Marc Lynch defends the Obama administration's decision to intervene in Libya:
The centrality of Libya to the Arab narrative about regional transformation is the main reason why I am unmoved by the "double standards" argument that we are not intervening in Cote D'Ivoire. It did matter more to core U.S. national interests because the outcome would affect the entire Middle East. Thanks to al-Jazeera's intense focus on Libya, literally the whole Arab world was watching, dictators and publics alike. Not acting would have been a powerful action which would have haunted America's standing in the region for a decade. And many of the same people now denouncing the intervention would have been up in arms at America's indifference to Arab life -- it is all too easy to imagine denunciations such as "the dream of the Cairo speech died in the streets of Benghazi as Barack Obama proved that he does not care about Muslim lives."
When I first heard the U.S. and its allies would be intervening in Libya, I thought it was madness that the U.S. would be dropping bombs on a third Muslim country, having yet to completely extricate ourselves from Iraq. The narrative that the West is at war with Islam grows more entrenched and potent with every year Western militaries remain active in Muslim countries, so the idea that we would be opening a third front in Libya struck me as having dire consequences.
What Lynch explains here, and what Obama said last night, is that in addition to trying to prevent a massacre the administration is actually engaged in a high-stakes gamble that by intervening militarily to support the rebels, they are dismantling the clash of civilizations narrative rather than reinforcing it. But the cheers of relief in Benghazi could give way to a different story entirely if Moammar Ghadafi is not dislodged, and if the country is plunged into a lengthy, bloody insurgency like the ones that followed American backed or initiated interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. The insurgents needn't have immense popular support--large majorities of Afghans oppose the Taliban even as the group has managed to fight coalition forces to a stalemate.Western intervention could backfire could end up bearing the blame for Libyans' prolonged suffering (or the methods taken to prevent it), reversing whatever short-term goodwill was engendered by the decision to stop Ghadafi in the first place.
Stopping the massacre after all, was the "easy" part relative to removing Ghadafi or creating a democracy from the ground up from the ashes of a brutal dictatorship. Nothing the president said last night convinced me there's a plan for how to make that happen, and given our experiments in doing so elsewhere, I think there's plenty of reason to be concerned that this gamble may ultimately fail.
