Via Socblete, Stephen Walt proposes a name for a new category of wars, the wars of whim:

It’s not that the leaders who start these wars can’t come up with reasons for what they are doing. Human beings are boundlessly creative, and a powerful state can always devise a rationale for using force. And proponents may even believe it. But the dictionary defines whim as a “sudden or capricious idea, a fancy.” A “war of whim” is just that: a war that great powers enter without careful preparation or forethought, without a public debate on its merits or justification, and without thinking through the consequences if one’s initial assumptions and hopes are not borne out. Wars of whim aren’t likely to bankrupt a nation by themselves, or even lead to major strategic reversals. But they are yet another distraction, at a time when world leaders ought to focusing laser-like on a very small number of Very Big Issues (like the economy).

One of the things that makes wars of whim particularly easy to start is the limited immediate costs involved. As foolish and misguided as the Libyan war is, it has fortunately imposed very few direct costs on the intervening governments and their countries. The costs of prolonged conflict and suffering that the intervention has imposed on Libya are considerable, but these don’t directly affect the U.S. or its allies. Obviously, on the terms of its own ideological justification, this is what makes the war that much more disgraceful, but it helps explain why there are so few genuine political consequences for any of the leaders responsible for said disgrace. The same desire to stay out of Libya’s civil war guarantees that a war that inflicts harm only on Libyans will not bother the folks back home. Indeed, had it not been for the egregiously illegal manner in which Obama has committed the U.S. to this war, opposition in Congress on the substance of the policy would likely be much weaker. Public support for the Libyan war has always been exceptionally weak, but there is relatively little strong opposition to the war in the media or in public opinion. This may be because there are fewer glaring mistakes that would generate strong opposition.

The Libyan war is a reckless intervention, and it has been a classic example of how not to take military action, but incompetence in waging the Libyan war doesn’t seem to produce the same dissatisfaction that incompetent management in Iraq did, and this is because incompetence in Iraq led to American and allied casualties. As long as a war can remain “casualty-free” for the intervening governments, they are free to under-resource or mismanage it to their hearts’ content. That said, the Libyan war has gone better for the U.S. and NATO in certain respects than the war twelve years ago. Yes, the Libyan war is longer than Kosovo, it is worsening the humanitarian situation it was supposed to alleviate, and it seems to have almost been designed to drag on by committing insufficient resources to a vastly more ambitious mission. On the other hand, the U.S. and NATO have had no aircraft shot down, nor have there been quite as many egregious blunders as NATO made in 1999 when civilian trains and the Chinese embassy were bombed. Because NATO is not targeting civilian infrastructure, this war is in a few respects less outrageous than the one that involved bombed-out wreckage of bridges clogging up the Danube. Instead of the embarrassment of having a stealth fighter shot down, NATO has so far only lost an unmanned drone. Consequently, the Libyan war has faded into the background for the most part. Unfortunately, that means that the public’s understanding of what has been happening in Libya is minimal, and the supporters of the war will be able to spin the outcome in the most flattering way possible. That makes it more likely that there will be more such wars of whim in the future.