On Libya, Will vs. Wolfowitz

Robert Costa/The Corner March 20, 2011

On ABC’s This Week, columnist George F. Will and Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy Secretary of Defense, sparred on whether U.S. forces should intervene in Libya.

“It is not worth war,” Will argued. “We have intervened in a tribal society in a civil war. And we have taken sides in that civil war on behalf of people we do not know or understand, for the purpose — not avowed, but inexorably our purpose — of creating a political vacuum by decapitating the government. Into that vacuum, what will flow we do not know and cannot know.”

Wolfowitz disagreed. “What we have prevented, for one thing, is a bloodbath in Benghazi, which would have stained our reputation throughout the Arab world at a time when our reputation really matters,” he said. “I understand George’s hesitations. But it would seem to me, if you followed those hesitations, you would say, ‘It is better to keep this devil that we know than the unknown.’ And I don’t see how any unknown could be worse than the devil who is in Tripoli right now.”

“We have paid the price of intervention, sometimes we have paid the price of nonintervention, in Bosnia, for example,” Wolfowitz continued. “One of the things that makes this situation so unique is the monstrous quality of the Tripoli regime, the monstrous quality of Qaddafi and his sons. I know people say, ‘What about Bahrain? What about Yemen?’ This is a totally different case, where a man is actually slaughtering his own people, has no regard for his own people, and uses mercenaries to kill them. It is a unique case and it is being watched around the Arab world.”

“There is no limiting principle in what we have done,” Will replied, commenting on the global implications of U.S. policy. “If we are to protect people who are under assault, then where people are under assault in Bahrain, we are not only logically committed to help them, we are inciting them to rise in expectation. The mission creep began, Paul, before the mission began because we had a means not suited to the end. The means is a no-fly zone. That will not affect the end, which is obviously regime change.”

Me:

I'm with Wolfowitz on this one!

Last Plea for Obama's Leadership in Libya

Obama’s Moment of Truth

The clock is ticking on action in Libya—and on the president’s foreign policy legacy.

Larry Diamond / March 15, 2011/TNR

Each president of the United States enters office thinking he will be able to define the agenda and set the course of America’s relations with the rest of the world. And, almost invariably, each confronts crises that are thrust upon him—wars, revolutions, genocides, and deadly confrontations.

Neither Woodrow Wilson nor FDR imagined having to plunge America into world war. Truman had to act quickly, and with little preparation, to confront the menace of Soviet expansion at war’s end. JFK, for all his readiness to “bear any burden” in the struggle for freedom, did not expect his struggle to contain Soviet imperial ambitions would come so close to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Nixon was tested by a surprise war in the Middle East. Carter’s presidency was consumed by the Shah’s unraveling and the Iranian revolution. George H.W. Bush rose to the challenge of communism’s collapse and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Clinton squandered the opportunity to stop a genocide in Rwanda and waited tragically too long before stopping one in Bosnia. George W. Bush mobilized the country to strike back after September 11, but, in the view of many, he put most of his chips in the wrong war.

In the eye of the historical storm, and in the absence of a challenge as immediate and overpowering as September 11, Pearl Harbor, or the Nazis’ march across Europe, it is risky to identify any set of world events as game-changing. Yet that is what many analysts, including myself, believe the Arab revolutions of 2011 are. And a surprising number of specialists—including hard-eyed realists like Fareed Zakaria—have seized upon the crisis in Libya as a defining moment not just for the United States in the region but for the foreign policy presidency of Barack Obama as well.

To date, one could say that Obama has had a surprisingly good run for a foreign policy neophyte. He has revived the momentum for arms control with a new START treaty with Russia, while pressing the issue of human rights within Russia. He has managed the meteoric rise of China decently, while improving relations with India. He has not cut and run from Iraq—as most Republicans were convinced he would. And he has ramped up but at least set limits to our involvement in Afghanistan. As the Arab revolutions have gathered momentum, he has increasingly positioned the United States on the side of democratic change. His statements and actions have not gone as far as democracy promotion advocates (like myself) would have preferred, but they have overridden cautionary warnings of the foreign policy establishment in the State Department, the Pentagon, think tanks, and so on. Without Obama’s artful choreography of public statements and private messages and pressures, Hosni Mubarak might still be in power today.

