The fact that the war helped put Obama’s seal of approval on the American practice of going to war surreptitiously, without congressional approval or public accountability — as well as the possibility that perceived success in Libya might make the U.S. more reckless in intervening in the future — are both potential pitfalls that have little to do with the outcome of action on the ground. And that’s before we even speculate about whether the rebels’ victory will prove to be conclusive, or what Libya’s next government will look like.

This is not to deny that the fall of Qaddafi’s regime is good news — it is. But we should be very cautious about drawing sweeping conclusions or claiming vindication at this early stage, particularly in light of the disasters that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

There is, however, one line of argument that I think we can confidently say has been discredited by the recent events in Tripoli. This is the argument — particularly common among leading neoconservative hawks who wanted to criticize Obama without lending support to “isolationism” — that the apparent stalemate in Libya demonstrated that Obama had been insufficiently assertive, and should have opted for a more forceful intervention. (This was also the position of the more hawkish Republican presidential candidates like Romney, Perry, and Santorum.)

At the moment, it seems clear that the upside of an American intervention with a heavier footprint, namely the possibility of shortening the war by a few months, would have been far outweighed by the downside. Not only would such an intervention have put U.S. troops on the ground at risk, it also would have risked discrediting Qaddafi’s opponents: imagine how much less legitimacy the post-Qaddafi government of Libya would enjoy if Tripoli had fallen to American tanks rather than to the rebels themselves.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

In June, Rubin falsely suggested that the Obama administration was abandoning past Quartet policy by pressuring the Israeli government to negotiate without preconditions with Hamas. Rubin cited as evidence a conference call that administration official Steve Simon held with American Jewish leaders; unfortunately, she misrepresented the contents of the conference call so brazenly that JTA’s Ron Kampeas stepped in to call her out on her deceptions. It’s worth noting that the Breivik dustup marks the second time that Kampeas — a veteran journalist with strong connections to the American Jewish establishment who is anything but a radical leftist — has flatly accused Rubin of dishonesty. But these scandals are, more than anything, predictable. When the Post first hired Rubin last fall, I noted that she seemed to have been brought on board purely as a sop to the right, despite the fact that she had almost no actual reporting experience and seemed to view her job as a form of PR rather than journalism. In defending the Rubin hire, Post editors suggested that she was intended to balance liberal-leaning journalist Greg Sargent. But as I wrote, this logic was highly revealing of the problems with the mainstream media’s conception of “balance”:

Sargent certainly leans liberal, but he is also a very good reporter who breaks stories and is willing to criticize the Democrats; Rubin, by contrast, has no real experience as a reporter (as opposed to commentator) and has never met a Republican or Likud talking point she didn’t like.

To take only one recent example, Sargent recently wrote a widely-read piece describing the recent debt-ceiling deal as a “huge, unprecedented political victory” for the Republicans. Read his post, and ask yourself if you can ever, under any circumstances, imagine Rubin describing any event as a “huge, unprecedented political victory” for Obama or the Democrats. On the contrary, for Rubin every event marks a glorious triumph for the Republicans and a crushing defeat for Obama; she has rapidly supplanted the Weekly Standard‘s Fred Barnes as the most comically in-the-tank Republican flack. Since Rubin has amply demonstrated that she views her Post gig as a means to advance Republican and Likud political goals rather than an opportunity to do actual journalism, almost inevitably it’s only a matter of time before she gets in hot water for fudging the truth once again. The only real question is how long her Post higher-ups will be willing to put up with it. Despite its rapid decline in recent years, the Post still has many distinguished journalists on staff, and one has to imagine that they are rapidly growing tired of having to apologize for their honesty-challenged colleague.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

While Blair suggested that drone strikes might still be permissible if executed in consultation with local governments, he called for an end to all unilateral drone strikes. Coming as the Obama administration continues to step up the use of Predator and Reaper drones across the world, this makes Blair the most prominent former national security official to question the conduct of the drone war as such. And as discussed here previously, this is precisely the sort of conversation that needs to be had in Washington: the seemingly “clean” and “low-cost” nature of drone strikes means that Obama will likely only reconsider his use of them if prominent political figures raise the profile of the issue and force him to pay a political price at home for relying on Predators and Reapers as primary instruments of foreign policy.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

