[lbo-talk] Libya

Somebody Somebody philos_case at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 23 11:05:52 PDT 2011


All the arguments in favor of the hopelessly unbalanced "war" between the U.S., France, and UK and Libya apply equally well to Iraq before the March 2003 invasion. If we do not intervene, Qadaffi will remain in power, so it was with Saddam as well. But we learned through bitter experience that hundreds of thousands of deaths and the psychological trauma of an entire generation were rather worse than the continued reign of the dictator.

You might argue then that there was no rebellion in Iraq at the time, in contrast to Libya. Well, if there was, would you have supported Bush's war? For that matter, when there was a rebellion, right after the Gulf War, would you have supported a continuation of that conflict? I suppose that the pro-war leftists around here would have, putting them to the right of the first Bush administration.

With all due respect to the Libyan rebels, this issue is larger than their country. Libya is a nation of six and a half million, less than that of New Jersey, sprinkled in a network of towns over a country larger than Alaska. If this intervention succeeds, whether with a small or great death-roll, it will allow new wars in the future that never would have occurred otherwise.

The U.S. just had a brief moment when, the continued campaign in Afghanistan a glaring exception, it more or less declared a breather from launching new wars. Now the pro-war left is joining the foreign policy establishment in cheering the end to that moment of respite.

I agree wholeheartedly with Stephen Walt when he put it, more eloquently than I. Although he frames it terms of American interest, what he says is entirely on point:

"And even if this little adventure goes better than I expect, it's likely to come back to haunt us later. One reason that the Bush administration could stampede the country to war in Iraq was the apparent ease with which the United States had toppled the Taliban back in 2001. After a string of seeming successes dating back to the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. leaders and the American public had become convinced that the Pentagon had a magic formula for remaking whole countries without breaking a sweat. It took the debacle in Iraq and the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan to remind us of the limits of military power, and it seems to have taken Obama less than two years on the job to forget that lesson. We may get reminded again in Libya, but if we don't, the neocon/liberal alliance will be emboldened and we'll be more likely to stumble into a quagmire somewhere else."

Link: <http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/21/what_intervention_in_libya_tells_us_about_the_neocon_liberal_alliance>



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