Libya – the case for intervention

Conor, two questions if you have a minute please:

I find the latter of the three arguments the least interesting because they inevitably descend into a search for the hidden ‘real reasons’ for military interventions.

But aren’t these linked to the first? Ie, what kind of things (pragmatically) happen in the course of a war are going to be determined to a large extent by the reasons for starting it. A classic example of this would be Operation Turquoise, where the motivations of the French government were entirely relevant to assessing whether the outcome would be good or disastrous.

And second, what was the crucial piece of evidence that convinced you that Libya passed the threshold test? I have been travelling a lot for the last four weeks, and I’m just trying to piece together the rationale for war – I keep finding lots and lots of official statements about how bad Qadaffi is, and some evidence that he’d fired on demonstrators, but for all the statements about bombing cities and massacres, I am coming up very short on actual mass casualty reports. Was there a specific event that I’m missing, or did you make a judgement call based on a precautionary estimate of what he might do?

I dont think you can dismiss the issue of motivation so easily. Whilst its fruitless to get into debating the “real reasons”, the issues driving the invasion do affect how the action will be conducted and what end game the participants will push for. In the case of Iraq it was not the idea of “humanitarian intervention” that created the problems, but the postwar plans that the Allies had for Iraq. If, for example, they had entered Iraq planning, as far as possible, to minimize economic disruption and support Iraqi enterprises and non-security state institions, to use oil wealth to promote development, high employment, social services and health services, its unlikely that Iraq wouldve descended into sectarian violence and civil war. Rather, it was the ideological insistance on crash neoliberalization and privatization which threw millions out of work, turned them against the coalition and each other, gave many people nothing to live for or lose, and eventually caused that tragedy.

If the Allies are intervening in Libya with a similar game plan it poses a similar threat to the sovereignty of the Libyan people, to their national resources and to the integrity of their country.

I find the latter of the three arguments the least interesting because they inevitably descend into a search for the hidden ‘real reasons’ for military interventions.

This isn’t true. The concern that we should not risk the lives of our military in a cause that has tenuous connection to national interests has nothing to do with the “real reasons” for a military intervention. It is rather a direct confrontation with the argument that, so long as some humanitarian threshold is reached, military intervention is ethical.

The problem is that “we” are intervening only by virtue of ordering others to intervene.

Really there is a two-fold question here:

(1) Is military intervention justified?
(2) Are we justified in ordering a particular military to intervene?

Humanitarian arguments love to ignore the second question, but the second question is just as crucial as the first.

dsquared – I think the idea you could have missed something along those lines is pretty unthinkable. If there were anything it would be all over the news, with videos longer than a couple of seconds, showing actual atrocities, being played constantly on 24 hr news. Instead we get stuff like this Sky news ‘reporting’, which is really worth a watch as an example of dog-wagging of typical insultingly poor quality.

Incidentally, I found that on Juan Cole’s blog (ht CB), apparently offered without irony as evidence in support of his considered view that this time it’s all different (again), etc.

But a very-slightly-less obvious question – why is this only in the last few days being addressed by the likes of Kuperman, and why have the media utterly failed to address this simple and fundamental question from the start, instead parroting, sometimes in quotes but never in scare quotes, these obviously vague and unsubstantiated claims about massacre, genocide, etc.

Kuperman does seem to have his head screwed on though – he also makes the point (here) that Libya’s rebels started the war knowing that they could not win on their own, and that their attacks would provoke harm against civilians, aiming to draw in outside support — and it worked.

Now, how many months do we need before questions about the genesis of the armed uprising (and their arms) can be addressed in a sensible manner? I suppose it will have to wait until after the first wave of violence, at least, then a few disturbing questions will be aired here and there until the dominant media voice treats them as settled or irrelevant or old hat etc and they end up consigned to the conspiraloon blogs.

Three questions.

1) Isn’t all this the typical generational change the world has seen since forever? One man, 30 years max. Then you are out. Crucially, until then you are the apple of our eyes.

2) Why is it that Francophone or at least Francophiles are a natural target, this time even by the French? Why is there nothing done about Anglophiles. Mugabe and whoever it is in the various Emirates.

3) What is it that you want?

ejh seconded: also, the need for people to be a bit quicker off the mark. There is a small window of opportunity to raise dissent (this latest affair shows that lessons have been learned from Iraq, though obviously they are the lessons fitted to the interests of those doing the learning.)

Those casualty figures haven’t started up yet, so I have a little more gloat-space:

“Something must be done, this is something, so let’s do this” with little thought given to “what next?”

Or, from exactly a month ago:

Something must be done
Bombing is something
____
Bombing must be done

I rather selfishly find the latter of the three arguments very compelling, but mostly because my new husband spent the first week of our already much delayed married life sitting near Brize Norton on standby to be the first in. I have a whole human’s worth of skin in this game and am glad it’s an air assault so far.

I’m also curious about why the UK government is so keen to keep up the rhetoric about taking Gadafi out, when the Chief of the Defence Staff has publicly ruled it out as dangerously outside the US resolution and mission objectives. Cameron’s position seems to have all the disadvantages of potential failure, mission creep and alienating other countries. Have I missed some key advantage, other than looking manly?

Kuperman does seem to have his head screwed on though – he also makes the point (here) that “Libya’s rebels started the war knowing that they could not win on their own, and that their attacks would provoke harm against civilians, aiming to draw in outside support — and it worked.”

Kuperman is basing this assertion mostly on his previous work on Bosnia and esp. Kosovo, but how does he know this is what happened in the Libyan case? He presents no direct supporting evidence in the USAToday column, unless I missed it. And didn’t this start out as peaceful protests against Gaddafi rather than an armed uprising, or am I misremembering?

Maria: Yes, IMHO this was all about getting Gadaffi from the start. The Army guy spoke out of turn. Otherwise there would have been no propaganda to drum up the war, no question of intervention, and the fighting would probably be over now, instead of just getting warmed up.

On the OP: has the level of violence reached such a threshold that the use of counter-force is morally justifiable?

Is this referring to the damage caused by the fighting between the rebels and the government forces, or are we going with the Mad Dog motif? If the former, cessation of hostilities would be the thing, but ‘counterforce’ suggests that the idea is to join in the fighting on the rebel side.

Re: ‘real reasons for war’:

1. As others point out, the question of motives is important since we are not talking about a trolley case with perfect knowledge. We are talking about a resolution which, having done its job of conferring open-ended authorisation for all-out war, is now out of the picture – just about the only relevant reasons for war are now the ‘real’ ones, and they will determine which of a very wide range of future possibilities will come about.

2. Going to war for the wrong reason and accidentally bringing about the right outcome (if we pretend that is what is happening) is not a good model. If the model is that dubitable motives of the invaders are reliably kept in check by the apparatus of international law and diplomacy, that might be OK but it would need some argument. And one might well argue that it wouldn’t be all that OK anyway, since it gives those with the firepower a veto over military action, which ability to introduce bias is a corrupt kind of power.

LFC: didn’t this start out as peaceful protests against Gaddafi rather than an armed uprising

We don’t really know do we – either way. But we do know that there is no way for a peaceful protest to seamlessly morph into a military campaign. Juan Cole’s apologetic gives this account:

Libya began as a protest. Some of the protesters (apparently only a few thousand) were turned into armed rebels as they sought to defend themselves. Qaddafi responded to the protest movement by firing tank and artillery shells at the protesters and at infrastructure in the rebel cities. Many are without water and electricity, creating a humanitarian crisis.

This kind of impressionistic account is a cross-examining counsel’s dream. The timeline is kept conveniently ambiguous as regards the order of events described in sentences 2 and 3. The ‘were turned into’ and ‘defend themselves’ appear to be empty phrases, which resist any attempt at visualisation or concrete understanding of what might be involved.

For anyone else who is paying attention with anything like a fitting degree of cynicism, this additional comment from Cole is intriguing: There were large numbers of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the rebel ranks.

Yes, thanks, PHB, for bringing this back to all too much that we know [sic] about Gaddafi, instead of sticking to the topic under discussion.

“The justification for the attacks to topple Gaddafi is to be found in his actions in the 1970s and 1980s. … Gaddafi supplied the explosive for the Brighton bomb and the Harrods bomb and the bombs used in many of the IRA ‘spectaculars’.”

It seems a bit unfair to let all IRA personnel out of prison, but then decades later launch a war to extra-judicially execute Gaddafi.

Yes, I’ve watched the clip, and I think it is highly unlikely that it is all a pack of lies. Presumably Juan Cole is also evaluating it in the light of all the other information that he has plus his general knowledge of the society and regime.

So there is no concrete evidence of large-scale attacks on civilians. (Certainly much less than in many other countries, in the region and elsewhere.) And there is no reason to believe that the intervention will make things better than worse. Is there any war that does not pass the test for legitimate humanitarian intervention by this standard? After all, it is the case in 100% of civil wars tha both sides fear violence from the other, and of course it is always the case that “inaction has consequences too.”