All of this, however, may appear in time only a prelude to the fateful choice that Obama will soon have to make—and, one fears, is already making by default in a tragically wrong way—in Libya. Why is Libya—with its six million people and its significant but still modest share of global oil exports—so important? Why must the fight against Muammar Qaddafi—a crazy and vicious dictator, but by now, in his capacity for global mischief, a largely defanged one—be our fight?
When presidents are tested by crisis, the world draws their measure, and the impressions formed can have big consequences down the road.

After watching Jimmy Carter’s weak and vacillating posture on Iran, the Soviets figured he’d sit on the sidelines if they invaded and swallowed Afghanistan. They misjudged, but Afghanistan and the world are still paying the price for that misperception. In the face of mixed messages and a long, cynical game of balance-of-power, Saddam too, misjudged that he could get away with swallowing up Kuwait in 1991.

When the United States did not prepare for war as naked aggression swept across Asia and Europe, the Japanese thought a quick strike could disable and knock out the slumbering American giant across the Pacific. When Slobodan Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies launched their war of “ethnic cleansing,” while “the West”—which is always to say, first and foremost, the United States—wrung its hands, many tens of thousands of innocent people were murdered and raped before President Bill Clinton finally found the resolve to mix air power and diplomacy to bring the genocidal violence to a halt.

If Muammar Qaddafi succeeds in crushing the Libyan revolt, as he is well on his way to doing, the U.S. foreign policy establishment will heave a sad sigh of regret and say, in essence, “That’s the nasty business of world politics.” In other words: nasty, but not our business. And so: not their blood on our hands. But, when we have encouraged them to stand up for their freedom, and when they have asked for our very limited help, it becomes our business.

On February 23, President Obama said: “The United States … strongly supports the universal rights of the Libyan people. That includes the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. They are not negotiable. … And they cannot be denied through violence or suppression.” Yet denying them through murderous violence and merciless suppression—with a massacre of semi-genocidal proportions likely waiting as the end game in Benghazi—is exactly what Qaddafi is in the process of doing.

Barack Obama has bluntly declared that Qaddafi must go. The Libyan resistance, based in Benghazi, has appealed urgently for the imposition of a no-fly zone. Incredibly, the Arab League has endorsed the call, as has the Gulf Cooperation Council. France has recognized the rebel provisional government based in Benghazi as Libya’s legitimate government—while Obama studies this all. Can anyone remember a time when France and the Arab League were ahead of the United States on a question of defending freedom fighters?

There is much more that can be done beyond imposing a no-fly zone. No one in their right mind is calling for putting American boots on the ground in Libya. But we can jam Qaddafi’s communications. We can, and urgently should, get humanitarian supplies and communications equipment, including satellite modems for connection to the Internet, to the rebels in Benghazi, where they can be supplied by sea. And we should find a way to get them arms as well. Benghazi is not a minor desert town. It is Libya’s second largest city, a major industrial and commercial hub, and a significant port. Through it, a revolt can be supplied. If Benghazi falls to Qaddafi, it will fall hard and bloodily, and the thud will be heard throughout the world.

Time may be running out. As the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday, “All that stands between Kadafi and rebel headquarters in Benghazi are disorganized volunteers and army defectors spread thinly along the coastal highway.” They have passion and courage, but they lack weaponry, strategy, and training. Like so many rebel movements, they need time to pull these all together. Time is what a no-fly zone and an emergency supply line can buy them.
Libya’s rebels are pleading for our help. “Where is America?” asked one of them, quoted in the L.A. Times, who was manning a checkpoint in Port Brega. “All they do is talk, talk, talk. They need to get rid of these planes killing Libyan people.” The “they” he was referring to was the Americans, beginning with their leader—one would hope, still the leader of the “free world”—President Obama.