With those preliminaries aside, a few thoughts:

1) It’s become clear that Breivik’s political views were drawn in large part from the writings of “anti-jihad” writers in Europe and the U.S. I’ve written about many of these writers in the past — folks like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy — and it’s fair to say that I don’t have much sympathy for their views; I think they’re ignorant, bigoted, and frequently hysterical. But ignorance, bigotry, and hysteria are very different from the mass murder of innocent civilians. So while it’s perfectly legitimate to fault the Gellers and McCarthys of the world for fostering an atmosphere of apocalyptic alarmism about Islam, let’s be clear that none of them has ever legitimated or called for anything resembling Breivik’s actions.

2) But if the “anti-jihadists” are within their rights to object to being tarred with Breivik’s actions, one would nonetheless hope that the atrocity in Norway would prompt some degree of introspection on their part — some reflection on how it was that this person (however crazy or evil) took their work as justification for mass slaughter. Unfortunately, such introspection has been in short supply. Mark Steyn and Andy McCarthy have typically glib responses, in which they breezily deny that there might be any connection between Breivik’s politics and their own.

Their arguments are unconvincing and in places downright silly. Can Steyn actually believe, for instance, that just because Breivik’s victims were white Christians the entire Islamophobia angle on the killings is therefore simply a distraction? As even a cursory skimming of Breivik’s writings will show, Breivik’s main criticism of the European ruling elite is that they are too decadent, relativist, and multiculturalist to stop the threat from Muslim immigrants. (They’re “supporters of European multiculturalism and therefore supporters of the ongoing Islamic colonisation of Europe,” he writes at the beginning of his manifesto.) Perhaps this might ring a bell for Steyn, since he’s written a book arguing precisely the same thesis. (It’s also striking how many of the keywords — “lack of cultural self-confidence,” “national suicide” — are the same.) Insofar as we can perceive a motive for Breivik’s attack, it appears to be that the mass slaughter of the future Norwegian political elite would be a shock that would force Europe to awake to the Muslim threat.

3) As always, the double standards involved in the treatment of Muslim and non-Muslim terrorists are highly revealing. Molly Ziegler Hemingway, for instance, attacks the media for labeling Breivik a “Christian extremist.” He may be both a Christian and an extremist, Hemingway suggests, but there’s little evidence that his Christianity was a central cause of his rampage — he’s more of an extremist-who-happens-to-be-Christian. This is a fair point, but it’s striking that such logic virtually never gets applied to Muslim militants — “radical Islam” is trotted out as an all-purpose explanation regardless of the militant’s specific beliefs and grievances. (Witness the Fort Hood shooting, where the right was eager to downplay all of Nidal Hasan’s concrete political grievances and to focus on his religion as the sole and sufficient cause of his rampage.)

Similarly, it’s been revealing to see so many of the “anti-jihadists” draw a strict differentiation between violent and non-violent forms of politics, and suggest that even if Breivik shares many of their political goals, his use of violence utterly differentiates him from them. Again, this may be a fair point — but it’s precisely the distinction that they frequently deny when it comes to Muslims. Andy McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad, for instance, argues at great length that the threat from Muslim violence is largely a red herring, that the more insidious threat is from religious Muslims pursuing their goals peacefully through the political process, and that these peaceful Muslims (or “peaceful” Muslims, to adopt his gratuitous use of scare quotes) should essentially be viewed as no different from the terrorists. Of course, applying the same logic to the anti-jihadists would suggest that there’s little distinction between a McCarthy on the one hand and a Breivik on the other. If McCarthy and his compatriots don’t like this conclusion (which I myself don’t share) then perhaps they should reevaluate the premises that led them to their Islamophobic alarmism.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

Unfortunately, so far he’s been right, as war skeptics in both parties have proved unwilling to speak forcefully against Obama’s expansion of the drone war. Some Democrats seem to have made an opportunistic calculation that Predators and Reapers give the administration an opportunity to look tough and claim terrorist scalps at minimal political risk, while the murmurings of discontent over Afghanistan and Libya among Republicans — particularly visible in Monday’s primary debate — have not translated into any vocal criticism of the drone war. As long as American soldiers aren’t on the ground and taking casualties, there seems to be no appetite even among relative doves and anti-interventionists in Congress to criticize the administration on this issue.