I have been a humanitarian worker. I have been involved, since the 1990s, in the debate about humanitarian military interventions. The genesis of this idea was that humanitarian workers were involved more and more in crises that had a military origin (and not earthquakes and floods etc); so why was not more being done to prevent these military conflicts that were causing “complex emergencies”? Why were there no international military interventions to stop the downward spiral into violence? I remain unconvinced that this principle would in practice lead to military interventions of a type that would stop this kind of downward spiral and afterwards build a just peace. Why?

Firstly the debate about the invasion of Iraq showed that politicians and journalists and commentators will be very quick to misuse the concept. If well-known commentators claim that they supported the invasion of Iraq for humanitarian reasons, when it was the UK/US that was starting the war, and when there is a huge confusion between humanitarian interventionism and liberal interventionism in the minds of those who should know better, we have a huge problem. The risks of a humanitarian concept being used to start, or escalate, wars is too great.

Secondly, there is high likelihood that a proper humanitarian intervention will involve putting boots on the ground: missile strikes are a blunt instrument for protecting the civilian population. Western militaries are however very reluctant to put boots on the ground in between two warring factions (or between two lots of fuzzy-wuzzies, as I have heard military people say) and they know that it could be a very long-term commitment with the risk of being perceived as invaders. So I doubt if we will see troops being put on the ground in the front-line to try to slow down the development of conflict.

Thirdly the military is a powerful institution, much more powerful than any humanitarian organisation. Whenever I have seen military and humanitarian organisations together it is the military one that is in the driving seat. The question of the motivation of the military force (and the states it represents and the economic interests lobbying the states) is therefore a pertinent one. The nature of the French intervention in Rwanda in 1994, and of the lack of US/UK intervention, is linked to the politics of the situation. Ivory Coast has been slipping into civil war for several months and there are large number of French troops there under a UN mandate but I have seen no signs of action to prevent a conflict developing: the price of chocolate probably doesn’t warrant a military intervention for those who make the decision.

So the risk is that a dangerous genie is being let out of the bottle. Humanitarians have great difficulty in setting the ground-rules in these situations and there are other forces in play.

Yglesias: “It’s nuts for intervention enthusiasts to dismiss out of hand the obvious concerns that have been raised about US-subsidized regimes in Yemen, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia attacking un-armed protestors even as we intervene militarily in Libya to halt repression. There’s an obvious question as to what, in reality, American policy in the Arab world is. Is this part of a policy of boosting democratic change in the region, or is it part of a policy of bolstering the position of the Persian Gulf dictators?”

Tim Wilkinson: we do know that there is no way for a peaceful protest to seamlessly morph into a military campaign.

Do we? How do we know that? I would have thought that it’s conceptually fairly plausible: peaceful protest marches – violently suppressed by police – attacks on police – army brought in – army fires on violent protesters – protesters hit back – street fighting – bits of security forces switch sides – military campaign. And there are quite a few recent historical examples.

So there is no concrete evidence of large-scale attacks on civilians.

What kind of evidence are we after here? There are plenty of eyewitness reports of attacks on civilians; there are people in hospital; there are lots of large smoking holes in the ground in the middle of rebel-held cities.

In context of Chris’s #35, I’d note that I wasn’t trying to be cute in #2 – in principle, precautionary assessments of an imminent slaughter could be a convincing rationale for war if they were very credible, and Qadaffi does have a very nasty track record in this regard which means you can’t dismiss his statements as just showbiz and rhetoric. I’m just trying to get the facts squared away.

I think we’re all familiar with the phenomenon whereby partisans of one side (or course of action) require standards of proof in the case of accusations that don’t support their narrative which they wouldn’t apply in other cases.

No doubt. But is it should we really apply the same standards in all cases? Or is it appropriate to apply a higher standard of proof for launching a war, than for not launching one?

is it appropriate to apply a higher standard of proof for launching a war, than for not launching one?

Yes, obviously.

35: I think it’s still OK to ask what kind of evidence we’re looking for, because I’d like to know whether it’s even reasonably possible to expect to have it at this point.
Your point is well made, and the obvious question is: if this were happening in Fallujah rather than in Benghazi, would it be accepted as evidence of large-scale attacks on civilians?

ajay: your seams are showing

CB: I don’t think you make out your case that an unfair or unrealistic standard of proof is being demanded. My remarks about this are based on the fact that it all looks so fishy. I was willing to accept the reports for about half a day, until I realised that there was no detail or evidence being offered, and the unmistakable sheen of a concerted propaganda campaign became evident.

I would say that the CNN clip linked to above while crude is a classic of the genre – long on emoting and borderine tearfulness, plenty of vague claims, discussion of the meaning of ‘massacre’ but not a single number – not even a ballpark figure – of casualties. It also talks about people being fired upon and then discusses one of those people being armed with an rpg launcher. ‘The pictures’ are held up by the on-the-phone-on-the-telly (unnamed?) Sky News reporter as proving something – but they just don’t show what she repeatedly, reality-defyingly suggests they do, for all the talk of protestors begging that the footage must ‘get out’ and be shown to the world etc. I have to say that it has the appearance of a deliberate piece of dishonest propaganda.

But maybe there is better evidence available for the existence of a massacre programme?

I’m certainly not a ‘partisan’ of Gadaffi, eager to cover up his evildoings. I think the danger is the other way – the Mad Dog is a baddy, so we can believe anything without evidence. It’s pretty important to note that we are talking about ongoing or imminent large-scale killing of civilans if we want to justify war to protect civilians. So where is the evidence of that, of any standard?

Or perhaps the partisanship is supposed to be ‘anti-American’. Well, it’s not my fault that I can’t off the top of my head come up with an example in which I have believed and approved of US spokespersons’ reasons for going to war – it’s theirs.

What Conor is advocating doesn’t take place in a moral vacuum. He’s asking governments — the governments of the West principally — to set themselves up the sole as arbiters of elegance in matters of butchery. His political assumptions, to the extent that I can discern them, seem to be that we save people by bombing others whenever, and only whenever, the politics permit it.

Thus, we bombed Belgrade in defense of the Muslims of the Yugoslavian rump states because we could. Likewise, we now bomb Tripoli in defense of LIbyan revolutionaries because we can. On the other hand, we very pointedly didn’t bomb Moscow in defense of the Hungarians or the Czechs or the Chechens because any fool knows that we couldn’t. We didn’t bomb Tel Aviv or certain parts of Jerusalem in defense of the Gazans not because we couldn’t, but because Washington wouldn’t let us. We didn’t bomb Khartoum because no one cared much about the non-Arab residents of the Sudan, and we didn’t bomb anywhere in Rwanda because we couldn’t figure out where to bomb.

Conor seems to think that this is okay because…well just because. We must understand that although the R2P is honored as often in the breach as in the observance, the moral discrimination that would allow it to be universally adopted, and instituted without prejudice in all situations of atrocity, is still in development. If we don’t ignore the self-serving of all sorts which seems to be part and parcel of every actual intervention, or the dead manufactured by our bombs as well as by the tyrants-who-must-be stopped, our moral evolution will be stunted. We must keep our eyes on the prize.

This may very well be true Conor, but as you’d be the first to admit, it’s an agonizing truth — not only because of the implacability of politics, but also because, inevitably, it becomes a numbers game. X + how many, exactly, constitutes a genocide-about-which-something-admittedly-very-nasty-must-be-done? I think we can be excused if we aren’t as sanguine about such calculations as you would have us be. We’re not any of us Gods, even if the engines of modernity have dropped the responsibilities of the Gods in our unwilling laps.

Assuming that the alternative to intervention was the large-scale slaughter of civilians in rebel stongholds, would intervention be justified?

Obviously for some value of large-scale, the answer is, Yes, war would be justified. (An aside: Let’s call things by their names — this is a war, or attack. The term “intervention” is inherently dishonest.) But the whole point is that we do not know what the alternative is.

Those of us in the “anti-war crowd” think there is a strong presumption in favor of not starting wars – we apply the same standard to them that we would apply to using violence against another person ourselves, i.e. there must be an immediate, direct threat to us that can’t be averted any other way. We don’t regard violence as a general way of making things better, except when it is carried by legitimate authority under a strict set of rules, *and* where there is a high degree of confidence that the outcome will be better. Whereas for people like Conor, war is a tool of policy like setting tax rates. It doesn’t require any special procedural safeguards and there’s no presumption that one option is the default.

Actually, what’s striking about Conor’s post here is that he doesn’t make any attempt to argue that the intervention will produce a good outcome, let alone with the extraordinary degree of confidence that most of us would require for such a claim. For him, it’s sufficient that (1) the situation in Libya pre-intervention was bad (though of course, not nearly as bad as in many other countries which however are on good terms with the US) and (2) the intervention sends the right message. (How he knows that that message is “don’t violate human rights” rather than “don’t piss off the US/Europe” is not explained.) Oh yeah and (3), that there is at least one bad argument against the war. By this standard, of course, you should support any US-led military action. Which presumably is the point.

