So we are joining the civil war in Libya. We and our European allies will fly against Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s forces to stop them from overrunning the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. Will we then keep flying to roll them back to Tripoli, and roll him out of power? The United Nations Security Council has authorized the use of “all necessary measures” to protect Libyans from their leader. Anything is possible, for better, and for worse.
Even as we gird for action in Libya, the government of Bahrain (not to mention Yemen), our ally and client, has unleashed its security forces, in league with those of our ally and sometime client Saudi Arabia, to murder and in every way crush the nonviolent opposition arrayed against its unjust rule. The “Arab Spring” is starting to feel like it could be our fall.
Advocates of American military intervention in Libya have been saying for weeks that we should join the fight. Have these voices also been raised for the people of, say, Ivory Coast, to name just one of any number of other countries in Africa whose leader is presently killing his people in the name of clinging to power?
Until last week, many of the Libyan rebels spoke passionately of their desire to liberate themselves, and implored the West to stay out of it. That changed when Qaddafi’s forces came at them with relentless force, driving them, helter-skelter, into retreat. Even then, it seemed best for America to stay out, given our unhappy record of failing to spread our revolution by the exercise of military might, and our equally unhappy record of succeeding (for a time, anyway) in propping up dictators in the Arab world in the name of stability.
The Arab League, in a rare spasm of coördinated loathing for one of their own, endorsed the idea of a no-fly zone to contain Qaddafi, while France joined the rebel cause outright, and Britain, too, called for action. But none of these parties was ready to do it without us. So America—reluctant, overextended, financially strapped America—was on the spot. And now here we go: another war.
We might best describe our intervention in Libya as a war of no choice. The fighting there has come to such a pass, with Qaddafi’s killers at the gates of Benghazi, that we’d be damned if we did nothing, and we’ll be damned for what we do. Nobody in Washington wants to take ownership of the Libyan rebellion, and nobody in Libya wants us to do so, either, but that is what we’re doing. Why? Because if we stayed out of it Qaddafi’s forces might inflict a terrible slaughter on the people of Benghazi and other defeated rebel outposts, east and west of Tripoli.
Advocates of intervention have been fond of invoking Rwanda in 1994 as a spur to action. As usual with such historical analogies, the differences are far greater and more significant than the parallels. If Rwanda taught us anything, it should be that the U.N. is a woeful instrument for responding to an emergency. Time and again, we have seen that to be under U.N. protection in a U.N. safe area is to be in terrible peril. Qaddafi’s first answer to the Security Council was to start the heavy bombardment of the rebels, and then, this morning, his Foreign Minister declared a unilateral ceasefire; that accommodating gesture was accompanied by Qaddafi’s comments to Portuguese TV that he’d start attacking non-military ships and planes in the Mediterranean. “If the world gets crazy with us, we will get crazy, too,” he said. “We will respond. We will make their lives hell because they are making our lives hell. They will never have peace.”
To Qaddafi, everything that is not murder is theatre, and having scared us into joining his war he is now calling our bluff, saying, in effect, that the West once again pretends to be acting in the name of humanitarianism when the real motive is regime change. It’s true that a full-scale humanitarian intervention would merely turn the crisis into the status quo and insure that it drags on forever. And it’s true, too, that now that we’ve made this our war we cannot pretend to be satisfied by simply containing or neutralizing Qaddafi. Are we prepared to accept that, by the grim logic of our intervention, the only way we can avoid being defeated in Libya is by defeating him? That could happen swiftly, or it could be a brutally drawn out, bitter, bloody slog, and come at a terrible price.
Either way, the military campaign is likely to be the easy part. Then what? We know that we are fighting against Qaddafi, but whom are we fighting for? It is impossible not to sympathize with victims of Qaddafi’s reign of terror who want to overthrow him. Still, do we have a good idea of who the Libyan rebels are and what they stand for? Jon Lee Anderson’s superb dispatches from the eastern front in recent weeks have made it clear that even the rebels themselves don’t know exactly. Some say the fight is for freedom; some say it’s for democracy. Meanwhile, an acting chief of the rebellion is a man who served, until a few weeks ago, as Qaddafi’s own Minister of Justice.
And speaking of democracy, what about American public opinion? What about Congress? Is the Security Council the only place where this should be deliberated? What about some attempt by our Commander-in-Chief to advise and seek the consent of the electorate before we march into battle overseas? What we know about these rebels is that we have a common enemy, and that they cannot fight for themselves. That is how our newest war begins. Nothing about it may ever be so clear again.
Slide show: Our coverage of the protests in Libya.
Photograph by Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images.