Responsibility to Protect ... and Do Nothing Else

A few days into the intervention and the Libyan exit-strategy is already clear as mud.

In an insightful column from Slate reposted by the National Post, Anne Applebaum writes that Barack Obama’s much-criticized near silence on the Libyan intervention is a master stroke that will enable him to avoid being sucked into a long and costly war. “Enthusiasm and soaring rhetoric would ... lock the United States and its allies into an implied set of promises,” she writes. “If we’d compared Gadhafi to Hitler, we’d have to eliminate him. If democracy were the only solution in Libya, we’d have to stay in Libya until it was democratic. If the president had been talking about nothing else for the last three weeks, his entire presidency would now be on the line.”

The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star editorialists are concerned that the mixed messages coming from the no-fly zone coalition leaders appear to indicate there’s no plan to ensure that military intervention in Libya doesn’t escalate into a costly war to bring about regime change. “[T]he no-fly-zone coalition needs to focus on its continuing limited mission” to protect civilians, writes the Globe, “and should refrain from fantasies of tyrannicide and wars of liberation.” The problem is, it’s easy to see how one mission could bleed into another. If neither the rebels nor Gadhafi gain the upper hand and engage in a protracted civil war, won’t protecting civilians from Gadhafi necessitate assisting the rebels in any way possible, including getting directly involved in the war? And what if the rebels start killing Gadhafi loyalists? Then whose side are we on?

In a somewhat starry-eyed piece in the Toronto Star, Ramesh Thakur writes that the Libyan intervention marks a new era in which sovereignty is no obstacle to the international community’s “responsibility to protect” (R2P) civilians from hostile governments. “R2P responds to the idealized UN as the symbol of an imagined and constructed community of strangers: We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers,” he writes. Maybe, but we’re still a little less keen to do the keeping if it means violating the sovereignty of strategically allied countries like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. In that way, the new era is a lot like the old.