other states a normal part of their practice of foreign policy. If authoritarian states liberalize, that could also create new pressures to intervene in neighboring states in support of local popular movements.

National Review‘s editors propose that the U.S. embark on a Bay of Goats exercise:

All this means that we should want the rebellion against Qaddafi to survive. We initially opposed a no-fly zone, but circumstances have changed. We should establish both a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone in the approach to the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi to prevent Qaddafi’s armored vehicles from entering the city. The no-fly zone is unlikely to tip the military balance in itself, but Qaddafi’s air force has been a factor in his fight against the rebels. Coupling a no-fly zone with an effort to stop his advance on the ground should save Benghazi and allow the rebels time to recoup. Ideally, the Egyptians would dispatch peacekeepers to the city. Regardless, we should work with our allies to provide logistics, training, and arms to the rebels.

The U.S. isn’t even involved in Libya’s civil war yet, and already we are being warned about the dangers of abandoning rebels we don’t really support. Imagine how much more difficult it will be to give up on the Benghazi Freehold (or Republic of East Libya) after the U.S. has started launching attacks on Gaddafi’s forces. The argument for why the U.S. should do this never gets any stronger. On the contrary, each time I see it repeated I find new reasons why it doesn’t make any sense.

The editors write:

The question now is whether Qaddafi crushes the rebels with impunity and consolidates his terroristic, anti-American rule.

It is in the interest of the United States that this not happen.

U.S. interests didn’t dictate supporting rebels in Cyrenaica six weeks ago, and they don’t now. The U.S. didn’t seriously entertain sponsoring rebellions against Gaddafi before 2003, so why is it imperative that the U.S. actually do so now? When the rebellion started, it did appear that it was proving to be something more than a regional uprising against the government in Tripoli, but that was evidently not the case. Setting up an extra-legal protectorate created on the fly with no specific purpose beyond perpetuating the existence of the protectorate is the sort of lousy, short-term “solution” that people come up with when they can’t articulate why the policy serves concrete American interests. It is a good example of how some people let what the U.S. can do define what it should be doing.

It doesn’t help their case that part of the editors’ argument is based on wishful thinking:

We should have no illusions about the rebels, a rag-tag crew that, no doubt, includes its share of bad actors. The standard here, though, shouldn’t be particularly high — are they better or worse than Qaddafi?

The editors can’t know the answer to that, and neither can I, which is why the sensible thing is to err on the side of caution and not provide unknown actors with a large arms cache and the training in how to use it.

A de facto partition of Libya seems like a recipe for the creation of at least one and maybe two failed states, and an endless drain on U.S. resources for as long as Washington was foolish enough to keep subsidizing the rebels. Critics of Russia’s presence in South Ossetia point out it has become a “black hole” outside any real legal authority that allows the flourishing of corruption, weapons trafficking, and massive wasted spending by the patron government. Essentially, this is the sort of extra-legal enclave that is being proposed for Benghazi and its surroundings, except that the editors also envision the rebels in Benghazi being recognized as the legitimate government of Libya. This goes a bit beyond what Russia did in 2008. It would be more like recognizing Eduard Kokoity as the “real” president of Georgia, and insisting that its military presence in South Ossetia was only there until Kokoity and his supporters could “retake” the rest of the country. Offhand, my guess is that such a Libyan government will have about as much legitimacy in the eyes of most Libyans as the Somali transitional government did for most Somalis when the Ethiopians helped re-install it in Mogadishu, which is to say very little. Some interventionists have worried about Libya turning into something like Somalia absent outside intervention, but what the NR editors are proposing is that the U.S. very deliberately begin the “Somalification” process.

As far as the U.S. is concerned, this is an awesomely bad idea for the reasons Ross outlines here. It’s easy to imagine how this would go down badly not only with Libyans supportive of the regime, but also among Libyans in both east and west that would like to be rid of Gaddafi. Think about it. A rebellion breaks out against the repressive government in your country, but it falters and only survives by being propped up by outside governments through the creation of a semi-permanent partition of your country. Are you going to see the government that the outside powers support as the legitimate government of your country, or are you more likely to see it as the outsiders’ puppet? It is conceivable that most Libyans would rally against the government in Benghazi, which they might come to see not as the launching pad of their liberation, but instead fear as the beachhead of foreign domination.

