Libyan Civil War Megathread

[Valmy]

No, it's much better for us if they're responsible for their own deaths.

Not to mention cheaper and with much less blood on our hands.

[Neil]

Here's something I wonder about:

If Gadhafi starts to lose and get pushed back onto his home turf, and the rebels start slaughtering members of the Gadhafa tribe (as we all know they inevitably will), will we start bombing the rebels?

Of course not.  This is regime change, not a humanitarian intervention.

[Berkut]

Meh, I don't have any problem with acknowledging that intervention is a messy process that often has undesirable results. But I think it is morally bankrupt to simply state that a *known* bad result should be tolerated because of a potential bad result that may happen if we act in some manner.

Valmy, your argument, for example, applies even moreso to Afghanistan. When we went in and helped the NA kick out the Taliban, we knew that the result would be unknown, and likely pretty bad (in an objective sense, compared to Western norms) in its own right. And guess what? It has been pretty bad. The kabul government is a corrupt mess, Afghanistan is still a mess, and I doubt anyone is particularly happy about the outcome at this point. Does this mean we should have just tolerated the Taliban in charge?

Hell, there were imcredible respisals against the Germans at the end of WW2. The Russians raped and slaughtered German civilians in staggering numbers, with the help of US and British arms, fuel, and munitions. Does that mean it was a mistake to help the Soviets against the Nazis?

I think holding up this standard of "Well, unless we can be sure that the result of intervention will be sunshine and happiness for all, then how can we possibly intervene? What if the people we intervene to help do nasty things???" Yeah, some of them ARE going to do nasty things. We should exercise whatever control intervention gives us to limit that as much as possible. If we really believe that the people we are helping are going to be as bad (or worse) than the people they are fighting, then we should not help them at all. But that is a specific evaluation based on specific circumstances. It is not an easy evaluation, by any means, especially when we don't necessarily understand what is going on - but generic "we should not intervene in messy situations because we cannot predict with certainty that the 'good' guys are all that good" is moral cowardice, IMO.

[DGuller]

To be fair, neither case was an intervention.  In both cases, we were at real war because they fucked with us directly enough.

[Neil]

Hell, there were imcredible respisals against the Germans at the end of WW2. The Russians raped and slaughtered German civilians in staggering numbers, with the help of US and British arms, fuel, and munitions. Does that mean it was a mistake to help the Soviets against the Nazis?

Of course.  What are you, a commie-lover?

[jimmy olsen]

Meh, I don't have any problem with acknowledging that intervention is a messy process that often has undesirable results. But I think it is morally bankrupt to simply state that a *known* bad result should be tolerated because of a potential bad result that may happen if we act in some manner.

Valmy, your argument, for example, applies even moreso to Afghanistan. When we went in and helped the NA kick out the Taliban, we knew that the result would be unknown, and likely pretty bad (in an objective sense, compared to Western norms) in its own right. And guess what? It has been pretty bad. The kabul government is a corrupt mess, Afghanistan is still a mess, and I doubt anyone is particularly happy about the outcome at this point. Does this mean we should have just tolerated the Taliban in charge?

Hell, there were imcredible respisals against the Germans at the end of WW2. The Russians raped and slaughtered German civilians in staggering numbers, with the help of US and British arms, fuel, and munitions. Does that mean it was a mistake to help the Soviets against the Nazis?

No, but we should have pushed east as hard as possible to occupy as much of Germany/Europe as we could and then let Stalin bitch about it. He wasn't in position to do anything about it.

[Warspite]

Meh, I don't have any problem with acknowledging that intervention is a messy process that often has undesirable results. But I think it is morally bankrupt to simply state that a *known* bad result should be tolerated because of a potential bad result that may happen if we act in some manner.

Valmy, your argument, for example, applies even moreso to Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was an action taken under the UN Charter's terms of self defence; something, I would argue, even more fundamental to the international system than humanitarian intervention.