Many prudent reasons have been offered for doing nothing. It is not our fight. They might lose anyway. We don’t know who these rebels really are. We have too many other commitments. And so on. The cautions sound reasonable, except that we have heard them all before. Think Mostar and Srebrenica. And we had a lot of commitments in World War II as well, when we could have and should have bombed the industrial infrastructure of the Holocaust. As for the possibility that the rebels might lose—a prospect that is a possibility if we aid them and a near certainty if we do not—which would be the greater ignominy: To have given Libya’s rebels the support they asked for while they failed, or to have stood by and done absolutely nothing except talk while they were mowed down in the face of meek American protests that the Qaddafi’s violence is “unacceptable”?

Oh yes. There is also the danger that China will veto a U.N. Security Council Resolution calling for a no-fly zone. Part of us should hope they do. Let the rising superpower—more cynical than the reigning one ever was—feel the first hot flash of hatred by Arabs feeling betrayed. Go ahead, make our day.

Presidents do not get elected to make easy decisions, and they certainly never become great doing so. They do not get credit just because they go along with what the diplomatic and military establishments tell them are the “wise and prudent” thing to do. This is not Hungary in 1956. There is no one standing behind Qaddafi—not the Soviet Union then, not the Arab League now, not even the entirety of his own army. That is why he must recruit mercenaries to save him. Qaddafi is the kind of neighborhood bully that Slobodan Milosevic was. And he must be met by the same kind of principled power.

For America to do less than that now—less than the minimum that the Libyan rebels and the Arab neighbors are requesting—would be to shrink into global vacillation and ultimately irrelevance. If Barack Obama cannot face down a modest thug who is hated by most of his own people and by every neighboring government, who can he confront anywhere?
For the United States—and for Barack Obama—there is much more at stake in Libya than the fate of one more Arab state, or even the entire region. And the clock is ticking.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, where he directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Duplicity as Journalistic Ethics

Peter Wehner

03.14.2011//Contentions

One of the reasons the secretly recorded video of National Public Radio’s Ron Schiller was so damaging is that he confirmed the impression many people have of those who work at NPR — that they are not simply liberal but also contemptuous of conservatives, of Christians, of Israel.

The Tea Party, according to Schiller, is Islamophobic, xenophobic, and racist. Zionists are in control of American newspapers — but thankfully, not NPR. Mr. Schiller’s views may not reflect the attitude of everyone associated with NPR, but he obviously fit right in with its culture and ethos (who can forget Nina Totenberg saying she hoped that Jesse Helms or one of his grandchildren would get AIDS from a blood transfusion). And given how disgracefully NPR treated its former employee Juan Williams, conservatives could be forgiven for a touch of schadenfreude.

That said, the technique that James O’Keefe used to snag Schiller does, on reflection, leave me a bit queasy. I understand that sting operations can serve a useful role. But surreptitiously recording conversations of either NPR executives or governors (see the liberal blogger, pretending to be conservative donor David Koch, who taped a phone conversation with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker) can easily cross into dangerous terrain. Human nature is weak and can be easily exploited.

I and virtually every person I know have said things in private conversations that we would not want recorded and broadcast publicly. And when you add to the mix people who are play-acting and goading their interlocutors, concerns about how the tape was subsequently edited, not to mention the offer of a multimillion-dollar donation, and you are in questionable ethical territory.

I don’t pretend to know where the line should be drawn between responsible investigative journalism on the one hand and irresponsible entrapment on the other. Deceit in the cause of some other aim and some other good is sometimes morally justifiable; sometimes it’s not.

But I do know that the tendency we all have to battle is to take delight in watching our ideological opponents trip up in a sting operation but squawk when our allies step into a similar trap, to react one way when James O’Keefe does the recording and another if a liberal blogger or 60 Minutes does it. In thinking through what’s fair, it’s probably worth taking into account this question among others: how would I feel if I were on the receiving end of the sting operation?

Me:

Dear Mr. Wehner:

I agree to a point with your thoughtful post today in Contentions about clandestine tapings for journalistic purposes. While often an enthusiastic recipient of the news so gained, I am, as are you, troubled by the invasion of privacy, and outright deceit, in gaining information.

I’m not a journalist and haven’t studied journalism’s canons of ethics. But it seems to me to be the obverse of journalistic ethics to record private conversations in rigged circumstances in which all expectations of privacy are dashed and then go public with the gathered information.

