Tweet

Email

Print

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson argues that the campaign against Muammar Qaddafi represents the height of hypocrisy. Because the United States is abstaining from taking military action against other regimes in the region that are also using force to quell domestic uprisings—namely, Bahrain and Yemen—“all the homilies about universal rights and freedoms” are bunk. The war in Libya “isn’t about justice,” Robinson says, “it’s about power.” Far from arising out of some neoconservative impulse to spread democracy, he argues, the military action against the Libyan regime is rather an example of “realism.”

The failure to comprehend that these two criteria—“justice” for the oppressed and the preservation of American power—are not mutually exclusive is precisely why Robinson and many other liberals view American military intervention anywhere as inherently suspicious. They are discomfited by the prospect of American power, and see any attempt at preserving it as unfair, if not immoral. That global power politics are closer to a zero sum game than a kindergarten exercise in which all must have prizes, is a prospect that Robinson is either too naive or too ideologically blinkered to understand (that is, were the United States to decline, the current world order would not give way to some rosy, multilateral dispensation mediated by the United Nations, but rather see the rise of the likes of Russia, China, Iran, and other rapacious, authoritarian states).

The crux of Robinson’s argument is the notion that because the United States cozies up to some “useful tyrants,” it must therefore not act against the “non-useful ones” (Robinson’s description of the likes of Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and other targets of American wrath as merely “non-useful”—as if their effect on the world were net neutral and not radically destructive—offers us a telling clue about how he views the world). The logical corollary to this nonsensical calculation is that the United States should never take military action to stop atrocities, because it refuses to alleviate abysmal situations everywhere else. As Leon Wieseltier writes of other chatterers in the liberal blogosphere who made the exact same arguments, “These are debater’s points made by people who have no reason to fear that they will ever need to be rescued.” And further, “The history of help and rescue is a history of triage.”

The guiding principle of American foreign policy should be to support freedom overseas, when we can, where we can, and however we can. There are no firm rules by which this principle can be implemented. Libya, however, presented a rather obvious case: a murderous dictator who had the blood of many thousands of innocent people—including American citizens—on his hands, who had fomented instability in his region, and who had for many years been a leading sponsor of international terrorism, was suddenly confronted by a mass domestic insurgency. He reacted violently, in a way that rendered moot whatever economic benefit he was providing to the West. He all but announced his intention to commit genocide against his own people, stating that he would “cleanse Libya house by house,” practically rendering international intervention a legal imperative due to the stipulations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which the United States is a signatory. Furthermore, from a basic practical standpoint, and unlike in Yemen and Bahrain, Libya is located on the periphery of Europe, meaning that continued strife would have resulted in a mass refugee exodus onto the shores of NATO states. By assisting an indigenous revolt, and not partaking in the dread warfare of the sort that liberals like Robinson so fervently opposed in Iraq, the United States and its allies were given a prime opportunity, the sort of opportunity that arrives once in a blue moon, to overthrow a despicable regime and implement something better in its stead.

The very premise of Robinson’s argument, that the intervention in Libya is primarily about the preservation of American power, is untrue. After all, Qaddafi had been a largely compliant leader since 2003, when he unilaterally abandoned his nuclear weapons program and his support for terrorism in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. Most American grand strategists would have been content to see Qaddafi or some other member of his sadistic clan hold the reins in Libya for the foreseeable future. From the “realist” perspective that Robinson claims to be the motivating ideological force behind the Libya intervention, the status quo is certainly preferable to the uncertainty that is to follow.

The most cogent part of Robinson’s otherwise inane argument is his complaint that the United States imposes a double-standard in the ways in deals with various dictators. Those that are “useful” get one sort of treatment, and those that are “non-useful,” who may be no less vicious, get condemnations, sanctions, and the occasional Tomahawk missile. Conceding that Qaddafi is “crazy and evil,” Robinson concludes with the admonition that “war in Libya is justifiable only if we are going to hold compliant dictators to the same standard we set for defiant ones.” If only the president could wave a magic wand and fix the miserable situations of Yemen and Bahrain. The government of Yemen is the only thing standing in the way of the country becoming an al-Qaeda sanctuary. Bahrain has been host to the American Fifth Fleet for six decades, and, with its majority Shiite population now in revolt, is being eyed by Iran in what the New York Times aptly refers to as a “proxy battle” between the Islamic Republic and Saudi Arabia. The unpleasant reality of being a superpower is that one must deal with these realities, not curl into a ball and do nothing because the world is a scary and difficult place.

So, intervention in Libya? Yes. Tolerating but pressuring in Bahrain and Yemen? Yes as well. Hypocritical? Perhaps, but tolerable if we consciously hew to the goal of freedom.