Hell, there were imcredible respisals against the Germans at the end of WW2. The Russians raped and slaughtered German civilians in staggering numbers, with the help of US and British arms, fuel, and munitions. Does that mean it was a mistake to help the Soviets against the Nazis?

The war against Germany was not couched in humanitarian terms: it was a war of national survival, indeed of civilisation itself.

I think holding up this standard of "Well, unless we can be sure that the result of intervention will be sunshine and happiness for all, then how can we possibly intervene? ... but generic "we should not intervene in messy situations because we cannot predict with certainty that the 'good' guys are all that good" is moral cowardice, IMO.

I think we're saying, if you're going to violate the principle of state sovereignty in the name of impartial protection of civilians, you undo your own case when you pick a side in a civil war and then suddenly find they're committing murder and reprisal.

If you want to do a straightforward regime change, that's fine. But let's not pretend this isn't undoing a basic principle of non-intervention in domestic affairs that we decided was a good thing - on the whole - over the last couple of hundred years.

[Berkut]

If you want to do a straightforward regime change, that's fine. But let's not pretend this isn't undoing a basic principle of non-intervention in domestic affairs that we decided was a good thing - on the whole - over the last couple of hundred years.

Yeah, we haven't messed around with regime change at all in the last couple of hundred years. With "we" being defined as the West in general.

Also, regime change is a means to an end, not an end itself. We decide to try for regime change because the regime in question is doing something we don't like - regime change in and of itself is never a motivation.

In the case of a nominally humanitarian intervention, we are trying to create regime change because presumably the regime in question is involved in humanitarian violations. The idea that we are doing regime change *instead of* humanitarian intervention is a bit spurious, to say the least. you are confusing what we are doing with why we are doing it.

[Valmy]

Meh, I don't have any problem with acknowledging that intervention is a messy process that often has undesirable results. But I think it is morally bankrupt to simply state that a *known* bad result should be tolerated because of a potential bad result that may happen if we act in some manner.

It is not moral cowardice to reject butchering people and putting our people in danger to serve somebody else's nationalist agenda or when it has historically tended to make the situation worse.  It is one thing to see others kill each other...it is another to do it ourselves.

Valmy, your argument, for example, applies even moreso to Afghanistan. When we went in and helped the NA kick out the Taliban, we knew that the result would be unknown, and likely pretty bad (in an objective sense, compared to Western norms) in its own right. And guess what? It has been pretty bad. The kabul government is a corrupt mess, Afghanistan is still a mess, and I doubt anyone is particularly happy about the outcome at this point. Does this mean we should have just tolerated the Taliban in charge?

I guess I missed it when we invaded Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons.  In the event it would have resulted in far less harm IMO if we had simply done that: defeated our Taliban enemy and left Afghanistan to the NA.  Trying to create a new government and prop it up ourselves has done enormous damage to the entire region IMO out of a basic desire to do good.  We simply did not know the place well enough.

Hell, there were imcredible respisals against the Germans at the end of WW2. The Russians raped and slaughtered German civilians in staggering numbers, with the help of US and British arms, fuel, and munitions. Does that mean it was a mistake to help the Soviets against the Nazis?

I guess I missed it when we got involved in WWII for humanitarian purposes.  Even in the event the brutal Russian reprisals on the Germans are pretty horrifying and embarrasing for the Allied cause.  But the Germans were our enemies and we were committed to their destruction so not really comparable.

I think holding up this standard of "Well, unless we can be sure that the result of intervention will be sunshine and happiness for all, then how can we possibly intervene? What if the people we intervene to help do nasty things???" Yeah, some of them ARE going to do nasty things. We should exercise whatever control intervention gives us to limit that as much as possible. If we really believe that the people we are helping are going to be as bad (or worse) than the people they are fighting, then we should not help them at all. But that is a specific evaluation based on specific circumstances. It is not an easy evaluation, by any means, especially when we don't necessarily understand what is going on - but generic "we should not intervene in messy situations because we cannot predict with certainty that the 'good' guys are all that good" is moral cowardice, IMO.