“There’s an obvious question as to what, in reality, American policy in the Arab world is. Is this part of a policy of boosting democratic change in the region, or is it part of a policy of bolstering the position of the Persian Gulf dictators?”

I was puzzled by this when Matt posted it, and I remained puzzled. Isn’t it pretty obvious that US policy towards middle Eastern dictators is neither “always bolster” nor “always oppose”? And isn’t it pretty clear that it shouldn’t be either of those extremes, and that the distinction should depend, in part, on how firm a grasp a given dictator has on power?

I remain dubious about intervention in Libya, but there’s clearly a difference between (1) a dictator who’s in the middle of a civil war, (2) a dictator who’s likely about to be toppled by nonviolent protests, and (3) a dictator who is likely, absent invasion, going to maintain control of his country for a long time. And it doesn’t seem particularly crazy to largely be friendly with (3), firmly oppose (2), and be very uncertain on what to do with (1) (even if they are the same person at different times).

Aulus-

The question, tho, isn’t what US policy should be, it’s what it is. The history of US support for anti-democratic governments in the Middle East gives us important information about the kind of regime that is likely to emerge from US involvement in Libya. Conor wants us to ignore this information, for reasons that aren’t clear.

Eugene Robinson: “In explaining why the U.S. would join in establishing the Libyan no-fly zone, which immediately became much more, Obama tied himself in rhetorical knots. If Gaddafi were to commit atrocities against his people, Obama said, “The entire region could be destabilized, endangering many of our allies and partners.” Well, duh. As he no doubt has noticed, the region is already destabilized. Friendly regimes are already being threatened, but not by Gaddafi. They are endangered by the democratic aspirations of their own people.”

So much for all the confident avowals that this time it’s not geopolitical stability at stake and it’s only conspiracy nuts who say so. When Obama needed to present a reason for doing this, he didn’t start in on legal case-making. He didn’t even go with lofty rhetoric of the sort that unnamed senior administration sources are willing to attribute to him in a secret policy meeting. It’s stability again.

Guano, thanks for posting above. Since Conor is being presented as having moral authority due to his humanitarian work, I was starting to think that he might be representative of humanitarian workers in his political vacuousness as well. It’s good to hear from someone else in the same field who is willing to acknowledge political facts, such as that once the intervention is started, the military is in charge of it, and the motivation of the people who they take orders from becomes of great importance.

I very explicitly have no real opinion about what the rest of the UN should do – I don’t feel I can get enough evidence to form a good judgment.

But I do have an opinion about what the US should do. Here in Washington state, Medicaid payments for non-emergency dental care stopped altogether at the end of 2010. Every time I go to the University of Washington’s dental clinic, I hear patients and doctors talking seriously about which dental problems they can best let slide toward emergency status, since the patients are already paying 20% or 50% of their total SSI stipend for medical care and simply can’t afford any more.

Since both major political parties are committed to treating us as a poor broke notion when it comes to caring for the needy, I commit to treating us as one when it comes to intervening abroad. Can’t afford it. Let others bear the load, if anyone must, until and unless we get a government that isn’t waging war on its own needy citizens.

This commits me to opposing all foreign interventions by the US, indefinitely, and I’m just fine with that. I’m doing what I can to support people and groups pushing for relief of our ever-growing banana republic condition here, and part of that is opposing all bright shiny lethal distractions abroad.

47: so “video of people dying or it didn’t happen”? Well, at least that’s a clear standard.

In most concrete circumstances where R2P might be invoked there is a very limited choice as to whom might realistically do the ‘protecting’ (which is always increasing the lack of protection for some other group). You can’t magick up a international force of unsullied reputation, devoid of ties of specific national interests. This much I accept.

I think the problem for advocates of the current intervention is that it isn’t clear to me that its the West who actually are those people who can do the ‘protecting’ in Libya. ‘Protecting civilians’ means coming between two conflicting armed parties and stopping them shooting at each other: you can’t do that by air power alone. You need BOTG.

Politics, geography and the long shadow of Iraq and previous Western behaviour in Arab lands combine to make that a job which can only possibly be carried out by one halfway plausible candidate: the Egyptian Army. Who have point blank refused to do it.

If there is a diplomatic or military logic to the current Western bombing it is surely based on one of two scenarios:
(a) The bombing will create a breathing space in which the manifestly disorganised ‘rebels’ will get their act together, win a small scale civil war and then not shoot the Gadaffi lot in numbers which might prove over embarrassing; or
(b) The bombing provokes a split in the Gadaffi-led state and military apparatus such that he is given the boot (in either the Mubarak or the CeauÈ™escu style) and the new leadership reach a (relatively) peaceful accommodation with the shadowy leaders in Benghazi – some of whom they sat round the cabinet table with six weeks ago.

Either strategy seems a pretty long way from R2P to me.

There’s a couple of points worth the making about law, and international law. When we invoke the law in normal circumstances, we are talking about something which should be, and often is, administered and applied impartially, to which we all have effective access and from which nobody is immune. That’s an idealisation, of course, but fundamentally, if something roughly like it does not exist, then “the rule of law” doesn’t apply. If the law is something that is only applied occasionally, partially, in bad faith and never against powerful parties, that’s not the rule of law.

It’s not nothing, but it’s not the rule of law.

The other thing is that of course, when we’re talking about authorisations from international bodies, we’re not talking as we would about the judgements of magistrates. We’re talking about legally constituted authorities: they have the authority to act and to issue mandates permitting people to act (as they have done in this instance, and did not do over Iraq) but that doesn’t oblige us in any way to agree with them or to consider them proper. A government has the authority to act, but that doesn’t oblige us to agree with the actions of a government (let alone accept its rationales).

I only mention this because people talk about international law as if once the UNSC had spoken, that was some kind of judicial act. I don’t see that it is. It’s an executive act, an action in the political field, and we should see it for what it is.

CharlieMcMenamin @59: “You can’t magick up a international force of unsullied reputation, devoid of ties of specific national interests. This much I accept.”

No Clone Troopers? I’m disappointed.

Everyone more or less tacitly accepts this, but that acceptance doesn’t mean that the political problems around motivation can be wished away.

“[…] You need BOTG. Politics, geography and the long shadow of Iraq and previous Western behaviour in Arab lands combine to make that a job which can only possibly be carried out by one halfway plausible candidate: the Egyptian Army. Who have point blank refused to do it.”

Wait a minute. The Egyptian demonstrators overthrew a dictator, well and good. Who’s is charge there now, after this democratic feat? The army, isn’t it? Does it really seem like a good idea to encourage them to rally the country into a new war?

Three rhetorical questions in a row is too much. I think that the chances of the Egyptians emerging with anything like a democratic country as opposed to Mubarak 2.0 would be vastly decreased if Egypt went to war right now.

“video of people dying or it didn’t happen”?

I wouldn’t necessarily put it exactly that way but basically yes – I think cameraphone technology has now reached that level of penetration. And it’s not as if there isn’t a long history, from the Sudetenland to Jenin, of people tricking up urgent humanitarian rationales for their desired political outcomes.

McDonalds sells delicious hamburgers?

@dsquared
My apologies, certainly I should have checked your blog before posting, and shouldn’t have used the phrase “antiwar crowd”

But @Lemuel Pitkin decided to raise me one on semantics. Perhaps he should have checked his own comments first, in which he repeatedly refers to the attacks as an “intervention,” as I do. And why is the term “war” that much more honest? Certainly, the phrase “war” can be used in a number of contexts, such as when one is “battling” drugs or terrorism. But can the occasional North-South Korea skirmishing be called a war? The Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia? Certainly one can call the current attacks a war by some definitions, but I think that if you had to pick a phrase, “military intervention” might actually be the best characterization.

I wrote 71 before I saw 70, but it stands.

#62 Rich Puchalsky: I can’t have been clear enough in my previous post. I’m not arguing for Egyptian intervention, nor speculating on the effect any such intervention might have on Egyptian politics. I’m just saying they’re the ones who could actually ‘protect civilians’ . Or the ones who could do it in the R2P spirit that Conor advocates.

I’m further saying that whatever the coalition powers are doing with all those war-planes and Cruise missiles it doesn’t look like R2P to me.

Since virtually every military intervention in modern history has been framed as an act of justice and/or mercy, in virtually every case falsely

It ought to be remembered that the plight of the Sudetendeutsch was the original rationale for Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, making the Second World War arguably the least successful humanitarian intervention in history.

@ed above links to Glenn Greenwald’s latest on this. I think that Greenwald piece (and I’m usually a fan) is a symptom of something. In the whole polemic, he fails to mention France or the UK or NATO at all, it is all about the “U.S.’s military action in Libya” as if those other countries were simply irrelevant and Obama is pulling the strings single-handed.

Well, I wasn’t part of the anti-war crowd either, but you can count me in now.

I find it astonishing that to this day, one of the most common criticisms of the anti-war crowd is that they’re reflexively opposed to any British military wheezes, and that this in some way reflects badly on them and not on their critics.

