Support for freedom fighters is self-defense. ~Ronald Reagan

Since we’re hearing some talk about arming Libyan rebels in connection with the Reagan Doctrine, it’s worth revisiting what the Reagan administration said about this policy and the flaws that this policy had. As the Reagan quote shows, Reagan argued that this policy of arming anti-communist insurgents was a form of defense against the Soviets. Whether one agrees with that “self-defense” assessment or not, Reagan articulated this policy in the context of opposing the influence of another superpower. Obviously, the Libyan case has absolutely nothing to do with American self-defense or undermining the influence of another major power.

Secretary of State George Shultz defended the policy as a response to Soviet-sponsored insurgencies and subversion:

So long as communist dictatorships feel free to aid and abet insurgencies in the name of ‘socialist internationalism,'” Shultz asked, “why must the democracies, the target of this threat, be inhibited from defending their own interests and the cause of democracy itself?

Advocates of the Reagan Doctrine portrayed the policy as a retaliatory move against Soviet support for revolutions. Of course, the U.S. would not be striking back at a rival exporter of revolution by arming Libyan rebels. On the contrary, the U.S. would be trying to facilitate a change of regime in Libya that America’s actual jihadist enemies would welcome. Comparisons with Cold War-era policies are often unhelpful, because the nature of security threats and the existing international order are significantly different from what they were when the Reagan Doctrine might have made sense, but this is the precedent some of the interventionists have chosen. Even if the Reagan Doctrine was appropriate to the late Cold War period, it doesn’t follow that doing something similar today makes any sense.

Did the Reagan Doctrine make sense as a policy? Back in 1986, Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute wrote a paper questioning the Reagan Doctrine’s assumptions and its importance for U.S. security interests. Carpenter concluded that with the possible exception of one case, the Reagan Doctrine was not supporting causes that mattered to American security interests:

Although the degree of Soviet-bloc interference, the ideological composition of the rebel movements, the danger of a clash with the USSR, and the risk of entanglement all represent important considerations, the principal factor governing U.S. foreign policy with respect to the five rebel movements should be U.S. security. Assessed in this light, there is only one arena for which a respectable case can be made for providing material aid–Nicaragua–and even that is less than compelling. The other four conflicts are essentially irrelevant to the legitimate security concerns of the United States.

Carpenter went on to criticize the Reagan Doctrine as a basically flawed policy:

It is difficult to see how the Reagan Doctrine would bolster U.S. security; indeed, the opposite result is far more likely. Most Third World struggles take place in arenas and involve issues far removed from legitimate American security needs. U.S. involvement in such conflicts expands the republic’s already overextended commitments without achieving any significant prospective gains.

He also rejected arguments for the Reagan Doctrine as a vehicle of democracy promotion:

The prospects for the Reagan Doctrine promoting democracy in the Third World are no more promising; again, an intrusive U.S. military policy is likely to produce the opposite result. The Reagan Doctrine threatens to become a corollary to America’s longstanding policy of supporting “friendly” autocratic regimes. Administration leaders exhibit a willingness to endorse and assist any insurgent movement that professes to be anti-Soviet, without reference to its attitude toward political or economic rights [bold mine-DL]. The United States has already antagonized Third World populations by sponsoring repressive governments and may incur even more enmity as the patron of authoritarian, albeit anti-Marxist, insurgencies. Such a strategy is hardly an effective way to promote the popularity of democratic capitalism.

It seems to me that proponents of arming the Libyan rebels are blissfully unaware of the rebels’ attitude toward political or economic rights, and they seem eager to take the word of rebel leaders that they are democrats. Calls for U.S. intervention in Libya or arms shipments to Libyan rebels have many of the same flaws that arguments for the Reagan Doctrine had. It isn’t a model for what the U.S. should do now, but an example of what the U.S. should try to avoid, namely wasting American resources on conflicts that have nothing to do with American security.

Those who argue that we have no national-security interests in Libya are correct in the narrow sense. But the Libyan case represents a much larger issue. The Arab world is experiencing a genuine awakening. People in the region have lost faith in the old order. Whether they can actually overthrow the government, as they did in Egypt and Tunisia, or merely demand real reform, as in Jordan and the Gulf states, they are searching for a new political identity. ~Fareed Zakaria

Well, count me among the people with a “narrow” vision, because I still don’t see how the regional search for a new political identity merits the U.S. taking sides in someone else’s civil war. Advocates of a no-fly zone and/or arming the rebels keep falling back on a few lines of argument, and Zakaria (in favor of arming the rebels) rehearses a couple of these:

For the U.S., this presents a powerful opportunity. For decades, Arabs have regarded Washington as the enemy because it has been the principal supporter of the old order — creating a bizarre series of alliances in which the world’s leading democracy has been yoked to the most reactionary forces on the planet. It has also produced a real national-security problem: the rise of Islamic terrorism. Al Qaeda’s first argument against the U.S. is that it supports the tyrannies of the Arab world as they oppress their people.