This is a shame, because Obama’s expansion of drone warfare is extremely problematic both morally and strategically and deserves to be more publicly debated. The administration would like the public to believe that drone strikes are surgical operations targeting terrorist leaders based on surefire intelligence, and that civilian casualties are the exception rather than the rule. While the sheer number of reported civilian casualties and “high-value targets” who have been announced dead only to reappear suggest that this is a wildly optimistic picture, it’s difficult to tell just how wild — since the amount of reliable information that makes it back to the U.S. media is low and the administration has both the ability and the incentive to euphemize the civilian cost of the drone war. (Muhammad Idrees Ahmad has an important piece examining what he terms the “magic realism” of the body count numbers coming out of Afghanistan and Pakistan.)

And while the short-term domestic costs of the drone war for Obama are virtually nil, the long-term international costs are likely to be far greater. In the wake of the Arab Spring, it’s been grimly ironic these past few months to watch various Beltway pundits earnestly debating how the U.S. can “get on the side of the protesters” while having nothing whatsoever to say about the drone war. It only stands to reason, however, that the U.S. will continue to have trouble demonstrating its good intentions to the Muslim and Arab worlds so long as its primary instrument of foreign policy is a technology that seems more appropriate to the George Lucas’s Galactic Empire. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the only prominent pundits to question the use of drones have been counterinsurgency gurus such as David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, who have observed the political fallout of the use of Predators and Reapers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Given the political incentives in play, it seems likely that the Obama administration will continue to expand the use of drones until factions within the U.S. show that they are willing to make the administration pay a political price at home. Some of this mobilization would have to come from the left, but this is also a scenario where self-styled Tea Party Republicans could put their money where their mouth is and go beyond mere murmurings of discontent over the course of U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps Michelle Bachmann can finally make herself useful?

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

Seymour Hersh’s new piece in the New Yorker has generated a fair amount of buzz, so much so that Iran hawks have quickly leaped into action to try to discredit it. Virtually none of the criticism of Hersh’s piece has actually addressed the substance of his article, however, and since the article is subscription-only, it’s possible that not many people have actually gotten a chance to read it. It may therefore be worthwhile simply to spell out what Hersh’s piece actually says.

By far the most significant revelation in the piece concerns the recently-completed 2011 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). NIEs represent the consensus judgments of the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, and as such their findings frequently have major political ramifications. The 2007 NIE was particularly important (and contested), for it concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and found no evidence that the program had resumed.

Predictably, the 2007 NIE elicited howls of outrage from hawks who have been pushing military action against Tehran, and in the years since they have constantly attempted to discredit it. It’s worth making clear, however, just what the NIE did and didn’t say. It found no evidence of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program — that is, a nuclear program with elements that had no conceivable civilian uses (e.g., nuclear warhead design). The NIE never claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear program entirely, only that none of the nuclear program’s projects were unambiguously military in scope. Thus, to point to the fact that Iran continues to enrich uranium as evidence that the 2007 NIE has been discredited, as the Iran hawks have frequently tried to do, simply misses the point; the NIE did not suggest that Iran had stopped enriching uranium.

Nor did the NIE claim that it’s inconceivable that the Iranian regime ultimately seeks a nuclear weapon. It’s quite plausible that the regime does (not least, to deter U.S. or Israeli military action). What the NIE claimed was that there was no hard evidence or smoking gun proving that this was the case. Thus the relevant question is not whether we believe in our heart of hearts that Iran is seeking nukes, but whether there is any incontrovertible evidence that it is. This question is particularly salient in the wake of the Iraq war intelligence fiasco. In the runup to war, most people (including many war opponents) suspected that Saddam Hussein had WMD programs of some kind, but the U.S. would have been better served to put less weight on such suspicions and more weight on the actual evidential record.

