Libya doesn't appear to be going well. Or maybe it is. It's hard to tell exactly what our objective... is. Or is not. But basically, to expect Gaddafi's forces to sit out in the desert and patiently allow us to kill their heavy weapons so they cannot advance against rebels in their own country seemed a little silly. They've already adapted to a "no-fly" zone that included tanks and artillery by camouflaging their heavy equipment and weapons with civilian improvised vehicles instead.
No matter how well intentioned this intervention seems to have been (ie, that Gaddafi is a brutal dictator and he will kill many people if we do nothing), I think the appropriate questions were as follows:
1) What is our actual goal? Is it the removal of Gaddafi? The partitioning of the country? The "humanitarian" mission was, given diplomatic efforts here, basically requiring the former in order to prevent mass reprisals by the Libyan government, but we have explicitly removed that from the board.
2) How does bombing satisfy some humanitarian problem in the first place? I heard last week the interventions in Kosovo and Somalia described as a "success". Naturally the commenter involved was not a foreign policy expert, and might be described as a squishy liberal internationalist. Nevertheless, if these are considered by anyone as "successes", I'd have to wonder what their failures look like. The same applies to the fools who thought invading and conquering Iraq would be a great idea. We do no credit to ourselves to pretend that our guns and planes somehow introduce stability anywhere and everywhere they are used. In fact, we do ourselves no credit to pretend that this would even be a common response to our actions.
3) How does.. whatever our end goal is... impact the medium and long-term stability and prosperity of the region. The interventions in Somalia and Kosovo among others have had spectacular failures in the medium term as the governments that have formed generally organise reprisals against the former controlling interests, drove them out of the countries, or otherwise instigated unfair legal structures to punish. It sounds to me like the people we're intervening on the behalf of in Libya are not some noble rebellion of freedom and democracy either.
4) The best argument for this was that doing nothing damages our credibility among the Arab states and their people who are agitating for freer states. This has two problems of course. A) That Egypt and Tunisia already have their freer states, such as they are. And there are a myriad of institutional reasons for that (including that they were both dictatorships dependent on American aid and thus had instituted some liberal economic reforms, half-assedly making crony capitalist states) and B) That we are not supporting agitations elsewhere in the region. We are silent on Iran and Syria, and we have ignored and indeed supported the crackdowns in Bahrain and Yemen (the latter of which appears to be a complete failure). We may suppose that there are realist-pragmatic reasons to avoid interventions anywhere and everywhere that America might feel any interest to do so, but if so, then avoiding and ignoring interventions that look suspiciously like the one in Libya (Syria for example) and then intervening in Libya doesn't seem to make the most sense as a foreign policy doctrine.
5) How much will this cost us? It doesn't seem like a very short term engagement of force and it's quite expensive to launch missiles and fly combat air patrols. Maybe we cannot put a price on civilian lives that might be spared. But this assumes that our actions will in fact spare civilians. The actual event appears to be that they may not spare very many, if at all. Particularly if the fight drags on for many months precisely because we intervened in the first place.
Milei and populism
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Read this:
http://links.org.au/node/2231
It will explain, why we need to intervene in Libya. Of course, you will not understand it, because you refuse to believe.
So we must intervene because it is our socialist duty to?
I must have missed where either one of us is a socialist.
Or alternatively, we should intervene because socialists don't want us to do so? That is not an affirmative reason to do something and it's not even a very good negative reason.
Largely because true Marxist-socialists do not present a significant international or existential threat to American interests here or abroad and therefore their concerns are unimportant. I mean really, are we going to start worrying about Venezuela or Cuba in a serious way other than as a regional issue in our hemisphere? (Brazil or Chile are far more important regional players).
What exactly did you think that link explained? It looked more like it explained that we (and our allies) are acting like a hegemonic imperial actor and then used a lot of defunct and useless Marxist explanations for how that's a bad thing.
If the President buys into the socialist agenda, this explains why we are there. And a bunch of people thinking of it as "humanitarian" will keep us there.
I was opposed to going into Afganistan and Iraq, because we are still in Germany and Japan fifty years later. But once there, we had esablished goals.
I keep asking myself, what is the established goal(s)?
We are just there to make the fighting "fair"? Oil?
The idea, that we intervened to continue the civil war that was almost done, is intriguing. It is consistent with what we did. We did not give Gaddafi an exit. The rebels also have no viable exit. This would indicate that we want instability in Libya.
I believe you said this would explain why we need to intervene. This is not an explanation for why we "need to". It might be an explanation for why we are, but there are a number of flaws.
1) I don't see that it explains why, if Obama is a socialist, he is doing this actually. He's not following the socialist plan of action as outlined. (Note, I accept Obama as a moderate socialist relative to market freedoms, but this is not much distinct from Bushv2.0 or FDR and so on. He's no Karl Marx, but holding Americans politicians to a Freidman-ite standard of market economic support in a country that's about half hostile to "capitalism" doesn't seem to make sense either. Consider how unpopular economists' positions on public policy are, much less the libertarian ones. If food subsidies are still roughly popular as they are, then we're fucked already before we start).
2) I certainly buy the "humanitarian" angle as a mirage. But not because it advances some socialist goal. Most wars are fought under pretenses that are at least half false. That has little to do with proving what the underlying logic of the war was that they lied. This one is very false, but it remains to be seen what the end goals were. If any (I think it is like Iraq or Kosovo and we don't have any idea what we are doing and that there is no mysterious reason behind it).
3) Even if Obama is a Marxist, his foreign policy hasn't been Marxist IR. There are very large differences between the Marxist IR critique illuminated there and the sort of half-pragmatist, half-liberal internationalist methods of Obama as President and even going back to his opposition to Iraq. I just don't see a lot of parallels between either of these and Marxism.
4) What goal is advanced by increasing instability in a region already marred by it? I suppose there could be an individual goal (something like: Gaddafi must go!), which increases instability. But we have done little to advance that individual goal. General instability and revolts in the Arab world hasn't advanced necessarily socialist goals. It is certainly true that workers, especially young and unemployed, provided much of the annoyance behind these revolts, but it's far from clear that they will achieve any usurpation of power for themselves as a consequence. Powerful elites still govern, they just have different names and more varied politics. And in any case the general impetus of instability in Egypt and Tunisia was neo-liberal economics mixed with crony capitalism and the natural effect that these have on a population (think how mad people are/were over the banking and auto bailouts here). Libya has neither because it lacks any formal national institutions of consequence by comparison. It is, in essence, inherently unstable because it was never a strong state independent of the ruler (for reasons that are obvious).
5) The rebels have advanced a viable exit (mostly because they've realized that the West isn't willing to fight the war for them, at least not entirely, and thus that they cannot win). Partition the country (eventually) and accept peaceful protests. Gaddafi may still reject it, but it's probably a better deal for him than trying to retake Benghazi in the face of international pressure and air support. Question is whether he thinks it is (which I doubt he much cares).
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