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.

Back in 2009 I made a remark to the effect that John McCain’s response to the August 2008 war in Georgia was partly responsible for convincing voters that he was unfit to be President. One of the commenters correctly pointed out that McCain’s response to the war in Georgia basically made no difference to his electoral chances. I would still say that his response was a good indicator of the crazy way he would respond to international events, but on reflection I have to agree that as far as the 2008 election was concerned the impact of the August war was basically nil. The war in Georgia involved a client state that received American aid, and one whose troops were among those deployed in Iraq, and McCain immediately staked out a fanatically pro-Georgian position. Given all these things, it’s all the more interesting that it had no meaningful impact on the election. This came back to me when I saw Jennifer Rubin discussing the impact of Libya on the 2012 election:

Libya may therefore become a critical issue in one of two circumstances. First, if — as some conservatives fear — it devolves into a bloody, prolonged civil war and casualties mount, this foreign policy debacle could well become a stunning example of President Obama’s foreign policy ineptitude and of the perils of excessive reliance on multilateralism. We have yet to get a credible casualty count or see vivid depictions of the violence, but when those inevitably surface, the outrage over American passivity may well heighten.

Even if the Libya situation does not devolve into genocidal war, Libya may simply become one more item in the growing list of foreign policy failures. When viewed in conjunction with Obama’s fixation on Israel’s settlements, attempts at Iran engagement, his backing of Hugo Chavez’s crony in Honduras and his deferential stance toward a wide array of autocrats (from Bashar al-Assad to Vladimir Putin), voters may come to see that Obama’s foreign policy is hastening the decline of American influence.

To take the worst-case scenario first, a “genocidal” war in Libya would be a truly awful outcome, but for it to have political effects at home the American public would have to believe that the Obama administration should have intervened early on. As far as anyone can tell, most Americans want no such thing. If anything, most Americans want the opposite: to stay out of a conflict that has nothing to do with the U.S. Unless the U.S. inserts itself into the war, Libya is not going to become much of an issue in the 2012 election, much less a “critical” issue. The reason? Unfortunately, Americans barely pay attention to the major wars the U.S. is already fighting, and to the extent that the public is frustrated with those wars the mainstream GOP offers them no alternative to current policy. Non-intervention in Libya isn’t going to win Obama many votes, but it isn’t going to lose him very many, either. The people who believe the things listed above count as Obama’s “failures” are already dead-set against his re-election, and most voters either don’t care about these issues or the issues aren’t top priorities for them.

If Obama keeps the U.S. out of the fighting, that matches up with what most Americans say that they want, and outside of their cocoon Republican hawks are going to have a hard time using non-intervention in Libya to attack Obama. For them to make that attack, Republican candidates would need to be able to explain why starting yet another foreign war is a good use of American resources and a necessary risk to American military personnel. There is not actually an argument for this. According to the hawks, intervention is simply something that the U.S. “must” do.

Even if Obama made the horrible mistake of intervening, which we can still hope that he won’t do, Libya would not be an issue that Republicans could exploit very effectively. If Obama started an unnecessary American war in Libya, his main Republican challengers have boxed themselves into a corner by insisting that this is exactly what Obama must do. There is significant political pressure to make this horrible mistake, but it is not coming from the American electorate.

Could 2012 be the Republican version of what happened to Democrats in 2004? ~Chris Cillizza

If it is, that is another argument for Romney as the nominee. After all, what happened to the Democrats in 2004? The field was full of rather drab “centrist” and hawkish Democrats, and all of the candidates coming from the Senate in 2004 had voted for the Iraq war resolution and had only belatedly become critics of the management of the war. Dean had started off as a little-known “centrist” governor whose main interest was health care reform, but quickly tapped into intense antiwar sentiment among activists and donors by becoming an outspoken critic of the Iraq war.

As interesting as Dean’s brief surge was, he didn’t have the organization or depth of support on the ground in Iowa to translate that early enthusiasm into a victory, and after finishing third in Iowa it was all downhill from there. As a result, Kerry eventually came away with the nomination, and the Democratic ticket could draw no clear contrast with Bush on Iraq. Despite that, Bush was re-elected with the weakest winning result for a modern incumbent President. It may be that the Democrats squandered their chance to beat him by opting for the safer, more conventional candidate. Regardless, the Republican candidate in the likely 2012 field who most resembles Kerry and represents the conventional, establishment choice is Romney.

Jim Geraghty has imagined a scenario in which Jon Huntsman launches his 2012 candidacy by launching a major attack on Obama’s conduct of foreign policy. Here is a sample:

And then, in detail, Huntsman paints a picture of an administration that is flailing, frozen with indecision, short-sighted, often at war with itself, disorganized, and ultimately lacking any sense of what it wanted to do after Obama had finished his apology tour.

He says things like, “The charm offensive wasn’t just this president’s first foreign-policy tool; it was his only one. And when it failed to achieve significant concessions from either our allies or our foes, the president and the team around him had no plan B.”