So what does the Hersh piece actually say? The biggest revelation is that despite four years of intense political pressure from Iran hawks pushing the intelligence community to renounce the 2007 NIE, the just-released 2011 NIE continues to find no clear evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. According to Hersh, analysts at the military’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in particular have pushed back against this political pressure; in fact, the DIA analysts suggest that Iran’s nuclear weapons program was primarily directed at Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, not Israel, and was abandoned following the fall of Saddam.

Typically, a declassified version of the NIE is released for public consumption. This has not been done with the 2011 NIE, however, for reasons that are unclear. It’s possible that the Obama administration fears a political backlash along the lines of the 2007 version, or that it is worried that publicizing the new NIE would undercut its relatively hard-line stance on Iran. Regardless, the fact that an declassified version of the NIE has not been released means that Hersh’s piece is the first time the public is hearing about it.

In light of this, it is obvious that most of the criticism of Hersh’s piece completely ignores its central contention. The issue, once again, is not whether we should believe in our heart of hearts that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon. The issue is whether the U.S. intelligence community has found any incontrovertible evidence that this is the case. If Hersh’s account of the 2011 NIE is correct, the intelligence community has not, and this is a fact that surely deserves to be mentioned in discussions of the Iranian nuclear issue.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

As usual when Chait writes about this topic, he concedes the heart of the lobby critics’ argument in passing, while spending the vast majority of his piece attacking a strawman. I cannot speak for the lobby’s “left-wing critics” in general, but since their (our?) argument is so often caricatured — particularly by those (like Chait) who want to distance themselves from the critics while still maintaining their liberal bona fides — it may be helpful to spell out what the anti-lobby argument entails and what it doesn’t. As I see it, this argument contains two basic claims.

1) The lobby has a significant influence on U.S. foreign policy. Note that this does not imply that it is omnipotent, or unique, or qualitatively different from other special interest groups. It simply implies that the lobby skews (not dictates) U.S. policy in a markedly more pro-Israel direction than would be the case if the lobby didn’t exist. (Thus even though American public opinion leans “pro-Israel” in some vague sense, we can’t simply view U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East as an unproblematic emanation of the Will of the American People, as lobby apologists like Walter Russell Mead assert with willful naivete.)

2) The lobby has a pernicious influence on U.S. foreign policy. Once again, this does not imply that our foreign policy would magically become virtuous and wise in the absence of this influence. It simply implies our foreign policy is worse than it would otherwise be, whether in moral terms, in terms of U.S. strategic interests, or both.

Chait can’t argue against either of these propositions with a straight face, so he simply concedes them in a sentence before commencing his assault on the strawman. He closes by suggesting that the burden is on the lobby’s critics to prove to him that it exerts influence on Middle East policy that is different in kind from other special interest groups.

This is an irrelevant debate. The lobby’s critics don’t need to show that its influence is unique or total, only that it is significant and pernicious. It may well be that, say, the AARP or NRA or financial lobby exert comparable influence in their designated areas of policy.

But it is equally true that someone pushing for, say, financial reform would have no problem saying publicly that the financial lobby has a significant and pernicious effect on policy. More than that, most proponents of financial reform would recognize that it is essential to publicly highlight the ways that Wall Street skews policy, both in order to build support for reform and to adequately understand the forces standing in its way.

But make a comparable critique of the Israel lobby, and you will find that people suddenly get very, very alarmed — and not just the Michael Goldfarbs and Jennifer Rubins of the world, but also liberals like Chait himself. Such liberals ostensibly share these basic criticisms of the lobby but for some reason feel that one should never, ever talk about them publicly. If you do talk about them publicly, and suggest that the Israel lobby has as significant and pernicious effect on U.S. foreign policy in the Levant as the Wall Street lobby has on financial regulatory policy, you will quickly find yourself compared to Hitler or bin Laden or Father Coughlin and your position caricatured beyond recognition.