Where I respectfully disagree with you is in your readier contemplation, than mine, as I read you, of the propriety of journalistic “entrapment” in some circumstances. Our difference is one of emphasis. I’d feel more than “queasy” about O'Keefe's false pretences. I’d like to be referred to your understanding of the categories of circumstances, understanding the differences between criminal and journalistic investigation, when false pretences might be justified.

A quick internet search of journalistic ethics discloses these seemingly applicable principles:

“Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone's privacy.”

“Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public.”

“Minimize Harm: Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.”

My own to hand, first-time-thinking-about-it formulation consists of a strong presumption against duplicitous practices to be overridden only in the investigation of serious felonious conduct when there are no other reasonable means of gathering the information and when the means used are not themselves criminally or civilly unlawful.

On this formulation, and on the ethical principles above cited, O’Keefe’s "outing" of Schiller seems glaringly violative and news outlets ought not have accepted the story, the latter being an ideal never, I’d think, to be realized in practice.

Yours truly,
Itzik Basman

Obama Dithering Says Anne-Marie Slaughter, Who's No Slouch

NYT//March 13, 2011

PRESIDENT Obama says the noose is tightening around Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. In fact, it is tightening around the Libyan rebels, as Colonel Qaddafi makes the most of the world’s dithering and steadily retakes rebel-held towns. The United States and Europe are temporizing on a no-flight zone while the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Gulf Cooperation Council and now the Arab League have all called on the United Nations Security Council to authorize one. Opponents of a no-flight zone have put forth five main arguments, none of which, on close examination, hold up.

IT’S NOT IN OUR INTEREST Gen. Wesley K. Clark argues that “Libya doesn’t sell much oil to the United States” and that while Americans “want to support democratic movements in the region,” we are already doing that in Iraq and Afghanistan. Framing this issue in terms of oil is exactly what Arab populations and indeed much of the world expect, which is why they are so cynical about our professions of support for democracy and human rights. Now we have a chance to support a real new beginning in the Muslim world — a new beginning of accountable governments that can provide services and opportunities for their citizens in ways that could dramatically decrease support for terrorist groups and violent extremism. It’s hard to imagine something more in our strategic interest.

IT WILL BE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE Many thoughtful commentators, including Al Jazeera’s director general, Wadah Khanfar, argue that what is most important about the Arab spring is that it is coming from Arabs themselves. From this perspective, Western military intervention will play right into Colonel Qaddafi’s hands, allowing him to broadcast pictures of Western bombs falling on Arab civilians. But these arguments, while important, must be weighed against the appeals of Libyan opposition fighters for international help, and now, astonishingly, against support for a no-flight zone by some of the same governments that have kept their populations quiescent by holding up the specter of foreign intervention. Assuming that a no-flight zone can be imposed by an international coalition that includes Arab states, we have an opportunity to establish a new narrative of Western support for Arab democrats.

IT WON’T WORK The United States ambassador to NATO, Ivo H. Daalder, argues that stopping Colonel Qaddafi’s air force will not be decisive; he will continue to inflict damage with tanks and helicopters, bombing oil refineries and depots on his way to retaking key towns. But the potential effect of a no-flight zone must also be assessed in terms of Colonel Qaddafi’s own calculations about his future. Richard Downie of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argues that although Colonel Qaddafi cultivates a mad-dictator image, he has been a canny survivor and political manipulator for 40 years. He is aware of debates with regard to a no-flight zone and is timing his military campaign accordingly; he is also capable of using his air force just enough to gain strategic advantage, but not enough to trigger a no-flight zone. If the international community lines up against him and is willing to crater his runways and take out his antiaircraft weapons, he might well renew his offer of a negotiated departure.

IF IT DOES WORK, WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE WILL GET Revolutions are almost always followed by internal divisions among the revolutionaries. We should not expect a rosy, Jeffersonian Libya. But the choice is between uncertainty and the certainty that if Colonel Qaddafi wins, regimes across the region will conclude that force is the way to answer protests. And when Colonel Qaddafi massacres the opposition, young protesters across the Middle East will conclude that when we were asked to support their cause with more than words, we blinked. Americans in turn will read the words of Mr. Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo, with its lofty promises to stand for universal human rights, and cringe.

