Indeed, one would think that after missing the boat during the Green Movement’s June 2009 uprising and standing idly by as Lebanon slid under Hezbollah’s boot that the administration would welcome the opportunity to lend a hand to oppressed Muslims struggling for their lives and for self-determination.

And if the “realists” in the White House aren’t moved by humanitarian appeals, one would think they would at the very least see there is geopolitical advantage in demonstrating that America is willing to flex its muscles. Iran is watching. Those who will come to power in new governments throughout the region are watching. We are being tested, and so far have been found wanting. ~Jennifer Rubin

Yes, this is what pro-war arguments are reduced to: unfounded claims that the U.S. has a moral obligation to take sides in a Libyan civil war, and the desire to have the U.S. “flex its muscles.” Interventionists rely on the moral obligation argument to cover up for the fact that the U.S. will not gain any advantage from intervening in another country’s civil war. Most likely, the U.S. would acquire another international ward, and in the process America’s reputation as a lawless, meddling hegemon would be confirmed. After the last decade, the U.S. and the world could do without additional American muscle-flexing. These people talk about foreign policy as though it were a body-building competition rather than the pursuit of American security interests and valuable international relationships. That may explain why their responses to foreign crises are what we might expect from steroid addicts rather than intelligent analysts.

Fly notes that previous no-fly zones didn’t have explicit U.N. authorization. That’s right. They were illegal. A Libyan no-fly zone, in addition to being inadvisable and not in the American interest, would likewise be illegal. As long as the major members of NATO capable of assisting the U.S. militarily insist that U.N. authorization is required, as a practical and political matter it is required.

Fly claims that it is in America’s interest that the Libyan people overthrow Gaddafi. What Fly means is that it would be a good thing if the Libyan people (or the greater part of them) overthrow Gaddafi. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is definitely true. This is a good example of how interventionists confuse something that would be a good outcome for the people in another country with something that affects U.S. security and interests. There is a significant difference between the two, and the failure and indeed refusal to recognize that difference is the sort of thing I was talking about yesterday. For example, it would be a very good thing for Zimbabweans if Zimbabwe were not ruled by Mugabe and his henchmen, but the U.S. has essentially nothing at stake either way. It is actually none of our business. This is troubling for people who believe that everything everywhere is our business, but the reality is that there are desirable political developments that could happen in a great many countries that have no implications for U.S. interests.

P.S. Rubin makes no argument as to what Obama could or should have done to prevent the legal formation of the new government led by Miqati. Apparently he should have told the Lebanese majority that they are only permitted to have governments approved by Washington. That would have been right after he magically gave Mousavi a majority of the vote by snapping his fingers.

It was on Feb. 23 that President Obama said regarding Libya that the United States would “stand up for freedom, stand up for justice, and stand up for the dignity of all people.” And on Feb. 25 Secretary Clinton asserted that, “This is a time for action. Now is the opportunity for us to support all who are willing to stand up on behalf of the rights we claim to cherish.” On Mar. 2, she observed that the events in the region demanded a “strong and strategic response.” They were right, but so far our actions have not matched these words. ~Michael Singh

Singh makes a strong case that the administration has erred by making such excessive statements, not least because it provides an opening to arguments for intervention. What he doesn’t do is make a persuasive argument that the U.S. should intervene in Libya. These statements create expectations that the U.S. is willing to lend direct support to opposition forces in a number of countries, and it doesn’t seem that this is actually going to happen. The administration should match up its public rhetoric more closely with what it is prepared to do, but it doesn’t follow that it should follow through on general promises of help with specific military actions in Libya.

According to Singh, the U.S. risks its credibility by not acting. Aside from the fact that this is what interventionists always say about every crisis everywhere in the world, the main thing that jeopardizes U.S. credibility is pledging support for foreign political causes prematurely before we know what we’re endorsing and making promises that the U.S. cannot or will not keep. We have heard this before. Before NATO intervened in Kosovo, we frequently heard the argument that NATO’s “credibility” was at stake.