To avoid further unproductive debates on this subject, let me venture a suggestion for Chait and other liberals who are, if not quite pro-lobby, at least anti-anti-lobby. My position, and that of most of the other lobby critics to whom he refers, is simply that the lobby’s influence is significant and pernicious, and that recognizing this fact is essential for any attempt to positively influence U.S. policy in the Middle East. If you want to argue that the lobby’s influence is not significant, or not pernicious, or that we should simply avoid talking about the subject at all, then do so. Otherwise, save yourself the time.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

Referring to the 1967 lines as “Auschwitz borders” is an old rhetorical trope that dates back (in some form or other) to Abba Eban in the 1960s. The underlying thought is that Israel’s borders are “indefensible” (as Netanyahu suggested) without large chunks of the West Bank; this claim sits rather uneasily with the fact that Israel has in fact successfully defended the pre-1967 borders on multiple occasions, and that its military advantage over its neighbors has only increased since the Six-Day War. The “Auschwitz borders” line is merely a particularly rhetorically vile and emotionally manipulative way of stating this claim, with its implication that an end to the Israeli occupation would be in some way comparable to the Holocaust.

While the trope is noxious enough coming from your garden-variety Likudnik or American neocon, it is especially rich coming from the Wiesenthal Center, an organization whose mission includes “teach[ing] the lessons of the Holocaust for future generations” and which has taken a leading role in policing the bounds of discourse concerning the Holocaust. The latest Wiesenthal statement raises some salient questions for Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, the center’s leaders. For instance: if fully ending the Israeli occupation would be a calamity comparable to Auschwitz, what other contemporary world events can legitimately be compared to Auschwitz? Is it permissible to compare, say, Guantanamo Bay to Auschwitz? Is it permissible to compare the Israeli blockade of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? Is it permissible to compare Operation Cast Lead to the Holocaust?

More importantly, who gets to decide what constitutes a legitimate or illegitimate appropriation of the Holocaust for political purposes? Is it only Rabbis Hier and Cooper? If so, by what authority? Was there some sort of election in which they were appointed official custodians of the memory of the Shoah? If so, why is there no record of it?

The Wiesenthal Center has already been in hot water for its plans to build a “Museum of Tolerance” in Jerusalem on the site of an old Muslim cemetery. This latest statement displays a similar tone-deafness, in ways rather similar to the Anti-Defamation League’s self-marginalizing attack on the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” last year. Given this record, one is forced to ask what purpose these Jewish civil rights groups are serving in this day and age. Both the Wiesenthal Center and the ADL seem to think that their mission is first and foremost to serve as enforcers of the Likud line in the international arena. If this is all they have to offer the world, perhaps they have outlived their usefulness.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

As it happens, I agree with the Corner-ites’ opposition to Graham’s proposal, if not their hysteria about the ongoing Islamization of the West. But it’s worth looking a little more closely at the logic of Graham’s proposal. Graham and his close ally John McCain have frequently tried to cast themselves as a “vital center” on issues of torture and civil liberties, but in fact they have proved themselves to be reliably right-wing on these issues; in particular, Graham has been a vocal opponent of civilian trials for terror suspects and of accountability for Bush-era officials involved in the torture of detainees. His belief that the First Amendment might have to be sacrificed in the name of the war on terror is not some out-of-character lapse of cultural confidence; rather, it’s of a piece with his generally stated view that fighting terror should take precedence over civil liberties at home.

Steyn and McCarthy profess to be shocked — shocked! — that the Bill of Rights might be abridged for American citizens as a result of what’s going on “over there.” But in fact, Graham’s proposal is rather mild compared to the views of, say, John Yoo, who suggested in a notorious October 2001 memo [PDF] that the President during wartime can override the Fourth Amendment — and by implication, the entirety of the Bill of Rights — at will, provided he deems it necessary for the war effort. (Graham at least seemed to be proposing that the First Amendment should be restricted through legislation rather than presidential fiat.) Of course, Yoo’s analysis has since been repudiated by the Justice Department, and he was later reprimanded by an internal Justice Department report investigating his conduct during the Bush years. But since leaving the Bush administration he’s been welcomed with open arms by the American right — not least, National Review, which has brought him on board as a contributor along with Steyn, McCarthy, and Stuttaford. If Steyn and McCarthy, at least, have expressed any misgivings about Yoo’s analysis, I haven’t seen them. (Stuttaford is more reliably libertarian.)

