A perennial question among the more thoughtful political types is why things don’t change, why the discourse doesn’t get better. A big part of that is that we have no history. The news cycle is relentless and people never seem to look back. It takes failure of world-historic proportions to prompt retrospective consideration of the wisdom of previous commitments, and as we saw with the hand-wringing over Iraq, that never actually leads to anybody losing their jobs because they got it wrong. But it’s still better to look back than not to. If we have no history, nothing will ever, ever get better.
Well: Libya is a nightmare. A humanitarian intervention has led to a humanitarian crisis.
So: you guys want to step up and talk about why you were wrong? I mean I don’t expect the real Samantha Power warmongering types to admit they were wrong. But can we get a little social pressure for our political class to own up to the fact that they were wrong, please? You guys want to weigh in, here? Zack Beauchamp? Spencer Ackerman? Juan Cole? Jon Chait? Garance Franke-Ruta? John Judis? Christopher Hitchens, I’m sorry to say, is no longer around to apologize. But how about you, Fareed Zakaria? John Heilemann? Andrew Sullivan, at least— and his readers— are getting frank about the damage done. But Shadi Hamid, how about you? Anne-Marie Slaughter, we already know, is beyond helping. The whole New Republic will never stop being wrong about war. And Jeffrey Goldberg has built a career on being wrong but acting really pompous about it. But you, Peter Beinart? You have another of those brooding apologies in you? Matt Steinglass, still feeling good?
I could go on. I keep score, you guys. Because every time you get these things wrong, people die.
Me, I wrote dozens of posts about Libya, at the time. You can check my record. (And right on, Matt Yglesias, Radley Balko, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and of course the always prescient Daniel Larison, among others.)
You guys. The people who want to make things better. The people who think there should be accountability in punditry. The ones who think professionals should take responsibility for their professional work. This is where it happens, or it doesn’t. Either the community that is the elite political media pressures people to examine their support for this failed intervention and in so doing perhaps gain insight for the future, or it doesn’t. But this is where it happens. This is where the rubber meets the road. So what are you guys gonna do?
Poor Sully. He took the unpopular stance early, then got scared and backed down a few months later. The worst of both worlds.
Also, there’s a 0% chance Hitchens would’ve recanted on Libya. In fact, his rationale wouldn’t even have changed: when evil strongmen do evil things, it’s the personal charge of the United States to depose them.
I wouldn’t hold my breath.
On a similar note, it’s perversely amusing to watch the coverage of ISIS. A Martian who began observing our mass media only within the past couple of months would be absolutely convinced that ISIS has simply just appeared out of nowhere. I don’t know if the typical American has a five minute attention span, but the typical MSM pundit definitely does.
It might be interesting to compile a list of every country the U.S. has either invaded or bombed in recent decades, for whatever reason, and note which of them are on the fast track to liberal democracy.
One step ahead of you, to no avail: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/keeping-score-the-libya-intervention-good-idea-or-tragic-11119
I think the pertinent question when talking about Libyan national self-determination is whether a majority of Libyans (1) would have preferred Gaddafi win the war and whether (2) they opposed intervention from the U.S. and NATO. Because it really doesn’t matter what any of these pundits and journalists you listed think — including yourself. And everything I’ve seen, including polling, shows an overwhelming “no” to both of those questions.
This comment belongs in the Smithsonian.
In a discussion about the deployment of military force by a democratic country, you’re claiming that the opinions of the people of that country are irrelevant, because the people of another country wanted it to happen. Like the American military is a U-Haul that anybody gets to rent, except the American people. How hard are you going to run with this theory, eh? I can think of quite a few civil wars where one side would have loved to have called down US ordnance. Do the different sides get a vote off? If ISIS really moves the needle with the people, they get to use our airforce, no questions asked? That sound like a smart policy to you?
This is the inanity of this kind of militarism taken to its logical ends: American military projection is so ubiquitous that the people who pay for that military, and ostensibly control it, have in fact not only no right to stop the deployment of its power, but are irrelevant to conversations about it. Unlike you. Your opinion, I’m sure, is very, very important.
” A humanitarian intervention has led to a humanitarian crisis.”
Uh, no Freddie. Get a grasp on yourself. A humanitarian intervention took place in one small corner as the Libyan people wrote their current hard chapter.