It’s helpful to reflect on how bogus that argument was. Kosovo was part of Serbia, and the fighting in Kosovo didn’t threaten any NATO members. One of the closest NATO members that might have been affected, Greece, didn’t really want to intervene against its historic ally. NATO’s credibility was never at risk. What interventionists did by using this credibility argument was to invent a new political obligation by arbitrarily re-defining NATO’s role in Europe. For the sake of protecting the so-called credibility of NATO, the U.S. and its NATO allies launched an illegal, unprovoked war against another state to take the side of separatists inside that state’s territory. In other words, to save its credibility NATO had to destroy its credibility as a purely defensive alliance. The situation in Libya is very similar, except that instead of separatists the anti-regime forces are rebels that intend to replace him and his government in Tripoli. Needless to say, the U.S. hasn’t the remotest legal pretext or justification to intervene, just as it had no justification for what it did in 1999. No one bothered to pay much attention to the forces we were siding with in Kosovo, and no one seems to be considering what forces the U.S. would be empowering if it intervened in Libya.

The Russians have been quite clear that military action is not acceptable to them, and neither the Poles and the Turks support intervention, so there is no question of a mission authorized by NATO or the U.N. Egypt objects to military action, which is understandable, since it will would be one of the countries most directly affected by an intensifying refugee crisis that military action would inevitably cause. If the U.S. were to take action, it would be done in collusion with a handful of other allies against the wishes of Libya’s neighbors, without support from a significant numbers of its European allies, and contrary to international law. U.S. credibility would hardly be served by once again trashing our national reputation with yet another unilateral, illegal military action. It is not clear how many of the rebels actually welcome intervention and how many reject it. We don’t really understand what is happening in Libya, and it is absolute folly to plunge ahead without becoming much better informed.

Singh identifies another possible consequence of inaction:

As the fighting drags on and the violence deepens, the risk that extremist groups will enter the fray as they have in other conflicts in the region increases as well, which has serious implications for our future relations with whatever Libya that emerges from the fighting.

That’s a possibility, but for all those who imagine how Libya might turn into a “giant Somalia,” it is worth recalling that the state of Somalia today and the problems of disorder and piracy resulting from it are the effects of a major intervention by the Ethiopian army in 2006. Back then, Ethiopia (with Washington’s approval) was trying to dislodge an Islamist group from its stronghold in Mogadishu. They succeeded in the immediate goal, and anarchy and protracted conflict have followed. Somalia was in very bad shape before the invasion, but it has been a disaster afterwards. Failure to think beyond the initial intervention is a recurring problem with pro-war advocates.

In addition to all of the usual difficulties, risks, and pitfalls of military intervention, what is the plan for what comes later? Let’s assume that the operation goes reasonably well and succeeds in deposing Gaddafi. Does U.S. involvement end at that point, and Washington wishes the rebels’ new government good luck as our forces leave the area? Or does the U.S. take on responsibility for post-conflict peacekeeping and reconstruction once Washington has decided to take the rebels’ side in trying to oust Gaddafi? Do the U.N. and AU take over instead? I have not seen anyone give these questions any serious thought.

Another recurring theme in pro-war arguments is how little intervention will cost the U.S. Military action is being sold to the public and the government as something that will not turn into a prolonged mission, but the same people who insist that we get involved will make all of the same arguments against leaving Libya to its own devices after the initial fighting is over. Americans have also become spoiled by two decades of wars in which the U.S. has achieved overwhelming and immediate air superiority, so many people think of air campaigns as low-risk exercises. Libyan air defenses are substantial, and U.S. forces may suffer some casualties and prisoners of war from enforcing even something as “limited” as a no-fly zone.

