Interventions – humanitarian or liberal?

I confess to not quite understanding how that summary might be considered remotely accurate, and having invented the “Shorter” concept eight years ago and been delighted to see it take off, for the first time I am beginning to get a little bored of it.

I think this just might be one of those terms that has no set meaning, because it’s always been used in an ad-hoc fashion to refer to interventions conducted/defended by “liberals,” usually in the American rather than philosophical sense. Given my own background (political philosophy and IR), I’d think to analyze the terms separately: “liberal” referring to the fact that the reasons for intervention were grounded in liberal aims (the protection of individual liberties, including freedom from bodily harm and political freedoms) and “intervention” obviously referring to the use of military force by a third party. On that understanding, “humanitarian” intervention in its usual sense is a subset of all possible liberal interventions.

The tricky bit with attempting to distinguish between “humanitarian” and “liberal” interventions, though, is that post-war reconstruction, which usually entails external military forces remaining in the target country, is usually directed in part towards creating liberal political institutions. So it’s far from clear that there even is a tenable distinction between the two.

This post seems a little slippery to me. I mean, yes, there’s a tenable distinction between liberal and humanitarian interventions, but (a) I’m not certain that the people you criticize are using the words according to your definitions, so that doesn’t necessarily deal with their arguments, and (b) both LIs and HIs are subsets of the group “invasions [supposedly] for the purpose of improving the lives of the people in the countries invaded.” Such invasions have, in practice, very often been utter nightmares. Now you can say that the nightmares have generally been the liberal ones, and humanitarian ones have gone better; but with such a small sample, it’s not obvious that we should rely on the division at all, rather than lumping them all together.

Does it matter, for the purpose of distinguishing between liberal and humanitarian interventions, whether the UNSC authorized the intervention? If the UNSC did not authorize foreign military efforts in Libya, but those efforts were identical in every respect, including the stated goals, would that effort become less a humanitarian intervention?

Was Kosovo a humanitarian or a liberal intervention?

Does the expressed determination of various nations to continue their operations until Gadhafi is gone alter the nature of this intervention from merely humanitarian to liberal?

Strangely enough, when I read this post I thought it was going to be against the war until I got to the second to last paragraph. The current intervention definitely seems to sit on a blurry line between humanitarian and liberal intervention.

Which poses a dilemma for me and others who are theoretically supportive of humanitarian intervention, and think the action in Libya may be a reasonable attempt to stave off a humanitarian catastrophe. Should we support a “intervention” that has potential to turn into a Bosnia-style war? Is it ok to say, “I support intervention now, but I reserve the right to call it a terrible idea in a week?”

I would say this is a reasonable decision, especially considering that I am not exactly able to assess to threat to civilians, effectiveness of the rebel forces, etc from this side of the pond. Maybe I can subscribe to a twitter feed that makes me feel more informed, and read al Jazeera constantly, but I don’t pretend these actions give me an accurate handle of the situation in Libya. I can maybe draw an analogy to the US stimulus (or, for those Conservative CT readers, the UK cuts). I supported the stimulus, but the jury is still out on what its actual effects were–and really I doubt there was any way for a layperson to know in advance how effectively the stimulus funds would be managed. Similarly, in retrospect many would claim that Clinton’s decision not to interfere in Rwanda was a failure of leadership, and I think even those who were against intervention are entitled to make this claim. Luckily, we will find out in a much smaller time horizon how to judge the Libya situation.

Keep in mind that this shouldn’t be construed as an argument for intervention. I am just thinking about the right to withhold judgment on a decision until more information (including information on its results) comes to light. There is a case to be made that we should know in advance how these interventions will turn out (i.e. badly).

I think that this post and the preceding one is clear in their precise, minimalistic committment to humanitarian intervention. But minimalism does become the basis of more robust commitments, postively and perniciously. Critical analysis demands making situational distinctions. I can imagine building upon the minimalism through democratic practice not military escalation, see http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/03/libya-and-the-mission-creep-i-hope-for/

NB – I’m reposting this quote without a (fairly innocent, I thought) four-letter word, in hopes of springing it from moderation. Sorry if it appears twice.

Conor: Isn’t just “Yes” a bit glib? Wasn’t aaron merely saying that unless you’re pretty sure you won’t be keenly regretting your support within a week, it’s probably wise to withhold support now? Especially given the importance of establishing extreme reluctance to use military force as the norm, as Glen Tomkins and I were urging in the previous thread?

Again, this observation is nor referring specifically to the Libya case.

Sorry, that in response to RP @17

was the intervention in East Timor in 1999 an ´utter nightmare´ for the people concerned (you do know what was happening at the time?). Likewise Sierra Leone in the same year?

In your terms, don’t both of those count as liberal, not humanitarian interventions?

Both had expressed and evident aims that were about changing or supporting favoured governments (to independence in one case, to unified democracy in the other). And both those new governments did, by most reports, turn out to be an improvement in standard liberal terms (less limb-chopping, more elections).

This contrasts with, on the one hand, humanitarian interventions like Somalia, Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda, which were about more direct protection and supply of non-combatants, with varying success.

It also contrasts with Afghanistan and Iraq, which were, in terms of both legal and public arguments made beforehand, almost entirely retaliatory or pre-emptive interventions. Only subsequently did they turn into occupations justified on some mixture of humanitarian (‘there will be a bloodbath’) or liberal (‘only x% want the Taliban back’) grounds.

The takeaway point of recent history is that liberal interventions do sometimes succeed. Armies can change governments, and some governments, under the same economic circumstances, are noticeably worse than others. Success is not guaranteed, or even predictable, but is possible.

Whereas opposed military _humanitarian_ operations are doomed. Define success as ‘less people getting killed’, and any enemy who needs to see you lose is unlikely fail to adopt the opposite goal. And no technology or doctrine exists that can stop them.

Humanitarian operations, in order to avoid that trap, need to be strictly neutralist, to have no enemies. Even to the point of taking tea with a Hitler.

It is not a job I envy.

I do.

Oh, now this is giving me flashbacks to The Poor Man. Those DFHs and their mean words! (The Medium Lobster came back for this one, too.)

In all seriousness, now, I’m not the one who just helped to start a war. That would be you, wouldn’t it, Conor? You’re the one who is working on legal justifications for war — oops, I mean humanitarian intervention with Tomahawk missiles — and who calmly wrote that “I accept that the campaign will result in people being killed by allied airstrikes”. You’re the one who is telling us how the people who are more directly involved in setting out to kill people think. I mean, how the people who are more directly involved in humanitarian intervention think.

What you refer to as facile personalized abuse seems to refer to the fact that when I said it was your job to come up with ideological justifications for war, it is literally your job. You said that you work for the U.N.; I don’t know in what capacity, but you’ve claimed personal experience in the decision making process around the legal justification for this intervention. For pointing this out, Henry started to go on about my hang-ups, and you’ve said how irritating and pompous I am (while completely misunderstanding my point, but that’s typical too).

Well, that’s familiar as well. Yeah, I’m an Internet blowhard. But I didn’t set out to make war, for whatever supposedly noble reasons just like every war, and I didn’t set out to justify it. People are perfectly free to find my rhetoric the real horror here. I admire them, really.

Rich – this is making discussion quite impossible. I’m banning you from commenting for 72 hours, and warning you that you need to seriously calm down on personalized accusations if you wish to continue commenting here. Please don’t try to evade this ban either if you want to continue commenting here in any capacity.

You should see the foul state the other thread‘s got into.

http://www.raceforiran.com/obamas-embrace-of-the-neocon-liberal-alliance

@35, @36

Indeed. I think that these two variations on a theme are as close to the truth as we’re likely to get about the reasoning behind the Libyan intervention. Political, rather then moral, in particular, seems a charge that history will let stick.

Still, I respect Conor’s attempts here to carve out a place where something righteous can be done about the Gaddafys of the world, even though I too find it more than a little disingenuous. The moral can’t ever be separated from the political. And yet there are, don’t forget, events in recent history approved by all which have foundations which seemed just as disingenuous, not only at the time, but in retrospect as well. One wonders, for example, if the 60 million dead in WWII would approve in retrospect of Roosevelt’s presumably principled, but at very least crafty bit of political engineering which guaranteed the US entry into that war. My guess is that they would, but that they might also think it, on balance, a gesture of very limited consequence.

Knowing what we know now, do you not think that the UN should have instead deployed forces to protect civilians against attacks by supporters of the regime?

I do think there is a real problem with this form of argument, Conor, and it’s the same problem which irritated people about your answer “Yes”.

About more or less any massive failure, it’s possible to say after the event that “Knowing what we know now, do you not think that this should have been done correctly rather than horribly screwed up?”. But “do things properly, don’t screw them up” is pretty clearly not a decision rule ex ante. At the time, everyone involved thought that they were doing the right thing on the basis of the information they had at the time. And although the French government probably contributed to the problems by bringing their own political agenda into things, this is not exactly missing from the Libyan case, is it?

Or, “shorter me”, to repeat a catchphrase that I keep hoping catches on: Operation Turquoise was a humanitarian intervention that was poorly planned, largely politically motivated and utterly counterproductive. In other words, the normal kind.

(my personal view, stated once and once only for this thread, is that the UNSC has to be given the delegated authority to start wars because without the authority to start them it can’t have the authority to stop them and the alternative is a de facto policy of no international law at all).

