Most Americans say they support U.S. participation in a no-fly zone over Libya as a way to neutralize Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s air force, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

But support slips under 50 percent when it comes to more unilateral U.S. action, as Democrats and independents peel away. And under either scenario, about a quarter of all no-fly advocates turn into opponents when the specifics of the military action are detailed [bold mine-DL]. ~The Washington Post

Put another way, a slim majority favors a no-fly zone in which the U.S. is just one participant when the respondents don’t have to think very much about what is involved. Once the respondents hear about what is involved, support plummets. The Post/ABC poll‘s question to respondents that support a no-fly zone seems reasonably accurate:

Creating a no-fly zone first requires bombing attacks on anti-aircraft positions, and then requires continuous air patrols. Given those requirements, would you support or oppose using U.S. military aircraft to create a no-fly zone in Libya?

72% of would-be supporters actually support a no-fly zone when confronted with what it would require. That means that just 40% of respondents favor a no-fly zone when the U.S. is one of many participants in enforcing it, and support for a primarily U.S. effort would be lower still.

In light of this, I found Sen. Lugar’s call for a full Congressional debate and a declaration of war before any U.S. military action against Libya to be very encouraging. Considering his exalted view of executive power, I doubt that Obama is unwilling to order military action without a declaration of war, but it’s a very healthy sign that the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee is insisting that Congress have a major role in making this decision. As the vast majority of the public is against a Libyan war even in the form of a no-fly zone, it is hardly certain that Congress would authorize military action, much less take what is by now a very unusual step of formally declaring war. This is as it should be. War powers were reserved to Congress to prevent the executive from launching wars arbitrarily, and the failure of Congress to rein in presidential abuses in this area and the failure to insist on declarations of war before going to war have been at the heart of many of the most serious foreign policy blunders since WWII. A full debate in Congress might create one more obstacle to the folly of going to war against Libya.

What is happening in Libya is ghastly but unless I’ve missed it – which is not impossible – I haven’t seen a case for intervention that marries morals with a practical course of action that might actually work and that’s not based on conscience-salving more than it is on interest or a considered measurement of what might be possible. ~Alex Massie

Massie hasn’t really missed anything. As the much more pro-intervention Steve Clemons has pointed out, calls for a no-fly zone have a lot to do with conscience-salving and not much to do with what would support the rebels:

A no-fly zone has become an emotional touch point for many who want to help the struggling and brave Libya Opposition — but it doesn’t change facts on the ground.

Clemons proposes that the U.S. and other states comply with what the Benghazi council has actually requested. It’s worth noting that a no-fly zone isn’t on the list. Briefly, these requests are 1) recognition as the Libyan government; 2) arms supplies; 3) disrupting Gaddafi’s communications; 4) coordinating on intelligence-sharing. Clemons argues that these are the things that the council wants, and they are things that could lend meaningful aid to the rebels. That raises the obvious question: why take sides in a Libyan civil war? That’s the first question that Clemons, Slaughter, and everyone else advocating for some form of involvement in the war need to answer, and so far none of them has given an answer that is remotely persuasive.

Such zones basically favor the side with momentum, which two weeks ago were those opposed to Gaddafi. A no-fly zone placed atop Libya then would have frozen Gaddafi’s losing position into place and accelerated rebel efforts on the ground [bold mine-DL]. ~Mark Thompson

Er, no, not really. These zones favor the side that has superior forces on the ground, which is not the same thing as momentum. They don’t freeze a conflict into place or prevent one side from suffering sudden reverses. Most of what Gaddafi’s forces have achieved in the last week were the result of sustained rocket and artillery barrages on rebel positions, which was made more effective by the rebels’ poor defenses and lack of experience. A no-fly zone at any time over the last several weeks would have changed very little. Rich Lowry makes this point fairly well:

Indeed, the only thing worse than what’s happened over the last week or so on the ground is if the very same thing had happened while we were flying overhead patrolling a mostly irrelevant no-fly zone. This would have been an intolerable humiliation and we inevitably would have ended up bombing on behalf of the rebels. We’re looking at the same choice now. Are we really just going to fly overhead to watch from above as Qaddafi continues to prosecute his dismayingly effective counter-offensive? The debate over the no-fly zone should be understood as merely a proxy for the debate over whether we are going to intervene militarily to topple Qaddafi or not.