There are some countries where it might make sense for the U.S. to align quickly with emerging political forces, but Libya is probably the worst case available. Of all the authoritarian regimes in the region, Libya’s is among those with which the U.S. has had the weakest relationship. The U.S. normalized relations with Libya after it suspended its weapons programs, and American companies were doing business there, but the U.S. has not become Gaddafi’s patron in the same way that it was Mubarak’s. Working to secure Gaddafi’s downfall isn’t going to win the U.S. that much goodwill, especially since Washington isn’t giving up very much in the process. Zakaria underestimates the degree to which the history of U.S. policies in the region has created so much distrust that any U.S. policy of subverting an Arab government by force will be perceived badly.

As far as American security interests have been concerned, Gaddafi has been more accommodating in the last decade than he had ever been before. Many Libyans have been radicalized over the decades of Gaddafi’s rule, but this was also going on before the U.S. restored ties with Libya, and at least some of these radicalized figures are among the rebels fighting against Gaddafi right now. No doubt there are those who maintain undue confidence in the government’s ability to discern “good guys” from “bad guys” as they would say, but what is striking is how little this matters to some of the people arguing for arming the rebels. Here’s Marc Thiessen:

Applying the Reagan Doctrine in Libya is not without risks. While most Libyans want to replace Gaddafi’s tyranny with democracy, there are also jihadists and al-Qaeda sympathizers in eastern Libya, where the rebellion is based. Look at any list of al-Qaeda leaders killed in drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions, and you will see many names ending with “al-Libi” (“the Libyan”). How do we distinguish between the Islamic radicals and those who share our aspirations for a free Libya?

America faced a similar challenge in Afghanistan in the 1980s, where we struggled initially to distinguish between moderates in the anti-Soviet resistance like Ahmad Shah Massoud and radicals like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Today, we have little intelligence to help us determine who the Massouds and Hekmatyars are in eastern Libya – and there is a danger that we could end up arming the wrong people. But our intelligence won’t improve unless we get advisers on the ground to start linking up with anti-Gaddafi forces. And if we can figure out who the good guys are, American support could help determine who leads the rebel column that takes Tripoli.

If there is even a remote chance that the U.S. could end up arming “jihadists and al-Qaeda sympathizers,” which Thiessen admits to be quite possible, I’m not sure why the debate is still continuing. For the sake of a triple-bank-shot effort at public diplomacy with other Arab publics, we’re contemplating sending weapons to rebels whose cause we don’t fully understand and some of whom are obviously hostile to the U.S.? Arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan was a questionable decision when it was made, but at least it had the merit of being part of a larger strategy of resisting Soviet power. Arming Libyan rebels against Gaddafi doesn’t have any similar strategic purpose.

Supporting rebels against Gaddafi isn’t going to make other authoritarian rulers more reluctant to use force against opposition. It’s going to give them an incentive to do as much damage as quickly as possible to the opposition before foreign support is forthcoming. If the U.S. arms the rebels in Libya, and Libya becomes the model of what other governments can expect from the U.S., the U.S. has committed itself not only to supporting rebels in this case but also to doing the same in each civil war that follows the same pattern. After all, we wouldn’t want to signal to other governments that “the way to stay in office is to engage in mass slaughter.” Backing Libyan rebels won’t serve as a deterrent against brutal crackdowns elsewhere unless other governments believe that the U.S. is willing to keep doing this each time it happens, and no one believes this.

Zakaria’s column makes an excellent case that Obama should not have said that he thought Gaddafi should go. Saying that the U.S. wants him gone creates the expectation that the U.S. will work to bring that about, which makes it that much harder to do the correct thing for U.S. interests, which is to avoid being pulled into a civil war that has nothing to do with us. So we can agree that Obama blundered by calling for an outcome that he has no intention of realizing. It doesn’t follow that Obama should compound an error of saying the wrong thing by doing something even more unwise.

Nick Kristof talked recently to Gen. McPeak, who assured him that a Libyan no-fly zone is very easy. Kristof quotes him:

“I can’t imagine an easier military problem,” he said. “If we can’t impose a no-fly zone over a not even third-rate military power like Libya, then we ought to take a hell of a lot of our military budget and spend it on something usable.”

