Preempting "Mission Creep:" Debates over Libyan intervention

Much of the concern -- and much of the neocon 'excitement' -- over Libya seems to be over the prospect of 'regime change' and about deposing Qaddafi. Even President Obama, who should know better, has contributed to the chatter with an ill-advised mention of a 'tightening noose.' And, on the other hand, there is a well-founded fear that Libya might constitute yet another in our growing list of quagmires.

All the the chatter obscures the current reality of a limited war for limited political goals. And, arguably, it makes it much harder for those limits to be maintained, especially given the politicians' rhetorical taste for "wars to end all wars," "promotion of democracy," and the public's desire that the ends actually clearly justify the means.

As such, there is a fairly Bismarckian and cold-blooded point to be made in favor of NATO's current Libyan adventure, such as it is. Specifically, the real and significant danger in Libya is the potential that a bolus of armed, angry, and desperate Libyans 'rebels/refugees' might end up crossing the Tunisian and Egyptian borders and further roiling already troubled political waters. Especially in the Egyptian case, the consequences are fairly imponderable but certainly bad... much as a flood of Irish and Italian refugees (in, say, 1796) could not have helped quiet the turmoil of French politics at the end of the 18th century.

It's a difficult point to make. Essentially, it's saying that an ongoing, slow-burning Libyan Civil War is -- for the time being -- better than a bloodbath/exodus that might (re-) destabilize Tunisia and Egypt. Is this a goal worth fighting and dying for? It is hard to answer the question, but it's important to remember three things:

1) Egypt is commonly accepted as lying at the heart of the Arab world. It's a huge country with significant resources and a millenia's history as a geopolitical center of mass. What happens there matters.

2) The tragedy in Rwanda has come to an end. The tragedy in Central Africa and the Eastern Congo is ongoing, and of a terrible scale. Rwanda's displaced have played no positive role in this tragedy.

3) It's difficult to gauge whether NATO's Balkan intervention was successful or not. As with everything else, it's difficult to tell the longer-term consequences of outright failure. At the time certainly, there were reasons to worry about a conflict that could force Greece and Turkey to contend cooperatively with a refugee crisis.

Against these concerns, NATO's involvement in Libya seems fairly low-risk, at least in the immediate sense. Certainly NATO's leaders must quell public expectations that the end-game will be regime change, and maintain focus on the the fairly limited political goal -- firewalling Libyan violence from the ongoing Arab/Egyptian unrest. Further and more significantly, it would be well that Qaddafi were meditating on the fate of Idi Amin or Napoleon Bonaparte, rather than Saddam Hussein or Benito Mussolini. This especially because Libyan-sponsored terrorism would almost certainly make regime-change a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Within the this context, public realists may have a particularly important role to play in 'managing public expectations' about the Libyan conflict, but this role may involve far more cautious and nuanced critiques than produced so far.



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Responding to Stephen Walt's post on the Libyan intervention, http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/24/social_science_and_the_libyan_adventure, to Yoni Applebaum's post on the "Third Barbary War"
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/03/the-third-barbary-war/72749/
And to Max Fisher's "In Arming Libyan Rebels, U.S. Would Follow an Old, Dark Path"
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/03/in-arming-libyan-rebels-us-would-follow-an-old-dark-path/73019/