Advocates of military action are primarily recommending it as a solution to the government’s excesses and crimes, but suppose instead that outside intervention triggers the mass slaughter that the intervention was intended to prevent. What then? Once U.S. forces are committed, it will be virtually impossible politically to halt the intervention, but it is easy to imagine how intervention could worsen the situation and the U.S. would legitimately receive part of the blame for that outcome.

Via Scoblete, Paul Miller complains that the Obama administration is needlessly rushing into Libya:

The administration looks to me like it is being driven by the CNN effect. Libya is in the headlines, dramatic events are afoot, so the administration believes it must do something, it must act, probably to demonstrate resolve, or exercise leadership. It isn’t leadership to let the media drive your foreign policy. If the exact same thing were happening right now in Equatorial Guinea, no one would care and we would not be contemplating a no-fly zone.

The administration is blundering into an unnecessary crisis, setting unrealistic expectations about our ability to drive events in Libya, and exposing itself to the dangers of unplanned escalation and mission creep. If we’re to have a grand strategy centered on building the liberal democratic peace — which is not a terrible idea — it should start from more considered reflection, not lurching overreaction to a crisis over which we have little control. Secretary Gates, ever the pragmatist, appeared to be walking back the administration’s aggressiveness on Wednesday morning. He is probably aware that using foreign policy to bolster one’s public standing has a venerable pedigree, but that does not make it wise.

I agree with Miller on several points, but he seems to be attaching too much importance to these minimal moves. As the report he cites states, and as Miller acknowledges in his post, there does not seem to be any intention of actual military intervention:

But officials in Washington and elsewhere said that direct military action remained unlikely, and that the moves were designed as much as anything as a warning to Colonel Qaddafi and a show of support to the protesters seeking to overthrow his government.

Miller makes a fair point that the warning won’t carry any weight if government officials tell the media that there is no intention of using force. It would be better to do nothing than to engage in empty gestures, but there isn’t much political support in Washington for doing absolutely nothing. Almost all of the arguments have been on the side of more direct U.S. action, and the administration has so far resisted giving in to the clamoring for war.

Miller clearly regards the use of force in Libya as a terrible blunder, so wouldn’t it be more unsettling and more disturbing if the administration were seriously considering attacking Libya? It would be much better if the U.S. were not trying to influence events inside Libya at all, but if some ultimately meaningless gestures help keep the U.S. out of this conflict I’ll settle for that. One could object that there is no need for Washington to go through the motions of a review of options when the Pentagon and many NATO governments are pretty clearly against intervention, and other permanent members on the Security Council will never support it. It would be much better if Obama simply ruled out all of these options from the start, but if going through a review process leads to that conclusion it won’t have done any lasting harm.

There’s no doubt that hardly anyone would be seriously discussing intervention of any kind if Libya’s civil war had broken out last year, or next year, or at almost any other time. Forget Equatorial Guinea. There’s an incipient civil war brewing in Ivory Coast right now between pro- and anti-Gbagbo factions. Gbagbo’s forces have killed civilian protesters, and Gbagbo is a bit of a fanatic who promotes hostility to Burkinabe and other foreigners. Just this week, Gbagbo’s thugs have been attacking foreigners in Abidjan. As far as I know, no government recognizes Gbagbo’s election, but Ivory Coast has nothing to do with the uprisings sweeping through Arab countries, and so it is not the political crisis that anyone cares about at the moment. Libya and Ivory Coast are equally (un)important to the U.S., but one of the crises is on television and dominates the news cycle, and the other draws blank stares and questions asking “where’s that?” What should make us all stop contemplating intervention in Libya is that Western governments probably understand the situation and the competing factions in Ivory Coast much better than they understand what’s happening in Libya, which means that they don’t know very much at all what’s happening there.

Peter Beaumont made this point very well earlier this week:

The reality is that we are rushing to make policy on Libya without knowing precisely what is happening here. That is not to say we do not know some of the broad details. Yes, people are being killed for demonstrating against the regime. People, too, are being taken from their homes amid a widespread policy of intimidation. Human rights abuses are unquestionably being committed. But it is a question of scale. And there is a requirement for a response that fits the reality of what is happening and does not exacerbate the country’s problems, or the region’s.

