There's Nothing Easy About War - The Libya Version

Posted by Michael Cohen

There's a lot that Shadi has written below that I find disagreement with, but one paragraph really does jump out:

I don't know about you - but I have trouble understanding how people can be okay with sitting back and doing nothing, when, with military intervention, it [protecting civilians] could fairly easily be prevented. We can stop it.  Moving to the strict "interests" rationale, it seems fairly self-evident that Libya, under an isolated Qaddafi, would likely return to attacking Western interests in the region, including through terrorism. He's done it before.  

Putting aside the notion that an isolated Qaddafi would be more likely to return to terrorism than say a Qaddafi under military attack from the West . . . I would have thought by now that after that whole "greeted by liberators" and "cakewalk" thing in Iraq, foreign policy analysts would be a little more circumspect in describing the use of military force as "easy." This is precisely the sort of language and attitude that worries me so much about this operation - the propensity to watch pictures of cruise missiles flying off ships or see the wreckage from Allied airstrikes and come to believe that anything we are trying to do in Libya today is not extraordinarily difficult or that somehow the hardest part has been done.

I have enormous respect for Shadi's passion around this issue - and the passion of those supporting the use of force. And as I've said I think the decision to intervene is a close call. But it would be helpful if those advocating the use of force were a bit more skeptical about what it can hope to achieve - particularly in regard to protecting civilians. This sort of disregard for the inherent challenges in military intervention is both wrong, it's dangerous - and it seems endemic in the foreign policy community. And dare I say it's a good part of the reason we've stumbled our way into the third military intervention in the last ten years in the Muslim world. How many times will we underestimate the consequences of using military force before we become a bit more hesitant about its recommended utilization?

And to be very candid, no one seems more guilty of this than the President of the United States. Consider this quote from the NYT piece about the decision to intervene:

The president had a caveat, though. The American involvement in military action in Libya should be limited — no ground troops — and finite. “Days, not weeks,” a senior White House official recalled him saying.

Where does this sound familiar? Perhaps from the debates about Afghanistan when Obama demanded that escalation be short-lived and troop withdrawals commence in July 2011. Or perhaps when he told the military that no US troops should be sent to areas that couldn't be turned over to the ANSF by the same date. How are those dictates working out?

You would think that after a deadline for withdrawal from Afghanistan evolved from July 2011 to 2014 this President would be skeptical that any use of military force would be tidy, can be easily limited or could be completed in days, not weeks.

Apparently not.