Put another way, advocates of a no-fly zone at this point are kidding themselves that their recommendation will accomplish anything, or they are trying to push for a much more significant military intervention without explicitly calling for one. They can engage in outraged denials that they want anything more than a no-fly zone, when they must want a more significant military intervention if they aren’t simply engaged in bellicose posturing. If there is this much political resistance here in the U.S. and in Europe to a no-fly zone, we can easily imagine how much stronger the resistance will be to a more extensive military campaign.

This year, the conservative intelligentsia doesn’t just tend to dislike Palin — many fear that her rise would represent the triumph of an intellectually empty brand of populism and the death of ideas as an engine of the right. ~Politico

This wouldn’t be much of a change from the intellectually empty brand of pseudo-populism that prevails right now. What makes some of the new movement conservative anxiety about Palin so amusing is that the people cited in the article continue to perpetuate the fiction that there are well-formulated ideas rather than slogans and talking points that inform movement conservative arguments. Here is a quote from Pete Wehner:

Wehner, now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, cited the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous 1980 declaration that the GOP had become “a party of ideas.”

“Conservatives are very proud of that,” Wehner said. “But she seems at best disinterested in ideas or least lacks the ability to articulate any philosophical justification for them. She relies instead on shallow talking points.”

It’s true that Palin relies on shallow talking points, but where do these come from? They come from the institutions and leaders of the movement that is supposedly so concerned with ideas. Palin is uninterested in ideas, and she has flourished in the conservative media for years. She does rely on shallow talking points, and legions of conservative pundits have repeatedly defended her against charges that she is ignorant and incurious. Everything about her public persona since she received the VP nomination has been built up around tapping into resentment, grievance, and identity politics, all of which are in one way or another antithetical to critical thinking and substantive discussion of policy, and for a while most of her new detractors said nothing or gushed about how wonderful she was.

As long as she was useful prior to the midterms, the institutions, magazines, and leaders of the movement not only tolerated her, but actively promoted her and gave her typically glowing coverage. Those that couldn’t bring themselves to praise her went out of their way not to criticize her. Now that Palin may represent a political threat to Republican chances of regaining the White House, they are suddenly very concerned about her impact on the quality of conservative argument. Their concern would be interesting if it weren’t so belated and narrowly focused on Palin. When Moynihan made that statement about Republicans 30 years ago, it was true. Thirty years later, the label “party of ideas” has simply become another slogan that Republicans trot out in lieu of any policy ideas.

One imagines that had Obama been president at critical times we would never have intervened in Bosnia, freed Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, aided pro-Western democratic fighters in Central America or liberated Grenada. ~Jennifer Rubin

I know this is supposed to be an insult, but it’s an awfully strange selection of conflicts. In light of the last twenty years of endless conflict involving Iraq and the radicalizing effects of a prolonged U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, going to war against Iraq over the invasion of Kuwait seems like more of a cautionary tale against intervention than it is a brilliant example of enforcing collective security. Had the U.S. not aided the Contras, invaded Grenada, or intervened in Bosnia, would American security and interests have been harmed?

Had Reagan not backed the Contras for so many years, Nicaragua might be governed today by Daniel Ortega, and we wouldn’t want that. Oh, right, Nicaragua is once again governed by Daniel Ortega, and it’s remarkable how little that matters to American interests. I realize that Grenada has a near-mythical significance for some Republicans, and as far as American “small wars” in the Western Hemisphere go it is the least objectionable, but it also wasn’t very important. Had Reagan not intervened in Grenada, would anyone today look back on his administration and say, “I can’t believe he stood idly by and let Grenada turn communist!”?