Like much of the American right, Steyn and McCarthy seem to have no objection to rescinding the constitutional rights of American citizens provided it only happens to “them” (brown people with funny names) and not to “us” (nice, patriotic white people). They might want to consider, however, whether this is really a tenable line — or whether, as Graham’s proposal suggests, the slope is more slippery than they would allow.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

First, he suggests that the same sort of humanitarian considerations that war supporters are currently making about Libya were far stronger in 2003 with regard to Iraq; thus, if one supports intervention in Libya, one would logically be required to have supported intervention in Iraq:

Now, those opposed to U.S. involvement in the civil war in Libya are deemed indifferent to the repression and brutalities suffered by the Libyan people from Gadaffi and willing to protect his power. This rationale is as flawed logically as it is morally. Why didn’t this same moral calculus justify the attack on Iraq? Saddam Hussein really was a murderous, repressive monster: at least Gadaffi’s equal when it came to psychotic blood-spilling. Those who favored regime change there made exactly the same arguments as [John] Judis (and many others) make now for Libya…Why does that reasoning justify war in Libya but not Iraq?

It certainly is the case that supporters of the Iraq war manipulatively invoked humanitarian considerations in order to paint opponents of the war as callous. But is it really the case that the humanitarian case for war was much stronger in Iraq than it is in Libya? It seems to me that there is one important consideration that Greenwald doesn’t mention: Saddam Hussein certainly had more blood on his hands than Qaddafi overall, but by the time of the 2003 invasion his worst atrocities were in the past. He undoubtedly remained a brutal dictator with a horrific human rights record, but was no longer committing bloodshed on the scale of, for instance, the Al-Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s. Furthermore, in 2003 he was not imminently threatening to commit more atrocities; in Libya, by contrast, Qaddafi has been threatening to inflict mass violence on rebels (not to mention peaceful protesters) in the immediate future.

I would suggest that if any intervention of this kind can be justified — which is, of course, a question open to debate — its aim must be preventive rather than punitive. Such an intervention should not, in other words, be intended simply to punish a dictator for past atrocities, but must have the prospect of preventing atrocities in the imminent future. Thus the humanitarian argument for war in Iraq was deeply unconvincing in 2003, but it would have been far stronger if the year were 1988 and Saddam was in the process of slaughtering the Kurds. (This is not to say that an intervention in Iraq would necessarily have be justified in 1988, but simply that it would have been more justified than it was in 2003.) Of course, the fact that the Reagan Administration continued to actively support Saddam during his late-80s atrocities — with nary a peep from many of the same people who 15 years later would be piously invoking the humanitarian case for war — was one reason many war opponents were deeply skeptical of this argument for invasion.

Second, Greenwald mocks the notion that the US government is motivated by benevolence and earnest humanitarianism:

But what I cannot understand at all is how people are willing to believe that the U.S. Government is deploying its military and fighting this war because, out of abundant humanitarianism, it simply cannot abide internal repression, tyranny and violence against one’s own citizens….They just all suddenly woke up one day and decided to wage war in an oil-rich Muslim nation because they just can’t stand idly by and tolerate internal repression and violence against civilians? Please.

This is a frequent line of argument from critics of the Libya intervention on the left. It has the added virtue of being almost irrefutable: no one can seriously examine the US record of inaction when friendly governments commit atrocities against their citizens and conclude that American decision-making is motivated solely by some humanitarian calculus independent of geopolitical considerations. (I do, however, find the notion that this intervention is primarily about oil to be deeply unconvincing.)

However, even if we concede that Western policymakers are hypocrites and that their claims to be motivated solely by disinterested benevolence are disingenuous, what follows from this? Presumably, whether the Libyan intervention is just or wise must be decided on the basis of its concrete effects on the ground — and not on the basis of whether or not the people pushing it are noble and benevolent. That is to say, if we believe that the intervention will prevent mass atrocities without exacerbating the crisis, we should support it even if Western leaders are hypocrites for doing so. If, on the other hand, we believe that the intervention will only make matters worse, we should oppose it even if we believed that these leaders were genuinely well-intentioned.

As stated, there are many, many good reasons why someone could be opposed to the current intervention. But I don’t think that either of these arguments, which have frequently been made by opponents of the attack on Libya, are particularly convincing.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]