Incidentally, it might well be argued, with Allen Buchanan, that current international law with regard to humanitarian intervention is indeed in need of reform (especially, for example, in light of the realpolitik nature of the Security Council, including the veto power accorded the five permanent members). As I wrote at Ratio Juris:

I agree with Allen Buchanan’s argument in Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination…(2004) that “under certain conditions a willingness to violate existing international law for the sake of reforming it [analogous to the use ‘civil disobedience’ in municipal law] can be not only consistent with a sincere commitment to the rule of law, but even required by it.” It follows, for example, that we might explore the “possibility of developing a rule-governed, treaty-based regime for humanitarian armed intervention that bypasses the UN Charter-based law.” But Buchanan importantly qualifies his proposal by emphatically reminding his readers that

“[v]iolations of fundamental rules of existing international law, such as the prohibition of preventive war and against any use of force that does not qualify as self-defense and lacks Security Council authorization, are irresponsible, unless they are accompanied by a sincere effort to construct superior international legal structures to replace those they damage or render obsolete.”

This latter condition (i.e., the ‘sincere effort’ part), among other problems, was arguably lacking in several prior interventions which were ostensibly “humanitarian” (they at least gave rise to the literature on ‘humanitarian intervention’) although perhaps better termed “liberal” in the sense intended by Conor. In short, Buchanan rightly envisions the possibility of a “humanitarian intervention” sans Security Council authorization (owing to a veto by one or more of the permanent members) in cases where the principled rationale exists but because of the behavior of a state or states motivated by its/their perception of its/their own interests or the exigencies of power politics, blocks other parties from acting so as to prevent further egregious violations of human rights….

The “dictionary definition” of “humanitarian intervention,” to which you linked, is considerably more broad than the definition you used to distinguish liberal from humanitarian intervention.

The former describes humanitarian intervention as simply:
(1) Humanitarian intervention involves the threat and use of military forces as a central feature;
(2) It is an intervention in the sense that it entails interfering in the internal affairs of a state by sending military forces into the territory or airspace of a sovereign state that has not committed an act of aggression against another state.
(3) The intervention is in response to situations that do not necessarily pose direct threats to states’ strategic interests, but instead is motivated by humanitarian objectives.

This definition includes operations focused on establishing democracy and overthrowing an existing leadership (Haiti) which are UN authorized, as well as operations focused on protecting civilians which lack UN authorization (NATO operations in the Balkans).

Therefore it’s likely most accurate to say that “liberal intervention” is a type of humanitarian intervention, just as an intervention premised upon and with the limited goal of implementing R2P is a type of humanitarian intervention.

I really don’t think UNSC authorization or lack thereof captures any of the distinctions you want to draw – unless the real goal here is simply to yell “this isn’t Iraq!”

I ask this honestly: why care about the UNSC authorization anyway?

The basic answer to the question is surely that an armed attack on another country, by definition, cannot be humanitarian. You can argue that by killing people you are preventing other people from being killed; the Rwandan genocide was an example where it might have been possible, through aggression, to save numerous lives. But aggression is not humanitarian. Aggression is not really liberal either, because a war is not a liberal business.

Therefore, instead of using footling phrases which conceal one’s political intent, one should get down to the nitty-gritty: is the Western attack on Libya likely to save a lot of lives? Is attacking the Libyan government in support of rebels trying to overthrow it going to save lives? I really don’t know. So far as I can tell, the U.N. Security Council did not know either. If that is indeed the case, then this is not an operation calculated to save lives; it might have that effect by accident.

Secondly, is the Western attack on Libya likely to lead to a more just, democratic and freedom-loving government there? Are the rebel forces in the east of the country likely to provide a better administration than the Gaddaffi government? I really don’t know, and so far as I can tell, nobody really knows. Therefore, this is not an operation calculated to improve socio-political conditions in Libya.

Thirdly, what are the most plausible political goals of the United States in supporting an attack on Libya? (For, in reality, this is a U.S. operation from start to finish.) To my mind, promoting democracy or saving lives are not very high on that country’s agenda. It seems to me that the goal of the operation is to terrorise countries which have in the past been hostile to, or uncooperative with, U.S. foreign policy, and perhaps to further cement relations between the pro-American regimes in Western Europe while establishing the U.S. government’s aggressive credibility.

If this assessment is correct, then the real basis for the aggression is neither humanitarian nor liberal, and indeed the whole operation is a sordid political scheme cynically exploiting an opportunity to use brutal force for self-interested objectives.

I appreciate Conor’s experience in the field here, but I really think the question of whether intervention works is more pressing than whether it’s legal.

I mean, I know that when Disneyland opened in 1956, nothing worked… But when the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.

Tim… why would the US want to build such grand bases in Libya, exactly? You realize that the US DOD is in the midst of CUTTING its budget, right?

Interventions… break them down by aspects for categorical purposes:

Legality.

Objective.

Motivation.

Justification.

For evaluative purposes, of course, we’d need a list of other aspects as well. But I think this well get us farther than simply declaring humanitarian interventions legal and liberal interventions illegal.

I just heard on the BBC the French foreign minister explain that the goal of the “coalition” is the promotion of “dialogue” in Libya.

I just heard on the BBC the French foreign minister explain that the goal of the coalition is the promotion of dialogue in Libya.

Sure looks different without scare quotes, doesn’t it. & there is something to be said for the fact that with less tanks there will be more opportunity for free interchange of ideas.

No no, just not satisfied that it is good evidence for what it’s said to be good evidence of. As I said in that reply – peole can decide for themselves without muggins here having to run the gauntlet of accusations of a something-or-other denial, moral turpitude, unseriousness etc. But felt impelled at least to register may take on it so as not to give the impression that absolutely everyone is entirely happy with the metadossier in question.

Steve L @ 55: “And that’s exactly the problem”.

The problem with what you say is the problem is that there are plenty of arguments on all sides of this that are “unreasoned and unmeasured” (e.g. Rich); there are also some on most sides that are ‘reasoned and measured’. For those of us, like me, who are somewhat perplexed the ethics of all this, and how the ethics of it pertains to real political choices, the problem is how to sort through the various reasoned and measured arguments available on different sides of the debate. The fact that Conor’s posts sound reasoned and measured, and that he brings experience to bear on the problem and provides evidence to support his claims when it’s available, while responding to counterargumetns and evidence in their favor, makes him helpful to read . It doesn’t make him right.

If some people want shake and yell at poor dupes who are simply fooled by tricky dicky smooth snake oil salesmen then he can do that somewhere else. But I think it’s obvious that Conor is not a snake oil salesman and most commenters on these threads are not dupes, but thoughtful and engaged disputers. Which is why I was glad to see Henry ban Rich so that he can go elsewhere for awhile.

I won’t say any more about this since it distracts from the main discussion, but I do hope to hear more from Conor and his thoughtful critics on this and other issues.

dsquared @ 42: the UNSC has to be given the delegated authority to start wars because without the authority to start them it can’t have the authority to stop them

I think that’s wrong. The function of the UN is to prevent wars. Jaw-jaw is better than war-war. High words, or at least wounding innuendo, in the Security Council or a strongly worded resolution passed in the General Assembly (after it’s united for pease, of course) is better for all parties than an invasion. Once war starts the UN has failed. For the UN to start a war is to connive at its own failure.

Part of my problem is that no-one seems interested in the timeline, i.e. when these casualties occurred. It is to be expected that many civilains casualties will come about once a civil war is under way. But the claims are of massacres on unarmed protesters – and I think they probably need to be, since if the casualties result from an ongoing war, then it’s not clear that what may amount to escalating and prolonging that war by supporting the weaker side is a godd way of going about things.

And in general, the evidence is being grudgingly dug out and comes in little suggestive dribs and drabs, which is not what you would hope for from those who have been so adamant for so long about the narrative of a huge massacre of defenceless protestors.

Word.

I don’t know why you folk have to try to cram this event into an irrelevant academic classification.

This intervention is not being driven by the US and the people who are driving it could not give a hoot for the distinction being drawn.

The justification for this intervention is very similar to the justification that was given for the invasion of Iraq. The difference is that the facts are very different and this time the facts are not being falsified or misrepresented, as was the case with Iraq.

Gaddafi was a state sponsor of terror and he has threatened to return to that policy in retaliation for the financial measures taken against him and his family. There is in fact international support for the no-fly zone. Statements by members of the Arab League aside, the Arab League has not changed its position, they are still providing logistical support.

The objection made by Turkey should in my view be seen as tactical. Turkey is going to have to be responsible for fixing the mess that is left afterwards. So it is natural for them to be rather concerned.

Unlike the invasion of Iraq which deterred and delayed democracy, the Arab spring and the intervention in Iraq is encouraging moves towards democracy. Morocco is moving from what was almost a de facto constitutional monarchy to a de jure one.

There is a tendency for US observers to fixate on the Gulf region and the precious oil and precious little Israel. But in European terms they are really not important and each one is the author of at least as much suffering as they claim to be victimized by. Let them stew in the misery they have created for themselves while we fix North Africa.

Sure it is a colonial approach. But that is who Cameron is. That is what it means to be a Tory.

The root justification for this intervention is that North Africa has still not completely escaped from the middle ages. And the reason we are going in is that we have not completely escaped the middle ages either.

The reason the US is involved is because they spend too much on arms and have no choice but to support their allies in this and every other intervention or look pretty stupid.