Intervening in Bosnia is supposed to be counted as one of the “correct” interventions of the 1990s, and it is widely regarded as one that was delayed for too many years, but the merits of that intervention as far as American security was concerned were negligible if they existed at all. Bosnia today is hardly an inspiring model for the sort of political settlement that foreign interventions make possible. Had the U.S. never intervened in Bosnia, it is hard to imagine how the rest of Europe and the U.S. would have been worse off. Had there been no Bosnia intervention, there probably wouldn’t have been one in Kosovo, either, and I am failing to see how this would have been a problem for the U.S.

No lament about administration decisions would be complete without the required shout-out to the Green movement that Obama could have magically delivered from the violence of government crackdowns by wishing:

It never dawns on them, apparently, that defeat of anti-totalitarian movements becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy [sic] when the U.S. slinks away from a confrontation.

What might occur to them is that it doesn’t make sense to support the Iranian opposition when Iranian opposition activists say that they don’t want American government backing. That doesn’t mean that it would have made sense to support them had their leaders requested assistance, but it ought to lay to rest this idiotic claim that the administration contributed to the Green movement’s defeat.

Now we have a chance to support a real new beginning in the Muslim world — a new beginning of accountable governments that can provide services and opportunities for their citizens in ways that could dramatically decrease support for terrorist groups and violent extremism. It’s hard to imagine something more in our strategic interest. ~Anne-Marie Slaughter

Slaughter gets around the most obvious objection to a Libyan war by simply asserting the contrary. Essentially, in order to have a “new beginning in the Muslim world” that could dramatically decrease support for terrorist groups, the U.S. must resort to military action in another Muslim country for the sake of regime change. As we should know by now, the Iraq war actually led to massive increases in terrorist activities and major attacks on Western targets. We don’t know what sort of blowback the U.S. and our allies could expect from intervening in Libya, but there would likely be some.

Of all the popular causes in the region that the U.S. might back, the Libyan rebels’ cause is one that we understand the least, and based on some of what we do understand it is debatable whether we should want to provide military support to them. Rather silly people thought that aiding Muslims in Kosovo would earn the U.S. gratitude from Muslims around the world, as if our other policies weren’t still in place. 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.

There are a few reasons why it is important to distinguish between internal conflicts where the U.S. has interests and where it has nothing at stake. The U.S. doesn’t have infinite resources, and can’t afford every new commitment overseas that it could conceivably make, so it is important to avoid entirely unnecessary commitments. Libya is a fairly easy call: the U.S. has nothing at stake. Advocates of a war against Libya are eager to make the outcome of the war into a major turning point for the region, but this is because the argument for involvement in Libya is so weak.

Slaughter relies heavily on the claim that the U.S. can’t allow Gaddafi to set a precedent that protesters can be suppressed with massive violence:

But the choice is between uncertainty and the certainty that if Colonel Qaddafi wins, regimes across the region will conclude that force is the way to answer protests.

Obviously, governments everywhere understand that force can be used effectively to quash protests. The Tunisian government’s security forces tried and failed, because the protesters did not disperse and the military refused to assist in the crackdown. The Egyptian regime used its police in the same way, but once again the military did not want to be directly implicated in violence against protesters. Early on, Gaddafi invoked Tiananmen Square as a model, and this will always be a model for authoritarian governments in the future. Whether Gaddafi wins or loses, the Tiananmen model will always be there for other governments to imitate. Jumping into a Libyan war for the sake of deterring other authoritarian governments won’t work, because the U.S. isn’t going to commit itself to a global policy of taking military action in support of rebel movements everywhere.

Jackson Diehl promotes the same idea:

“The Egyptian crowds watched and learned from the Tunisian crowds,” Will observed last week. “But the Libyan government watched and learned from the fate of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments. It has decided to fight. Would not U.S. intervention in Libya encourage other restive peoples to expect U.S. military assistance?”

