What about Yemen?

Yes! What about Yemen, or any other country with violent, authoritarian regimes? What do we do with them? As with Libya, I do not wish the United States to get involved in regime change in other countries across the Levant, the Persian Gulf and Sub-Saharan and North Africa. But, one can see where laying the foundation of war on humanitarian precepts, countries arguing for action can find themselves in double-standards in other situations where they are more complacent and predisposed to inaction.

Having said that, principally, I think last week’s Economist cartoon summed up my feelings on the War in Libya (It is even quite comical that the phrase “War in Libya” is in and of itself is controversial, as if calling a war by another name, e.g. intervention, distorts the scope of the realities on the ground). My feelings being primarily that the case for intervention on humanitarian grounds in Libya and not in Syria, Iran, Bahrain, Ivory Coast or Yemen was arbitrary on a "responsibility-to-protect (R2P)" spectrum.

What the wording of the UN Security Council resolution has done is leave the US and NATO-led war against Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi and Qaddafi’s forces up for criticism based on the limits of the scope of involvement and humanitarian basis of war itself. For this reason, limiting the scope of the allied involvement for humanitarian purposes has drawn criticism from countries not involved in the intervention when juxtaposed with the overt allied rhetoric for the need of regime change in Libya.

Notably, the case for war was based off the need to prevent of a “humanitarian disaster” in Benghazi by Qaddafi’s forces. This claim was made from the dual presupposition that there was truth in the stylistic ranting by Qaddafi and his son, Saif al-Islam (over various interviews where they promised to go “door-to-door” and warn of the threat of “rivers of blood,” if civil war were to ensue) and that thousands of civilians would perish at the hands of Qaddafi's retaliatory revenge against the uprisings. In last Monday’s speech, President Obama said:

"We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi – a city nearly the size of Charlotte – could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen." 

The case isn't as strong as Samantha Power, et al, would have you presume. This is not an intervention to prevent genocide, or violence on some comparable level. Invariably, it is difficult for us to judge the true merits for war given that the word 'humanitarian,' itself, is vague. Is there a threshold of deaths needed for the 'humanitarian disaster' label?  The Blaine Truth argued last month that the case was clear - the United States must protect the rebels and aid them in their overthrow of Qaddafi. This goes beyond the stated scope of the UN Security Council Resolution. In a previous post, I stated what the difficulties were with such a limited scope, but nonetheless they were necessary to build a coalition.

Although we may not like Qaddafi, although we may not want him to be in power, we are limited by the wording of the resolution - as Dr. Cordesman highlights - which is a consensus piece and not itself a diver of policy. Nevertheless, it is the basis for justification of intervention. Ultimately, what is important and what Stephen Walt highlighted is that President Obama's speech "did not matter," it is the results of the No-Fly Zone that matter. The justifications for intervention can change with time (as witnessed in Iraq), but there is only one clear rendering of the results, which remain to be seen.

References:

Marc Lynch’s article:

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/29/the_case_against_the_libya_intervention

Stephen Walt’s article:

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/29/why_obamas_libya_speech_didnt_matter

http://csis.org/multimedia/video-anthony-cordesman-unrest-libya

My apparent "Marc Lynch"

To any of you who have read my last two blog posts. You may be confused. For I, apparently, have pulled a "Marc Lynch," which in this case goes from overtly supporting intervention in Libya to taking a more measured stance on the situation. For Marc Lynch, this shift is witnessed on his blog for Foreign Policy, Abu Aardvark's Middle East Blog, from this post to this post. It is only right that I concede that I too have made an ideological shift to a more tempered response. Given that since my last post, the United Nations Security Council has voted in favor of a No Fly Zone or a No Drive Zone, depending on how you define, I now must defend my shift away from liberal interventionism.

I will admit, as Stephen Walt contends, there are many similarities to the decision-making process that I underwent and the "gut instincts" aspects of decision-making under the George W. Bush Administration. Initially, I was angry at Col. Muammar al-Qaddaffi's brutal retaliation against the Libyan Rebel Forces and I hoped on the interventionist bandwagon. I, myself, am quite surprised by quick shift in the ideological stalemate in the Obama Administration towards intervention. The cool response, I advocated for, in my last post, was not headed.


Now that I have apologized for my ideological shift. I will go on to further justify why I made the shift away from intervention through the words of 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?  

And even if we are successful, what then? As in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, over forty years of Qaddafi's erratic and despotic rule have left Libya in very poor shape despite its oil wealth. Apart from some potentially fractious tribes, the country is almost completely lacking in effective national institutions. If Qaddafi goes we will own the place, and we will probably have to do something substantial to rebuild it lest it turn into an exporter of refugees, a breeding ground for criminals, or the sort of terrorist "safe haven" we're supposedly trying to prevent in Afghanistan.