The American Conservative: “Responsibility to Protect” Seems To Be Good at Starting Wars, But Not at

[pampango]

Limiting Them

(What google will find! A peek at some of the thinking from the other side.) :)

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2011/03/23/responsibility-to-protect-seems-to-be-good-at-starting-wars-but-not-at-limiting-them/

"One problem with the war is that it is just enough of a “responsibility to protect” intervention that some of its supporters will not want to see it turn into a war for regime change, but it has already morphed into just enough of a war for regime change that it cannot be limited by its original “responsibility to protect” justification. “Responsibility to protect” is a doctrine that justifies initiating hostilities, but it has no way to restrain the forces that starting a war unleashes. This makes it a doctrine that is easy for interventionists to invoke to get into a conflict, and equally easy to ignore once the conflict begins.

But from the beginning it has been clear that while this intervention has been couched in the language of humanitarianism and of the global good deed, invoking the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the U.N.’s new doctrine that is supposed to govern those instances when outside powers must step in militarily to prevent tyrants from killing their own people, the more important goal has been to support the insurgency, which is to say, to bring about regime change.

...it is doubtful that Libya’s civil war qualified for a “responsibility to protect” intervention, but more important it is hard to see how any government could intervene just a little and then resist the apparently inevitable push for escalation. ... When we started hearing the first calls for a no-fly zone, I was one of many observing that these “simple” solutions had a way of getting out of control:

No-fly zones are the sort of easy-sounding response to an immediate problem that can turn into an endless policy. If the reason for the no-fly zone is to halt Gaddafi’s assault on civilians, it probably won’t be long before the no-fly zone evolves into an air war against Gaddafi’s ground forces to achieve the same end, and that might escalate into a new war for regime change.

There was a poll posted here a couple of days ago that showed almost identical liberal/conservative (Democratic/repub) support for (64%, I think) and opposition to (32%, as I remember) the UN intervention in Libya. This article would seem to illustrate the conservative opposition to that intervention.

[rfranklin]

1. However, invasions on the basis of ginned up intelligence claiming WMDs is fine

Just saying.