We should admit our ignorance and own it as we try to determine what is happening in Libya. When we have determined the reality of what we are dealing with then perhaps, and only then, can we talk seriously about appropriate measures to respond to it.

I write all this not to denigrate the great Huntington. He may still be proved right. The Arab world may modernize on its own separate path. But his mistakes illuminate useful truths: that all people share certain aspirations and that history is wide open. The tumult of events can transform the traits and qualities that seemed, even to great experts, etched in stone. ~David Brooks

If Huntington may still be proved right, it isn’t clear that he has made very many mistakes. Saying that all people share certain aspirations doesn’t actually tell us very much. It is how people try to realize those aspirations, the way they prioritize them, and the importance they attach to them that reflect cultural values and contribute to cultural differences. When abstract terms are used for expressing those aspirations, it makes it much harder to know what these aspirations actually mean. I’m not sure that knowing that all people share certain aspirations is all that useful. At best, it is a truism, and at worst it can blind us to the deeper disagreements that lie behind these shared aspirations.

Time after time, middle-class political liberals (in the classical or European sense) have demanded an end to arbitrary government and the establishment of constitutional and representative government. They have quickly learned that the opening of the political system empowers majorities hostile to their interests. It is not an accident that political liberals have sometimes aligned themselves with monarchical, oligarchic or authoritarian systems in the fear that mass democracy will represent significant changes for the worse for them. Expanding the franchise has sometimes meant reviving the conservative forces that the liberals opposed earlier, and sometimes it empowers more social democratic and/or socialist movements, but in either case political liberals tend to lose as a result. That sometimes leads to support for coups and a return to a more restricted or advantageous electoral system. Anti-democratic backlash is one of the things Amy Chua warned about in World on Fire, and it is something that Kurlantzick has noted in his recent survey of the Asian nations that participated in the “third wave” of democratization. This backlash has been taking place in Thailand for the last five years. While Thailand is the clearest example of this, it isn’t limited to Thailand, as Kurlantzick explains:

During the eras of street protests, Filipino, Thai, South Korean, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Taiwanese middle classes stood at the forefront of demonstrations, much as middle class men and women are doing now in the Middle East. But less than a generation later, these same middle class men and women often now oppose democracy. In Indonesia and Taiwan, the middle class has continued to be a bulwark for reform, particularly in Jakarta. But in other nations, the middle class no longer always stands for reform and good governance.

Of course, reform and good governance are other terms that will mean different things to the middle class and the majority of the population. When democracy meant making the government more accountable to them, middle-class liberals were all for it, but when it means a government with economic and fiscal policies that challenge of threaten their interests they naturally become less enthusiastic. On the surface, the illiberal democratic majority and the liberal minority both want “freedom” and “democracy,” but what they mean by this is as different as can be.

Regarding nationalism, Huntington may have missed something, but if he did it wasn’t because he was paying too much attention to each civilization’s cultural values at the expense of “universal” values. If there was a mistake, it was in attaching too much importance to civilizational identities and not enough to more local and national identities. In other words, Huntington’s scheme is a useful corrective against universalism, but it can miss many of the other more particular values and attachments that matter as much or more. That said, the most effective protests movements we have seen so far are in the nation-states with some of the strongest national identities and relatively long traditions of secular nationalism. Libyan rebels claim to want to topple Gaddafi and establish a new government for all of Libya, but the heart of the rebellion remains in Cyrenaica, and the country is split by tribe and region. It’s very early to conclude that the primary attachment of most of the people in almost all of these countries is not religion. It would be quite strange if it were not one of the most important after immediate natural loyalties.

