As some of you have probably noticed, I've been opposed to it all along, but with every hour that passes, I'm growing more opposed, and angry.
My no has become a hell no.
The best, and only decent, argument for intervention is the humanitarian one. Gaddafi had slaughtered protestors, and left unimpeded, would slaughter more. The world needed to do something. But the violence has to be put in perspective. In most contexts, I don't prescribe to this kind of utilitarian comparison of barbarism -- horror is horror is horror -- but when a country is deciding whether to wage war, which itself brings horrors, it must make distinctions. To decide whether a war is just requires a kind of moral math.
Slaughter occurs regularly. (Can you name the most lethal conflict in the world since World War II? Answer below.) The violence in Libya that had occurred (and probably would've had occured) doesn't rise to the level of genocide, which occupies its own category and renders irrelevant most consideration of the downside of military intervention. The worst has already happened. What was happening in Libya, for all its horrors, wasn't that. It just wasn't. Here's Michael Walzer, who wrote the book on just war theory.
None of this would matter if this were a humanitarian intervention to stop a massacre. But that is not what is happening in Libya today. There would have been a cruel repression after a Qaddafi victory, and it would have been necessary to help rebels and dissidents escape and to make sure that they had a place to go. Watching the repression wouldn’t be easy (though we seem to be having no difficulty doing that in Bahrain and Yemen). But the overthrow of tyrants and the establishment of democracy has to be local work, and in this case, sadly, the locals couldn’t do it. Foreigners can provide all sorts of help—moral, political, diplomatic, and even material. Maybe neighbors, who share ethnicity and religion with the Libyan people, could do more. But a military attack of the sort now in progress is defensible only in the most extreme cases. Rwanda and Darfur, where we didn’t intervene, would have qualified. Libya doesn’t.
The slaughter in Benghazi seems to have been prevented, at least for now, but it's been traded for horrors for which the west has responsibility. No can be predict exactly what will happen, but it's not hard to foresee the broad outlines. The most likely scenario in the short term is one in which the west essentially takes ownership of a failed rebellion. Here's Josh Marshall, who seems to have learned a thing or two since supporting the invasion of Iraq.
A week ago a relatively limited intervention probably could have sealed the rebels' victory, preventing a reeling Qaddafi from fully mobilizing his heavy armaments. But where do we expect to get from this now? It's not clear to me how the best case scenario can be anything more than our maintaining a safe haven in Benghazi for the people who were about to be crushed because they'd participated in a failed rebellion. So Qaddafi reclaims his rule over all of Libya except this one city which has no government or apparent hope of anything better than permanent limbo.
But I don't believe permanent limbo is a possibilty. It won't be acceptable to the western powers. They'll need to take action. They'll need to take Gaddafi out. Here's Stephen Walt:
More importantly, despite Obama's declaration that he would not send ground troops into Libya -- a statement made to assuage an overcommitted military, reassure a skeptical public, or both -- what is he going to do if the air assault doesn't work? What if Qaddafi hangs tough, which would hardly be surprising given the dearth of attractive alternatives that he's facing? What if his supporters see this as another case of illegitimate Western interferences, and continue to back him? What if he moves forces back into the cities he controls, blends them in with the local population, and dares us to bomb civilians? Will the United States and its allies continue to pummel Libya until he says uncle? Or will Obama and Sarkozy and Cameron then decide that now it's time for special forces, or even ground troops?
That's something like a worst case. But let's consider the best case: Gaddafi falls easily. That's what Patrick Cockburn predicts will happen, but this best case scenario is still pretty damn bad. In fact, it's terrible.
It is the next stage in Libya – after the fall of Gaddafi – which has the potential to produce a disaster similar to Afghanistan and Iraq....In terms of the exercise of real authority, Gaddafi is likely to be replaced not by Libyans but by the foreign powers which assist in his overthrow. Going by what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq it will not take much for their actions to be seen across the Middle East as hypocritical and self-serving, and resisted as such.
So to review: the worst case is a stalemate, which leads the western powers to dramatically increase the violence, possibly with ground troops. The "best" case is a rapid departure by Gaddafi that leaves a vaccuum that the west fills. Under any scenario, the west will play the primary role in creating the post-Gaddadi government. Even if the west's motives for intervention were moral (an enormous if), when Libya is leaderless and instability threatens, the west's realpolitik, terror-war imperatives will kick in. Given the potential for a failed state that attracts militants -- and the presence of rich oil reserves -- the west will be unwilling to cede the job of running the government to the Libyans.
Perhaps the United States will lay back and let Italy and France and Great Britain be the imperial heavies. In either case, the result will be more western imperialism in the Middle East and a western-backed strongman running a country, precisely the thing that's made a mess of the region, precisely the thing that protestors are rebelling against.
Answer: the civil war in Congo.