The answer is: Perhaps it would. And: If a powerful opposition movement appeared in Syria, and asked the West for weapons or air support to finish off the Assad regime, would that be a disaster?

For the people of Syria, it might be depending on what happens, but Diehl seems to miss Will’s point that the U.S. doesn’t need any additional military commitments. Intervening in Libya sets a precedent of supporting rebellions against other governments that will pull the U.S. into many more military engagements in the future. Far worse than just calling for war against Libya, Diehl and Slaughter and others making this argument seem to want the U.S. to be in the business of facilitating regime change-by-rebels whenever possible. At best, this commits the U.S. to start wars whenever there is a sizeable uprising against a vilified regime, and at worst it badly over-promises what the U.S. will be able to do, which will end up making the U.S. partly responsible for encouraging uprisings that the U.S. will not be able to support for one reason or another.

Defenders of military action must answer tough questions but defenders of military inaction don’t need to. Doves are right to raise tough questions about any proposed military action in the Libyan crisis. But many similar tough questions need to be asked about the policy of inaction. The Obama administration has already taken sides in the Libyan civil war, is it willing to see “its side” lose? Is there a scale of humanitarian disaster that is intolerable and, if so, what is it and what will the United States do if that point is reached? With Obama’s own top intelligence officer predicting that Qaddafi will prevail absent military efforts to shore up the rebels, what is the plan to deal with post-rebellion Libya? ~Peter Feaver

I’m not sure how it contributes to a more “rigorous” debate when one of the three main objections Feaver raises just isn’t true, and another (the unilateralism question) is beside the point. It isn’t true that opponents of military action aren’t expected to answer tough questions. Half of our arguments involve answering such questions as part of the process of critiquing the many weak arguments for war. On top of that, non-interventionists are expected to account for and have answers to imaginary dangers to American credibility, phantom menaces to Middle Eastern democracy, non-existent American strategic interests in Libya, and made-up moral obligations to rebel forces that no one in the U.S. thought about twice before three weeks ago. We are expected to provide answers to these questions even though we realize ahead of time that the questions are ridiculous and based on faulty assumptions, and we are supposed to have powers of clairvoyance about the unknowable consequences of inaction.

Obviously, opponents of intervention are willing to see the rebels lose, because opponents of intervention don’t believe that it matters to the U.S. who wins this conflict. Every indication is that post-rebellion Libya is going to be isolated as much as possible, and it will once again be treated as a pariah state. If there were a systematic campaign of violence threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, that might merit joint action provided that it had a legal basis, but we are so far removed from such a scenario that this isn’t so much a “tough” question as it is a distraction from what we’re discussing.

I would also like to say something about the unilateralism/multilateralism issue as far as Iraq was concerned. It really doesn’t help advocates for war in Libya if they are still hung up on defending the bogus credibility of the “coalition of the willing.” Seriously, give it up already. This is just one notch removed from arguing “we found the WMDs” in pro-war dead-ender rhetoric. The vast majority of the governments that supported the U.S. invasion militarily and/or politically did so against the wishes of their electorates and the requirements of international law. The technically multilateral nature of the coalition couldn’t hide the fact that a huge number of “the willing” were joining the U.S. in the attack on Iraq to show their value as new NATO allies and their desire to express gratitude for their accession to NATO. Multilateralism by itself does not confer legality. Aside from Britain, Poland, Australia, Italy, and Spain, the actual military contributions to the war from these other governments were negligible, and for all practical purposes the U.S. and U.K. did most of the fighting during the invasion and provided the overwhelming majority of the forces occupying Iraq. So, no, the U.S. didn’t technically “go it alone,” but our government started the war without the support of most regional governments, over the vociferous objections of many major and allied states, and without U.N. authorization. Advocates for war against Libya are calling for more or less exactly the same thing, but with even fewer nominal allies in tow.