Now that revolution has spread from Tunisia to Oman, however, the administration is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom. ~Charles Krauthammer

In fact, this isn’t the “fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine.” It is at most an assumption that went into making the so-called Doctrine, which Krauthammer once defined here. In 2008, Krauthammer wrote:

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume — unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise — that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.

The fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine isn’t that Arabs desire dignity and freedom. That isn’t what distinguished Bush’s advocacy for democracy promotion from that of his predecessors. No one seriously contested the claim that all people desire these things. Krauthammer did famously dismiss the idea that people might value natural loyalties and religion less than they value abstract freedom, which was badly wrong, but that doesn’t mean that there is no desire for freedom. That has never been the objection to democracy promotion. It isn’t that some people don’t desire such things, but that the institutions and habits of democracy cannot be built up and learned rapidly, especially when they are introduced overnight from outside in the wake of an invasion. There is also the small matter that desiring freedom and desiring a democratic form of government are not the same thing, and can frequently oppose one another.

The heart of the doctrine, as Krauthammer himself defined it in the summer of 2008, is that “the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world.” That is indeed the last version of the Bush Doctrine as laid out in Bush’s Second Inaugural, and it is loopy. The Obama administration doesn’t seem to believe that, most Americans don’t believe that, and even a few neoconservatives don’t believe that this is the fundamental mission of U.S. foreign policy. Virtually no one in the U.S. has converted to the “freedom agenda,” because that agenda was a disastrous failure both in the way that it was implemented and in its assumptions about the U.S. role. One nation after the next has been rising up without much in the way of U.S. backing. Each time this happens, Bush’s assumption that it was necessary for the U.S. to be actively promoting democracy in Arab countries is made to look worse, not better. Those nations that have been “liberated” by the “freedom agenda” were mostly subjected to various degrees of semi-authoritarian or authoritarian misrule for years afterwards.

Krauthammer continues:

But whatever side you take on that question, what’s unmistakable is that to the Middle Easterner, Iraq today is the only functioning Arab democracy, with multiparty elections and the freest press.

It’s strange that Krauthammer would insist that “the Middle Easterner” is the one who would see it this way. It seems to me that these are the people least likely to see Iraq in these terms. It’s also not true. Lebanon has multi-party elections, it has more of a functioning democracy than Iraq, and its press is free. Recent political unrest aside, it is also a far better place to live than Iraq, which remains according to one ranking in the top ten of the world’s failed states. The result of this “functioning democracy” is a state that is listed by Freedom House as not free, and it is categorized by the Economist Intelligence Unit as barely qualifying as a “hybrid regime” rather than an authoritarian state. In the overall EIU score for Iraq, it leads such models of free government Madagascar and Kuwait by just .06 and .12 respectively. Those two are in the authoritarian category. The EIU rates the functioning of the Iraqi government at 0.79 on a scale of 10. Other countries on the list that boast similar “functioning of government” ratings are Liberia, Togo, Tajikistan, and Equatorial Guinea. A better term for Iraq would be the Arab world’s most dysfunctional hybrid state. Kazakhstan outscores Iraq on civil liberties, and Russia ranks ahead of Iraq in terms of electoral process and pluralism. For political culture, it is tied with Jordan and Azerbaijan.

Krauthammer believes that if Egypt were “to be as politically developed in, say, a year as is Iraq today, we would think it a great success,” which is simply mad. Egypt naturally rated worse than Iraq overall in 2010 according to the EIU, but their overall rankings were almost identical in 2008 (3.89 vs. 4.00). The point isn’t that Egypt was already doing well (it wasn’t), but that Iraq continues to do so badly. If Egypt improved to Iraq’s current level of political development, it wouldn’t have gone very far at all. It wouldn’t be seen as a great success, but would instead be regarded as a huge let-down.

