Libya: The Left's Iraq

An ill-defined military intervention into a country divided by murky ethnic factions and ruled by a blood-thirsty dictator. Sound familiar?

The “war in Libya is a creation of the liberal intellectuals – just as the war in Iraq was a creation of the neo-conservatives,” writes the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente. The idea is that the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) principle that the Libyan intervention is based on was drawn up by left-wing intellectuals still feeling guilty about Rwanda and Bosnia. Like the neo-cons, these pro-war liberals are “serenely convinced of their own moral rightness” but evidently ignorant of both the messy internal politics of the country we’re invading and the historically low success rate of military interventions. Wente fears we could soon be in a protracted bloody conflict with no clear goals. These are all very good points, but to the Newsroom, they testify to the difficulty of adequately addressing impending humanitarian disasters as much as to any liberal moral righteousness. Yes, liberals feel guilty the West didn’t stop the genocide in Rwanda. Isn't it arguable that they should feel that way?

The Halifax Chronicle Herald’s Scott Taylor writes that, contrary to the picture painted by the Canadian media, the Libyan opposition forces we’re supporting “are, in fact, heavily armed rebels and not simply ‘unarmed protesters’ demanding democratic reforms from a dictator.” Seeing as we know so little about them, Taylor asks, “should they prove victorious due to our interference, will we accept responsibility for the bloodshed they will invoke upon [Moammar] Gadhafi’s supporters?”

In the Globe, Roland Paris writes that the inherent paradox of humanitarian intervention is that you can never prove the result is better than the disaster you were hoping to avert. But Paris judges that “[b]ased on his track record, [Gadhafi’s] threatening words were alarmingly credible” and “on balance, even this deeply flawed intervention was probably better than inaction. Although we’ll never know with certainty, it could have been worse – much worse.”

However you judge the intervention in Libya, given the still-lingering potential for disaster it seems to us the last thing anyone should be doing is using Ottawa’s role in the mission as an excuse to boast about Canada’s international moral superiority. But apparently the Toronto Star and Vancouver Sun disagree.