Let’s compare support for action in Libya against the “coalition of the willing.” Today, Italy and Poland are opposed, Australia is not going to be involved, Asian, African and Latin American states are going to have nothing to do with this, and militarily speaking there are hardly any Arab governments that would be able to contribute to military action. If there is going to be a coalition of states in support of war with Libya, it will be even narrower and even more reliant on U.S. and British military power than the “coalition of the willing” that was widely and correctly perceived as window-dressing for a U.S.-British expedition. It doesn’t do supporters of war against Libya any favors to dwell on multilateral backing for invading Iraq, since they are proposing to start a war with Libya that with even fewer governments in support.

Many defenders of military inaction reach their point of view by way of a skewed cost-benefit calculation that assumes the worst about military action and assumes the best about inaction. Every untoward development that happens or is speculated to happen after military intervention is blamed on the intervener, but every untoward development that happens in the absence of military intervention is left out of the calculus entirely. Thus ideologues who bemoan American “militarism” count up all of the casualties in wars the U.S. intervened in and utterly disregard all of the casualties in conflicts the U.S. let fester without acting. ~Peter Feaver

Feaver says that he wants a more “rigorous” debate, by which he seems to mean he wants a debate that is automatically more skewed in favor of taking military action. This passage is one example of that. Non-interventionists don’t assume the best-case for inaction. We usually assume that even in most worst-case scenarios the U.S. has no business involving itself in another country’s civil war, and that even in the worst-case scenario American interests and security are not adversely affected. That has been true in Sudan, Congo, and Zimbabwe. The warfare in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been horrific, and it has claimed millions of lives over the years, but I don’t think anyone seriously believes that the U.S. or central Africa would have been better off had American forces plunged into the middle of the fighting. There might be exceptions to that, but Libya certainly isn’t one of them.

It is incumbent on the proponents of action to justify creating a new foreign policy commitment. The burden of proof is always on the activists, because they are the ones proposing that the U.S. take on new burdens and risks that it has not been expected to take on in the past. Comparing worst-case scenarios of taking action and inaction, the worst-case scenarios that come from taking military action are always going to be worse for the U.S. because those scenarios include significant costs and casualties for the United States. Speaking of skewed cost-benefit analysis, interventionists tend to be extremely flippant about the costs and risks that intervention will involve, but they are very quick to invoke the specter of large-scale massacres and genocide to try to browbeat opponents into supporting action. The weaker their policy argument is, the more heavily they have to lean on that bit of moral blackmail.

We can’t know the counterfactual of what would have happened inside Iraq had the U.S. not invaded in 2003, but it is much more likely that the invasion caused massive, unnecessary displacement, exile, injury, and death to millions of Iraqis (and deteriorating standards of living and unemployment for millions more) that would not have happened otherwise, and there would obviously be thousands of Americans killed and tens of thousands of Americans wounded in the war who would not have been. Most of the time, the “costs of inaction” never materialize, or the costs have little or nothing to do with the U.S. When a government invades another country, dismantles its institutions, and then fails to restore order amid mass bloodletting, it is actually responsible legally and morally for the disorder and insecurity that follow. It is pretty strained reasoning to conclude that a government’s refusal to intervene entails the same responsibility.

We don’t know whether there would have been a massive refugee exodus out of Kosovo in the spring of 1999 had NATO not taken action, but we know that there was a massive refugee exodus out of Kosovo while NATO waged its air war. The war to prevent the expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo briefly resulted in precisely that expulsion. Would Kosovo be governed in an even more corrupt and destructive way than it is by KLA thugs now had NATO never intervened and separated the province from Serbia? It is possible, but it is also conceivable that Kosovo is demonstrably worse off because of intervention. A basic understanding of accountability tells us that these things are the responsibility of the governments that intervened and decided the future of these places. In most cases, interventions make the countries they are supposed to be helping worse off.

Does Feaver actually want to apply the standard he’s using? Is the Bush administration in some way responsible for the loss of life and displacement of population in Darfur? I don’t see how anyone could claim that it is, but by Feaver’s standard the U.S. “let” the conflict fester and did not act, despite the fact that the U.S. theoretically could have acted against the militias Bashir was using.