War supporters have become so strongly attached to democracy promotion and the “freedom agenda” because they quickly ran out of excuses for the debacle in Iraq, but they are so intent on using Iraq’s political progress as their justification after the fact that they can’t see that Iraq is not free, barely democratic in the sense that we mean it, and sliding into a politics of authoritarian populism and sectarianism. They have to exaggerate that progress and pretend that Iraq is a “functioning democracy,” because the terrible costs inflicted on the Iraqi population and the terrible costs borne by the American military are completely inexcusable on the war supporters’ own terms if all that it has produced is an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian state increasingly in Iran’s orbit.

Ross:

The last few weeks should bury, once and for all, the foolish idea that neoconservatism’s rhetorical commitment to democracy promotion is just a smokescreen for Likudnik dual loyalties or U.S. imperialism.

As an opponent of U.S. democracy promotion and its advocates, I would point out that I have generally taken democratists quite seriously that they usually mean what they say when they endorse global democratic revolution and democratization. It has never been “just a smokescreen” for anything, which is why it is so dangerous. If it were just a cynical ploy for nothing other than justifying the expansion of U.S. influence and toppling regimes hostile to Israel, that would be mildly reassuring, as it would mean that there was some identifiable, limited purpose behind it. I have tended to assume that avowedly “pro-Israel” people with hawkish, quasi-imperialist ambitions supported the policies that they did because they believed that these would advance their other goals, but perhaps I have been giving them too much credit. What we can say is that neoconservatives conflate values and interests together in the same way that they blur together the interests of the U.S. and allied states. This applies to Israel, but not only to Israel. As Ross mentions, neoconservatives indulge in the same sloppy, immediate identification with the cause of Georgia.

Certainly, one can point to examples of how the “freedom agenda” was aimed mainly at subverting unfriendly governments in order to replace them with more reliable clients, but that didn’t mean that many of the people endorsing the “freedom agenda” didn’t want a more radical policy than the one that Bush promoted. When the Bush administration backed away from democracy promotion in the second term, it was neoconservatives who complained loudest about the return of “realism.” Unfortunately, their support for democracy promotion really does seem to be an unreasonable ideological commitment that experience will not cure. Theircritics on the right haven’t called them “neo-Jacobins” for nothing.

What I don’t quite understand is why sincere attachment to ideological democratism is supposed to be counted as a mark in the neoconservatives’ favor. If anything, genuine democratizing zeal is confirmation that neoconservatives are unwilling to make any important distinctions between values and interests, it means that they don’t really believe that democratic states will have fundamentally divergent interests over time, and it suggests that they do not believe that there are ever genuine trade-offs in policymaking, at least when it comes to their preferred policies. What Ross describes as the “shallow side” of neoconservative idealism isn’t just one side of it, but represents the whole of it. Values must conflict with interests, especially when American interests are defined as broadly and loosely as neoconservatives do, but they take it as a given that American ideals and power advance together. That’s not just an arrogant prescription for endless warfare and instability. It also happens to be painfully wrong, and it makes a mockery of both our values and our interests. The spread of democracy typically makes other nations more resistant to U.S. policies and gradually makes their governments more independent in their foreign policy decisions, and the stronger their democratic political cultures become the less likely they are to serve as reliable yes-men for U.S. policies.

Neoconservatives are typically very hawkish in their views on U.S. policy and favor U.S. hegemony, they are strongly “pro-Israel,” and for much of the last 20-25 years increasingly they have been enamored of democracy promotion as an important feature of U.S. policy. The first two may be compatible up to a point, but neither of them can be paired with the third for very long. At least during the Cold War there could be some justification that democracy promotion was occasionally useful as a complement to anti-Soviet containment, but as the Cold War recedes the strategic value of democracy promotion has declined dramatically. Instead of acknowledging that one of these three should be given priority and that the three goals seriously conflict with one another, neoconservatives have endorsed three sets of mutually contradictory policies with equal enthusiasm: maintain U.S. hegemony through activist and interventionist policies abroad, provide unstinting support to Israel regardless of what it does and pledge protection of Israeli security, and promote democracy abroad as much as possible.