@Creator I think you can make the case (also made before the Iraq war), that the US government knows enough to make some reasonable predictions. I don’t have the time or ability to sift through the various reports on the Libyan civil war and determine that a few tactical strikes by the US would be enough to lead to rebel victory, or at least a stalemate. But apparently someone did make that assessment, and it is increasingly looking like a very dubious one. That is something of what I meant by only being able to see after the fact whether the intervention/war was justified. It is increasingly looking like a “no,” and Obama might be best off limiting US involvement as soon as he can.

@jim maybe part of the function of the UN is to prevent wars, but it certainly seems to function to start them as well. The UN provides legitimacy for action, up to and including the military intervention. There are lots of reasons to question whether the UN really should have this authority, but it almost seems like its reason for being. Of course, the UN only supports humanitarian wars…i.e. wars that none of the major powers see fit to veto.

ajay, I think your 2 is pretty otiose, at least if the ‘if possible’ is made explicit, but I have problems with all three of the others, at least when 1 is interpreted as supporting 3, which I think pretty much means positing imminent gratuitous massacres.

(here they are to save scrolling: 1. is there sufficient evidence of large-scale attacks on civilians? 2. If so, should something be done to try to stop them? 3. If so, should that something be direct military action? 4. If so, should that action be carried out by us?

If there were a proper, well-equipped and trained blue-helmeted force which could be expected to try and enforce a ceasefire (and engage in necessary and limited offensive action where those on the ground can see it is clearly required to save lives, send credible reports and receive timely and properly-drafted authorisation) I would very probably be in favour. Or even if professional military men (for whom I’ve developed much more respect oevr the past 10 years or so) were able to make those calls directly, as in Sierra leone. Not sure that is a good blueprint at all, because there are political issues involved in taking sides and wiping out armies. But then the UNSC handed Gadaffi to the americans clearly enough, so that’s at least not a problem specific to the SL model (btw the colonel who took SL into his own hands is the same one who spoke out of turn in saying Gaddafi couldn’t justly be assassinated – an interesting character).

And just in case that all sounds too reasonable and non-tinfoil-hattish, I will take this opp’ty to mention the huge story of half the Polish government dying in extremely suspicious cricumstances a while back, with the Russian government appearing to be the prime suspect. Just to see if anyone else noticed that one at all.

there are political issues involved in taking sides and wiping out armies
is true but a conversational misdeed since weaker than I intended. It should have been …and wiping out armies is itslef not an unproblematic activity.

Just to clarify: Is this one of the ‘irrelevant academic classifications” you refer to that ‘others’ are allegedly making?

I find the term ‘liberal intervention’ to be at best useless, at worst a euphemism. Trying to distinguish here between humanitarian and liberal seems an irrelevance to me. Clearly the motive behind the intervention is neither. Cameron and Sarkosy are not liberals, they are rump imperialists who think in terms of flags and bits of maps being shaded in the right, preferably hard-right colour.

There seems to be a move to run away from the justification given for Iraq given the fact that it was obviously fraudulent and obviously a pretext. But that should not be allowed to confuse the fact that there are some circumstances and some facts for which it might have been a good one.

I opposed the intervention in Kewait because I don’t think that our troops should be sent in to defend one dictatorship against another. Saddam’s regime was in many ways more liberal than that of Kewait, it was certainly better than Saudi Arabia. We had other, better tools to defend our economic interests.

I opposed the Iraq war on numerous grounds, not least of which being that it was stupid and obviously going to be a fiasco. It was never intended to lead to a democracy. The Bushie plan was to install Chalabai as the new dictator and force a peace treaty with Israel and then use Iraq as a base from which to attack Iran. It was so deeply stupid, but academics still try to fit it into their models and ‘deeply stupid’ is not a category they use. It should be.

This particular intervention is not justified, but it may not turn out to be too bad. There are times when it makes sense to break the rules even though you don’t want to set a precedent.

In this case Gaddafi has murdered British citizens in the past, he is currently weak. We have the means at our disposal to eliminate him and there is no likely outcome that is worse than him remaining in power. If we do not intervene large numbers of Libyans will die at Gaddafi’s hand. If we do intervene there is a non-negligible chance of a more liberal regime resulting.

This is not a justification but it is a pretty good rationale.

As I’ve said in previous comments, I’m a sceptic about this one because of the lack of a clear sense of where it is going. However, I’m very open to arguments that I could be wrong. So, in that spirit, here’s a link to the latest from Juan Cole

http://www.juancole.com/2011/03/top-ten-accomplishments-of-the-un-no-fly-zone.html

79: ah ha. that makes a lot of sense.

Salient @75: yes I think there is that – which is why the regime change aspect has never been far from the surface. but I think there is a more pragmatic logic there too, which I think I mentioned somewhere in the past few thousand words.

Threatening some kind of intervention may be a good way of preventing a ‘discretionary’ massacre of non-combatants, but joining in a civil war in which at least one side is (so far as one can make out) embedded in cities is much less likely to help.

It might do – if the threat alone works to get a ceasefire, say – but distrust of the US was pretty clearly vindicated when they dismissed such an offer. And in general, threats need to be backed up for the most part to retain credibiility, and it’s not clear that it was OK to back this one up, which introduces a tricky question of whether it was OK to make the threat – in fact, the question doesn’t arise because there didn’t seem to be any expectation that G would offer to deal, presumably in exchange for half his kingdom or I know not what, and there certainly wasn’t the slightest inclination to actually try and negotiate the ceasefire when it was offered (possibly dishonestly, possibly not).

Basically, telling someone like Gadaffi to stop with the gratuitous murder already or there will be measures is one thing, but in a situation in which he takes himself to be fighting for his life-as-he-knows-it, and adding more motivation for resistance in the shape of people who clearly intend to kill him one way or the other, is not a recipe for peace. And basically the possible outcome in which G retains any of Libya was tacitly ruled out, regardless of the humanitarian consequences, which was pretty clear all along I think.

Mods: not sure why my comment is being held for moderation. Any chance of freeing it?

79: For what it’s worth, the French recognized the rebel’s National Council a few weeks ago as “the only legitimate representative of the Libyan people”.

I find that the folks – especially Tim Wilkinson, but I think there were others on an earlier thread – who insist that there were no attacks by Gaddafi’s forces on unarmed civilians are beginning to remind me of this chap.

I think the question is not “were there attacks on civilians?” – ajay has documented that there definitely were – but “were we definitely looking at an imminent humanitarian disaster, of the sort that would require intervention, ie war?”. As many as three thousand people might have been killed in Venezuela in 1989, but I doubt anyone would have seriously thought that external military intervention was warranted to remove Carlos Andres Perez. There is certainly a defensible point of view (which in fact carried the day at the UNSC) that Qadaffi’s track record is so bad that the threshold of evidence should be set very low, but I don’t think the argument is as strong as you suggest contra people like Tim who set the evidentiary bar higher.

As to D Squared’s point about the lack of videos from phones: given that there were scarcely any journalists in Libya before about 20th February, is not apparent to me a) how this would have got out to the wider world or b) – given a) why people would have wanted to take it.

You can send mobile phone video over the mobile phone network, even without making use of all the internet video sites there are. Some video footage did in fact get out (again, thanks ajay for the links).

Conor: You are right that there is a distinction between humanitarian and liberal interventionism, and you are right to point it out. However in practice politicians and the commentariat don’t understand that distinction and that should give you cause for concern.

If I remember correctly you had a debate with Norman Geras about it, and you provided good evidence from impeccable sources to back up your argument, but in the end Geras simply shrugged his shoulders and said he still didn’t see the difference. Somebody like Freedland should know the difference, but clearly he doesn’t. It has been pointed out countless times that Blair’s 1999 Chicago speech actually contains some very restrictive interpretations of when military intervention should take place but that doesn’t stop it being used as a justification for interventions well outside these boundaries. These people don’t understand because they don’t want to understand.

Most justifications for war are post-hoc rationalisations. This was very clear with the invasion of Iraq but it is happening this time too. There is no reason why humanitarians should not question military interventions even when humanitarian motices are given and even when a UN resolution has been obtained.

D squared: does that mean you’re dropping the ‘no cell phone pictures, so it didn’t really happen’ line of argument? Or are you saying – ‘Well, some cell-phone footage got out, so the fact that there isn’t enough of it to convince someone like me is evidence that things weren’t as bad as that’?

I think the question is not “were there attacks on civilians?” – ajay has documented that there definitely were – but “were we definitely looking at an imminent humanitarian disaster, of the sort that would require intervention, ie war

As far as I can see, the Comical Tendency has tried both ‘well they weren’t really civilians by the time they were being shot at’ line and ‘well there weren’t enough of them to count’ on this thread. Compare for example Tim Wilkinson @ 64 – worrying about the time-line – with Tim Wilkinson @ 81 – saying it was probably a bit like Bloody Sunday. (FWIW 81 was posted while I was composing my comment at 84).

In response to 84: I was about 2 years old when Bloody Sunday happened. Still, I don’t remember any stories of fighter pilots being told to strafe the crowd. As for ball-park figures: I think it was about 130 soldiers cemented into the basement in Benghazi.

Penultimately (for this post): I’m inclined to think that what weighs heavily here is not so much the number of casualties as the nature of the orders which Gaddafi was apparently – according to the reports of those receiving them giving to part of the airforce.

