Dan Drezner is surprised and puzzled by Robert Pape’s (sort of) pro-intervention op-ed this morning:

What I’m suggesting is that Pape’s sudden embrace of humanitarian intervention — and subsequent rejection of that option in Syria — is just damn puzzling.

I suppose I share Drezner’s puzzlement, but not his surprise. Prof. Pape was an early advocate of intervention in Libya. I still don’t find the arguments for that intervention persuasive. The Libya standard lowers the bar for the use of force so much that it makes it almost impossible to avoid new wars. I definitely don’t endorse the premature declarations of “success” in Libya. Regardless, this is an argument that Pape has been making for the better part of the last year. One standard that Prof. Pape has been using to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable interventions is the chance of casualties for the intervening forces:

Yet crises short of genocide, such as the Libyan conflict, justify a military response when it can save thousands of lives with reasonable prospects of virtually no or only very low casualties to international allies.

Judged by that standard, Libya was at least a partial success because there were no U.S. and NATO casualties. Seeing as how the Libyan death toll from last year’s war may have been as high as 30,000, I still don’t see how it can be judged a successful humanitarian intervention, but if one assumes that the death toll would have been far higher than that in the absence of intervention (which can’t be proven either way) it becomes possible to claim that many lives were saved. In any case, this should help explain why Pape favored attacking Libya but doesn’t favor attacking Syria: the latter involves too much risk to intervening forces at present. He holds out the possibility that there might be less risk in the future if Syrian opposition forces take control of territory, but rules out intervention until that happens. As Pape said last April:

Intervention for humanitarian goals cannot justify large-scale risks to our own people. Serious consideration of international moral action requires practical, case-by-case assessments of the feasibility of military intervention with very low risks.

In other words, unless humanitarian intervention is very low-risk, it shouldn’t be attempted. I don’t object to that, and it does raise the bar on the use of force a little higher than many other interventionists would like, but by design it means that humanitarian interventions are always going to be carried out against extremely weak, isolated states that have no real ability to fight back. States that have the means to defend themselves and inflict significant casualties on intervening forces are never going to be targeted. This standard is better for the U.S. than other standards of humanitarian intervention that would lead U.S. forces to face much greater risks, but it does seem to take for granted that intervention will not make things worse for the population. Drezner is puzzled because the humanitarian situation in Syria is worse than it was in Libya before the intervention, but that isn’t the standard Pape is using to judge whether an intervention is appropriate or not.

However, it is significant that a vocal supporter of the Libyan war has serious reservations about intervening in Syria when so many of the proponents for military action last spring are making the same arguments today. If one wants to treat Libya as a precedent, the conditions for intervention in other states need to be very similar to those that prevailed in Libya last spring. Those conditions aren’t present in Syria, and the risks to outside forces would be unacceptably high, which is why Pape currently opposes attacking Syria.

Update: Trombly has a good response to Pape’s Syria op-ed.