LET’S ARM THE REBELS INSTEAD Some commentators who agree with the analysis above say we could better accomplish our goals by providing intelligence and arms to the opposition. That would, of course, be much easier for us. It undoubtedly appeals to Mr. Obama as a neat compromise between the desire to help the protesters and the desire not to overrule his defense secretary’s reluctance to participate in a no-flight zone. However, we would be providing arms not to a disciplined military, but to ragged groups of brave volunteers who barely know how to use the weapons they have. They need action that will change the situation on the ground for Colonel Qaddafi, as well as his calculations. Moreover, by the time arms and intelligence could take effect, it is quite likely that Colonel Qaddafi will have retaken or at least besieged Benghazi, the opposition stronghold.

Me:

American inaction leading to Kadaffy's return to power will be the noose from which Obama will hang politically.

Of Human Umbrage: A Book Review by Isaac Chotiner

That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect//TNR/March 14, 2011

by Stefan Collini

AMERICANS TRAVELING ABROAD often hear this country discussed with great passion and intensity. These discussions, it will not surprise even homebodies to learn, are often critical. Nor is it surprising that the criticisms range from the uninformed to the witheringly acute; they fall on the same spectrum as American self-criticism. Foreigners can be imprecise or simply misinformed about this country—I remember being asked at a small bookstore in New Delhi why Americans would never elect a president with a postgraduate degree—but a unique (at least to us) perspective can also yield real insight. Different news sources or cultural reference points will produce distinct analyses. No criticism is invalid simply because of the critic; what matters are the opinions themselves.

I once listened to a large German baker in a café in downtown Frankfurt impugn American voters for voting George W. Bush into the White House. I nodded and occasionally interjected a thought or two while doing my best not to react defensively. Here was a Hessian who understood politics, and was simply outraged by the administration’s policies—policies that the American people had in some measure validated by reelecting the president. He had substantive reasons for his anger. But try commenting, as an American, on Indian or German politics in the same tones and with the same vehemence, and see the result.

After the man’s interrupted monologue, I mentioned that the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, had gone off to work for Vladimir Putin’s cronies at Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth. Upon hearing this, the man looked sternly at me and said that Americans had no right to lecture or criticize Germany, especially after Abu Ghraib and Bush’s foolish comment about Putin’s soul. He was offended that an American would dare call into question the ethical choices of a German leader, and, by implication, of German voters. Germany is hardly a poor or struggling country, but it does not share America’s power and standing, and criticism is too often defined as acceptable when it is made against the “more powerful” and offensive when it is made against the “less powerful.” If this is in part a positive sign that people are sensitive to the less fortunate, it is also a threat to uninhibited intellectual inquiry.

I now wish I could fly back to Germany and give my interlocutor a copy of Stefan Collini’s book. This volume is only sixty-seven pages long, and small pages too, but Collini, a distinguished historian of ideas, has written a powerfully argued manifesto on the subject of offense and criticism. The book is neither densely philosophical nor as militant as books that have covered some some of the same ground, such as Robert Hughes’s The Culture of Complaint. But Collini’s deft dismantling of various forms of cultural relativism—conveyed in clear and concise prose—are sure to be debated and discussed by anyone who engages with his important essay. His decision to forego real world examples and instead focus on principles slyly puts the reader in mind of recent controversies (such as the one over Danish cartoons) while contributing to the clarity of his argument.

Collini begins by defining “offense.” From a dictionary entry, he writes that the taking of offense is often seen as intensely related to one’s feelings. [This] may suggest, he writes, “that if someone does not feel offended, they have not been offended. And this may in turn seem to entail the reverse proposition, namely that each individual is the only possible judge of whether or not they have been offended.” For claims of offense to be given respect, however, an objective standard needs to have been violated by the offender. No one, for example, is offended by people who snore in their sleep. We might find them annoying, but they do not offend us. Nor is sympathy always granted to those who claim to have taken offense. To say of someone that they “do not easily take offence” is to compliment them, Collini notes. The bar, in other words, is higher than it could be.