Finally – and this is mostly ad hominem for D squared: given the great deference you grant the UNSC, does the fact that there was an earlier (possibly pre-Benghazi) SC resolution referring Gaddafi’s treatment of the protestors to the ICC carry any weight with you. (Obviously, innocent until proven guilty; but on the other hand, presumably prima facie evidence of significant violations of international law.)

PHB wrote, “I opposed the intervention in Kewait because I don’t think that our troops should be sent in to defend one dictatorship against another. ”

Whose troops? I was in England that summer. Every paper but IIRC the Guardian had front-page headlines with complaints from Thatcher and the French that the US hadn’t already sent troops. In Paris a few weeks later it was the same. (Oh, sure, I’ll bet, the CIA put them up to it.)

praisegod barebones: so you assess the evidence (of a kind that might be useful to someone ‘genuinely in doubt’ – the best kind of evidence I always think) as amounting to:

1. unproofed statements of two defectors, in explanation of what at some level they presumably regard as dereliction of duty, that their newly-made enemy ordered them to do something (which in the event they did not do, and we have no substantial evidence suggesting that any of the other, non-defecting, pilots did). If you need concrete examples to get the idea, you might remember what Iraqi exiles were saying when they wanted to encourage an invasion. Why on earth are the statements of these two defectors of unknown character, telling their debriefers what they want to hear and and what they probably want them to hear, treated as sufficient evidence this time round, when, to repeat, we have no substantial evidence suggesting that any of the other, non-defecting, pilots did?

2. one other report about 7 people (not 130 in the first-Googled version that I read: this thing is called a ‘link’), at least some acknowledged to be ‘mutineers’, I suppose one calls them, who were apparently imprisoned, and apparently concreted in sometime before the rebels overran the compound. Now that is as weird as it is grisly, but I don’t really see what it establishes, remembering that we are talking about humanitarian crisis, rather than weird non-committal ways of (not) killing a handful of rebels.

And what is inconsistent about pointing out the various reasons why none of these miscellaneous titbits constitute what they obviously don’t constitute – something that indicates a humanitarian crisis? Is your idea that a sufficiently wide variety of failure will average out to success? I’m not shifting my ground, I’m pointing out that the case for imminent massacre is. (As, it appears to me, are you with your penultimate point.)

And: are you saying ‘Well, some cell-phone footage got out, so the fact that there isn’t enough of it to convince someone like me is evidence that things weren’t as bad as that’?

I’d guess that’s close – I would hazard a guess that it’s ‘phone footage could get out, yet none showed any sign of large-scale atrocities. Which is pretty rum, on the hypothesis of some large scale massacre involving mass demonstrators’ (or is it supposed to be some other kind of atrocity, something indefinable perhaps?). Equally odd the failure to get any detailed eyewitness accounts, isn’t it?

—

dsquared There is certainly a defensible point of view (which in fact carried the day at the UNSC) that Qadaffi’s track record is so bad that the threshold of evidence should be set very low, but I don’t think the argument is as strong as you suggest contra people like Tim who set the evidentiary bar higher.

I’m setting the bar pretty low anyway – I just want something that actively suggests that the imminent massacre scenario was a significant likelihood. But I don’t even think this is really a question of setting an evidentiary bar – the ‘mad dog’ approach is more or less fact-insensitive. Which is why it has this curious scattergun appearance, with disconnected bits and pieces of evildoing piled up haphazardly to support the vague impression of something big and bad. (Note for example p. barebones has introduced strafing into the Bloody Sunday(+-) scenario.) Now where is that evidence – I could swear I had it earlier. It all seemed so clear when William Hague said it.

And I think it is precisely Gaddaffi’s reputation (a well-chosen word) that helps to underwrite this inflation and conflation of various bits and pieces of nastiness into a casus belli.

Previous reputation, when not shown to be relevant e.g. by way of showing MO, rebuttal of good character defence etc, is prejudicial, like telling the jury about previous convictions. It tends, if not corrected for, to provide false corroboration – reputation builds on reputation, and both the accusation and its assessment take account of past form, thus double-counting. In fact reports need to be checked (as best one can) for anti-Gadaffi bias for that very reason – and a failure to do so is not setting the bar lower, but ignoring relevant evidence.

There’s also the aspect of adopting an inadvertent version of our leaders’ failure (not entirely inadvertent, though well-buried/compartmentalised in natural liars like Blair) to grasp the difference between ‘nasty and worth replacing with something better if reasonably feasible’ and ‘about to kill thousands if not seriously threatened with bombing’, i.e., roughly the distinction under discussion. And that’s one of those ‘bounded reasonableness’ things, where amassing evidence is all very well, but if anyone suggests it’s inadequate to the advertised purpose, it’s time to stop that game and take a reality check; let’s be honest, Gadaffi is a wrong’un, and that’s that.

—

Also, may I point out that the Juan Cole link provided by Chris B, and those of its links that I’ve looked at, seem blatantly one-sided in the way they frame casualties at the hands of Gadaffi’s forces (bombing ‘civilan cities’, unlike the coalition), and minimise or simply omit mention of those which must have occurred at the hands of the coalition/rebel forces, e.g. when ‘bombing suburbs’. Cole also constantly makes bold assertions about the terrible things that various bombing raids have averted. And how about this:

At night, the surviving tanks crept into the city and bombarded its center, including a hospital with 400 patients in it! [the centre includes a hospital with patients]. All through Wednesday, pro-Qaddafi snipers took a toll on pedestrians in the downtown area. [Is it actually very plasuible that these were, as is strongly suggested, just pot-shots at flaneurs?] Still, the cessation of the bombardment for many hours benefited the city, which could easily have seen many times the 16 dead killed by Qaddafi’s thugs. [I suppose so – you might think that if these tanks ‘bombarding the city centre’ had tried, they could have killed a lot more – maybe those 400 patients for example?]

And that kind of observable bias suggests that there is likely to be unobservable bias too. Doesn’t it.

(And I hope, rather forlornly, that I don’t need to point out that this is not an attempt to defend or excuse anyone for anything, but an analysis of manifest bias)

Doubting atrocities of the Eurasian army, huh? Doubleplusungood.

dsquared at 88, the evidence of early killings of civilians was undoubtedly not enough to warrant intervention, but the intervention didn’t come at that point – it came at the point that tank columns were moving towards Benghazi, after Gaddafi made public claims that he was going to kill people.

In 2007 Gaddafi claimed an islamic uprising was occurring in Benghazi, and after stating on tv that he wanted the rebels to “die like dogs without trial” he cut off electricity, water and phone lines, and sent helicopter gunships into Benghazi.

We also have two pilots who defected after they were told to bomb demonstrators, long before the demonstrations had turned into civil war; and recall that foreign ambassadors defected to the rebels before there was a military confrontation. It was after that happened that Gaddafi instigated the military action and started flying in his mercenaries.

What he was going to do to Benghazi this time around was obviously intended to be more serious than 2007. Unless you have very strong evidence that he was not going to do what he has a history of doing, it’s really pushing the limits of credibility to claim that this wasn’t going to end horribly.

I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to participate in this thread since Conor responded so politely to my initial snarky interventions. But Salient and Tim Wilkinson are saying pretty much everything that needs to be said.

my personal view, stated once and once only for this thread, is that the UNSC has to be given the delegated authority to start wars because without the authority to start them it can’t have the authority to stop them and the alternative is a de facto policy of no international law at all

Gosh, what does that remind me of? Maybe this?

the general run of debate has been that classic schema of argument that you hear over and over again in politics: Q: “this is not possible”, A: “but not having it would be really bad”, Q: “Okay it’s possible then”

What we need are reasonable upper-bound estimates of what constitutes a horror so horrible that military intervention is justified.

I’m not sure what Khadafi needs to do, but if he is responsible for holding even one person in solitary confinement and making them stand naked…then he probably needs to answer for that.

5.4 million were killed in the Second Congo War (1998-2008) and nobody gave a shit.

Also, to discuss Libya with no sense of present context is frankly obscene. Political theory is not politics. A political debate about the situation in the ME would be welcome but I see no sign that anyone is interested in getting much beyond the schoolroom.
Again I expected more fro C Foley.

“But it’s pretty clear from Gaddafi’s behaviour to date that he intended to, was able to, and almost certainly would have, killed lots of civilians.”

It’s not clear to me — I might’ve thought he was going to kill lots of insurgents, and maybe some civilians who he thought (or claimed to think) were insurgents or citizens providing material support to insurgents. We’d do the same thing here in the U.S. in a heartbeat, and have on a few notable occasions (e.g. Waco), and it’s not crystal clear to me that putting down an insurgency attempting to undermine the government is an obviously unacceptable use of maximum military force.

I think a whole lot hinges on whether or not you acknowledge the insurgent rebel forces to be bona fide insurgent rebel forces (and I should mention that I’m not sure on this myself, so perhaps this criticism of your comment is unfair). However, since France has explicitly formally acknowledged the insurgent rebel forces and their attempt to assert an alternative government of Libya, I’m kind of assuming that everybody agrees Khadafi was heading into Bengazi to kill insurgents, not innocent civilians.

(For the sake of goodness, please take all this with some salt. I taste bile in my mouth every time I type the word insurgents, and I’m deeply uncomfortable with a lot of my own assertions, especially those that I’m trying to put forth just to get a better handle on what kinds of assumptions people in the pro-intervention camp are assuming. I’m currently too disoriented to firmly assert my support of or opposition to any of this.)

