I tell ya, if critics of the Administration's decision to intervene in Libya keep making arguments as tendentious and disingenuous as what I've been hearing lately, I might find myself pulling a Major Kong over Tripoli before all is said and done.
I tackled Morning Joe the other night, but today I want to turn my attention to someone of considerably more intellectual heft, every liberal's favorite paleoconservative (or, at the least, libertarian), Daniel Larison.
Larison's been highly critical of the intervention from the start, which wasn't really surprising considering his long history of battling neocons and "liberal hawks" alike when it came to the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan. He's a sophisticated and interesting enough thinker on these issues that assigning a label is to do him a disservice, but for the sake of brevity let's just say he's a real realist's realist.
So I haven't been surprised or bothered by any of what he's written so far...until now.
Because it wasn't really until this post that Larison started to let his frustration with the President's decision, and his profound aversion to the whole enterprise, muddy his rhetoric towards making more sweeping arguments than are necessary or fair. He's pushing back against a Marc Lynch post in support of the President; specifically the following argument:
There was no mad rush to war, and certainly no master plan to invade Libya to grab its oil. The administration resisted intervening militarily until they had no choice, preferring at first to use diplomatic means and economic sanctions to signal that Qaddafi's use of force would not help keep him in power. The military intervention came when those had failed, and when Qaddafi's forces were closing in on Benghazi and he was declaring his intention to exterminate them like rats.
As a first salvo, Larison makes what I think is a fair point, writing, "Supporters of a military action are always supremely confident that the administration responsible for taking that action did not rush to war and had no other choice. It’s important to point out that these are not impartial observations or balanced descriptions of the situation." Indeed, I think it's true that, in general, we assume the best of intentions from those Presidents that we strictly or loosely think of as on "our side." But almost immediately thereafter, Larison goes off the rails (and in a way not dissimilar from Scarborough):
When opponents of the war in Iraq described Bush’s relentless push to attack Iraq as the “rush to war,” advocates of the invasion emphasized how long, careful, and well-aired the period before the invasion was. Compared to Libya, those defenders of the Iraq invasion have a point.
This is an unfair and rather specious analogy, and one that neglects the real essence of the argument presented by opponents of the Iraq War. The argument was not that the Bush Administration didn't spend enough time talking to the country about invading Iraq. Rather, the argument was that it seemed clear to most observers that from the start President Bush had decided to invade, and the entire run-up period before the first bomb fell was little more than an extended PR campaign or, less charitably, a charade. I, too, wish the President had spent more time talking with the American people about the Libyan intervention before giving the go-ahead, but there's no reason Larison can't just stick with that argument, even if the sting of the above quote is more exciting.
Next he writes:
The claim that the administration had no choice is just not true. This may be the least necessary, most arbitrary foreign war in U.S. history. Obviously, the President concluded that intervening as Gaddafi’s forces were approaching Benghazi was the right choice, but one of the reasons this is so questionable is that the decision seems to have been reached with little or no concern for the consequences beyond the immediate goal of preventing the fall of Benghazi. One of the reasons there seems to have been little or no concern for these consequences is that the decision was a hasty one driven by a mixture of panic about what might happen and guilt over things that happened in the ’90s during the Clinton administration.
All right. There's a lot in there that I'm going to quibble with, but I might as well start from the beginning. I agree that the Administration had a choice; one always has a choice, if for no other reason than inaction is itself a choice. But calling what's going on in Libya "the lest necessary, most arbitrary foreign war in U.S. history"? Wow. Considering this is a nation that's been in many, many wars--many of which we've come to subsequently see as either misguided or immoral--that's quite a statement. It especially surprised me to read it coming from someone who had spent so much time criticizing Bush the younger's foreign policy; you'd imagine Larison was already familiar with the so-called "Ledeen doctrine," which was cited approvingly by the Iraq war's supporters, and which reads: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." Without even getting into Vietnam, the war against the Philippines, or World War I, for Larison to call an intervention in the name of thwarting an enormous massacre "arbitrary" with this recent history is...well, it's something.
But perhaps the clue as to why Larison feels comfortable writing the above can be found in his description of the motivations for the intervention in the first place. Using a rather anodyne phrasing, he says the decision to intervene in Libya was based upon the goal of "preventing the fall of Benghazi." Going by that description, I'd understand why someone would be shocked and appalled by the President's decision. All of this just to keep a silly little city no one's ever heard of before from falling? In war, cities fall all the time! They sure do; but that's not what the Administration has ever argued was the reason for intervention, and that's not what the President argued the other night. Here's what he said:
Ten days ago, having tried to end the violence without using force, the international community offered Qaddafi a final chance to stop his campaign of killing, or face the consequences. Rather than stand down, his forces continued their advance, bearing down on the city of Benghazi, home to nearly 700,000 men, women and children who sought their freedom from fear.
At this point, the United States and the world faced a choice. Qaddafi declared he would show “no mercy” to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment. In the past, we have seen him hang civilians in the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day. Now we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city. We knew that if we wanted — if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.
Again, I've no problem with Larison making the argument that a massacre of Benghazi's civilians--women, children, the elderly--like "rats" is not our concern; or that, even if it is, we're in no position to do anything about it, etc. But if he's going to make that argument, I'd like him to do it plain, without minimizing or obfuscating the real and terrible choice that confronted Obama. Larison's phrasing that the decision was motivated by "panic" and "guilt" is subtly but similarly misleading, reducing a profound moral issue into one defined by a craven, hysterical "panic" over the world's condemnation--not the fate of the hundreds of thousands of souls in Benghazi--alongside a soppy-headed, self-directed guilt over past mistakes.
And about those "things that happened in the '90s": I've heard many critics of the intervention make this point as of late , that Obama did what he did because of the Clintons' guilt over their role in the Rwandan genocide, and while I think it might be useful to a point, I also think many have gone much too far. The President was not a member of the federal government during the Rwandan genocide. What's more, he--not Secretary of State Clinton--is the President; he's the buck's final destination. So let's judge him by those already lofty standards without the cheap and demeaning psycho-analysis.
Moving on, Larison counters Lynch's claim that "It [Libya] did matter more to core U.S. national interests because the outcome would affect the entire Middle East," with the equally contestable and unsupported assertion that "the effect of not intervening simply wouldn’t be as powerful as supporters of the war claim." And then he swiftly moves along to a rhetorical question, asking if we are "seriously accepting the assumption that the United States government should make its policy based on Al Jazeera’s editorial decisions regarding which political crisis it chooses to cover the most?" Again, Larison certainly knows full well that the argument isn't about what Al Jazeera's editorial staff concludes, but rather what the vast numbers of Muslim Arabs in the surrounding region will think when seeing images of wholesale slaughter while the United States--with tens of thousands of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan--simply watches.
I understand that the more we talk about certain things--especially things about which we already hold strong opinions--the more likely it becomes that our rhetoric will become unmoored from what we actually know or believe. There's a reason for Godwin's Law, after all. But I would just ask generally restrained, intelligent, and fair thinkers like Larison to keep in mind that while our anger may mount as spend more time examining a decision we thought was folly from the start, the rationale in its favor does not conversely shrink in validity and merit.
