“So let's review: No clear national or even humanitarian interest for military intervention. Intervening well past the point where our intervention can have a decisive effect. And finally, intervening under circumstances in which the reviled autocrat seems to hold the strategic initiative against us. This all strikes me as a very bad footing to go in on. “Marshall's arguments are well taken and he's right to advance them. But his analysis is also a day late, a dollar short and based on erroneous presumptions. It typifies the all too predictable hand-wringing that sends the left into convulsions at the first sound of gunfire. Marshall presumes, for example, that the intervention is past the point of being decisive. Yet the events on the ground indicate otherwise. Let me explain.
“And this doesn't even get us to this being the third concurrent war in a Muslim nation and the second in an Arab one. Or the fact that the controversial baggage from those two wars we carry into this one, taking ownership of it, introducing a layer of 'The West versus lands of Islam' drama to this basically domestic situation and giving Qaddafi himself or perhaps one of his sons the ability to actually start mobilization some public or international opinion against us.”
“I can imagine many of the criticisms of the points I've made. And listening to them I think I'd find myself agreeing in general with a lot of it. But it strikes me as a mess, poorly conceived, ginned up by folks with their own weird agendas, carried out at a point well past the point that it was going to accomplish anything. Just all really bad.”
Three weeks ago – when the rebels indeed had momentum – intervention then might very well have hastened Gaddafi's fall. But the “cavalry” had no horses. A cinematic charge to Libya’s “Aqaba” at the behest of the rebelling downtrodden was not possible then. It was missing Arab support, a Western coalition and a UN mandate. Marshall (like Andrew Sullivan and others) conveniently ignores or papers over these facts.
Rather than acting alone, Obama waited and created the conditions for a muscular intervention backed by both Arabia (more or less) and the world. In less than 24 hours, airstrikes stopped the Libyan Army in its tracks and forced Gaddafi into hiding. Benghazi is largely secure. Jubilant, re-energized rebels have pressed some 40 miles back west toward Ajdabiya, the strategic city from which they had been ousted only a day before. By any measure, the intervention has been decisive. Is it late? Yes. Could it have been mounted sooner with the current component parts and support? No.
None of this is to say that Marshall’s objections shouldn’t be taken seriously. They should be, and I value his thoughtfulness (unlike some other folks I know).
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