PF @ 101

As a generality, true enough. What constitutes an insult in a specific case, though, is not for the accused to judge. If you think that I’ve been guilty of insulting anyone here, I can only say that no offense was intended, and I apologize if any was taken.

sorry, ignore the dashes in the above

It seems the crux of the matter lies a lot in the basis of the distinction between insurgents and civilians. The bulk of the insurgents were ordinary citizens a month ago and still are in most respects. Because of this, they are indistinguishable from other civilians save in those moments when they are openly using or brandishing weapons, something under their, not Gaddafi’s, control. In this situation, can Gaddafi practically distinguish combatants from others? If he cannot, can he expected to try to spare “civilians” while crushing “combatants”?

Let’s see how a parallel situation would look in the US. Suppose the militia movement caught fire and got the participation of large masses of people. Because the US military is not primarily organized to fight insurgency and because some in the military took the insurgent’s side, they were able to take control, not of 90% of the country, but, let’s say, of the South and Appalachia, in which areas they have considerable support, though it is difficult to quantify. Their forces are now massed in Virginia City and planning to attack Washington. Washington can stop them only with the fairly crude means of jets, artillery, and the like, which leaves very little room for distinguishing combatants from non, especially in urban areas. Suppose 1/3 of the population is active in the insurgency, another third sympathizes passively, and a third opposes. Does Washington have the right to treat “Virginia City” as the enemy and begin shelling it or using jet fire? Keep in mind that this is arguably a greater justification than the North had in the Civil War, as the South did not pose an existential threat to the North.

This is not merely a rhetorical question. I think there is a real argument for “no”, even where “no” means that the US government is overthrown. If a government cannot keep enough popular support to prevent a situation like this, perhaps that is sufficient to condemn it as illegitimate. However, what the government is pondering is not really the same as saying let’s go get the Tutsis or the Jews or whomever, more of less out of nowhere. It’s not even the same as Stalin saying “let’s starve the Urkrainians because they *might* rebel in large numbers.” A few weeks ago, most of the punditocracy was gleefully proclaiming Gaddafi finished and chatting about lamppost decorations.

Now, it may be that the case rests on some things that Gaddafi has or is said to have done or intended to do that go beyond what directly serves counterinsurgency into punitive measures. However, I don’t think it is clear that punitive measures are superfluous. It may be that what is required to maintain Gaddafi’s power is to rebuild “the wall of fear”, and that the way to do that is with a reign of terror. I don’t think anything yet documented rises to the reign of terror level, but let’s take it to max and argue that. Is a reign of terror illegitimate if that is the only way to forestall violent revolution? Regardless, of whether this is currently true in Libya, even in the abstract, do we recognize limits on what a government can do to protect itself from immediate and dire violent threats from within? If the answer is yes, we are committing ourselves to the view that some violent revolutions have the moral right to succeed and claim international aid to do so and this without regard for the content of the underlying dispute, but rather as a consequence of the strategic situation.

This is an important philosophical dispute, and one this war forces us to confront. I’ve yet to see anyone demonstrate how Gaddafi can suppress this insurgency without harming non-combatants fairly indiscriminately. If he can’t, then saying he cannot harm non-combatants is saying he must go. Which many western leaders including Obama have in fact said, though they seem not to recognize the consequences. In terms of Conor’s distinction, an intervention that necessarily entails the end of a regime is political, or, if you like, “liberal” in nature. I don’t see how the situation can be reduced to a “humannitarian” effort, since the aim cannot be limited to ending or preventing human rights violations.

In my comparison of Gaddafis situation to a large militia rebellion in the US, some might think it matters that the US is democratic while Libya is not. I think Conor implied this in the previous post by saying dictators are now second-class citizens. However, if Gaddafi’s being a dictator plays any significant role in the casus belli, the war is political, not humanitarian.

I’ve yet to see anyone demonstrate how Gaddafi can suppress this insurgency without harming non-combatants fairly indiscriminately. If he can’t, then saying he cannot harm non-combatants is saying he must go.

The current measures, if maintained but not escalated, could have the effect of preventing the insurgents/rebels from losing and thereby creating a standoff, which could lead to some kind of partition. Nobody wants a partition, but it may come to look (at least from the outside) like the least-worst solution. Gaddafi would not “go”; he would rule over a smaller country. I don’t know anything about Libya (“well, that’s obvious!” I can hear you say), but if the tribal bases of support are geographically concentrated, then a partition would not necessarily be impractical, much as everyone might not be happy about it.

(For that matter — OT — some kind of partition of the current Afghanistan, called “a vertically integrated criminal enterprise” by someone quoted in Filkins’ recent New Yorker piece, might not be terrible either.)

Partition looks to me the most likely outcome, along with a long term military presence. If the problem is that Gaddafi is going to go punitive against the rebels, there must be many people in the territories he now controls who rebelled, and he will have the ability to comb through video archives and hire snitches to locate them. And if he really wishes to attach non-combatants as well, e.g., for reign of terror purposes, nothing will stop him from doing that either. So partition would seem to fall short of the objectives of the intervention, if the intervention advocates are correct in their assessment of Gaddafi’s intentions.

If I thought non-proliferation was a principle worth defending, then that would indeed be evidence against Libyan intervention. But since I think non-proliferation is a crock of bull, that argument carries no weight with me.

Perhaps an easier mistake not to repeat would be “opening fire on peaceful demonstrators” followed by “announcing on tv you’re going to kill everyone” then “shipping in mercenaries” and “bombing anyone you don’t like.”

As the example of Bahrain shows, you can make all those mistakes and get away with it.

‘Nobody wants a partition, but it may come to look (at least from the outside) like the least-worst solution. Gaddafi would not “go”; he would rule over a smaller country. ‘

The problem with this is that Gaddafi’s ‘part’ of Libya has all the oil. The Americans, sorry, Nato, sorry, the International Community will never let that happen.

At the moment I think there are only three things we can be sure of.

1: When the ‘International Community’ say that the goal is a no fly zone, they are lying. The goal is regime change. While it’s true that Gaddafi will be brought up on war crimes charges if he lives, it’s very clear from the ‘pattern’ of missile attacks that one of the main goals of the attack is to kill him.

2: When the ‘International Community’ state that ground troops have been ruled out, they are lying. Indeed, given that ‘1’ (above) is true, they could hardly NOT be ruled out.

3: In Kosova NATO’s bombing campaign lasted for ten weeks and during this period, NATO aircraft flew over 38,000 combat missions. This mission failed to bring down MiloÅ¡ević *(that happened later). Moreover, Gaddafi has been on the ‘throne’ in Libya for an awful lot longer than MiloÅ¡ević had, and has embedded himself much more thoroughly into Libyan society than MiloÅ¡ević had.

Don’t get me wrong. For all I know Gaddafi will capitulate tomorrow. But it is reasonable to think that this attack on Libya will last at least 10 weeks, maybe longer. Maybe a lot longer. Given the fact that this may be the case, and the fact that we know, a priori, that NATO forces always and in all cases (of military attack) end up killing innocent civilians, we know that resistance to ‘us’ will grow and that eventually the number of people ‘we’ kill (if we stay long enough) will exceed the number of people Gaddafi might have killed.

Also: if Gaddafi doesn’t cave in that means ground troops and that means invasion, and occupation, perhaps long term occupation.

One last thing: if recent history has taught us anything it is that if there is slightest, tiniest, most miniscule chance of fucking everything up, the Americans will take that chance and run with it.

*I know this wasn’t an official ‘war aim’ and wisely so. But you are deluding yourself if you don’t think that the Americans wanted him gone by this time.

sg – I think the only point in your latest that merits a response is

how you can claim in the same comment that “expecting surrender from gaddafi is fundamentally unrealistic” and then complain about “the brush-off given to offers of ceasefire from Gaddafi.”

A ceasefire arrangement is obviously not a surrender and G might have hoped to retain some or all of his power. But of course the political objectives have been bolted firmly onto the humanitarian case, so that

Could it be that the rebels don’t trust him? That they want him to stand trial for murdering civilians? That they want to dismantle his police state?

become reasons why a ceasefire offer short of surrender just doesn’t count as a ceasefire offer, rather than (bad) reasons why it should be ignored.

If the rebels refuse to surrender, Gaddafi has the option to withdraw his troops unilaterally, and not threaten to “fight to the last bullet.”

Well that was the unrealistic option I mentioned wasn’t it.

Over-reliance on bellicose rhetoric (cf announcing on tv you’re going to kill everyone) is a Decent favourite, btw, as is this kind of smear:

You have a very consistent streak of victim blaming, and supporting the aggressor. You also are trying to turn this into a fight between islamists and dicatorship

(you could at least have had the small-d decency to just stick to ‘anti-American’, which in one sense (the non-kneejerk one) I’d probably be willing to let pass.)

The second point is perhaps worth answering (so that’s two actually) – the main point of the Islamic stuff was I suppose a bit of an ad hominem really against neocon GWOT types, which is not an especially important or useful thing to be doing I’ll admit.

But it’s also one small part of pointing out that the rebels are not necessarily an unproblematic successor to Gadaffi, committed to democracy human rights and apple pie. (And nor are all of them, it would appear if the West Point people are to be believed which is not necessarily the case, ordinary peaceful Egypt-style demonstrators who found themselves ‘turned into’ combatants by Juan Cole’s unexplained process).