The war in Iraq showed that these three are basically incompatible and undermine one another. The war was supposed to advance U.S. hegemony in the region and remove a threat to Israel, but effectively empowered Iran to Israel’s detriment, and this was compounded by the insistence on democratizing Iraq, which redounded to the benefit of those factions aligned with and supported by Tehran. More recently, it has become increasingly obvious that the close relationship with Israel and the prolonged U.S. presence in the Near East work at cross-purposes, and both of them contribute to anti-American attitudes and violent opposition in the form of terrorism.

Instead of backing away from any of the goals listed above, neoconservatives have become even more adamant in their support for all three, and their critiques of Obama’s foreign policy have largely been based on their perceptions that he is overseeing American decline abroad, that he is antagonistic to Israeli interests, and that he is insufficiently committed to promoting democracy. These critiques are usually tendentious and often inaccurate on many points, but these critiques show that the same goals remain. There has been absolutely no learning going on, and there is no awareness on their part that neoconservatives are still pursuing mutually contradictory policy goals.

The main answer that some of them have come up with is to revive the discredited “freedom agenda” (now to be called the Freedom Doctrine) as a sure-fire way to combat Iranian influence, and most of them are all in favor democratization in the Arab world so long as no Islamist parties can participate in elections. In other words, they still want to have it all, pretend that trade-offs don’t exist, and send U.S. foreign policy careening from one disaster to the next.

While Americans may have some quibbles with the speed and extent of Obama’s response to the Libyan conflict, I think we can all agree that David Cameron has not acquitted himself all that well in making his first significant foray into making foreign policy decisions since becoming Prime Minister. Alex Massie sums up the problem:

Is David Cameron a hawk or a dove? And how useful is that question anyway? I suspect the answers are “more of a hawk than not” and “not much”. The Prime Minister has not, shall we say, been at his best vis a vis Libya. Then again, foreign policy is not his longest-suit as anyone who recalls his reckless – and pointless – response to the mini-crisis in South Ossetia. His Dash to Tbilisi was straight from the pages of the John McCain Foreign Policy Manual, substituting feel-good sloganising and photo ops for measured calculations of both the national interest and anything Britain could practically or usefully do.

It isn’t all that surprising that Cameron’s instincts would lead him astray. Despite occasionally saying reasonable-sounding things in the last few years, Cameron was a member of the Tory front bench that supported the invasion of Iraq, and as Massie reminds us he made a fool of himself over Georgia. Hague remains Foreign Secretary, and he belongs to that batch of Tories that fell under the sway of hawkish interventionism and Hannan-esque preaching about democracy during the first decade of the century*. Cameron and McCain both wanted to show solidarity with Georgia in 2008, which caused them to stake out misguided and somewhat irrational positions on a conflict that they didn’t really understand, and both of them have been at it again in Libya.

In this case, the desire to show support for the rebels in words has overwhelmed the reasonable judgment that there is not very much that the U.S., Britain and allies are able to do to lend support to them that would not plunge our governments into yet another foreign war. McCain is an opposition Senator with no real responsibility for making policy, so he has the luxury of indulging his militaristic instincts and can be more easily ignored, but Cameron is a head of government and shouldn’t be so eager to propose military action (which is what supporting a no-fly zone is).

* In fairness to Hague, this report relates that Hague is among the more cautious members of the Cabinet when it comes to Libya.

Another oddity, particularly given Obama’s high regard for the power of his own rhetoric, is that you’d think he’d be looking for ways to take credit for, and guide, the forces of reform in the region. ~Jonah Goldberg

It seems to me that this gets to the heart of what bothers so many people, especially conservatives, about Obama’s response to events in Libya. For them, American Presidents are supposed to want to exploit, appropriate, and control foreign political crises. Not doing this amounts to “dithering” or “failing to lead.” It may be that it really doesn’t occur to these critics that it is not the responsibility of the President of the United States to take credit for political forces that have nothing to do with him, much less to guide the political development of other countries.