Unlike a lot of other people (all of whom now happen to be in the “attack Libya now” camp), I have no problem with Gen. McPeak, and he can speak with some authority on this subject, but I can’t stand this line of argument. For the last week, I have seen some version of this “if we can’t impose a no-fly zone on Libya, we should get our money back” argument quite a few times, and it is just an updated version of Madeleine Albright’s question to Powell: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” It is usually the sort of thing that silly civilians say to military commanders. For their part, the commanders probably don’t think the armed forces exist to fulfill the passing whims of politicians, officials and pundits in response to the latest news cycle. If the U.S. has the ability to take military action somewhere, the claim seems to be, there is no argument against doing it.

In fairness to him, that isn’t what McPeak is saying. He is answering the technical question, “Can the U.S. military do this?” The answer to that has always been yes, but that has never been the question that mattered. McPeak is not assessing the policy implications, nor is Kristof asking him about the effect a Libya operation would have on other missions elsewhere. My guess is that Gen. McPeak would give Kristof less satisfying answers to those questions. It is Kristof who is using McPeak’s expertise to bolster a bad case for attacking another country, because this time it “feels different.” As Scoblete says, this is not much of an argument. Scoblete cites a more recent post from Mark Leon Goldberg from U.N. Dispatch, who made the point very early on that a no-fly zone is ultimately little more than a “gesture.” He argues the following now:

A no fly zone carries all the political risks of military intervention, but without the intended benefits.

Indeed, I suspect some no-fly zone advocates understand this, and want to make the U.S. commit to a no-fly zone as the first step in a series of escalations that would lead to a much larger, more destructive operation. So, yes, it is relatively easy to enforce a no-fly zone, but it won’t have that much of an effect on the civil war. It should tell us everything we need to know about how unwise intervening in Libya is that even the most hawkish interventionists aren’t proposing more significant military action right now. It may be that some hawks are trying to get the administration to accept a half-measure in the hope that committing to the half-measure will force the administration into taking additional military action later.

The overwhelming focus on the “easy” part is a warning sign that the people advocating intervention haven’t given the issue enough thought, or they don’t want to acknowledge publicly that agreeing to their “easy” and minimal military commitment will in all likelihood lead to a much more difficult, costly, dangerous, larger commitment once it begins. Tom Ricks detailed in Fiasco how there was no real “Phase IV” planning for what to do after the invasion of Iraq ended, and many others have made the same observation. This proved to be one of the more disastrous blunders of the war. From everything we have heard so far from war advocates (which is what they are), there doesn’t seem to have been any thought given to what the second phase of a Libyan intervention would be, much less anything after that.

A Nato source said not only would there be no decision on a no-fly zone by the notoriously slow-moving organisation, but it was unlikely there would be a joint communique either. Gaddafi, in spite of outrageous acts against his own people, had not done enough to trigger intervention under international law, the source admitted. ~The Guardian

It’s interesting that this is being admitted publicly, since it completely undermines the rationale for international intervention. Much of the discussion of intervention has concerned the practical problems or political opposition that would be encountered along the way, but aside from the hawks who believe that international law is a minor inconvenience most proposals have taken for granted that the Security Council ought to authorize an intervention. This report tells us is that the Council wouldn’t have a legal basis for authorizing such action at the present time.

David Bosco wrote a post Monday that touches on this question, which gets to the heart of the arguments to intervene for humanitarian reasons or because of a “responsibility to protect”:

Given the ubiquity of the phrase, it’s notable how little discussion there has been of the actual scale of the killing. Most estimates of the death toll run between 1,000 and 3,000. There is no doubt that security forces killed several hundred in the early days of the crisis. However, recent reporting suggests relatively low casualties from combat, and what combat there is appears mostly to have occurred between armed groups. If there have been large-scale attacks on civilians as the crisis has evolved, they have remained well hidden [bold mine-DL]. The fighting and the broader political crisis have clearly prompted large population movements, which carry their own perils. But is the suffering in Libya remotely comparable to that in other recent humanitarian crises?

Nobody has an incentive to be parsimonious in their phraseology. Politically, the drumbeat on the suffering in Libya helps to delegitimize the Gadaffi regime, which almost all major players now want to see gone. UN aid agencies are mounting a $160 million appeal for further funds based on the crisis. And after the last several decade’s dramatic bloodletting in Rwanda, the Balkans, and Darfur, nobody wants to be caught minimizing what has happened. The Libyan regime has clearly committed serious crimes and no doubt is capable of much worse. If warning loudly about an impending human catastrophe can help avert one, why be picky about language?