Collini is also aware that in many societies today, free speech is highly valued, even at the cost of offense. “If we confine ourselves to the traditional form of the debate about ‘free speech,’ it is not difficult for those of a liberal disposition that the rights of criticism should be guaranteed in any tolerably open society, even when the activity risks giving offence to some of those being criticized.” And yet Collini sees the outlines of a problem: “Those who think of themselves as committed to ‘progressive’ moral and political causes have come to believe that two of the central requirements of an enlightened global politics are, first, treating all other people with equal respect and, second, trying to avoid words or deeds which threaten to compound existing disadvantages.”

Treating people with respect is a fine goal, but Collini notices that respect tends to be shown with special deference to so-called “out groups.” Claims of offense that would otherwise be ignored are instead given credence and even deference. Collini also correctly identifies the people who tend to fall into this trap. Very few “progressive” forces, for example, would have shown any “understanding” of hurt Christian feelings if Jesus had been mocked in a Danish newspaper. The entire force of the argument against the offensiveness of the Danish cartoons was based on the concern that Muslims were somehow less powerful than other religious believers. But this hardly qualifies as an adequate justification for a double standard.

This is Collini’s central passage: “Where arguments are concerned—that is, matters that are pursued by means of reasons and evidence—the most important identity we can acknowledge in another person is the identity of being an intelligent reflective human being.” And in case this seems too easy or too glib, he adds:

“This does not mean assuming that people are entirely—or even primarily—rational, and it does not mean that people are, in practice, always and only persuaded by reasons and evidence. It means treating other people as wish to be treated ourselves in this matter—namely, as potentially capable of understanding the grounds for any action or statement that concerns us. But to so treat them means that, where reason and evidence are concerned, they cannot be thought of as primarily defined by being members of the ‘Muslim community or ‘Black community’ or ‘gay community’ … ”

What is crucial here is the ability of people to evaluate and to criticize, and to not feel as if their doing so is given more or less respect based on the groups to which they belong. Their words do not gain force or lose force—or “credibility”, to deploy a nonsensical and overused term—because of their specific identities.

The related point, which Collini also touches upon, is that if one decides to criticize a culture or a tradition or a work of art, doing so is not an act of Western arrogance. Criticism is not Western or Eastern or Christian or Jewish, and those facing criticism—and those societies and cultures facing criticism—should respond in a spirit of openness about truth. To withhold criticism from certain communities or religions is, in Collini’s word, a form of condescension towards them. It denies these groups the ability to engage in constructive dialogue, and to fortify their own values. In the final analysis, everyone loses.

Collini does not adequately address the issue of when people should take offense, because his focus is on the inequitable way in which offense is deemed valid. Moreover, his vision of the public square, where ideas find free flow among honest debaters, may strike some as too optimistic. There is no such public square yet in existence. (He acknowledges this criticism). But he ends very strongly: “When engaged in public argument … do not be so afraid of giving offence that you allow bad arguments to pass as though they were good ones, and do not allow your proper concern for the vulnerable to exempt their beliefs and actions from that kind of rational scrutiny to which you realize, in principle, your own beliefs must also be subjected.”

And Collini offhandedly mentions something that is infrequently recognized about cultural relativism: that no one is intellectually consistent in their relativism. Those most fond of relativist arguments, for example, are the first to belittle American politics and culture. The conclusion is obvious, and important: if relativism were widely and consistently embraced, and criticism were increasingly stifled, the results would be both boring and sinister.

Me:

Two brief points:

1. From recent David Brooks on how much what we think of as rationally detached issues from our psychic and formed depths.

2. Fom older Stanley Fish on how readers of texts cannot be readers of texts unless they exist in a particular community of shared assumptions which inform their reading.

Geras on Walzer on Geras on Walzer

Norm Geras/Normblog/March 9, 2011

Michael Walzer on Libya

Further to these recent posts on the now reviving debate about humanitarian intervention, I see that Michael Walzer has a post up on the Dissent blog, Arguing the World, in which he explains why he doesn't see military intervention as being called for in Libya at the moment. There are two strands to Michael's explanation. First, the crisis in Libya hasn't passed a point - mass murder, ethnic cleansing - that could justify intervention on humanitarian grounds. Second, following J.S. Mill, Michael doesn't think that an intervention to aid a democratic transformation can be supported or shown to square with international law; this is because, to put it briefly, as a rule people have to win democracy for themselves and not by the armed intervention of external powers.