One of the common refrains we keep hearing is that Obama has not been consistent in his responses. Consistency can be overrated, but it’s hard to miss that there has been a fairly consistent message. The administration has repeatedly said that these crises are internal to their respective countries, the U.S. is not favoring or dictating particular outcomes, and the political fortunes of each country will be determined by the nations involved. Egypt was a more complicated case, because the extent of our support for the Egyptian regime was such that professions of “not taking sides” meant less there than they did in Tunisia.

The differences between the situations in Libya and Egypt are obvious, so it’s puzzling to me why people keep demanding to know why Obama’s responses have been different. In Egypt Washington had leverage and had common interests with the Egyptian military in easing Mubarak out of power. It mattered to members of the Egyptian regime how the U.S. viewed their actions, so it made sense to exert more direct pressure on the figures in the regime on the assumption that they would be responsive to it. Angrily denouncing Gaddafi from the start wouldn’t have changed anything in Libya, but in addition to endangering U.S. embassy personnel it would have immediately inserted the U.S. into a conflict that has nothing to do with us.

As it did in Iran, the administration seems interested in making sure that an American response does not overshadow, step on, or get in the way of the opposition. Part of that involves not publicly identifying with the opposition. From what I can see, the administration doesn’t presume that it can or should directly facilitate the opposition’s success, but it isn’t going to complicate their task by burdening the opposition with U.S. backing that could undermine, splinter, or discredit the opposition. Egypt may be the exception to this pattern, because Washington found that Mubarak could be removed without dramatically changing the relationship with the Egyptian military.

Critics of this approach reject the idea that U.S. support can ever be a burden, but more than that they believe that the U.S. should be trying to promote puppet factions that will give Washington a degree of control over the shape of these future governments. In their view, the “color” revolutions weren’t horrible mistakes that backfired and harmed the countries affected by them. Instead, they see those largely failed revolutions as models for other countries. To the extent that there are connections between some of the Egyptian protest groups and instigators of earlier “color” revolutions (and their American funding), we should be cautious about endorsing the independence of these groups and skeptical about the degree to which the next Egyptian government will actually represent the Egyptian people.

Huckabee had another radio interview this week, and he expressed his outrage that his position had been so horribly misrepresented:

Fischer: Well Governor, what got lost in all the shuffle was the legitimate point that you were making which is that we may have a president who has some fundamentally anti-American ideas that may be rooted in a childhood where he had a father who was virulently anti-colonial, hated the British – might have something to do with the President returning the bust of Winston Churchill back to England. You know, I was struck by the fact that when he made his tour to Indonesia, he made a point of going to an Indonesian memorial that celebrated the victory of Indonesians over British troops – again, part of that anti-colonial thing. And so I’d like you to comment on that; you seem to think that there is some validity to the fact that there may be some fundamental anti-Americanism in this president.

Huckabee: Well, that’s exactly the point that I make in the book and I don’t know why these reporters – maybe they can’t read, I guess that’s part of it because it’s clearly spelled out and I’m quoting a British newspaper who really were expressing the outrage of the Brits over that bust being returned and the point was that they felt like that due to Obama’s father and grandfather it could be that his version and view of the Mau Mau Revolution was very different than most of the people who perhaps would grow up in the United States. And I have said many times, publicly, that I do think he has a different worldview and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas.

Ah, yes, the heroic Indonesian fight against the British. Who can forget that one? There were just a couple small problems with this. As far as I can tell, Obama did not visit any memorial during his Indonesia trip, and Indonesia was formerly a Dutch colony. Not that it will matter to Huckabee, but Obama didn’t attend a madrassa when he was in Indonesia. Of course, there is that famous Punahou madrassa in Honolulu, but everyone knows about that one.

Update: Obama did visit the Indonesian national war cemetery, which is what one would expect during a state visit to another country.