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

For those genuinely interested in promoting the “responsibility to protect” as a principle, there is a significant danger of crisis fatigue and an appropriate wariness of claims that “we must do something” about this or that conflict. Interventionists are always so eager, impatient, and insistent that Western governments take action right now. They desperately grab for any pretext or justification they can find to support getting involved in another country’s conflict, and as a result they repeatedly err on the side of exaggerating the crisis in order to make an immediate response seem more necessary.

This is a simple foreign policy matter: The United States should exercise moral and political leadership by assembling a coalition of nations to end this wanton violence immediately. ~Job Henning

There is one thing that the situation in Libya isn’t, and that is simple. Henning’s “simple foreign policy matter” remark reminds me that interventionists are always promoting their “simple” solution each time there is a foreign crisis or debate over what the U.S. should do, and that solution is always that Western governments should use of force against the regime. Of course, the practical instruments that interventionists are calling for will not end all “this wanton violence,” but only certain types of it, and all of this will be in the service of improving the chances that the rebels will prevail, which will as likely as not lead to brutal reprisals against the defeated regime loyalists.

Like the Krajina Serbs driven from Croatia in 1995 in Operation Storm, the Serbs and Roma driven out of Kosovo or killed by the KLA after 1999, and the Sunnis expelled and slaughtered in huge numbers in 2006 (one of which the U.S. facilitated and two of which took place in NATO and U.S.-occupied territory), regime supporters in Libya will likely face terrible violence, but the R2P brigades will have moved on by then to go “save” another country. These crimes aren’t going to trouble the interventionists, and there will of course be no talk of intervening against the people whose victory our forces helped realize. Instead of thinking this through and seeing how horribly wrong it could go, Henning sees it as a clear-cut matter of moral leadership, which is one of the reasons why some of us are sick to death of hearing warmongers talk about morality.

To give the situation more than five minutes of thought is to realize that it is not a remotely “simple foreign policy matter,” but would be a tremendously complicated matter if the U.S. government were stupid enough to become entangled in it.

Henning continues:

Strengthening the concept that sovereignty is contingent upon behavior would make it less likely that in the future the United States would have to act unilaterally and conduct military interventions.

No, it would simply weaken the principle of sovereignty, which would make every weaker state vulnerable to greater interference and violence from its stronger neighbors. Each time that the U.S. and its allies endorse the idea of unilateral, illegal intervention in the name of “humanitarian” concerns, it provides one more precedent for other states to exploit internal problems in neighboring countries. It is an open invitation to illegal military adventurism by any state capable and willing to do it. The barriers of international law that interventionists want to tear down today might be necessary later to protect weak states and deter more powerful governments from meddling in their neighbors’ affairs. Interventionists want to destroy legal barriers to military action to get at particular despicable rulers, but they forget why those barriers were created in the first place.

“Nonintervention” is a form of interference. ~Christopher Hitchens

One thing I will agree with is that non-intervention is a deliberate, alternative policy. It is not the absence of one. It is the refusal to shape the outcome of a conflict that has nothing to do with us. After dwelling at length at the start of his column on the misuse of words, Hitchens engages in far worse distortions of language in this one sentence than anything he criticizes. Non-intervention is the refusal to interfere. It is the refusal to make another country’s internal problems one’s own. Non-intervention in Libya means accepting that it doesn’t matter to the U.S. whether Gaddafi or the rebels win. This isn’t all that hard to accept, because it is true.

When I read a blind quote from a White House staffer in Tuesday morning’s New York Times saying Obama “keeps reminding us that the best revolutions are completely organic,” I tried to convince myself our learned head of state is not, in fact, such a fool as his staffer. Organic? Meaning totally home-grown and self-sustaining? Ask the French, for instance, how “organic” the American Revolution really was. ~Christopher Dickey

Yes, very droll. I have seen some version of this “the French helped America, so America should help Libyan rebels” a few times in the last day or two, and I am amazed that interventionists are using this argument. I shouldn’t say anything, since they are doing an outstanding job of discrediting their own argument, but it is really too good to pass up.

It wasn’t out of sympathy with the finer points of British constitutionalism or because of humanitarian concern that Louis XVI sent military support to the rebels here in the colonies. The French intervened to deliver a blow to their British rivals as payback for the loss of their colonial holdings in North America and elsewhere after the Seven Years’ War. The French perceived support for our cause as a useful pretext and occasion for dealing the British a defeat. France saw a great strategic opportunity in an ongoing struggle for influence and power with another major power, and it assumed the risks and costs of significant military support for that reason.