I mean, can anyone think of another area of government policy that has fucked up this badly, this many times, and hasn’t been axed? If road traffic regs were causing fifty-car pile-ups every other day, or if the NHS were horribly botching 80% of surgical procedures, they’d be scrapped in seconds and anyone opposing their destruction would be instantly denounced as a psychopath.

And yet, how many hundreds of thousands of needless deaths down the line are we in the last decade, and the UK reaches for the tomohawk missiles with a song in its heart. Only 13 MPs voted against the use of force in Libya after a decade in which our involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan has led to a bodycount so vast that we’re afraid to start tallying it… And seriously, people think these jokers should be given another shot? The coalition can’t decide who’s in charge, FFS, and it’s blatantly obvious that they can’t even agree what they’re trying to achieve or how they’re going to go about achieving it.

I disagree with Daniel and Conor here – I think that the bar on humanitarian intervention and all the other euphemisms we use when we mean bombing the Hell out of people in pursuit of some vaguely-defined purpose in the hope of an outcome that we can’t and won’t define should be raised so ludicrously high that it can almost never be reached, except in the most absolutely dire of circumstances.

Honestly. Just about the only good thing that came out of the last decade was a general awareness that war is a big deal, an option that we don’t use lightly. Now it turns out that we don’t even have that.

Not surprisingly, George Scialabba (77) gets it exactly right. I can’t improve on his post in any way, so I’ll just note that it — its second half in particular — really could use a response from Conor, Chris B., etc.

You’ll be invoking the burden of proof next.Why don’t you just end all the pussy-footing around and show us that whatever it is did indeed happen? What is the evidence for a campaign against civilians that was sufficient to justify war?

I don’t think a war is justified, and not because there isn’t clear evidence of attacks on civilians: I just don’t think the Libyan rebels are trying hard enough to be worth helping.
Plus, it’s an expensive business and we could use the money ourselves. I’d rather spend money on something that will at worst give a few Brits an unproductive job, rather than something that will at worst blow up a lot of Libyans and annoy a lot more and not really do anything at all good.

On the “why aren’t the Egyptians intervening” point: there are still quite a lot of Egyptian citizens in Tripoli and it’s worth assuming that, if Egypt invaded Libya, they would be harshly treated.

I am getting increasingly nervous about the “fallacy of the missing objective function” in Libya, fwiw.

If this means “we don’t have a clear objective” then I am absolutely with you. If it means something else, please elucidate.

Many commentators have rightly pointed out the double standards of the ‘international community’/UN in sanctioning interventions in some places and not others (and I accept this is likely to have been influenced by a variety of political and strategic questions). Since we all agree with this I don’t see any point in pursuing it further (apologies if that sounds dismissive).

Your phrasing elides the actual source of disagreement here. Many commenters, including me, don’t see a double standard – we see a single standard in which human rights concerns are relatively unimportant (or irrelevant).

Some interventions have also undoubtedly been more successful than others in humanitarian terms and that is what I have tried to focus on in this discussion.

And some interventions aren’t primarily about humanitarian concerns. I’d like to see some evidence beyond UN legalisms that the U.S. is currently killing people primarily for humanitarian reasons.

I mean, can anyone think of another area of government policy that has fucked up this badly, this many times, and hasn’t been axed?

Prison? The average prisoner released from an English prison commits 1.4 crimes within a year of his release. 39% of prisoners reoffend within a year of release. And this is actually a significant improvement on the situation ten years ago. And that’s not to mention all the crimes that are committed inside prisons.

Libya is about…Iran. This is what connects bombing Tripoli and winking in Bahrain. Obama needs to make the liberal interventionist tools all shiny again after they were tarnished by his evil total opposite Bush. There are probably anti-government groups being financed and fed promises this very day in Iran. They will hit the streets, be massacred, and then Obama/BP can save democracy again. This is the plan.

Maybe Conor Foley will be embarrassed by having his nuances used in such a way, to have his words in a bubble over the head of some orphan in the rubble of Teheran. I doubt it, Iraq hasn’t seemed to slow him down.

You want to stop the freaking wars? Try guillotines and firing squads in the Mall and 10 Downing Street. My disgust dates Perrin’s by at least ten years.

@ Bob 93

Libya is not Iran. This is not a US led action.

Iran has more than an order of magnitude larger population. Their army is well equipped with modern weapons. Iran has the ability to embargo the Straits of Hormuz and shut down the West’s oil supply. A western attack would advance the cause of the Iranian regime, not the protestors.

Only an imbecile would suggest an attack on Iran. Though there are plenty of those on the right.

PHB – Libyan actions in the 1970’s and 1980s have not, from what I have seen, been mentioned anywhere by anyone involved in making decisions or voting about this war, so I think they are irrelevant. Maybe you don’t think it should be irrelevant (#15) , but that’s a different issue.

As a side-note, since Rich Puchalsky seems to want to relitigate the debate in the last post, I’ll note that the evidence does not support his veering-between-conspiratorial-and-cockeyed-functionalist ad-hominems, and that the humanitarian work stuff was not introduced as an “appeal to moral authority” but rather directly in response to Rich’s own suggestion that Conor was “doing [his] job” of telling people that the technocrats were in charge, presenting himself as an expert and seeking to buff up the role of legal expertise etc. And I’ll leave it at that.

On the substantial question, I disagree with Conor’s suggestion that we should take motivations off the table. Take this Financial Times article this morning.

bq. “There are major tensions between the US-UK and the French,” said a western official, who added that Nato countries had been working for weeks to have the alliance assume effective command of the mission. “As we got closer and closer to closing the deal at Nato, France suddenly blocked everything, which confused us at first … But then it became clear – … Sarkozy wanted to announce strikes just as he was walking out of his meeting in Paris where he was leading the show.”

This is speculation, but it is surely correct in its implication that Sarkozy is both volatile and interested more in burnishing his reputation than in the actual situation. David Cameron does not seem greatly more impressive. I don’t think that their motivations are humanitarian – and this will have implications for the way that they prosecute the intervention.

One way to think of this is as a principal-agent problem. If we (that is the various people who genuinely and in good faith would like to see the rights of the people of Libya protected, a group which I take to include all the people arguing in this comment section) had the power to appoint agents to carry out our goals, we would ideally want agents whose goals resembled ours as closely as possible. If this were not possible, we would like to see agents with goals that didn’t conflict with ours. I think that there is _some_ compatibility there. I imagine that Sarkozy would at least find a direct and immediate massacre in Benghazi to be an embarrassment, and would probably seek to avoid it. But I wouldn’t go much further than that. I certainly would not trust him to avoid policies that would end up with rights abused and lots of people dead, as long as the political responsibility for this outcome was murky and did not rest with him.

Along the lines of bob mcmanus’ 93 (“There are probably anti-government groups being financed and fed promises this very day in Iran. They will hit the streets, be massacred, and then Obama/BP can save democracy again. This is the plan.”), but in a less conspiratorial tone: don’t these interventions provide various separatist movements in non-client states with a strong incentive to be more provocative, more aggressive, more violent? Stir some trouble, get a bunch of your people killed, and hope that the US/UK will use it a pretext to regime-change the central government. And if that’s the case, then the R2P and the massacres it’s supposed to stop appear to have some sort of a symbiotic relationship.

“Honestly. Just about the only good thing that came out of the last decade was a general awareness that war is a big deal, an option that we don’t use lightly. Now it turns out that we don’t even have that.”

flyingrodent is right that it would have been a good thing if that general awareness had resulted — but we never had it. Look at the posts here, for instance. This blog is written by posters who, on average, are far to the left of the general U.S. population. You would think that people here would have this awareness if anyone would. Yet all the old Decent Left tropes made an appearance as soon as war did.

I’ve pretty much gone to an evaluation that what matters isn’t so much whether someone is left or right, but what their job is and what their implicit self-interest is. Most adults never learn anything after their formative stages, and anyone who writes here is perfectly capable of finding rationalizations for essentially any course of action. So of course what they favor is complex moral deliberation and avoidance of any simplistic awareness that war isn’t something that should be undertaken lightly, in favor of technocratic activities for people like them. The people who benefit from warmaking in various ways of course want war. The only people with a vested interest in avoiding it are the foot soldiers, and they have been carefully placed into a system in which they get no voice.

I don’t think the left & right ideological claims are incompatible. An intervention can be in the interest of neither the inhabitants of the country being intervened in nor those of the countries doing the intervening.

Since we are all mulling over the pros and cons of ‘intervention’, I thought it might be wise to remind everyone that interventions don’t always go as planned. I thought Iraq might have taught us that. Nor do ‘they’ always learn the lessons from intervention that ‘we’ want ‘them’ to.

‘The action in Libya [might] encourage uprisings in other Arab (and non-Arab ) states and [might] also advance reforms. The results of such developments cannot be predicted, with the exception of a distinctive process of increasing levels of social energy in Arab countries. But the intervention in Libya may easily direct such energy against the West, because of an image of neo-colonialism and a desire to force its values on Islamic societies. An uptick in anti-Western terror is a distinct possibility.