Which is in turn one argument against precipitate regime change attempts in their favour, which is what we are observing despite your intransigent attempt to present it as a kind of pre-emptive rescue attempt which just happens to be made more tricky by being embedded in the middle of a civil war.

And I would note that the pro-coalition politicians and media are not interested in looking critically at the rebels/rebellion at all. Personally I think that is because the predominant aim is to get G, and the ‘break ’em down and build em up’ method means that continuing mayhem is not considered a bug, but in a sidelong kind of way, a feature.

Anyway I’ve wasted enough time on you, as Col Bat Guano would say.

sg:

” Perhaps an easier mistake not to repeat would be “opening fire on peaceful demonstrators” followed by “announcing on tv you’re going to kill everyone” then “shipping in mercenaries” and “bombing anyone you don’t like.””

Well, it must be a hard mistake to avoid, since the government of Bahrain and Saudia Arabia are doing just that (albeit with ground troops, not aircraft).

” I’m sure Gaddafi thought he could have his cake and eat it too – get paid for non-proliferation, get access to better weapons for killing demonstrators, and get to use them. Turns out that wasn’t true. Doesn’t mean he couldn’t still have benefited from the non-proliferation part of the deal.”

It’s a deal which many governments have taken advantage of, please note.

there hasn’t been any bombing in Bahrain

Just to keep plugging away, as far as anyone is able to establish, there weren’t any air attacks on protestors in Libya either, agreed?

Even ‘not very thoroughly’ is an overstatement, actually.

There’s something odd about this whole line of reasoning, like it subordinates the Libyan people and their political and humanitarian outcomes to the need to provide object lessons to others

Well, yes. That’s what a system of rules *does* — subordinates immediate outcomes to long-term incentives.

I thought everyone agreed he was going to kill both indiscriminately.

No, anyone who claims he was going to kill every last occupant of the city of Benghazi is being crazy or hyperbolic (probably the latter). Given that he wasn’t going to categorically kill every person in the city, you have to assume he was going to kill somewhat discriminately, though it would be completely fair to assert the hypothesis/assumption that he was going to kill insufficiently discriminately.

Perhaps the distinction is stupid/pointless outside of this thread, but I think it gets to the heart of the matter here (of liberal versus humanitarian intent): Khadafi is attempting to reassert the Libyan government’s control of and sovereignty over Libya. A good question is [a] should we let him, provided he plays by certain humanitarian rules of proportionality or [b] should we prevent him, on liberal-intervention grounds, because he and his government have forfeited all claims to legitimacy?

From what I can tell, the UNSC answer is “choose [b] but assert that we’re choosing [a]” — effectively collapsing the liberal-versus-humanitarian distinction. It seems to me like they’re not going to let Khadafi kill anyone who aided or abetted the attempt to overthrow or undermine the Libyan government — like they won’t let him kill large numbers of insurgents even if he demonstrates some attempt to keep his military attack proportional. I’m not at all certain or confident about my assessment, though.

Over on the Yemen thread: Alice de Tocqueville is making some realistic points (sg and possibly chris might find them a bit mind-boggling though).

You seem to have defined yourself into a position analogous to “No, one shouldn’t steal a gun to prevent a murder, because stealing is wrong”.

…Hey now.

No, really, officer, I had to steal a gun so I could go kill that guy. He was a murderer. Well, ok, he was going to be a murderer. He’d already hit somebody, and there’s lots of videotape showing he’s flown into a violent rage in the past. And sure, I shot a couple dozen uninvolved people in my attempt to shoot him. But if I had let him go into his rampage, he might’ve killed all five hundred people in that courtyard, and that’s much worse.

…Yours is the kind of argument I’m trying to encourage people not to make, because it leads to silly abstract recharacterizations of what’s going on. There’s no need to resort to analogy! And resorting to analogy like this just muddles and obfuscates exactly those details which we are most likely to disagree about.

OK, dealing with the the Comical Tendency feels a bit whack-a-mole at the moment. Before engaging with that issue, a couple of quick points:

1. It’s quite possible to believe that there was a humanitarian crisis and be skeptical either about the whole idea of armed intervention or about this intervention in particular. As far as I can see both ajay and I fall into at least the second of those categories. (ajay because he thinks that someone else should have been intervening; me because I’m not convinced that those in charge have a clue what they’re doing. As a specific example, I’d give Liam Fox – iirc – suggesting that Gaddafi was a target of air attacks and then having to walk it back. First: that strikes me as a clear case of failure of those at the top to agree about what was an what was not acceptable – and given that there’d been several weeks of diplomacy beforehand – lack of clarity there strikes me as likely to be symptomatic of similar lacks of clarity about other equally importat stuff. And secondly, because it’s clearly the wrong thing to do if you’re claiming that the purpose of the intervention is to prevent civilian casualties.)

2. I’m also inclined to think that the motives (and even more, the histories) of the defecting army officers in Benghazi might be a bit dodgy. So I’d agree: it’s not clear that if they won in a civil war – with outside support – they’d be an improvement.

3. As someone whose skepticism about the intervention is based on a belief that the people in charge might be shaky on the arse/elbow distinction, I reckon I’m precluded from thinking that there’s a carefully thought out plan to get hold of Libya’s oil.

I do however, have a question for those who see it that way: if Obama’s support for the SC resolution authorising intervention was ‘all about the oil’ was his apparent opposition to such a resolution back in February also ‘all about the oil’? If so, how’s that supposed to work?

4. That’s not to say I think that oil’s irrelevant here. While I doubt its the main motivation for intervention, I’d be surprised if it’s presence isn’t something which ends up having a substantial warping effect on all sorts of low-level decisions about what kinds of action to take.

5. Tim Wilkinson @ 96: I didn’t say that your 81 and 64 were inconsistent, and I didn’t even, in fact, mean to suggest it. I merely pointed out that you’d advanced both arguments – in response to d-squared’s suggestion that by addressing the time-line point, I hadn’t dealt with ‘the real issue’.

6. Also @ Tim Wilkinson: I’m glad to see that you are an expert with links. Could you provide one to support your suggestion @81 that the Libyan protestors were being fired at with non-metal (ie presumably plastic or rubber bullets)? Obviously, I’ll require cell-phone footage to be fully convinced, but a link to a reputable news source will do for now.

7. @ Tim W. again You suggest that the Libyan pilots might have been telling the people who debriefed them ‘what they wanted to hear’. Every news story I’ve checked says they were debriefed by the Maltese authorities. I’m not clear why the Maltese would want to hear that Gaddafi was ordering his airforce to fire on citizens. Could you elucidate?

8. I’m also confused by the reference to Iraqi defectors, but I guess the comparison is to Chalabi being in the pay of the Iranians. So I guess the suggestion is that the Libyan pilots might have been in the pay of Iran. Again, a link to support this suggestion – which I’ve not heard before – would move things forward.

9. Tim Wilkinson @ 119: You say that Gaddafi offered a cease-fire. For some reason you aren’t treating this claim with the skepticism you’ve treated everything else that’s been reported about this conflict. Why is that?

As it happened, I haven’t seen any reports that Gaddafi offered any such thing. I have read that he ‘announced’ a cease-fire (to foreign news media, but not domestically) without actually ceasing fire. For what its worth, even Hobbes thought that was a no-no.

10. @Dsquared: I’m still not clear what your answer to my question @92 was. But here’s a bunch of links to reports of land-line, cell-phone, and internet connections being cut off after 21st February.

http://www.google.com.tr/search?q=libya+telephone+lines+cut+february&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Particularly interesting links brought up by that search include this one from the UNHCR:

http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/publisher,RSF,,LBY,4d82268728,0.html

and for useful background, this one:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/libya-turns-off-the-internet-and-the-massacres-begin/711

11. Purely anecdotally: as someone who lives outside the USA and Western Europe, and in a country which is relatively stable and has strong legal institutions, but also a history of military involvement in politics, I’d think twice before filming an anti government demo, or publishing it on the internet. In an authoritarian state, transparency can cut both ways. I think that someone in Libya would have even more reason ton be cautious.

The fact that SAS troops are (or have been) in Libya isn’t a surprise if you were following the news in February: apparently they turned up in Benghazi, the provisional government told them to sod off, and William Hague had to explain red-fsaced to the house of commons, wtf they were supposed to be up to.

When you are talking about rules explicitly set up to govern situations like WW2

But we’re not, are we? Every a priori argument from high principles against intervention in Libya (a category which excludes factual arguments like “the evidence isn’t good enough”, which has already been addressed several times) is an equally good and noble-sounding argument against intervention in Auschwitz. Germany is a sovereign country with the right to resolve its own political issues, we ought to let them work out their own troubles, it’s better than encouraging countries to invade each other willy-nilly, and if we did try to intervene to prevent a humanitarian crisis, who knows where it might end? Millions of people could be killed. (And were, in fact.)

Although, in fact, the war started when Germany invaded someone else, removing the need to agonize over whether it was justifiable to start one, ISTM that the anti-intervention arguments prove too much.

Chris, uh, are you accusing the jewish of having attempted to overthrow the German government? Are you suggesting the jewish had already taken over control of several towns prior to the roundup and slaughter? … umm … ?!