As valuable as French aid was to our cause, that doesn’t mean that the decision to intervene was actually a wise one from the French perspective. If the French monarch and his ministers had appreciated the fiscal and political consequences of supporting a republican rebel movement, they might not have intervened at all. That would have been unfortunate for us, but it might have been much better for the gradual, healthier evolution of French politics. Urging intervention in Libya is bad enough, but urging intervention by saying that the U.S. should look to the disaster (for France) that was late Bourbon foreign policy as some sort of inspiration is truly mad.

There are no comparable American interests at stake in Libya. If Gaddafi prevails, that would be very bad for Libya, but that doesn’t mean that intervention is in the American interest. If the rebels prevail, that could be good or bad for Libya, but it still wouldn’t be in our interest to become involved. Some interventionists have been invoking the Reagan Doctrine, but the Reagan Doctrine was part of a larger strategic goal of combating Soviet influence by supporting insurgencies against communist/pro-Soviet governments in various parts of the world. There is no larger strategic goal advanced by supporting rebels we know little or nothing about against a dictator in a country of minimal strategic significance. Interventionists are scrambling to find some precedent or pretext for meddling in Libya instead of thinking through whether the U.S. has any reason to meddle.

As it happens, the best revolutions are not only organic, but they are those fought to safeguard customary rights and institutions against usurpation. By all accounts, Libya is a country whose institutions have been wrecked by Gaddafi’s misrule, and even if they are successful Libyan rebels will be confronted with building up new institutions more or less from scratch. The people insisting that we must intervene now are the same who will insist that we have an obligation to help Libyans fashion new institutions and fashion a civil society from next to nothing.

The most important question is not whether Western intervention would “taint” and discredit the cause of the Libyan rebels, nor is it whether the rebels could use military assistance, but whether it makes any sense for the U.S. to take sides in a Libyan civil war where it has nothing at stake. The answer to this question is no.

Confirming earlier findings, Rasmussen’s new poll (via Scoblete) on Libya shows that a large majority favors leaving the situation in Libya alone. Even among Republicans, the “leave alone” option outscores “more directly involved” by almost two-to-one (56-29%). This is worth noting when we see that just 23% of Republicans approve of Obama’s handling of Libya. 75% of Republicans rate Obama’s response as fair or poor (with 40% saying poor), but of those just over a third want a more interventionist response from Obama. 59% of independents rate Obama’s response as fair or poor (45/14%), but just 26% believe the U.S. should be more directly involved and 52% want the U.S. to leave the situation alone. There is no national consensus in support of intervention, and instead there seems to be a strong national consensus against getting involved. A significant percentage of the public finds Obama’s response dissatisfying in some way, but fewer than one in three find fault with Obama because his response has been too passive or inactive.

Because even the right already knows how this movie will end, with the Fifth Fleet leaving the Gulf with its tail between its legs and Israel forced to negotiate one man-one vote, the hunt for the enemy within has already begun in earnest. ~Jack Ross

I have been focused on Libya over the last two weeks because there is overwhelming agitation in support of starting another war. If “the right” already knows what is going to happen in the future, that would be remarkable. As it happens, both of the outcomes Jack mentions seem highly improbable.

I have no idea who or what would “force” Israel to do anything, much less give in to a one-state solution. Ben Ali and Mubarak are gone because their respective military officials wanted them gone, and Washington was content to see them go. King Hamad remains in power in Bahrain because his security forces apparently have no intention of getting rid of him, and because Washington has no desire to see him gone or to see a Saudi invasion aimed at propping him up.

Sometimes anti-hegemonists in the West fall into the habit of assuming that foreign nations can somehow solve our misguided, dysfunctional, warped foreign policy simply by withdrawing their governments’ support for it. What we have seen in each case from Turkish opposition to invading Iraq to Japanese discontent over Okinawa bases to more recent episodes is that the U.S. ignores the opposition and insists on pursuing its policy anyway. Sometimes this involves simply bypassing the other government, as the U.S. did in 2003 with Turkey, and sometimes it involves pressuring the other government until it is forced to cave. If the Bahraini majority managed to prevail and overthrew or significantly changed the existing government, my guess is that we will be surprised at how little of an effect that is going to have on U.S. military basing.

If we want U.S. forces and bases out of the Gulf, the Near East and Central Asia, we have to realize it here at home by changing the policies behind that military presence. Arab countries are not eastern European countries, and Obama isn’t Gorbachev. The empire needs to be dismantled by Americans, because there are far too many people and institutions invested in sustaining it for it to disintegrate. Of course, regional instability makes it that much harder to disentangle the U.S. from the region, as the sudden surge in mindless interventionism over Libya shows us.