From a simple “the bastards are lying again” point of view, it is easy to snort at the Western lust for bombing Libya under the risible guise of protecting civilians. With the partial exception of the Persian Gulf War, every time in recent memory that American/European white people have decided that Arab/Asian brown people needed a lesson in ordinance it has turned out to be folly and the unarmed have died in large numbers. Whether we’re talking about the catastrophically inconclusive embargo and no-fly zone over Iraq in the 1990s, the woefully misguided cruise missile strikes of 1998, or the incalculably wrongheaded invasion of 2003, hindsight argues against anything but inaction. And that’s before we even remember that it’s less than a month until the 25th anniversary of Ronnie and Margie’s excellent adventure on Tripoli.
All of which is to say that there are a great number of reasons to be skeptical that dropping freedom bombs on another Arab country will produce anything but decades long reverberations of suck. If we take diplomatic rhetoric at face value and assume that the planet’s roughly one hundred and ninety nation-states are a big community, then cartoonish diptards like Gaddafi are the unsavory boors at the family reunion. No one wants to be seen with them, but neither does anyone want to take the time and trouble to move to palookaville and spend several years setting things straight. It’s best to smile politely for the group photograph and ignore them the rest of the time. There is a reason the great powers of the world, from Beijing to Moscow to the fun loving metropolises of the West, tend to let these nasty puppets alone.
The now month long disruption in Libya has disturbed that polite silence. Normally that too could be ignored. Whether it’s a south-east Asian wastrel like Burma or another sub-Saharan shithole, the better parts of the world prefer to ignore the places where bullets and penises go where they please. For reasons of economy (oil), politics (Gaddafi’s an ass), and geography (second star to the right and straight on to Lampedusa), Libya can’t be so ignored.
Add that all together and you have an insistently grave – albeit patchwork – cause for war. It’s also the reason that well meaning critics trying to highlight the hypocrisy of intervention by asking why we’re not doing the same thing in Yemen or Cote D’Ivoire or anywhere else miss the point. Libya gets attention for (roughly) the same reason that Bosnia did in 1994 while Rwanda murdered itself. It is too important and too close to Europe, still the greatest concentration of wealth and peace on the planet.
With their high scores on the UN human development index and relentless commitment to the rhetoric of international law and human rights, none of the European powers can abide so public a disgrace across the Mediterranean lake. The problem is that neither can they simply impose order. Nearly seventy years of polite and lawful cooperation, and centuries of colonialism before that, mean that simply invading and deposing Gaddafi is off the table. Which is why, as Juan Cole pointed out on Thursday, they got real authorization from the UN Security council, for the first time since the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991.
Granting that the outcome of the war, upon which everything else depends, is still very much up in the air, this is a tremendously hopeful development. It’s not a binding precedent, but it does provide a real counterexample to the military adventurism that has characterized America and the West for so very long. This is particularly encouraging in light of the fact that Congress has basically ceded its war making powers to the Executive Branch. The UN isn’t about to have veto power over 1600 any time soon, but the only way to get American institutions to respect international norms again is to, you know, respect them.
Of course, there’s still the tricky matter of fighting a successful war. Not only have the Europeans placed a bet on the Libyan rebels being able to defeat Gaddafi, they’ve also de facto placed a bet on them being able to successfully govern once he’s gone. If one nightmarish regime replaces another the entire endeavor will be discredited. The same is true if some kind of grim stalemate results, one that could potentially escalate into ever bloodier Western intervention. But if one believes in international institutions, this particular war deserves to be given a chance, if for no other reason than it’s already started.