…I’m pretty sure that’s crazy, and I’m pretty sure you’re not crazy, so, err, what is it you’re trying to say again?

p. barebones:

This Comical Tendency tag you seem unaccountably pleased with – is there some kind of allusion or pun in there, or is it just something you like the sound of? A bit of general advice – try not to be too persistent with phrases that refuse to catch. It’s a bit like trying to legislate your own nickname – doesn’t look good.

5. Tim Wilkinson @ 96: I didn’t say that your 81 and 64 were inconsistent, and I didn’t even, in fact, mean to suggest it. I merely pointed out that you’d advanced both arguments – in response to d-squared’s suggestion that by addressing the time-line point, I hadn’t dealt with ‘the real issue’.

Oh good that clears that up then…

6. Also @ Tim Wilkinson: I’m glad to see that you are an expert with links. Could you provide one to support your suggestion @81 that the Libyan protestors -were being- might conceivably for all you know have been fired at with non-metal (ie presumably plastic or rubber bullets)? Obviously, I’ll require cell-phone footage to be fully convinced, but a link to a reputable news source will do for now.

Fixed. You are really reaching here, you old comedian you. Here’s what I tapped out, with the outrageous ‘suggestion’ highlighted:

ajay @69 yes I’ve seen that, it sounds horrific and I don’t doubt that the crowd were fired on, possibly with metal bullets. But it’s exactly the kind of impressionistic stuff I’m talking about. No eyewitness report, no detail, not even any ballpark numbers. And even taking the worst plausible reading it soudns like a Bloody Sunday type event and not really a humanitarian crisis of the kind we are talking about, where bombing might be considered as a remedy.

7. @ Tim W. again You suggest that the Libyan pilots might have been telling the people who debriefed them ‘what they wanted to hear’. Every news story I’ve checked says they were debriefed by the Maltese authorities. I’m not clear why the Maltese would want to hear that Gaddafi was ordering his airforce to fire on citizens. Could you elucidate?

Now that is a devastating point and not in any way comical. In fact, I’ve since learned that the main debriefer had a heachache and didn’t want to hear anything at all, so I must accept that that point is discredited beyond repair.

8. I’m also confused by the reference to Iraqi defectors, but I guess the comparison is to Chalabi being in the pay of the Iranians. So I guess the suggestion is that the Libyan pilots might have been in the pay of Iran. Again, a link to support this suggestion – which I’ve not heard before – would move things forward.

I think I said Iraqi exiles – any lurid tale any of them could think of was immediately plastered all over the TV news (if you can plaster things over TV news). Also Cuban exiles on Castro, etc. But I like this stuff about Iran – is it your own material?

9. Tim Wilkinson @ 119: You say that Gaddafi offered a cease-fire. For some reason you aren’t treating this claim with the skepticism you’ve treated everything else that’s been reported about this conflict. Why is that?

Because I don’t actually think that all news reports are false – there are different aspects – is there a source, is it on the record, is it biased, is it likely to be misinformed, is it too vague, does it posit facts in outline which can’t be filled in in any plausible way, is it likely be subject to known influences etc etc. All the stuff one does in evaluating news reports, if one is put on notice by any prima facie warning sign anyway. This isn’t some idiosyncratic peculiarity of mine is it?

As it happened, I haven’t seen any reports that Gaddafi offered any such thing. I have read that he ‘announced’ a cease-fire (to foreign news media, but not domestically) without actually ceasing fire. For what its worth, even Hobbes thought that was a no-no.

I’ve provided the link I got this from before, but as you seem keen to whack that mole, I’ll dig it up for you again:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8391952/Libya-ceasefire-announcement-challenged-by-West.html

The well-polished narrative coming from the likes of Cameron is now that G announced it and then broke it almost immediately. But people don’t just do a ceasefire, do they. They require reciprocation, recognition. Gadaffi may or may not have been the one to break it, or he may not have told the rebels to stop defending themselves, or all sorts of things may have happened. But that there would be no meaningful ceasefire was a self-guaranteeing prophecy because it was simply never taken seriously by those who mattered. The cartoon Gadaffi these comedians portray can always be relied on to do the most duplicitous and venal thing possible in any circumstances. But I’m willing to argue the toss over it. Maybe serious consideration was given to making it work by those in a position to do so, but I haven’t come across any links suggesting that was the case.

RE: phones – but the rebels apparently have an organisation – and they are in direct contact with the press. The point is that if anyone had recorded any footage (and aren’t we talking about a lot of casualties in a big crowd?), they could be expected to try and get it out, and doing so would be considered very much worth doing. And even in the absence of any phone or web network, it could be organised pretty easily by giving the phone to the reporters. But in any case, there just aren’t any detailed accounts or anything – it’s all insubstantial. Kinell.

RE: SAS: yes, we know. A bit crazed to harbour scepticism about full and frank reporting of the, er, covert op, I realise. But IIRC, the story – or impression given/taken – was that those were the only seven SAS, and had just arrived, and were captured straight way, and then went home ASAP.

…And I just realized that this line of discussion implicitly compares Gaddafi to Hitler. I’m not sure if that means the (sub?) thread is over and I lose, or not. After all, some other people *are* mass murdering dictators and they ought to be called on it, oughtn’t they?

a category which excludes factual arguments like “the evidence isn’t good enough”, which has already been addressed several times

“Evidence” of what, though? What’s the proper threshold for an action as severe as an military attack aimed at overthrowing a foreign government? Gaddafi’s a bad guy, but so was Saddam.

Say that Gaddafi has committed “atrocities” and of course there is plenty of evidence. But atrocities worthy of invasion?

Like WMD in Iraq, “atrocities” are a red herring. WMD was so broadly defined that even if we had found, say, a serious chemical warfare capability in Baghdad, it wouldn’t have come close to justifying the invasion. Likewise, Gaddafi is a villain, but it’s hard to see how his villainy is distinct from, say, Saddam’s or that of other despots whose countries we acknowledge that we have no business invading.

If atrocities are necessary for dictators in certain situations to retain power, then a humanitarian intervention will deny to a government the very tool it needs to survive. This denial is, therefore, little different from the liberal intervention, which would seek to do the same thing. Liberal or humanitarian, the government has become the enemy.

Therefore the dictator will be confronted with three options:

1 – Attack the intervention force;
2 – Retreat, dig in, and begin to commit atrocities using means not easily stopped by intervention forces, e.g. smaller death squads already infiltrated into an urban area – this is the “long war” promises by Gadhafi;
3 – Roll the dice with a cease-fire, and bargain hard for a role in a new government, and use that to rebuild;
4 – Flee.

We have foreclosed options 3 and 4 to Gadhafi.
Attacking the intervention forces isn’t possible at this stage since they’re at FL60.
That leaves him 2, the long war, punctuated by terrorism, and other unconventional tactics.

This can be a very aggressive long war, with continued efforts to locate military goods outside the normal channels. In fact, G’s desperate straits might lead to some innovative plans of action that would be troubling to a great many people.

So, let’s be real about this. Gadhafi thinks he needs his arms, his ability to PUNISH the peoples; and yeah he thinks he needs to stay in power. The Western powers disagree, and will continue to degrade his military forces.

The hope, I suppose, that the loyalists lose morale, depose Gadhafi, or defect. That outcome would be ideal.

But if it appears unlikely, then let’s get this done. We’ve been committed. Obliterate Libya’s military, seek out and destroy Gadhafi – his bill was long since past due anyway – and let’s stop fiddling around with tit-for-tat. This utterly confused military exercise is going to get us… the need for additional confused military exercises.

Why are we prolonging this? Bring forward the necessary force, and offer him trial at the Hague; when he refuses, keep him on the phone, and obliterate any number of his “elite” units; tell him he can still save the lives of his men if he were willing to give an account of himself, before the law, where all can hear him. And if he proves obstinate, then wish him well, as he is about to stop existing.

And yes… we’ve ended at liberal intervention. We’ve ended at war.

I have been following the discussion on this thread and the previous one with a great deal of frustration, one that I couldn’t begin to articulate. Fortunately, Aaron Bady sums it up nicely for me at zunguzungu:

“I would suggest, in fact, that it is precisely because there are no stakes in doing so that so many influential columnists and bloggers — who had no powerful opinions about Libya before the NFZ was declared, when their influence might have mattered – are now strongly asserting one position or another, vigorously battling each other over a decision that has just become academic. And while this very public debate over Libya (after the decision) allows us to pretend we have a real, functioning public sphere, self-important debate tricks us into thinking that debate actually is important, that “taking a position” is somehow a valuable and necessary social function. I would say, instead, that the fact that the decision has already been taken is actually what relieves their opinions of any force, thereby freeing them to perform their ideology for each other, to position themselves for the next big confrontation with their ideological foes, and to place their cultural and intellectual capital on the market and try to make it grow.”

An added caveat.
One should at least pay attention to the opinions of those with more at stake. Throwing up your hands is not the only alternative to spouting off.

Aaron Bady quoted at 162:
self-important debate tricks us into thinking that debate actually is important

whereas of course everyone knows that debate has no importance whatsoever … indeed, come to think of it, why are the Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemenis, Bahrainis protesting? these poor misguided people seem to think the right to engage in meaningless, unimportant, or should I say factitiously self-important, debate is worth something.