Even graver is the expected lesson Arab rulers will take from the Libya episode, that they need weapons to deter Western action. Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi surely regrets having abandoned his nuclear weapons program. If he had weapons of mass destruction, or at least the perception that he had them, the West would have backed off, no matter how despotic his regime, so long as he did not pose a serious threat to them.

Others will not repeat his mistake. The action against Gadhafi will harden the will of Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Other rulers too will learn from North Korea that nuclear weapons protect a tyrannical regime against forceful action from abroad…..Surely there is no room for sympathy for Gadhafi, but is it far from clear that those taking his place will be less hostile.’

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/western-action-against-gadhafi-has-self-serving-interests-1.351027

There’s Guido Nius again: the one-man definer of who is outside the consensus and can therefore be ignored.

I wait with bated breath to hear more about this “due process”, though. This would be the legalese favored by Conor, presumably. Let’s hear how this decision to go to war involved due process, if you are shameless enough to make that case. Is there anything to distinguish this due process from a correctly countersigned and legal order from Gaddafi to his troops to have people shot? I mean, yes, we can say that Gaddafi is wrong to shoot people and we are right to do so because we have superior military power and a higher budget generally for people to make up moral justifications for us. But that isn’t really a *process* distinction per se.

ajay @91, look I’m really not trying to be awkward here, but can you provide any actual sources? I actually do want to find out what is/was going on, and it’s a big problem for the humanitarian emergency thesis that the sources seem always to be vaguely alluded to and never provided, just as the accounts of what is supposed to have happened are always in soft-focus, lacking crucial detail.

(Also, assuming the claims you make can be stood up, do they amount to a claim of substantial armed attacks on noncombatant civilians?)

PHB @95 I like to point out that an order of magnitude is just a fancy way of saying 10 times.

what would would have been the objective function for the (now counterfactual) decision to not intervene?

I would have thought that if you don’t know whether sending your military into another country’s civil war will make things better or worse, that’s an argument for not sending it. Do you disagree?

‘I guess this is one thing we don’t need to worry about this time round, since it seems pretty clear that no-one involved has got any kind of plan for things not to go in accordance with’.

This is very true. I think it would save us all a lot of time if we simply all began to refer to ‘our’ Libyan ‘intervention’ as Operation Clusterfuck, and thank the Lord below that English has the perfect word to describe what will happen over the next few months (and years) as we unachieve our non-aims.

All of chat Hidari says is plausible and that is why it is implausible that this is about the oil.

Chris @113: No, I wasn’t suggesting either that someone other than the Security Council ought to make a decision in the Libya case, or that the US was intervening unilaterally against Libya. In fact, I wasn’t specifically addressing the case of Libya. I was addressing Conor on the tenor of his arguments about humanitarian intervention, which I thought didn’t give sufficient weight either to its possible (and in the past, actual) misuses as a pretext for great-power aggression or to the urgency of shifting military intervention, especially by superpowers, down the scale from early and favored resort to ultimate, minimal, and abhorred resort. I’m not sure that’s any help in the present situation, but it’s all I had to contribute.

Bill Gardner:

I suspect you may be confusing risk with uncertainty.

fwiw I agree with nearly all of Rich’s most recent comment. I would qualify it slightly by noting that voters in electoral democracies will have the opportunity to throw their leaders at some point or another if they really want to. But talk of the “international community” always raises my hackles – what community? who elected its leaders? and so on. I think it’s one of those very politically loaded phrases that does a lot more damage than good to political debate.

Henry, so you seriously believe the popular opinion is against this? At least in Belgium there was a vote, afaik nobody voted against.

Well, yes, but more importantly: what else is going to count as due process if a parliamentary vote doesn’t?

I congratulate the people in Spain and Belgium, then: a parliamentary vote was a lot more than what we got in the U.S. We have it written into our Constitution — the same document that we love to snidely lecture people in other countries about and tell them how they should have one — that only Congress can declare wars. But this is universally ignored.

Er, sorry.
that last sentence in #131 should read:
It’s more like a very unsubtle hijacking of a R2P resolution at the UN to pursue reasons of state ( i.e. the overthrow of Gadaffi) – but in a way which makes it probably likely that the original (and honourable) R2P is harder to achieve in the long run.

I blush with shame, and not for the first time.

But talk of the “international community” always raises my hackles – what community? who elected its leaders? and so on. I think it’s one of those very politically loaded phrases that does a lot more damage than good to political debate.

Well, it’s a step forward over “God wills it”, anyway. Seriously, if there isn’t some kind of multilateral institution for deciding when a use of force is legitimate, then everyone just starts from their own first principles (some of which *are* “God wills it”, or suitable local variations thereof), which are different from everyone else’s first principles, and no consensus can be reached on anything. And someone will probably go ahead and intervene even in the dubious cases and the ones where the intervenor’s self-interest is obvious, since there’s no consensus and no institution respected to make that decision.

The nonrepresentative governments would be *even more* likely to act unilaterally if there was no norm of multilateral consultation and action. (As proof, all that history when there wasn’t and they did.) Maybe the representative ones too.

The UNSC isn’t an absolute veto point. But a norm against military action in another country without its approval is a restraint on intervention far more often than it is an impetus to intervention (because it won’t approve intervention unless several nations are already in favor, at which point in the absence of the UNSC or something similar *they would probably have intervened already*).

If we get rid of Gaddafi we have a chance to establish a more or less liberal system of government across North Africa. We might also hope that it spreads to the Gulf over the next decade. That leaves only Zimbabwe, China, North Korea and some unpleasant ex-Soviet states as totally despotic regimes and Russia and some middle African ones as backsliders.

I’d think that too speculative for a game of Risk, let one yer real, authentic war.

That made me think of Risk, too. No dead and mutilated bodies to bother about.

“In this particular case I don’t think we need to wade into ulterior motives or tedious foreign policy blather. Gaddafi is going to get a slotting because he has one coming and now seems a good time to deliver it.”

Come on, people, it’s totally unfair to point out that this bellicose statement of PHB’s starts with essentially the same thing that Conor wrote. Conor’s disregard of motives comes from high principles of judgement — “has the level of violence reached such a threshold that the use of counter-force is morally justifiable and is it a practical, strategic option that will actually make things better for the people concerned” — and it’s only coincidental that it leads to the same place as where PHB gets: with bombs killing people.

Let’s slide down the slippery slope. In this humanitarian intervention, would the intervenors be justified in killing Gadaffi? If not, why not?

If they can capture him alive, then not. It is then up to The Hague.

Let’s hear from Digsby:

“The reasons being stated for this one are even more unconvincing than usual. Insulting, actually. Millions of people are suffering all over the world, even here in the US. And the money that’s spent to protect oilfields and our “strategic interest” in keeping people drunk on scarce resources so that the already wealthy can get wealthier would go a long way toward alleviating it. Calling these oil field protection operations “humanitarian” is Orwellian and it prevents the American people from facing the real questions before them about their own futures and how to genuinely work toward a more peaceful, equitable and decent world.”

Cue patronizing statements about conspiracy nuts and their belief in western plots and how you just look silly if you think it’s about oil.

PHB: “As for this being about protecting the gulf monarchies, I do not see that at all. The protests in the gulf were fizzling out being quit successfully crushed by mass murder until last week. It is not hard to see why either: Gaddafi was demonstrating a likely outcome.”

To be sure there are many noble and just causes in this world to which a military force might be put to great good. But that is not why we have our military.

We must remember that however much we abhor atrocities, to use military force is to order, under threat of imprisonment or worse, other people into harm’s way.

I understand Conor’s perspective as a humanitarian worker, and as a bit of a global citizen, to whom the moral weight of ordering one’s military into conflict might seem less salient than the moral weight of watching the suffering of so many human beings which might have been prevented.

However I do not believe an elected government can ethically act according to those same weights. Doing so goes beyond the reasons for which an elected government is given power over the military. An elected official may not, as simply a human being, wish to value the life of a citizen of his country more than the life of an innocent foreigner. In his capacity as an elected official, though, he is absolutely required to do so. He cannot act simply as if the military were an extension of his being, and ask himself merely whether the humanitarian cost of non-intervention outweighs the cost of intervention.

2) If this was such a big deal, then why was the West cozying up Qadaffi and selling him weapons up until just now?

We have always been at war with Libya.

Bento@135 But if a violent uprising took over 90% of the US, I have no doubt the military would be called in to attack with extreme prejudice and high tolerance for CD. I’m not saying Ghadafi was justified, but it is not clear to me that what he did is outside global norms for dealing with a serious threat of armed revolution.

If unelected dictators have that right, I agree, it’s justified.

How about monarchies?

Alright, I’ll quit being cute. This thing ends with Colonel Kadaffi dead or in exile. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time and money, not to mention blood. I don’t find that little practicality factored into the original post, perhaps because irrelevant in the poster’s view. I disagree, but respect that position as a matter of situational logic.

This thing ends with Colonel Kadaffi dead or in exile

Dead, to be more specific.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/20113227357222118.html

Shutting down the arab spring.

I’m tired of self serving arguments based on claims of intention.
I expected more od conor foley.