P.S. This last bit of speculation seems to find some confirmation in this Time report that Ross cited:

Gaddafi boosted his own forces by attracting volunteers ready to fight to hold Libya together, a sentiment reinforced when the rebels adopted the flag used by King Idris al-Sanousi, Libya’s former monarch, whom Gaddafi overthrew in his 1969 coup. That flag, says Fetouri, “represents the misery my country lived through as puppets of the West.” He cites one of his relatives — no fan of Gaddafi — who traveled 400 miles (640 km) to join the government forces against the rebels; he had driven from the Bani Walid area, the heartland of the Warfalli tribe southeast of Tripoli, which has long been the bedrock of Gaddafi’s support. Fetouri, who says he himself had been tempted to join the antigovernment protests before they morphed into an armed rebellion, asked his relative why he was “fighting for Gaddafi.” He said the man told him “it was about Libya the country, not Gaddafi.”

Enthusiasm for Libyan rebels in the West seems to have followed the consistent pattern of the last decade in always overestimating how representative and broad a movement there is opposed to the existing regime.

Diamond mainly discusses the consequences for the Libyan people, but I think that the harm will be global. Barack Obama’s America is showing itself to be a paper tiger; and every one of America’s enemies, especially the tyrants in Iran and Venezuela, are realizing that they can step up their aggression. If Gaddafi stays, he will resume his nuclear and chemical warfare plans and his support of global terrorism, secure in the knowledge that this American President will do nothing to stop him, unless the Russians and Chinese give permission. This week is may be one that will cause terrible problems for the United States for decades to come, comparable to the week when Khomenei seized power in Iran. ~David Kopel

Via Andrew

Ah, yes, Venezuelan aggression. It’s a good indicator that your argument doesn’t make any sense if one of the main things you are worried about in the world is Venezuelan aggression. Seriously, “the harm will be global”? At least some of the advocates of intervention in Libya have been honest in acknowledging how tremendously low the stakes are:

The question of who rules this desert state is not, after all, a matter of U.S. national security. And though Qaddafi has plainly committed terrible atrocities, they don’t begin to compare with those perpetrated by Bashir or Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, or by the factions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So neither the strategic nor the humanitarian case for action is overwhelming.

Since the U.S. has nothing at stake in Libya, warmongers have had to resort to alarmism. If he survives, Gaddafi might start building WMDs! Gaddafi might support terrorism! Yes, it’s possible that a victorious Gaddafi might resume weapons programs, and he could become a sponsor of terrorism again, in which case things would be back where they were for almost decades before 2003. This would be a problem, but it would be as manageable as it was in the 1990s and in the early years of this century. This isn’t remotely comparable to the effect that the revolution in Iran had, not least since Libya isn’t anywhere as important to the U.S. as Iran was then. Is it a big enough problem to merit taking sides in a civil war or initiating a new international war? Not even close.

A government doesn’t reveal itself to be a paper tiger by not intervening in conflicts in which it has no stake and doesn’t have a real interest. In fact, jumping into conflicts where there are no U.S. interests is a good way to create the impression of weakness later on, as there will be enormous pressure to get out immediately when something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong). One way to avoid appearing as a “paper tiger” is not to make every conflict the business of the U.S. government. Hawks love to talk about the withdrawals from Lebanon and Somalia as things that encouraged enemies of the U.S. to expect that Americans had no staying power, but this would never have become an issue if the Reagan and Bush administrations that sent U.S. forces to these countries and the Clinton administration that escalated involvement in Somalia had recognized that the U.S. had no business involving itself in the conflicts raging in Lebanon and Somalia. The lesson of Lebanon wasn’t that Reagan should have “stayed the course,” but that he should never have sent American forces into the middle of a war in Lebanon.

The “paper tiger” worry is a relic of the late 1990s. For good or ill, almost ten years of U.S. combat forces deployed in Afghanistan have shown that this is not true. It is ludicrous to be worrying about the U.S. appearing as a “paper tiger” after persisting in two foreign wars for the better part of a decade. The problem that the U.S. has now isn’t the danger that other states and non-state groups won’t respect American power, but that many Americans think every political crisis in the world demands that the U.S. government engage in constant, pointless demonstrations of strength.