The world doesn’t begin and end between Fogy Bottom and the Pentagon. Nor in the electrons of America’s
wordyitty-bitty blogs that you track so assiduously, it seems.-dlj.
ha so it was so immensely important to defeat Qaddafi, and in fact we were told constantly that the insurgency would surely be defeated by his army if we did nothing, and yet now, we were just a bit player? In addition to being flat-out, historically wrong when it comes to the actual military campaign that you’re talking about, it’s a bizarre way to defend the deployment of our military force. If you’re really claiming that NATO’s intervention was irrelevant to the progress of the Libyan civil war, then that’s an argument against our participation. You can’t have it both ways.
As it stands, the “current hard chapter” is as dramatic a slide into out-and-out chaos and bloodshed as I can imagine. But I suppose you view those as details.
Foggy, dammit. But Fogy will do…
-dlj.
The introduction to the Hitchens’ post you link to is a fascinatingly *correct* argument against intervention, that he then proceeds to argue against for the rest of the piece:
1)Libya contains too many unknowns for us to be sure whom we would be supporting. We thus run the risk of breaching the principle of primo non nocere, or “first do no harm.”
2) The relative calm of Tripoli, when contrasted with the upheaval in Benghazi, points to a historic east-west divide between the former provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which predates the formation of the modern Libyan state and might itself be destabilizing. The West might inadvertently ignite a sectarian regionalism culminating in fragmentation or partition.
3) The U.N. Security Council will not legalize the means with which to remove Muammar Qaddafi.
4) The Arab world is highly dubious about Western intervention and quick to take offense at anything smacking of a revived colonialism.
5) A “no-fly zone” is less simple than it sounds, since it necessarily involves a confrontation with a Russian-built air-defense system and would almost certainly necessitate the next step, which would be boots-on-the-ground military action and perhaps a period of occupation, for which the portents are not encouraging.
6) Political change in Libya should, in any case, be the work—as with the precedents of Tunisia and Egypt—of home-grown social forces.
“Why the discourse doesn’t get better”
This question has never occurred to me.
Dear Freddie, thanks for the post. I think this is an important discussion to have, although, obviously, I think we’re probably not going to see eye to eye anytime soon. That said, in the interest of responding to your call for “mea culpas,” I responded on Twitter. I couldn’t find you, but the series of tweets begins here: https://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/507595407422406656. If you do get a chance, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
“But the English government held on to its precarious position in northern France to the bitter end. As they saw it, and as all regimes involved in a hopeless and costly war have always seen it, there was no alternative. Duke John of Bedford, … who had struggled manfully to make the Henrician system in Normandy work, summed up the position. He was willing to concede much. But on the question of the English king’s claim to be also king of France, almost the only question that mattered, he would yield nothing. If Henry VI were to abandon his claim the world would think he was too weak to maintain it and, moreover, that ‘all the wars and conquests hath been but usurpations and tyranny.’ ”
–Geoffrey Hindley, England in the Age of Caxton
Amid your cynicism you forget what was going to happen to benghazi if NATO didnt intervene. As a Libyan who’s family lives in benghazi my deepest thanks goes out to those who struck Gaddaffi’s convoy.
Almost every bosnian in sarajevo ive spoken to wishes NATO had done something similar earlier.
Any military action can be approved of by individual people. There were Vietnamese who benefited from the American war there, Iraqis who benefited from American war there, and so on. That cannot be the sole or principle criterion for whether a war is wise or moral.
There’s nothing about the facts on the ground now, as far as I can see, that throw into serious doubt the following narrative:
By the time NATO engaged in a limited intervention, the likelihood of Qaddafi both a) ending the war and b) surviving the war as a ruling regime were extremely limited. The likelihood of a peaceful period immediately following the collapse of his regime has always been vanishingly low. Eventually, Qaddafi was going to fall and the chaos of the vacuum would begin. The relevant question would be how gruesomely high his body count would be before he was done. There are still good reasons to believe that some of the NATO bombing prevented significant unnecessary deaths in Benghazi and elsewhere. There are very few reasons to believe foreign military intervention is a significant factor in explaining Libya’s problems today.
You’re not doing the work you need to do before you get to be this self-righteous, and you’re evaluating Libya through a profoundly Western-centric lens. Stop trying to score points, stop reflexively siding with your tribe, stop viewing Libya as a cudgel to beat your domestic political enemies, and start thinking harder. The particular ways in which the Qaddafi regime organized power meant that the horrors of post-Qaddafi Libya were baked into the cake long ago. There are good reasons to believe the only thing NATO intervention effected was the number of people Qaddafi was able to take with him on the way out.
The distance with which you’ve moved the goal posts from the original definition of what this war was about and for is truly staggering.
I picture a cartoon with Uncle Sam standing fearfully on a chair looking down at a mouse named ISIL.