He points out that Obama and Hillary’s constant invocation of a “reset” button reflects an immature yearning to go back to some earlier, simpler time, out of a misplaced nostalgic belief that foreign-policy challenges were easier to solve in past years, and a tacit admission that they cannot make progress in current circumstances. “We have to deal with the world as it is; yelling ‘do-over’ doesn’t even work in the schoolyard.”

Huntsman sets a record for talking out of school, sharing a series of anecdotes that make Joe Biden look cloddish, Hillary Clinton frustrated, dismissed, and quick to lash out, David Axelrod meddling in areas he doesn’t understand, and the man at the top so far out of his league he terrifies Huntsman.

Huntsman shares frustrating tales of trying to be the voice of reason while the president tried to tailor his foreign policies to the whims of congressional Democrats [bold mine-DL]. He laments that Obama’s Middle East vision begins and ends with Israeli settlements, that he effectively sold out Iranian democracy protesters in pursuit of a Quixotic dream of a summit with Tehran, and that in two short years he has snubbed India and insulted almost every major ally.

Put another way, let’s suppose that Huntsman starts off his 2012 candidacy by telling making a lot of false claims and indulging the most demagogic misrepresentations of what Obama has done. Would this “inflict serious damage” on Obama? It would probably inflict some damage if the accusations didn’t sound like Republican boilerplate. It would help even more if there were much substance to any of these claims. There was no apology tour. He “snubbed” India so much that he publicly endorsed their desire for a permanent seat on the Security Council. Say whatever else you want about that gesture, but it was one that the Indian government greatly appreciated. There are two allies that might be included among the “insulted.” These would be Japan under Hatoyama and Turkey after the negotiation on the nuclear deal, but that isn’t what Geraghty means when he puts this claim in Huntsman’s mouth. The idea that Obama’s foreign policy has been an exercise in placating Congressional Democrats is quite funny. There is hardly any decision one can point to that was made out of deference to Democrats in Congress.

The “reset” with the Russians in particular was a deliberate effort to try to repair some of the damage that the previous administration had caused to the U.S.-Russian relationship. As far as I can tell, it had nothing to do with nostalgia for a simpler time, but stemmed from a desire to avoid policies that needlessly provoked Moscow and undermined securing shared interests. To a limited degree, the “reset” has done what it was supposed to do, and it has yielded arms reduction and nuclear cooperation agreements as well as some support for U.S. policies on Iran and Afghanistan. Huntsman could not make a detailed indictment on these counts, because the specific claims are largely or wholly untrue.

Instead of inflicting damage on Obama, it would annihilate the rationale for Huntsman’s candidacy as Huntsman’s supporters understand it. As misguided as Huntsman would be in seeking the Republican nomination, it makes even less sense for him to seek it by indulging in exactly the sort of pettiness and demagoguery that he and his supporters evidently see as serious flaws in contemporary politics. I suspect the gap between what mainstream conservatives believe about Obama’s foreign policy and what Huntsman would actually say about it is large, which is one more reason why Huntsman’s candidacy doesn’t make any sense.

If NATO (the U.S. Sixth Fleet in practice) can’t take out Libyan air defenses at no or minimal cost, we should all start studying Arabic and spending an hour a day with our foreheads pressed to the floor. ~Conrad Black

Via John Tabin

Black is free to do what he likes, but in what universe does that sentence make any sense? Gates was making a point of emphasizing what would actually be required to enforce a no-fly zone, partly as a way of responding to people who blithely talk about “taking out” other states’ air defenses when they have not actually done anything to provoke the U.S. Black is insisting that the U.S. government should never be reluctant to use its military superiority to intervene in another country’s civil war, and he implies that failure to do so is not far removed from inviting the forcible foreign conquest and conversion of the United States. There is a word for this: insane. The question is not whether the U.S. military can “take out” these defenses, but whether it makes any sense for the U.S. to insert itself in another country’s civil war. It clearly doesn’t make sense, which may explain why Black’s response to Gates’ testimony is so unhinged.

It wouldn’t just be the Sixth Fleet “in practice,” but of necessity, because there is no agreement among NATO governments in support of military action. The completely unjustified bombing of Serbia commanded much broader support inside NATO, which should tell us something about how little justification there is for an intervention in Libya. Both permanent and non-permanent members of the Security Council, including Brazil, object to military intervention. What everyone needs to understand is that military intervention in Libya would be an almost entirely American intervention, it would be widely (and correctly) perceived as illegal, and there is no consensus from any of the regional and international organizations representing those countries that have the most at stake in Libya. The costs may not only be casualties, which would be serious enough, but additional damage to relationships with allies and other states and unknown costs arising from complication, escalation, or blowback.

One wonders what Black thinks is “minimal cost.” This is fairly important, since it is the standard tactic of interventionists to minimize the risks of every military action to make intervention seem easy and relatively cost-free. Gates’ warnings are a valuable corrective to the impulse to ignore those risks.