So far so clear. But then - and most unusually from Michael - the clarity breaks down, or so it seems to me. He writes:

What if it looks as if Qaddafi is going to win? Would we be willing to go all the way with Mill and say that if the rebels lose, it's because the country isn't ready, isn't "fit," for democratic government? I don't think I am tough enough for that.

And he goes on to discuss what would be the best form of intervention - his view being that it would be an intervention by neighbouring countries. Why do I find this puzzling? Because it appears to me to go back on the very arguments Michael has himself just put forward. He must be thinking either that the threshold for justified humanitarian intervention has hitherto been set too high - if an intervention in Libya is to be carried out under that head; or that regime-change interventions to assist a democratic transformation are sometimes morally acceptable, and justifiable under international law - or morally acceptable even if not justifiable under international law. Mustn't he? But if so, why start by endorsing the principles he goes on to put in question?

Walzer Replies/March 10, 2011/Dissent:

When thinking about life and death decisions, I am inclined to worry about my own positions—and even to doubt them. Assume that we are all Millians: would we be ready to watch the killing that would follow a Qaddafi victory? (Did Mill himself ever have to contemplate anything like that?) The killing would be partisan, not genocidal, but there would be a lot of it, and it would be accompanied by imprisonment and torture on a large scale. So we need to begin now to argue about what we would want to happen then.

Maybe, at some point short of that, or just short of it, we would want to see a military intervention that denied Qaddafi his victory. Maybe not, but let’s think clearly about what “not” would mean. And if we were to decide in favor of a last minute intervention, the prime candidates to carry it out, it seems to me, are the Egyptian and Tunisian armies. Not the United States or NATO, bringing civilization and democracy to the natives, but an Arab force determined to prevent or stop the killing of Arabs. For many years, Arab political leaders have called privately for Western interventions, which they then denounced. Now that time is over, or should be, and the Libyan crisis may be the right occasion to announce its end.

Meanwhile, there is a lot we can do, and should do, to help the Libyan opposition win on its own.

Peter Wehner: Barack Obama’s America and With a Nod to the Kraut

Contentions//03.10.2011

According to AFP, French President Nicolas Sarkozy will propose air strikes on Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s command headquarters to EU leaders. At an EU summit on the Libyan crisis, he will propose “striking an extremely limited number of points which are the source of the most deadly operations” by forces loyal to Qaddafi, the source said today. The three sites being considered are Qaddafi’s Bab al-Azizia command headquarters in Tripoli; a military air base in Syrte, east of Tripoli; and an air base in Sebha, in the south, according to the report.

Contrast this development with this Washington Post story today titled “On Libya, Obama willing to let allies take the lead,” which begins this way: “President Obama is content to let other nations publicly lead the search for solutions to the Libyan conflict, his advisers say, a stance that reflects the more humble tone he has sought to bring to U.S. foreign policy but one that also opens him to criticism that he is a weak leader.”

The Post also reports that Britain and France are drafting the no-fly zone resolution for possible consideration by the Security Council — “[b]ut it remains unclear where Obama stands on the issue…”

Charles Krauthammer wrote an essay in 2009 that is worth rereading. Among his arguments is that the current foreign policy of the United States is an exercise in contraction, one that began with the demolition of the moral foundation of American dominance, “the fundamental consequence of which is to effectively undermine any moral claim that America might have to world leadership, as well as the moral confidence that any nation needs to have in order to justify to itself and to others its position of leadership.”

According to the new dispensation, Krauthammer wrote, “having forfeited the mandate of heaven — if it ever had one — a newly humbled America now seeks a more modest place among the nations, not above them.”

But it seems as if Obama, at least on Libya, is doing one better than having America take a place among the nations. We are, in fact, behind the nations of the world.

France – and not just France — is showing far more leadership on the world stage than the United States.

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America