The simplest answer for intervention is the playing field is being leveled so the rebels can take out Khadafy on their own. That’s it. Really, that’s all.

Or is it?

Lots of leaders equivocate about not starting wars, then do bad things.
Which is why arranging a ceasefire is a delicate thing, involving third party observers etc., as suggested by Gaddafi. This is as cartoonish as the rest of the belligerent case – as if taking the ceasefire offer seriously is a matter of trusting Gadaffi and leaving him to get on with whatever he likes.

It’s the opposite case that seems to be highly predictable: bald-faced statements of intention to kill usually end in … killing. Yes, which is why the term ‘sabre-rattling’ is obsolete. But here it’s more a question of to whom the threats were levelled, and that appears to have been members of the opposing army. Threatening the opposing army with death if they continue resistance is pretty normal among belligerents, isn’t it?

But these ex cathedra statements of probabilistic

civil war matters in terms of proof of intention to do bad things because the bad things is not specially bad when all the men is fighty anyway. The threat of violence might well prevent gratuitous slaughter (bad thing, full version) but is not at all likely to prevent a dictator – who is unlikely to be under any illusions about what they would like to do to him if they can get their hands on him, with the example of Saddam in mind – from prosecuting a civil war (bad thing, actual version).

If a war is being fought between two armies (and it is), then the way to protect civilians would be to try to end hostilities, which of course would involve trying to get both sides to stop fighting, seeking a ceasefire rather than refusing to countenance one, etc. Joining in with such a war on the weaker side is likely to escalate things if anything.

it doesn’t speak to Gaddafi’s willingness to slaughter his own yes it does. Attacking a rebel army is not ‘slaughtering his own’.

That was already clear.To misquote President Muffley, I am becoming less and less interested in your estimates of what is clear and unclear.

dsquared @107
This is Alan Kuperman’s “Strategic Victimhood Thesis”

a/k/a (in the IR journals) the moral hazard theory of intervention

sg. Ghadafi is not invading another country, the usual meaning of “act of aggression”. He has said he will kill those who are trying to overthrow his government by force. There are damn few governments that would refuse to do this, at least when the threat of revolution is credible and immanent. This may or may not be defensible under the circumstances – I’m open to arguments – but it is not the same thing as deciding to kill noncombatant civilians out of the blue. I could see an argument that the revolution was initially non-violent (assuming that is the case; I don’t know that we yet have all the facts) and only turned violent in response to violence – therefore, violent revolution is justified and we should support it. But that’s quite different from pretending that Ghadafi is about to slaughter untold masses with no provocation at all. If the principle at stake here is that a regime that uses violence against non-violent protest sacrifices its legitimacy in using violence against violent protest – which seems to me the case one could make here – then we should make that case and accept the consequence: we are fighting to overthrow Ghadafi because we support the revolution. That is a different situation from some Rwanda-style arbitrary massacre.

Tim Wilkinson:

_Attacking a rebel army is not ‘slaughtering his own’._

Calling them “a rebel army” is to dignify what appears to be a disorganized armed rabble. I’ve no doubt that if the IDF were slaughtering them, however, they’d be described in the Jerusalem Post as “terrorists”. Important, I think, to look at the reality (and the immediate history) and to avoid shoehorning groups into legal categories solely in order to assign permissions to shoot them or not.

The problem with “strategic victimhood” is that claiming that people who are being victimised want it really is a killer meme with a seriously bad record.

I can well imagine that the strategy might work, for some values of work, for some of the people involved, but it’s worth remembering that essentially everyone who has ever fired on a demonstration with machine guns/bombarded a besieged city at the moment the UN bread distribution truck shows up/sent a suicide bomber to explode in a crowded train/called in air on some building in a packed favela suburb of Baghdad or Gaza claims that the other side are doing it on purpose.

Oddly, they never seem to follow the logical consequences of their own excuse, which are that they should stop giving the other side what they want, already…it’s almost as if it was a lot of self-serving bullshit, or something.

Further, trying to operationalise it as a political principle leads you into some seriously sick pretzel-logic – because if you hold that the victims are bringing it on themselves to provoke you into intervening, the upshot is that the worse things are…the more guilty the victims are. And really, what’s the distinction between this kind of reasoning and that of, say, Ariel Sharon on a bad day or your neighbourhood wife-beater?

Also, it’s worth avoiding because of its content regarding one’s own actions, as it basically furnishes a ready made excuse for wellying that mobile bath truck next to the primary school with 2x Paveway IIs and hang the consequences. If they hadn’t put it there…

The problem with “strategic victimhood” is that claiming that people who are being victimised want it really is a killer meme with a seriously bad record

On the other hand, Kuperman’s thesis does work quite well as a way of inoculating yourself against the belief that Hamas, the KLA, the Darfur Justice and Equality Movement, the LTTE etc must be heroic fighters of a moral status somewhere between the Founding Fathers, POUM and the Rebel Alliance, just because their enemies are so horrible. It’s a good way of distinguishing between genuine popular movements and nationalist chancers. Although the problems with the thesis are genuine and basically the ones you identify, it is very important to remember that the purpose of humanitarian intervention is to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe, not per se to give the anti-government or separatist side everything they ever wanted in terms of a political program.

_The obligation of the US Government to the US military, and its families, FAR OUTWEIGHS any humanitarian obligations to non-US persons._

As stated, that claim is completely unclear. Moral obligation? Obligation under US law? Obligation under international law, including the laws of war?

Taking the claim to be a moral one ….

Do you mean that (1) the US government has a duty not to impose serious harms (or risks of harm) on its military personnel in order to provide positive humanitarian assistance, or to protect from third parties or whatever?

Or do you mean (2) that they have a duty not to impose serious harms (or risks of harm) on their own personnel and that this duty takes precedence over their duty not to impose harms (or risks of harm) on others?

(1) is arguable, depending on what is at stake (2) strikes me as obviously false and, indeed, iniquitous. (Though belief in it may explain large numbers of dead Iraqis at US military checkpoints).

Or do you mean (2) that they have a duty not to impose serious harms (or risks of harm) on their own personnel and that this duty takes precedence over their duty not to impose harms (or risks of harm) on others? … (2) strikes me as obviously false and, indeed, iniquitous. (Though belief in it may explain large numbers of dead Iraqis at US military checkpoints).

Eh? No, 2 is entirely accurate. Of course the US military has a duty to protect its own personnel from harm, even if it means harming others.
Now, there are limits here – proportionality, etc – but you can’t seriously argue that it’s false and iniquitous to suggest that the US army has a duty to kill Taliban fighters if the alternative is the Taliban fighters killing US soldiers. Self defence, no?

It seems that Germany is withdrawing its forces in the Med from NATO command.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in a statement that the alliance will monitor sea traffic in the region and intercept vessels suspected of carrying illegal arms or mercenaries. “All allies are committed to meet their responsibilities under the United Nations resolution to stop the intolerable violence against Libyan civilians,” he said.

NATO’s decision prompted Germany, reluctant to play a military role in Libya, to immediately announce it was pulling out of alliance operations in the Mediterranean. Four ships will be returned to German command, a Defence Ministry spokesman in Berlin said. “Because there is a component to the arms embargo that envisages the use of force if necessary, Germany decided it would not be part of such action,” the spokesman said.

Alex @174: The problem with “strategic victimhood” is that claiming that people who are being victimised want it really is a killer meme with a seriously bad record

What dsquared said, but just to underscore the point: unlike the motives of those seeking open-ended war powers, this question is predictively more or less inert, or rather the strong form of it which largely consists of adding mood music to the tune of ‘nasty rebels being sneaky’ is.

The rebels want outside help, and they want that help in order to further the objectives they have already and openly espouse. They have an interest in maximising the appearance that Gadaffi is being brutal and genocidey. None of this is controversial, and the only difference calling it ‘strategic victimhood’ makes is perhaps to suggest that the rebels might not have even tried had they not expected to get outside help in the first place (I would certainly be interested to find some info about the circumstances in which the belligerents actually decided to tool up and dig in.

It’s a bit like the theory of evolution – it falls out from the combination of a number of other uncontroversial facts, and does not itself make further substantial factual claims, provide a basis for some stupid operational principle, etc. Or at least if it does, it wasn’t something I intended to espouse. Which is why I didn’t call it the ‘strategic victimhood thesis’. Perhaps the ‘obvious propaganda value of presenting the other side as brutal and implacable, yea, even unto being ambivalent about real casualties’ thesis (henceforth ‘OPVPOSBIYUBAARC’ thesis)

ajay @179:

Right so is that everything? I won’t enter into my own analysis in light of the difference between humanitarian crisis and ongoing war, or issues of magnitude and proportionality: people can do that for themselves.

And no I hadn’t intended to speculate about any deficiency in your epistemic or moral faculties, or anything else about you personally. That would as you say be pretty low (unless warranted, in which case it might be bold frank and outspoken).

