As the Western intervention in the Libyan civil war prepares to enter its third week, it’s been interesting reading the various American takes on the conflict, particularly those coming from people with a long track record of opposing our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Glenn Greenwald and Juan Cole had a typically polite, good faith exchange over it this morning.) Something I’ve noticed, from both military/foreign policy people as well as people who typically focus more on domestic political issues is an underlying assumption that this war is a lot more American than it actually seems to be.
For example, here’s Digby:
Juan Cole makes many good points in his piece and I can’t fault him. I still disagree overall because I think that the motives are much more complex and opaque than the government is admitting and that we aren’t particularly good at this and usually make things worse. Most importantly, I think we are fighting wars in this region mostly because we are engaged in a Great Game over oil and that it needs to be discussed so that we can start having a rational discussion about energy.To the extent that there are other strategic reasons, the most important is around keeping nuclear arms out of the hands of extremists and rogue states and this latest adventure is probably counter-productive for the reasons Steve Clemons and Jonathan Schwartz raised above.
Digby is one of the most perceptive writers going when it comes to American politics, but that focus on us seems to be obscuring any wider, international context. Here’s the equally keen Amanda Marcotte making roughly the same error:
My broader concern has little, honestly, to do with this latest war adventure and more my frustrations with the U.S. and its defense program in general. It’s fucking ridiculous that we are perpetually at war with someone, but we’ve completely abandoned the Constitutional requirement to declare war before going to war. I’m not an absolutist on this or anything. If troops are attacked or our country is invaded, feel free to self-defend before a formal declaration. But the fact that no President, Democratic or Republican, even bothers to pay tribute to this legal restraint on what has become a tyrannical power bothers me.
And I think the reason is simply that our military is ridiculously large. When you spend as much money as we do on a military year after year, I think it starts to seem criminal not to use it.
Nor is this limited to people who usually stick mostly to American topics. Here’s Stephen Walt:
The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance. Both groups extol the virtues of democracy, both groups believe that U.S. power — and especially its military power — can be a highly effective tool of statecraft. Both groups are deeply alarmed at the prospect that WMD might be in the hands of anybody but the United States and its closest allies, and both groups think it is America’s right and responsibility to fix lots of problems all over the world. Both groups consistently over-estimate how easy it will be to do this, however, which is why each has a propensity to get us involved in conflicts where our vital interests are not engaged and that end up costing a lot more than they initially expect.
The above are all valid points, but they suffer from an American-centric thinking that, while not immaterial to Libya, is far less prevalent than in more recent Western adventures. Marcotte’s observation that a big part of why we’re involved is because our (fantastically expensive) whiz-bang military capabilities make “doing something” relatively easy to contemplate is true as far as it goes, as is Walt’s note that ideologically different domestic trains of thought often come to the same interventionist conclusion. What both miss is that the Libyan show, while heavily engaging American forces, was primarily pushed by our European allies.
Yes, our military capacity makes getting involved both easier to do and easier to justify, but it’s not as though Britain, France and the rest of Europe don’t have very similar capabilities when it comes to Libya. The European powers may not be able to operate drones over Yemen, or maintain fleets of aircraft carriers and support vessels, or have the economic and diplomatic juice to secure bases all over Central Asia, but Libya is a hop skip and a jump from southern Europe and they’ve all got perfectly capable fighter and strike aircraft. Plus they have plenty of cause to use them in this situation.
What seems to be forgotten in the American commentariat’s rush to declare this a potential quagmire or score points on one another over Obama’s motivations or failings is that the Europeans have a lot more at stake here than we do. Make no mistake, despite the fact that we’ve been doing plenty of the bombing, if Gaddafi’s regime had been allowed to crush the rebels two weeks ago it’d be in a position to cause an enormous amount of trouble for Europe. For starters there’s its ability to unleash a wave of migrants on a continent that’s on pins and needles over immigration. There’s also the potential disruption of the flow of energy north over the Mediterranean. Both of those actions could lead to serious economic problems for a continent that’s already at fighting itself over austerity and growth. And, oh yeah, there’s also that pesky history of Gaddafi’s backing terrorism in Europe. Whatever happens in Libya, it’s going to affect our allies a lot more than it’s going to affect us.
Then there’s the fact that Libya is located between Tunisia and Egypt, two countries whose recent popular uprisings have aligned themselves with the Libyan rebels who would’ve surely been massacred by now absent Western action. There are an almost unlimited number of ways that a reinvigorated Gaddafi regime could either become embroiled with its neighbors or sabotage their upcoming elections. Again, all of this would be felt far more keenly in London, Paris and Brussels than it would be in Washington.
Consider the situation if Obama had told David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy “No, we’re busy, do it your own damn selves”. They would’ve had to take greater risks with their pilots, they probably would’ve had to fly their planes at a faster tempo, but bombing a country so close to them is well within their wheelhouse. So things may not have turned out much differently if we hadn’t used our unmanned Tomahawks and invisibly invincible B-2s to target Libya’s air defense system. But the risk to French, British and allied pilots would’ve been greater, and a dead or captured European pilot, when American equipment that could’ve done the job much more safely was sitting unused, could’ve caused a serious problem between old friends. Europe can control the skies over Libya without our help, but they can’t do it as well or as safely.
The United States is involved, there’s no mistaking that, but we aren’t dropping bombs because we’ve got a sociopathic president and a cabal of foreign policy wackaloons who want to invade and occupy a foreign country. (Let’s all remember that Bush, Rumsfeld and Bremer weren’t planning on letting the Iraqis vote for shit, they wanted a nice puppet state. Ali al-Sistani forced their hand.) We’re involved because our oldest and closest allies deemed it in their national interests to take a chance on a big mess to prevent an even bigger one. Our debate seems to be ignoring that, and instead is falling back into a pattern established by Afghanistan and Iraq, two wars where the United States was far more out front than it is in Libya.
