My unease with humanitarian intervention is not that I don’t think the intent is good and the end moral. It is that the intent frequently gets lost and the moral end is not achieved. Ideology, like passion, fades. But interest has a certain enduring quality. A doctrine of humanitarian warfare that demands an immaculate intervention will fail because the desire to do good is an insufficient basis for war. It does not provide a rigorous military strategy to what is, after all, a war. Neither does it bind a nation’s public to the burdens of the intervention. In the end, the ultimate dishonesties of humanitarian war are the claims that “this won’t hurt much” and “it will be over fast.” In my view, their outcome is usually either a withdrawal without having done much good or a long occupation in which the occupied people are singularly ungrateful.
As I've said, intervening in Libya is certainly not immoral. But unless we get lucky (and to a certain extent, we did get lucky in Kosovo with Allied Force in 1999, although the threat of NATO ground attack was building and may have proved decisive), where is the will of the intervening powers to do what it takes to win? That's been another constant of my comments on the war.
Sure, if it was a pure humanitarian intervention, we can pull out. We did in Somalia (although I still believe that in part we intervened then to demonstrate we'd intervene in a Moslem country without oil to help Moslems, as it took place so soon after Desert Storm), once the gratitude faded (and on the day we went in to Somalia, I recall saying to my then-wife that Somalis would eventually start shooting at us), and we could afford to withdraw without a big hit on our interests. Yes, al Qaeda used our withdrawal as an example of why we were weak, but they would have found something else to justify their belief that they could beat us. But we actually do have interests in not losing the Libya War, as I've noted before, even if they aren't vital national interests. So we will have the choice of actually losing a war and coping with the repercussions, or trying to win with an alliance whose members don't want to do what it takes to win.
That's a problem. We've gathered a fragile and relatively small coalition that is willing, as long as it feels good, to attack Khaddafi. But when it stops feeling good, they'll stop. It may feel good to write a check to Amnesty International for a hundred bucks, but who will sell their house to write a really big check? What will we do then?