Intevening because we must stop the bad guys with no exit strategy...knowing we are going to have to kill a bunch of people and create enemies...in support of people who we cannot trust is what I am rejecting.  Going into parts of the world breaking shit like a bull in a china shop when we usually do not really understand the local dynamics is what I am rejecting.  Not to mention the fact we are broke and have to do all this on borrowed money, and how is ruining our ability to act on the international stage in the future a good thing?

In any case it is not so much moral cowardice as coming to see most, if not all, of these interventions to be morally suspect despite our good intentions going in.  The road to hell and all that.

[Ed Anger]

Saw the footage of the wrecked F-15E. The dune coons were standing on wrecked shit, as usual. I was hoping one would stand and set off the Aim-120's they showed. No dice.

Arabs and mooselimbs and their propensity to stand on wrecked stuff: hilarious.

[Berkut]

I don't buy into this idea that other "interventions" were for non-humanitarian reasons, and hence don't count.

WW2 for example, was most definitely sold as a humanitarian war. We cut off oil exports to Japan, which *directly* led to their attack on the basis of a aggressive Japanese war. We supplied Britain with war materials, which led directly to the German DOW on the basis of their war of aggression against France and Poland.

The list goes on and on - we cite humanitarian concerns in war after war after war. You cannot just blithely say "Oh, THAT was not a humanitarian war!" to dismiss any intervention where the result was that we end up supporting people who did terrible things. If so, I will just state "Oh, THIS isn't a humanitarian war!" either, and come up with some other "reason" why we need to take out the current nutjob up for removal.

[Slargos]

Hell, there were imcredible respisals against the Germans at the end of WW2. The Russians raped and slaughtered German civilians in staggering numbers, with the help of US and British arms, fuel, and munitions. Does that mean it was a mistake to help the Soviets against the Nazis?

You, sir, are a monster.

[Berkut]

Intevening because we must stop the bad guys with no exit strategy...knowing we are going to have to kill a bunch of people and create enemies...in support of people who we cannot trust is what I am rejecting. 

That statement right there could apply to WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I, Gulf War 2...the list goes on and on and on.

What does "no exit strategy" even mean? How do you know we have no exit strategy? What if the exit strategy is simply "We will stop bombing the Libyans when they stop attacking the rebels"? Isn't that an exit strategy?

Creating enemies? Again, that happens every single time you intervene anywhere. It also happens when you *don't* intervene, and when you kind of intervene.

"in support of people we cannot trust". Who can we trust? When have we even intervened in support of a people we can trust? The Brits? The list of people we can trust not to do something terrible is pretty damn short, and the only people on it are people who don't need anyone's help for the most part.

My point is that you are basically creating a criteria that cannot be met - it is essentially creating an standard where if we were to meet it, the US and the West would have to become almost completely isolationist. That is not necessarily an indefensible standard IMO - I actually think isolationism as a basis for forming an opinion on US/Western foreign policy has some moral and intellectual legs behind it.

But if you are going to walk down that path, then you have to reject a lot of interventions that most people tend to historically support. Like damn near every single war the US has gotten involved in after the Civil War. Because they have all been some version of us sticking our nose into other peoples business, when we could not at all predict the outcome, and when the outcome in one way or another has been pretty bad...except when compared to the potential outcome of doing nothing.

And there are plenty of historical examples of pretty horrific outcomes when we do nothing as well.

[Ed Anger]

Hell, there were imcredible respisals against the Germans at the end of WW2. The Russians raped and slaughtered German civilians in staggering numbers, with the help of US and British arms, fuel, and munitions. Does that mean it was a mistake to help the Soviets against the Nazis?

You, sir, are a monster.

I wish I could have raped Eva Braun. In front of Hitler.

[The Minsky Moment]

It is good to know that Obama and 90 percent of the democrats opposition to Bush was purely partisan and devoid of any true ideological principal.

Those are not the only and mutually exclusive possibilities, thus the incoherence of the NRO op-ed.