Coalition forces continue to destroy Gadhafi’s ground forces, especially those most loyal to the regime:

[Gen. Ham] said allied warplanes were also attacking troops from the Libyan 32nd Brigade, which is based in Tripoli and commanded by Colonel Qaddafi’s son Khamis. Colonel Qaddafi has used that brigade in other crackdowns, General Ham said, and allied commanders suspect it may be brought up to counterattack the rebel forces in the next few days. N.Y. Times

As this continues, one wonders when the proponents of humanitarian intervention will agree that, in this case and similar cases, R2P will require the destruction of the government – or liberal intervention.

No, I think that data has already been referenced in this thread and others, particularly the promise of Gadhafi’s forces to inflict massive casualties within Benghazi.

What is your point then? (Andrew, I mean, obviously).

Tim, are you worried that this might actually work in spite of your apocalyptic predictions and hackling?

What is “this” and how are we defining “actually work”? I assume the definition of “actually work” for a humanitarian intervention is: Khadafi retains power, the rebels/protesters/overthrow-sympathizers are deposed and brought to trial within the legal framework of Libya’s current status quo government (and probably all executed for treason in a semi-sham trial), and the Libyan military is reauthorized to conduct whatever functions are deemed legitimate by the international community, with Khadafi’s various assets unfrozen and the open availability of billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons for his purchase. (Not blood for oil per se, but the renewal and continuation of a ‘weapons for oil’ agreement.)

It’s not at all clear to me that I should be excited about, or even patiently resigned to, the outcome I just described. I literally am worried that the intervention might work! In the event that those in charge go ahead and admit they’re looking to bring about a regime change through killing off the Libyan army, I have my own set of worries for that, but that’s a very different (and perhaps more honest) universe than ours.

Tim, my point is that a humanitarian intervention will become, in certain circumstances, nearly indistinguishable from a liberal intervention. Those circumstances, which apply here, occur when the party from which civilians must be protected is the government, and the government believes that the very measures forbidden by the foreign force are those necessary to its survival.

Thus the difference in practice between liberal and humanitarian interventions in such circumstances, from the perspective of limited conflict, is almost nil. Regime-change is the goal of both.

And that is precisely what is happening here, albeit more slowly than would be advantageous.

I don’t regard humanitarian intervention in this case as a fig leaf for more strategic concerns – from a realist, strategic vantage I think Libya simply isn’t worth it, and I question the wisdom of getting involved. I think the humanitarian concerns are justified, and likely a key motivating factor.

BUT the pretensions of an engagement limited to protecting civilians are silly and counterproductive, in that they limit the formation of the political will, military resources, and the crystal-clear signaling to resolve the issue sooner rather than later.

Thus the signal to those around Gadhafi should be, and should have been from the beginning: throw him over the side and come to the bargaining table, or drown with him. Instead those around him heard about the limited nature of the NFZ and incoherent denials of regime-change as a goal.

The air-strikes should have been aimed from the start at completely crippling Gadhafi’s military and security apparatus, not simply its air-power and mechanized capabilities.

And the nation should have been told, clearly, the course upon which we are now committed.

wow Tim, you’ve gone from claims of islamic insurgency to now suggesting “western influence” on the rebels. Who was it – the CIA? You’re really desperate to prove they had military aims from the start, aren’t you?

Sorry, again that’s to Andrew, of course. (What is this, the Hall of the bloody Mountain King?)

Yeah, I think we get each others’ positions. One more elaboration of an aspect of mine I think I haven’t mentioned, and which is compatible with a R2P (though not a Duty2P) justification (or supposed justification) for intervention. I would suggest what I consider to be two further motives for a regime change assault on Gadaffi (which I think we both agree is happening, and actually we both agree that IF it is to happen, twere better done with a bit more focus and a bit less of the old meatgrinder).

1. Choose Gadaffi:
Because (among other things) it distracts from – and is explicitly used to resist demands for intervention of any kind in Bahrain, Yemen. (The latter done by a useful formula – just because we can’t do everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do something. The relevant words (in bold) are asserted in a subtle way by being treated as an assumption, so any argument about double standards becomes one about whether to intervene in Libya (and that argument becomes one about saving protestors from massacre, or you think you can get away with it, ‘genocide’).

This point at the very least cannot have escaped the attention of those involved, and specifically of the dictators of the Arab League whose blessing was claimed as providing additional legitimacy for the action. And if one accepts that increasing pressure meant something-or-other was going to have to be done against one of those oil producing ME arab dictatorships, Gadaffi is the obvious choice, since he is not really signed up in line with Western interests, and is a prominent hate figure and all-round pain in the arse to boot, whereas working arrangements were in place with the other contemporary candidates, and the idea of jeopardising those was pretty unthinkable.

2. Choose all-out regime change war:
Because (among other things) if you are going to intervene, you may as well go for full war, not only because of some of the reasons given for picking Gadaffi, but also because only in that way can Western powers ensure they are in the driving seat and in a position to influence, if not outright direct, the process of rebuilding society (as well as oil production – important – and everything else – bonus) from the ground up, as a Western-allied state with an ultra-neoliberal constitution.

The war strategy also allows exciting and supply-absorbing hi-tech methods to be used, and (it is probably hoped) may mean it is possible to avoid domestic-casualty-intensive peacekeeping methods involving ground troops. It also ironically allows the intervention to appear less intrusive – it is still being described on the BBC as a ‘no-fly-zone’ (no detail provided) that levels the playing field, so helping the rebels to help themselves.

(Here’s mild-mannered militarist Ming Campbell: We could keep out of the Arab world but we would be giving up an opportunity {to nurture democracy and} to exercise {a benign} influence. We would create a vacuum which others less well disposed to our interests would be eager to fill. (de-emphasis mine)

Oh yeah, one more thing before I bury my objectively pro-fascist uniform and blend into the general population: I think there’s a bit of tension between

a humanitarian intervention will become, in certain circumstances, nearly indistinguishable from a liberal intervention. Those circumstances, which apply here, occur when the party from which civilians must be protected is the government, and the government believes that the very measures forbidden by the foreign force are those necessary to its survival.

and

BUT the pretensions of an engagement limited to protecting civilians are silly and counterproductive, in that they limit the formation of the political will, military resources, and the crystal-clear signaling to resolve the issue sooner rather than later.

This can be resolved, by specifying that ‘protecting civilians’ in the second part is meant in a ‘narrow’ sense familiar from the formula ‘narrow self-interest’, and on a proper understanding of ‘protecting civilians’, the difference in practice between liberal and humanitarian interventions in such circumstances, from the perspective of limited conflict, is almost nil. Regime-change is the goal of both.

There’s obviously the danger that a broad sense of ‘protecting civilians’ will be stretched further than is justifiable (as I would suggest has happened here). But even when it is not, I don’t think the (‘near -‘, for interesting senses of ‘near’) equivalence thesis can be maintained, since for example ceasefire/conditional surrender is urgently to be sought in the humanitarian case, and resisted/ignored in the regime change one. Only by presupposing implacable and unmitigable brutality can the two be made equivalent, and that is a substantial thesis which even in the most favourable case is never so well-known to apply as to establish total regime change as a fixed goal.

Q: will the noises coming out of Italy and Germany about trying to arrange a ceasefire be given any consideration at all by the US/NATO? I predict that they won’t, regardless of how viable they might in fact be.

Alright then a quick rejoinder: I’d just say

1. that the pressure to act – in some way – on e.g. Bahrain might be greater if there were any coverage of what was going on there. Libya coverage seems to have displaced any attempt to report on what appears to far as one can tell to be a Saudi military assault on protestors. And there’s stuff like the BBC’s establishment to the point of caricature security correspondent Frank Gardner using not-being-Libya as a reason why Bahrain is just not that bad, the idea of intervening not even being considered.

2. I think (and have thought from the start) that there will be boots on the ground, with soldiers’ feet in and everything, after the fighting kicks off in the West. The next few weeks will see a gradual acceptance of the idea, as serious commentators say that unfortunately the unpredictable course of events means we are now committed, can’t cut and run, humanitarianism, all the eminently predictable reasonis – which by then will quite possibly have been made entirely valid by the facts created on the ground.

Also, I don’t think any of these motives have to be all that strong – there are a lot of vectors which always push towards war, and there just isn’t much downside from the POV of the likes of Clinton or Cameron.

I’d thought the Arab League backing for the “humanitarian intervention” in Libya was already based on an implicit or sotto voce deal for “non-intervention” in Arabia. No?

Tim, an even quicker rejoinder:

1. Pressure by whom? The American public wasn’t pressing for an intervention in Bahrain.

2. The American public will not accept a humanitarian argument for putting troops (beyond the special operations and similar forces that are likely already there) into Libya for the purpose of battle; nor would the Republicans in Congress; nor will the proposal be met with warm agreement by Secretary Gates; nor, for that matter, will many Democrats be able to support such a proposal.

And given that Obama has already committed to NOT doing so, I don’t think he’s left much room to reverse course.

Those are the politics. From a strategic vantage, the US military already has its hands full, and I think stretching them further by a deployment of ground forces in Libya would be so immensely unwise that not even the strongest proponents of intervention in Libya, namely Clinton and (Susan) Rice, could support it.

I am willing to bet 1 million Crooked Timber dollars on my view.

Pressure by anyone, on anyone capable of doing it. That has (by the peculiar logic of these things) been forestalled.

I wouldn’t want to invest in it, but I’m willing to predict a permanent US base in Libya within, say, 5 years.

With notably rare exceptions, American attacks on Arab countries have always gone swimmingly, so what’s the problem?