The era of the West’s enthusiasm for military intervention is over. Two reports on Iraq and Libya—written from the heart of the British establishment and published recently—have delivered its obituary. Each is damning; together, they dismember the case for intervention in both its neocon and liberal-hawk variants. Although their focus is almost exclusively on decision-making within Whitehall—the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the Ministry of Defence, and, above all, No. 10 Downing Street—Americans will recognize many of the same ills afflicting their own government.
.. Many liberals opposed the Iraq intervention because they disliked its architect and suspected its motives. But they still believed that Western, and especially U.S., military power, used assertively, could make the world a better place.
.. The 2011 Libya bombing was a swift response by liberal hawks to what most agreed was an imminent massacre. It was both opportunistic—a material interest in Libya’s oil industry, and bolstering French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s faltering political stature were strong motivations—and also a test of the noble doctrine of the “responsibility to protect,” adopted at the United Nations in 2005.
.. The Chilcot report on the Iraq War (so called after the investigation’s chair, Sir John Chilcot) reveals, most notably, that key war decisions were taken solely—during unminuted meetings—by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who would ignore legal advice he didn’t like and circumvented official procedures for cabinet collective decision-making. The report, which catalogs numerous obfuscations and outright lies of the Blair administration, offers a verdict that is all the more damning because of its laconic understatement: “The circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory.”
.. The central failing of military intervention is not coordination, secretiveness, or dishonesty, though these certainly exist. At its core, the problem is the iron law of organized violence: intervention is war, and war commands those who choose to fight, however much they may believe they are its masters.
.. In order to deter Iran, and to appear strong across the region, Saddam needed to project an illusion of power. His army had been shattered in the 1991 Gulf War. Admitting that he had lost his weapons of mass destruction would be tantamount to conceding that he was defenseless. Not only would this have made Iraq seem vulnerable to Iran, but it would have stripped Saddam himself of his dignity and aura of strength, leaving him exposed to challenges from within his own ranks.
.. Having vilified Saddam, they could not make the necessary leap to see the world from his point of view.
Attacking Syria Is Still a Terrible Idea
Nick Kristof has written another column calling for direct U.S. intervention in Syria:
Agreed, we shouldn’t dispatch ground forces to Syria or invest a trillion dollars. But why not, as many suggest, fire missiles from outside Syria to crater military runways and ground the Syrian Air Force?
One reason not to do that is that it isn’t legal for the U.S. to attack another state that hasn’t done anything to us or our treaty allies. The U.S. has neither the authority nor the right to do what Kristof wants to do. That’s not even the most important reason not to do this, but it is a pretty significant objection that is never addressed by advocates of “action.” It seems fairly telling that things like this never occur to supporters of this or that intervention. They tend to think that the burden of proof is on the people that don’t want their government to attack other countries, when the burden of proof is always on those that propose military action.
Hillary Defends Her Failed War in Libya
Clinton was criticized not just for the Iraq War vote that cost her the 2008 election, but also for the undeclared 2011 war that she urged in Libya. The Obama Administration waged that war of choice in violation of the War Powers Resolution and despite the official opposition of the U.S. Congress. “Governor Webb has said that he would never have used military force in Libya and that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was inevitable,”
.. Michael Brendan Dougherty offers one of the most incisive descriptions of Clinton’s incoherent approach. “American military adventurism relies on a very backward notion of causation,” he explained. “When evil men in the world kill their own people, somehow America is to blame for not stopping them. When American action leads directly to disorder, barbarism, and terror, well, that’s someone else’s fault.”
.. The lessons of Iraq have been internalized: Once you create a total power vacuum that will attract terror gangs and radical Islamic fundamentalists, it’s best to not have any boots on the ground to stop them.
.. She stands behind her course of action even today. More than that, she calls it “smart power at its best”!
As a result, Democrats ought to conclude that she hasn’t learned enough from her decision to support the Iraq War, and that a Clinton administration would likely pursue more wars of choice with poor judgment and insufficient planning. It is difficult to imagine a more consequential leadership flaw.