More Violence Needed to Stop the Violence in Libya

On the wisdom of military intervention.

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper should be applauded for taking a strong stance against the violence engulfing Libya,” write Kyle Matthews and Frank Chalk in the Montreal Gazette. Now if you want to get technical about it, Harper and the other leaders backing military intervention are actually taking a strong stand in favour of escalating the violence engulfing Libya, but Matthews and Chalk believe such steps are necessary to prevent Moammar Gadhafi from committing “mass-atrocity crimes” and to live up to the international community’s Responsibility to Protect principle. “The recent history of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the former Yugoslavia attests to this,” they write.

The National Post’s Peter Goodspeed suspects the ultimate outcome of the West’s intervention could be significantly less positive. It could cause Gadhafi loyalists to turn on the dictator, but the “imposition of a no-fly zone and the enforcement of a no-drive zone around rebel-held cities could just as easily lead to an uneasy stalemate that results in the de-facto partition of Libya and prolonged instability. That is probably the worst possible outcome, short of a Gadhafi victory.” In other words, our intervention could lead to more atrocities in Libya.

Also in the Post, Rex Murphy makes an impassioned plea for Barack Obama to intervene, not in Libya, but in earthquake-stricken Japan. “[S]ince the election of Barack Obama, there has been a subtle, un-articulated, but quite definite withdrawal from the United States’ earned stature as a pre-eminent and shaping influence on the key events and forces of our time,” Murphy writes. Yes, the U.S. has sent institutional support to Japan, but Obama is now jetting off to Rio de Janeiro, of all places. “Why not the obvious and serious foreign visit the times require? Why not a trip to Tokyo?” demands Murphy. “It is ironic that this high celebrity of a president seems more comfortable with acting the celebrity role than being the president.” Just so we have this straight, Rex Murphy's message to Obama is: Stop acting like a celebrity by making better public appearances.