Intervention and the Work That Follows: A Reply to Alan Johnson and Darrel Moellendorf

Intervention and the Work That Follows: A Reply to Alan Johnson and Darrel Moellendorf

Michael Walzer: Intervention and the Work That Follows

I am grateful for these cogent comments (by Alan Johnson and Darrel Moellendorf) on my original blog post on Libya. As Darrel says, these are difficult judgments, and it?s obvious from the lines that he and Alan quote that I went back and forth on the question of a last minute intervention, before coming down against it. I will turn quickly to my reasons, but before that I want to agree strongly with Alan that they don?t matter much now. The Allies are militarily engaged in a very strong way, and we have to hope for a decent outcome, one that meets Darrel?s proportionality test. And, meanwhile, democratic leftists have to look for ways of supporting our friends among the rebels?since some of the rebels are obviously not our friends. All the Arab uprisings have been the work of unstable coalitions. They include people courageously committed to democratic principles?liberal students and trade unionists and moderate Muslims who believe in toleration and pluralism. But they also include people whose triumph would make us wish for the return of the dictators. We have to help the good guys, and we have to do that even if the good guys are heavily dependent on the intervening armies.

What about the decision to intervene? Darrel, Alan, and I agree that the threshold for going to war has to be set very high. For many people, Qaddafi?s ?no mercy? speech passed the threshold. I felt that since nothing Qaddafi had said up to that point about who his enemies were or what his soldiers were doing was believable, we had no good reason to believe this either. In any case, the rebels were fleeing so fast that there wouldn?t have been many enemies left in Benghazi once the ?loyalists? got there. So the real question for me was whether to rescue a failed rebellion. And I thought that if we did that, we would probably be committed (as we now are) to reversing the failure. And since it is clear, at least as of right now (27 March), that the rebels can advance only when we blow up everything in front of them, it seems that we are committed to doing that too.

And so we are intervening in a very big way, again, in a country about which we know very little, on behalf of political forces about which we know even less. We don?t know what a new Libyan regime would look like (see Nick Serpe?s blog post of March 21 for some of the possibilities); we also don?t know whether a new regime can be put together without an extensive civil war. We can hardly even guess at how Darrel?s proportionality test will turn out. Given all this, I thought that the threshold held. The case for intervention just wasn?t strong enough.

I don?t want to argue that we shouldn?t have intervened in Libya because we are not going to intervene in Bahrain, or Yemen, or Syria. Libya was different in that the rebels established a territorial base and something that sometimes looked like an alternative government. We couldn?t believe them any more than we believed Qaddafi, since they reported on battles that they hadn?t fought and victories that they hadn?t won and, according to one New York Times reporter, exaggerated the atrocities of the other side. But there was a liberated area and a revolutionary council, on whose behalf it was possible to intervene. And now we have to hope that some of the council members really plan to establish, and are able to establish, a decent government. Actually, we would all settle now for a not-indecent government, with some free space for political organization.