Ross didn’t care much for Peter Feaver’s “rigorous debate” comments, either:

I think this is a deeply mistaken way of looking at these kind of debates. The United States is not the government of North Africa, and Barack Obama is not the president of Libya. We have obligations in the region, certainly — treaty obligations, strategic obligations, and yes, moral obligations as well. But America’s leaders are not directly responsible for governing any country besides their own [bold mine-DL], which means that almost by definition, they/we bear less responsibility for tragedies that result from our staying out of foreign conflicts than for tragedies that flow from our attempts at intervention. By involving ourselves militarily in a given nation’s internal affairs, we effectively claim a kind of political responsibility for the nation or region or question — a small share in the case of a no-fly zone, the lion’s share in the case of an invasion or occupation — that we didn’t have before. We would become part of the government of Libya, in a sense, if we engage our forces in that country’s civil war. And thus our obligations to Libyans would increase, and so would our share of the guilt if things turns out badly.

This is almost entirely right. I don’t agree that intervention in another country’s civil war makes the U.S. part of Libya’s government, but it does mean that our government has made commitments to one political faction and has obliged itself to achieving their goal of becoming Libya’s government. That implicates the U.S. not only in what results from the escalation of the conflict, but also in what our newfound clients do with the weapons and power our government might provide them. The more entangled the U.S. becomes in another country’s civil war, the more that the U.S. is responsible for the behavior of its local allies. That doesn’t mean that the U.S. will actually have control over those allies, which puts the U.S. in the ridiculous position of having to answer for the misdeeds of its clients without having the authority to prevent them. This is one reason why opponents of military intervention keep pointing out that we don’t really understand the forces the U.S. would be helping by siding with the rebels. If the U.S. were to arm, equip and presumably train them, which doesn’t seem likely at this point, that makes the U.S. responsible not only for what they do during the current conflict, but how they use the power the U.S. would be helping them to acquire in the years to come. Today Kosovo is run by little more than a criminal gang. The U.S. and our allies put that gang in power, and then went beyond that and acknowledged their fiefdom as a sovereign state. The U.S. government is responsible for that, and I don’t have much confidence that the results of a “liberated” Libya would be any better.

Ross had a good column on Libya the other day, and we’re in agreement that the arguments for intervention in Libya are not persuasive, but I have to object to this claim:

It isn’t that we have no obligations to Libyans now: As the dominant power in the globe, we have some responsibility for furthering peace and order just about everywhere on earth.

What does that mean? How great can that responsibility be if it doesn’t apply in many of the worst cases of civil war and disorder? Because the U.S. does have great power, it has to be particularly careful to use that power responsibly so that it does not contribute to international instability, but the U.S. does not take on some responsibility for peace and order “just about everywhere on earth” on account of that power. If it did, that would revive Feaver’s suggestion that the U.S. is morally responsible for conflicts that it “lets fester.” In practice, “just about everywhere” excludes most of Asia, virtually all of Africa, and almost all of Latin America. This may be because the governments ruling over these territories don’t want and don’t accept that the U.S. has a role in their regions, or because the U.S. sees no reason to become involved in “furthering peace and order” there, but “just about everywhere” applies to remarkably few places when we start talking about specific cases.

Ross wrote later:

We may bear a share of responsibility for casualties that result from our inaction rather than our actions, but the two ledgers aren’t comparable.

One of the ledgers doesn’t exist. The U.S. wasn’t responsible for the war in the Congo at all, and that definitely applies to the second, much larger phase of the conflict. The U.S. wasn’t responsible for the bloodletting in WWI before 1917 at all. Did the casualties from these wars result from American “inaction”? Could the U.S. have done something that would have resolved these conflicts with less bloodshed? Had Wilson somehow been able to plunge into the European war as soon as it began, American involvement would have more likely intensified the fighting and possibly encouraged the Allies to press the war into Germany rather than ending it more quickly. Today, many interventionists aren’t primarily concerned about minimizing the overall death toll in Libya, but are instead concerned now to prolong the war to achieve a certain political result (i.e., Gaddafi’s downfall). Proponents of action like to cast their argument in terms of saving lives, and they like to argue that inaction equals indifference to mass slaughter, but in virtually all of the cases I can think of far more lives have been lost and many more people injured, displaced, and impoverished because of military intervention than because of a failure to intervene. There may be extraordinary exceptions, but they are very rare.