TW @186: that should do; plus I’ll throw in eyewitness accounts of unarmed protesters being fired on by snipers (Daily Telegraph). I don’t think one can really argue against this on the grounds that large numbers of civilians have not been deliberately killed by Gaddafi’s government.
The questions are really “how many civilian deaths – if any – would justify a NATO war against Libya” and “have we reached that number yet”. My own answers are “no number” and “N/A”.

BTW, O/T but double effect happens to be a current research topic of mine: I can report back that it is, strictly speaking, bunk. Specialist medical and military ethics might possibly be able to sustain sui generis principles relating to permissibility of foreseen but peripheral harms, but those are surely not based on a general double effect principle of permissibility. More probably they are to do with necessity in the legal defence sense, doing/allowing distinctions, rights e.g. to self-defence, novus actus interveniens-type principles, and unpredictability/avoidance.

It’s never going to be that clear-cut though, is it?

It surely is sometimes going to be that clear cut, particularly in the context of an army that has access to drone-strikes (and thus regularly has one option that poses nearly no risk at all to its own personnel, at the cost of potential collateral damage). “There’s a sniper in that apartment block – shall we send in a drone missile or shall we take the risk?” is a decision that the US Army is going to have to take again and again in future wars.

troll

ajay: since we are undoubtedly not dealing with trolley cases, I think it’s right that uncertainty introduces a good deal of latitude (if there is to be latitude at all).

But that doesn’t mean that all bets are off: there will no doubt be cases in which epistemic probabilities (including those based on a visible component of uncertainty/principle of indifference – which is, I would argue, ever-present and underlies more confidently quantifiable cases of epistemic risk) are sufficiently clear-cut to determine the issue.

A possibility proof can be derived by substitutuing suitably large/small numbers into your example of a ludicrous argument – keep ramping them up until assent is extracted from interlocutor.

Stephen Walt is correct.

Neocons and Do-Gooder Libs are cut from the same cloth, and will use any excuse to hit the panic button and start wars that bleed the treasury, get innocent people killed, create new enemies, marching ignorantly forward with no clearly defined goal in sight, nor the ability to understand the meaning and reality of “unintended consequences.”

Thank you Conor for validating Walt’s bullseye thesis.

“There’s a sniper in that apartment block – shall we send in a drone missile or shall we take the risk?” is a decision that the US Army is going to have to take again and again in future wars.

Sure, but you still don’t know (a) how many people would die in the drone strike (it may even be uncertain that the sniper would be one of them, particularly if you don’t know his location any more specifically than “somewhere in that building”) or (b) how many people would be shot by the sniper before you succeeded in stopping him with less collateral-damage-prone weapons.

On the other hand, if your military is not manned by conscription, then all your military personnel are where they are because they *chose* to risk their lives in the service of whatever the political and military leadership say is in their country’s interest — a choice for which they are lionized to an almost indescribable degree, at least in the US. So while there certainly is an obligation not to expose them to *pointless* risks, I really don’t think it’s unfair to assign risks to them a finite (but still large compared to materiel) value.

A possibility proof can be derived by substitutuing suitably large/small numbers into your example of a ludicrous argument – keep ramping them up until assent is extracted from interlocutor.

Hmm, but isn’t this how the ticking time bomb scenario works too? If the numbers are ludicrous enough, I’m not sure the resulting conclusion generalizes to the real world.

There’s a fundamental slight of hand in the phrase “the option of doing nothing also has moral consequences” — of course it does, BUT NOT FOR US. Standing by while others do horrible things on the other side of the earth does NOT make us morally culpable. The unstated assumption on which the entire argument above rests, and on which the entire argument in favor of humanitarian intervention always rests, is that somehow you and I are culpable and responsible for the immoral acts of others with whom we have no connection other than some entirely fictive “humanity.”

Yes, of course, there will be moral consequences for Kadaffi if he is allowed to slaughter thousands of Cyreneans; but there will be scant few moral consequences for me and you, who have nothing to do with the choices Kadaffi makes. On the other hand, once our government intervenes, then we indeed do become morally imbricated.

I was rather, but not vehemently, against the Iraq invasion & I am rather, but not vehemently, in favour of the Libyan no-fly zone. Maybe I’m just mediocre. Then again, I am not be the only one in the world (even if I may well be a huge exception in the internet-discussion world).

It’s frankly beyond me how you cannot see this as a weighing exercise – & I am not talking about the weighing of consequences but the weighing of the virtue of not using violence and the virtue of not allowing the abuse of violence. The clear differences between Iraq and Libya are: absence and presence of mass military violence to civilians and the presence and absence of a conscious choice for unilateral action.

I’m sure that many countries qualify on the first difference with Libya yet don’t get multi-lateral agreement on intervention. I’m also sure most of those countries do not have natural resources. But that doesn’t mean that there has to be a first time for everything, in order for there to be the opportunity for there to be a last time to the kind of shit that was and is going on there and that, frankly, it is bordering on the insane to deny the exceptionality of it (or waste time in asking for strings of underlined blue letters starting with http in order to substantiate the exceptionality of it).

Of course, the resulting occupation will never end, short of a revolution in the US, because no president will ever be able to risk the domestic political consequences of bad things happening in Libya after such a withdrawal. Libya will be added to Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the other previously occupied countries from which US troops will never be withdrawn.

US troops have in fact been completely withdrawn from several countries.
Vietnam. Iceland. France. Libya (the former Wheelus AFB). Laos. Saudi Arabia. Austria. Tunisia.Morocco. And there are several more where they’re down to a hundred or so, which can’t really be called a force of occupation: the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Greenland, the Philippines, Thailand.

And it’s stated US policy to withdraw all US troops from Iraq by the end of this year.

Of course, the resulting occupation will never end, short of a revolution in the US, because no president will ever be able to risk the domestic political consequences of bad things happening in Libya after such a withdrawal. Libya will be added to Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the other previously occupied countries from which US troops will never be withdrawn

And this is not accidental; the middle east is full of permanent US garrisons and bases, each acquired more or less deliberately or opportunistically but undoubtedly with constitutents of the US policy vector pushing for their establishment and retention. Iraq 1 for example got US troops into Saudi* and Kuwait.

Someone who has a bizarre tendency to get conspiratorial about, er, military strategy and covert action might almost think the whole thing was engineered to achieve that end. (I also recall a domestic rebellion in Iraq being encouraged by the US – which led to some pretty bloody retaliation).

*the Saudi garrison was moved to Qatar in 2003, apparently, perhaps on the basis that the mad Islamists might accept that as a second best to destroying the US, its freedoms, frame, outlook, way of life and everything.

ajay,

The Cold War was a hybrid situation, in the sense that there was an at least half-way plausible foreign threat justifying the large US peacetime military establishment, but we already had the beginnings of an institutionalized paranoia in our domestic political.

So the US could sometimes behave pragmatically and withdraw military forces from countries we occupied in WWII but which were not threatened by the SU (from your list: Iceland, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco), and even make the occasional deal with the SU (Austria) over mutual withdrawal of troops. This pragmatism was possible because our foreign policy was still at least partly driven by actual foreign power realities.

But we already had the formation of that institutionalized terrorization of the US electorate that constrained rational reductions in forces and withdrawals form countries where we had no real security interest having forces. McCarthy may have lost, but McCarthyism won. Johnson, working from a much more secure political base than Obama, and having proven that he was willing to take huge political risks over civil rights — even Johnson felt that he simply could not run the political risk of “losing” Vietnam. Our foreign policy had been largely captured by domestic politics that left no room for pragmatism at crucial junctures.

What has happened since the end of the SU, is that, instead of letting that huge military establishment wither away in the absence of any real threat, the US instead has devolved into a purely domestic politics driven foreign policy. We’re afraid of “terror” itself, not any foreign power that actually has any power.

We could, back in the day, make pragmatic withdrawals even from countries like Vietnam, because there was at least one strand of our thinking about the use of military force that based its use on the practical need to form a counter to the SU’s military might. When staying in a country became obviously counter-productive to thwarting the SU, a misapplication of forces needed elsewhere, we could, though at the cost of great domestic political trauma, finally do the pragmatic thing and abandon Vietnam and Laos.

But there will never be any counter-vailing practical consideration strong enough to get us to leave Libya, because we no longer move military forces around with any practical view in mind except the need to feed the domestic political beast its regular ration of fear. Until and unless we change that dynamic, no way will any US president be able to hand his potential political enemies the whip of that fear, by foregoing the use of that whip himself. We will never be able to afford to “lose” Libya now, because of the use the Rs would make of any such “loss”.

I’m no more persuaded by the arguments — and non-arguments — of the liberal interventionists here or elsewhere than Rich Puchalsky is, and I have nothing to add to what I perceive to be the clarity and force of his arguments. I will say this, though. Watching him battering at the safe door of Western complacency with his sledge-hammer is really depressing, and I’d like to help.

