Confronting the Urge to Urge on the Libyan Intervention

Also, reports Gareth Porter:

Iraqi intelligence has indications that the original al Qaeda in Iraq network is in the process of leaving the country for Libya.

Perhaps most troubling of all to progressives was the administration’s failure to seek congressional approval and the dangerous precedent that sets. Still, as with withholding assistance because of Washington’s bias against helping the Bahraini protesters, it would have been dogmatic to spurn Libya out of concern that intervening without congressional approval would set a precedent.

In fact, an even more dangerous precedent may have been set. Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett at Race for Iran on those who promote humanitarian intervention for their own purposes:

Above all, they want to establish a robust, international mechanism for humanitarian intervention, and saw the Administration’s response to the Libyan case as critical to this end. . . . Make no mistake — Obama has supplemented the George W. Bush doctrine of “preventive” war with his own doctrine of “preventive” humanitarian intervention.  And there are clearly forces in the American body politic — if not within the Obama Administration itself — who would ultimately like to use this as a precedent for eventual action against Iran.

If not familiar with its history, you could be forgiven for wondering how a practice with such a benevolent name as humanitarian intervention got such a bad rap? After all the United Nations mandated the Responsibility to Protect. But, as mentioned earlier, it’s tough to be certain whether those on whose behalf you’re intervening are worthy beneficiaries. In the course of providing its recent history in a nutshell at BBC, Adam Curtis writes that

. . . humanitarian interventionism offers us no political way to judge who it is we are helping in Libya — and thus what the real consequences of our actions might be. Even if one’s instincts are to help those fighting Gadaffi, it is no longer enough just to see it as a struggle of goodies against baddies. For it is precisely that simplification that has led to unreal fantasies about who we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Despite Responsibility to Protect, as long as states are sovereign, intervention will always be difficult to justify. Also, it’s time we realized that airstrikes are not the answer. Though capable of stamping out small forces, such as al Qaeda in Afghanistan, from this commentator’s perspective, their moral horror dictate that they be shelved in favor of — oh, no — the dreaded “boots on the ground.”

A central reason that the use of armed personnel becomes a dead end is because the intervening force allies itself with the force that’s facing extinction. Meanwhile, the concept of fighting terrorism is denounced on the premise that a tactic is not an enemy. But, in these kinds of situations, that’s exactly what’s needed.

The goal is to end the violence, not support a particular force. Then, for their part, should the beneficiaries of your aid themselves become repressive, the interventionnaires must be able to pivot on a dime and turn on them. And once the violence on both sides is quelled, absquatulate*. Of course, easier said than done.

*ab·squat·u·late intr. v. To depart in a hurry; abscond.

Cross-posted from the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.

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