Ross also mentioned Indo-Pakistani wars. I don’t see how the U.S. had any responsibility for what happened in the first two, and the U.S. role in the Kargil war, as far as I know, was constructive in getting Pakistan to back down. However, the U.S. does have some responsibility for what happened in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war. The U.S. covertly provided some military support to the Pakistani side during that war by using allied governments to evade the legal restrictions on doing so, and it encouraged Pakistan in its war effort. The U.S. effectively took sides in a conflict in which the U.S. had no business being involved, and in that way tied itself to the dubious cause of smashing Bangladeshi independence.

Marc Lynch pours some cold water on interventionist arguments that attacking Libya would represent a “new beginning” for the U.S. in the region:

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. This tracks with what I see in the Arab media and the public conversation. As urgently as they want the international community to come to the aid of the Libyan people, the U.S. would be better served focusing on rapid moves toward non-military means of supporting the Libyan opposition.

If support for a no-fly zone in Libya evaporates when conversation turns to American bombing campaigns, which are the necessary preparation for any no-fly zone in which U.S. forces are involved, support for a no-fly zone doesn’t actually exist among these leaders. Arab League and Libyan rebel support for action that doesn’t include support for the things that are necessary to realize that action doesn’t mean anything. Like other governments, League governments have felt the need to be seen doing something, and so they have endorsed a no-fly zone in what is little more than a symbolic gesture.

The Politico story on Palin quoted Pete Wehner invoking the GOP as the “party of ideas.” I argued that the modern GOP can’t seriously claim to be the “party of ideas” anymore, because it relies so heavily on slogans and talking points in lieu of policy arguments. That was my main criticism of Wehner and the others quoted in the article. My objection to Wehner’s remarks was that he was pretending that there was some great intellectual vitality in the mainstream right that Palin put in jeopardy. Naturally, he skips past all of this and notes that he started criticizing Palin in mid-2009. Fair enough. Wehner isn’t one of the latecomers to criticizing Palin to which I was referring, and I’m happy to acknowledge it. I should have been more careful before claiming that his criticism was belated. I wrote, “Their concern would be interesting if it weren’t so belated and narrowly focused on Palin.” Wehner has demonstrated that I was wrong that his concern was belated, but it does still seem to be narrowly focused on Palin. If Wehner is critiquing the intellectual weakness of the right beyond Palin, that’s welcome news, but I haven’t seen that.

In the criticism he made in 2009, Wehner frames his argument against Palin explicitly in terms of her effect on the Republican Party’s future political fortunes. One of his main criticisms of Palin’s lack of intellectual depth was that it would doom the GOP to minority status if she became the public face of the party. That might be right, but it doesn’t take into account that the intellectual weakness of the mainstream right is a significant problem that goes beyond the influence of Palin and her enthusiasts. Wehner wrote in 2009 that the GOP’s revival depends on “emerging public figures who are conservative and principled, who radiate intellectual depth and calmness of purpose, who come across as irenic rather than agitated, competent and reliable rather than erratic and uneven.” Does Wehner believe that such figures exist in the modern GOP? More to the point, does he believe that such figures have a reasonable chance of leading the party?

I don’t deny that one can find individual mainstream conservative writers occasionally directing criticisms at Palin from the moment she was selected. It’s also true that they have become much more numerous and much more vocal since the midterms, because it has become more politically acceptable on the right to attack Palin now that she is less useful. As a general statement, what I said about the way movement conservative “institutions, magazines, and leaders” treated Palin up until the midterms was true. It doesn’t seem to me that I am ascribing cynical motives to those who have only just recently acknowledged that Palin is a political liability for their cause. I am observing their political cynicism in action.

Update: To follow up on Andrew’s comments, the issue is not so much when individual conservatives spoke out against her as their stated reasons for criticizing her. One could object to Palin in 2009 or later for narrowly political reasons that she presented a threat to Republican electoral success, or one could object to her nomination in 2008 because she was woefully unqualified. As long as Palin was useful in generating enthusiasm for the 2008 ticket and fired up the post-election opposition, her numerous flaws were overlooked or zealously denied. Some people abandoned this denial response sooner than others, but for the vast majority of conservatives, intellectuals or otherwise, this was their first reaction when confronted with Palin’s flaws. It’s a bit rich to claim now that these political concerns have become secondary to concern for the intellectual integrity of the Republican Party, not least since there was no evidence of concern for this during the Bush era.