Intervention – Arcade Fire (live on KCRW)
People really love (for other people) to fight wars. Even people who are otherwise strongly committed to liberal or left-wing values. This post from Jonathan Chait is a prime example. He says “I’m mindful of my lack of relevant expertise, but the case for a no-fly zone and arms shipments to the rebels seems more compelling than the case against. It’s the possibility of a disaster against the likelihood of one.”
And then he goes on to say “Second, the Obama administration’s decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan show that it’s obviously not allergic to the use of military force.” This seems like an irrelevant point. Does anyone seriously think that Obama would have initiated these wars had they not already been started when he entered office?
I’m not categorically opposed to the idea of a no fly zone, but let’s not mince words here. If we’ve learned anything from the previous decade it’s that military interventions are never as simple as they seem. And if we learned anything from the PREVIOUS decade it’s that intervening in non-European parts of the world is likely to provoke significant blowback both at home and abroad—often forcing disentanglement on worse terms.
If you want to make the case that Libya is equivalent to Rwanda, it seems like you have quite a steep hill to climb for making that argument.
And even if you think there is a good case for intervention, it is irresponsible in the extreme to ignore the context of OTHER arguments for reform. That is: who are your allies on this issue? What are their objectives? If you both agree on a no fly zone, is it because you see our relationship to Libya, democracy, the Middle East, etc. in exactly the same terms? Presumably not. So if we DO get involved, who is actually going to assert control over the development of that intervention?
I’m willing to be persuaded that we ought impose a no fly zone. But our presumption should be strongly against this premise. Not out of a status quo bias (as Chait assumes) but because the rush to military response has all kinds of hard-to-quantify biases built into it.
I’m much more interested in people taking these points seriously BEFORE military action than I am in heartfelt mea culpas and investigations of what went wrong in the aftermath (c.f. widespread liberal support for the Iraq war). It’s really easy to get caught up in the moment. We owe it to ourselves, to the people of Libya, and to the world at large to remain cognizant of this.