Lowry: The Foggy Intervention

Rich Lowry writes in National Review:

Everyone knows about the fog of war. In Libya, Pres. Barack Obama has added to the inherent indecipherability of immediate military events the fog of obfuscation.

We aren’t leading military operations, even though the operation is led by an American general. We aren’t seeking Moammar Qaddafi’s ouster, even though we are destroying his command-and-control capabilities and shellacking his military. We aren’t helping the rebels, even though they are back on the march. And we aren’t sure where any of this is headed.

Only the last of these seems, strictly speaking, to be true, although not quite: The logic of events in Libya points inexorably toward the end of Qaddafi ’s rule as the ultimate aim of the campaign. No other rationale for the war makes as much sense, or is alone worth the expenditure of American military might.

Protecting civilians on the ground? When Qaddafi pledged a cleansing with no mercy for the rebel capital of Benghazi, a city of 700,000 that the allied air campaign saved in the nick of time, he no doubt meant it. But we have stood by and watched much worse massacres through the years without stirring ourselves to act.

Fostering the “Arab spring”? Any chance Libya had of playing a role in the viral spread of popular uprisings in the Middle East ended when the rebels’ survival came to depend on outside intervention. Indigenous revolts have inherent appeal as glorious instances of people power; Western airstrikes — even when requested by the Arabs themselves — tend to reinforce a sense of Arab powerlessness.

Creating a democracy? Before we launched our first airstrike, Libya was already a broken-down shell of a society. As we destroy its military and its economy sustains body blows, it becomes more of one. This does not make fertile ground for democracy-building.

The most compelling reason to wage war in Libya is simply to topple Qaddafi.

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