The bottom line for me is that we don’t own these countries, or the people in them. If the peoples of the world were ready for a world government, and wanted one (and got one, which is another matter altogether), supposedly UN-sponsored interventions might make more sense then they do now, but even after nearly sixty years of trying, not even the Europeans can come up with a convincing prototype for that sort of thing. International communities, and coalitions of the willing as described by the President with the elephant gun, be he Republican or Democrat, have been to date little more than a macabre joke. That’s the reality of the situation, and no amount of lawyering in the Hague or anywhere else has been able, or likely will be able, to put lipstick on that particular pig.

Like Conor, I wish it weren’t so, but it is. The rest is just posturing.

Glen Tomkins @203: The worst that lies within Qaddafi’s power is a joke compared to the least consequence of applying US military power even in a good cause. That power is a blind thing that no longer knows any human control.

This is debatable, but it definitely deserves to be debated. In the first part of his comment, Glen makes, much more fully and convincingly, the point I only hinted at in 77: that resort to military force is a reflex that feeds on itself, in good part because frequent military intervention appears to justify the vast military machine whose beneficiaries (the defense industry and its investors, current and retired high military officers, and venal legislators) wield so much domestic political power. It is a deadly reflex, and though in particular cases like Libya the lives saved may outnumber the lives lost, the ultimate cost of entrenching the reflex may very well be cataclysmic. The same goes for the ultimate cost of disregarding the safeguards against unilateral military intervention embodied in the UN Charter, however cynical and opportunistic other great powers (unlike the US) may sometimes be.

What’s so exasperating about liberal interventionists of the Decent/New Republic variety: they ought to know this, but they keep insisting instead that their opponents are simply absolute pacifists or mindless anti-imperialists.

Henry, you can either describe it as a bad functionalist argument, or as a conspiracy theory, but not both. But you’ve never been much on consistency when one of your friends unfortunately doesn’t write what you think he must have written rather than what he actually did. I prefer the “bad functionalist argument” bit, actually, because it explains how people are so virtuously clueless when they repeat the same mistakes over and over. But if you want to go for the added thrill of calling it a conspiracy theory, go ahead.

The US withdrew from Saudi Arabia in 2003

and relocated to Qatar.

I’m curious. Does the ticking time bomb scenario only involve torturing people who have some guilt? How does it rule out torturing innocent people or even bystanders, if they might have information? The usual case is the underling who has information about his bosses’ activities, but why not, say, the accountant? (In real life, accountants tend to be easy to get to turn state’s evidence, as I understand it, having a greater interest in seeing themselves as innocent of criminal activity than in their right to have carried out their job whatever it took, but surely that has to be accounted for in order to have a complete theory.) Or something short of torture, say suborning some other crime, or even fraud that causes a monetary loss, whatever?

Sorry, I see the thread has lost interest in this question already. It doesn’t have anything that I can see to do with Conor Clarke’s post here or any others I remember Conor making. The argument of the OP itself makes me much too angry to respond. It’s understandable, and to be expected, that someone employed by NGOs would see everything in terms of humanitarian aid to be accomplished by whatever means, and all arguments in terms of marketing the idea of aid to people who might influence ultimate decision makers, but this doesn’t mean the frame is an appropriate one.

But of course in reality there are both blind-functional and intentional elements, as well as coincidental and cockup elements to the operations of organised power, and there are such things as hypocrisy, self-deception and other pragmatically adopted biases which make a distinction between merely functional and intentional (consciously functional) support pretty fuzzy. Also teleologically-designed institutions, intentional plans the nature of which is more or less determined by circumstances, etc.

Henry isn’t particularly opposed to the idea of ideology or various other aspects of the operation of power that regard what is done by powerful individuals and their employees as in some way teleologically related to its outcomes. He seems instead to object to the specific case.

I really wouldn’t want to get invoved in adjudicating that, but to keep to generalities, I’d note a previous objection to the ‘I know him’ line of argument which might come in at some point.

‘Job’ imply intention and well understood duty.

I didn’t think so when I first read it, and don’t think so now. Some folks are cogs in a machine that they don’t understand. Each such cog has a “job.”

Indeed, Conor is very specific about the limits of what he will attempt to understand, and he states that it’s a fool’s errand to attempt to understand the matters that interest Rich and me(1). Rich has made no effort to argue that Conor knows more than Conor claims to. I, too, am willing to believe that Conor’s intentions are as he describes them.

(1)Colin in the original post: “I find the latter of the three arguments the least interesting because they inevitably descend into a search for the hidden ‘real reasons’ for military interventions.”

Sorry, Conor Foley (not Clarke. too hungry/lazy to scroll to the top of the page and check)

Does anyone really, in a contemporary western society, have an employment relationship in which their job is paid-up Minion?

I would argue that any number of conservative think-tanks are exactly that, and possibly Fox News as well. Minion isn’t their official job title, but their salary depends on adhering to the party line and they know it, as evidenced by their continued employment.

Every so often someone decides there must be a left-wing counterpart and sets off to find it, or to pick someone to pin the label on, but it generally doesn’t work out.

CB @178: As to the second principle… let me make sure I understand the question it poses. Say MP = military personnel, and NC = foreign innocents. You’re asking whether, if our government has a duty to value MP > NC, then does government have a duty to harm NC where doing so protects MP? I agree with you that this is obviously false as an absolute principle.

As to the proportionality discussion that followed your comment… I don’t think proportionality fits well with the question’s focus. Let’s say we have three variables, military advantage (MA), military personnel (MP), and non-combatants (NC). Usually in a proportionality analysis the value of protecting MP is subsumed into the value of MA. So long as MA – (risk of harm)(NC) > (some threshold), the action is proportional. I have to say that I think there is little value in evaluating highly abstracted scenarios like the sniper in the building that fail to describe all the other factors that we need to make a determination of MA and therefore of proportionality.

Your question asks us to look at this differently, and to focus not on MA nor on MP as a component of MA, but on the obligations of a civilian government to protect its people, including its military, and to preference their well-being above that of others.

The short answer is that I would reject the implication contained in the second question: that I am obligated to value A more than B does not imply that I am obligated to commit any amount of harm to B for any amount of benefit to A.

My objection to the use of the military in humanitarian interventions (where national interest is not relevantly implicated) is premised on the notion that the government has an obligation to use its power to force a soldier into harm’s way only insofar as the purposes for which the government has been given such power require it. I think that in our grand weighing of the humanitarian costs of non-intervention, we fail to adequately consider the seriousness of a government telling a soldier to go risk his life, or be imprisoned for failing to do so.

Re strategic interest in Libya: almost nil. Humanitarian intervention is the only plausible account.

Indeed, Conor is very specific about the limits of what he will attempt to understand, and he states that it’s a fool’s errand to attempt to understand the matters that interest Rich and me

This, actually, makes a lot of sense from the point of view of a fonctionnaire international. Not only governments have hidden motives, individual government officials do too. To achieve anything, international civil servants navigate the terrain where suspicious motives are a given; what’s important is how to achieve the goal. The only problem is, in this case the goal is achieved by starting a war. This has got to be a special, very special case.

In fact I’m going to zap the 2 comments just above this one from “digamma” and “ed” right now.

Yeah, that’s fair. I kind of regretted that post not long after writing it.

Rich, I’m not a Decent, I have a strong preference for not starting wars over humanitarian issues, and I opposed the Iraq war vehemently on those and various other grounds. But I don’t have an ideological commitment to never using military power for humanitarian reasons, and if ever there was a case for an intervention it’s the point where the mercenary army is speeding towards the last remaining city, their intent to kill declared openly by their leaders. On television. That we all watched.

But what do we have as arguments against it so far? We have dsquared’s “atrocities didn’t really happen,” with no follow up to ajay pointing out the evidence that they did. We have Tim Wilkinson telling us that once people rebel against a government they become an enemy army and they’re open season; we have martin bento defining away attacking cities as “not an act of aggression.” These are all arguments none of you would countenance if they were used in defence of one of your own governments shooting its own citizenry, but you seem quite happy to present them here. I particularly like the trotting out of the strategic victimhood thesis, dependent as it is in this case on the demonstrators being able to see the future.

Also we have the weak claims of imperialism, which could have been used against the US if it didn’t intervene and left its client dictator to massacre his own citizens, but can be used equally well to describe US actions if they intervene. What’s the use of that?

The arguments against intervention presented here are necessarily empty of content. They have to deny the reality of ghaddafi’s presentation on TV of his military plans; they have to ignore the actual history of the events of the “revolution;” they (quite explicitly in dsquared’s case) have to deny the reports of atrocities; and they have to tread very carefully around the obvious actual one-sided military confrontation that was happening at the time of the declaration of the NFZ. This makes them quite the opposite of the arguments against intervention in Iraq.

So yeah dsquared, what I learnt from the presentation of the invasion of iraq was that policy built on a lack of facts and a lot of deception is not good policy. Bush was doing that in order to trick us into supporting an unnecessary war. I don’t understand why people here are doing the same thing in defence of Gaddafi, who is hardly a darling of the modern left. What’s the point?

‘Job’ and ‘servant’ carry very different implications than e.g. ‘function’

Surely a civil servant can easily fit the bill for “amoral functionary” rather than “intentional evildoer”?