He wasn’t asked about Clapper’s remarks, but given Pawlenty’s comments, I am certain he wouldn’t name Russia and China as our most serious threats or declare Libya’s revolution to be a lost cause. ~Jennifer Rubin

So Rubin assumes that Pawlenty inhabits a fantasy world, and this is supposed to be a good thing? In fairness to Pawlenty, he hasn’t committed to the views Rubin is “certain” he would hold, but if he did it wouldn’t be to his credit. Drezner and Weigel have both observed that Clapper’s remarks on Libya, Russia and China are basically correct. As Weigel says:

We estimate that North Korea has less than [sic] 10 nuclear weapons, and Iran has none. So it’s literally true — only China and Russia can obliterate us.

More to the point, it isn’t just that China and Russia have the second and third-largest nuclear arsenals in the world, but they also have the ICBMs to deliver those weapons. North Korea’s longest-range missiles may one day be able to reach the West Coast, but they can’t do that yet, and they do not yet have deliverable warheads. Iran has nothing that can reach beyond Europe. Obviously, Clapper forgot that he is supposed to pretend that Iran and North Korea are “mortal threats” despite evidence to the contrary that they aren’t major, much less mortal, threats to the United States.

One of the reasons why it was important to ratify the arms reduction treaty with Russia a few months ago is so that the U.S. would be able to have a verification regime to keep track of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, which is still potentially the greatest threat to American security in the world. This is a treaty that Pawlenty and Rubin, among others in the GOP, wanted to see go down in defeat because of ignorant or dishonest objections to different parts of the treaty. Improving U.S.-Russian relations, increasing security cooperation, and defusing tensions between our governments are all desirable things to make sure that the chances of future hostilities between our countries will remain as low as possible, but it would be negligent in the extreme to pretend that the Russian arsenal doesn’t still have the ability to destroy the entire country. Fortunately, the U.S. retains a credible deterrent, and relations with Moscow have been getting better rather than worse in recent years (over the objections of Pawlenty, Rubin, et al.), and the people in this country who would like to stoke tensions with Russia while depriving the government of the ability to inspect the Russian arsenal have been unsuccessful.

As for the military situation in Libya, Clapper was addressing the imbalance in forces that currently exists. If the U.S. and other governments started arming the rebels, that imbalance would change, but that hasn’t happened yet, and it isn’t clear that it will happen. Was Clapper supposed to indulge in a bit of happy talk and misrepresent the balance of forces in Libya? Had he done so, wouldn’t many of the same people be throwing a fit and denouncing Clapper for “spinning” the situation so that it matches up with the administration’s relatively hands-off approach to Libya?

For his part, Pawlenty has hardly distinguished himself in his foreign policy remarks over the last two years. In the past, Rubin has criticized Mitch Daniels for offering “worn out cliches” on foreign policy. Well, there is no cliche more tired than what Pawlenty had to say the other day:

My basic perspective on foreign policy – this is oversimplifying it – but in the interest of time this is it: You may have learned it on the playground, you may have learned in it business, sports. You may have learned it in some other walk of life, but it’s always true. If you’re dealing with thugs and bullies, they understand strength. They don’t respect weakness.

In other words, Pawlenty endorses the “worn out cliche” of peace through strength, which is the same “worn out cliche” Daniels endorses. When Pawlenty endorses the cliche, he is impressive, and when Daniels does it he has shown a troubling indifference to policy substance. To date, whenever Pawlenty has made a statement on foreign policy that touches on substance he has made sure that it lines up predictably with whatever the party line is. He started in early 2009 when he was whining about the changes to missile defense in central and eastern Europe, and continued with his knee-jerk reactions to New START to the recent upheavals in North Africa. I have yet to hear anything from him that suggests that he actually understands the subjects he’s commenting on, and that isn’t a good sign for the GOP going into an election year when one of its leading presidential candidates is so unprepared on these issues.