At the U of C talk he gave here in SF a few months ago, John Mearsheimer made the same point to a (mostly) liberal audience. You would have thought he was challenging the notion that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. But liberals are good and conservatives are evil!

It's too bad people like you have demonized the neocons so much you failed to appropriately recognize the influence of "liberal imperialists" (as John described them) in the decision to go to Iraq and other foreign policy initiatives. Even above, you use the term "well-intentioned" liberal hawks, to give you the cover you need with your liberal crowd. I challenge you to provide you one example in all of your scathing commentary of the Iraq war where you qualified your use of the word neoconservatives with the same adjective. Just saying.

This is you at your strongest, when you focus on these issues.

your comments are depressingly accurate. you have left out one important factor-domestic politics. whatever any candidate says about following the constitution, a new foreign policy etc., no democrat can afford to have republicans calling him weak, terrorist sympathiser, unbeliever in american greatness and exceptionalism, etc.-the "jimmy carter" factor. that is why obama went to war. he might change in a second term but without doing this he thinks he would not have a 2d term. there is no political penalty. a primary challenge is unlikely and any republican is likely to be even more hawkish-e.g. why wait for the UN or even wait for Khaddafi to start doing anything. just start bombing right away. as an aside- this is why the framers of the constitution knew that it would be extremely dangerous to put a permanent large standing army at the disposal of a president. the though they had placed enough constraints in the document. they were wrong.

Stephen, you've done it again. You are very good at articulating and analysing what many of us out here can only identify as a vague knot in the kishkas. I doubt that I'm alone in repeating to myself, "Just one more war, and that's the end of the West." It's just that we all feared it would be against Iran.

Libya is a mission that should have involved the Egyptian army with important support from the Europeans. But as you call him, "Uncle Sucker" got sucked in again. Erdogan is right when he implies that this is the kind of intervention that only highlights the hypocrisy of the US and its vassal states, which have sat back and watched this kind of behaviour from Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians but jump in to quash it when Qadaffi does it.

American power elites use academic pedigrees as (improper) proxies for wisdom.

The character flaws that transcend the Neo-Con and Neo-Liberal orientations are the hubris and conceit that are inculcated in the bastions of academic elitism.

They say there are maybe 5 flavors of intelligence. Many academic elites are deficient in 3 or 4. The Ivy League annually dumps scores of graduates and members of the professoriate onto Wall Street and into the Beltway where they proceed to wreck both economies and countries with supreme self-confidence.

Harvard grads may be smart. But they ain't that smart. Unfortunately the common people have to clean up their huge failures when they flunk out of the school of hard knocks.

Meanwhile the egregious elites merely retire to the Kennedy School or Brookings to write books that poorly rationalize their stupidity. (Barack Obama, Larry Summers and Donald Rumsfeld are instructive archetypes.)

Over the decades, America has been exhausted by those clowns. It's time we elected and selected leaders with the humility to say, "I just don't know."

P.S. And note the elites almost always get rich while cluelessly, generating their wreckage. Must be nice...

Comparing Obama to Bush is like saying that one of them chose to sometimes use lubricant before sodomizing us.

The only difference between W. Bush and Obama is that one is pink viceroy and the other is brown viceroy of Israel.

While it is reasonable to anticipate Chinese schadenfreude in the event the US gets bogged down in Libya, I anticipate Beijing's immediate reaction is concern. China needs African business partners who are reliably preoccupied with filling their coffers and reliably unconcerned with human rights on the African continent. Missiles are raining down on the most reliable such partner at the moment.

What I found especially interesting is the notion that "regional support" means Arab support. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, Libya is much more an African country than an Arab country. Muamar Al-Khadafi was called king of the kings of Africa - not of Arabia.

So where is the African regional support for action in Libya?

As western media always have a tendency to diminish Africa and especially regions like the Sahara, I found only few reports from there. The New York Times has recently ran a report from Bamako, the 1.7 mio people capital of Mali. Here are some quotes from that NYT piece "Libyan Oil Buys Allies for Qaddafi" about how people there look upon the conflict in Libya:

“We’re all ready to die for him,” Mr. Maiga said. “He’s done so much for us, after all.” “Some people see the colonel as the devil, but he’s not,” said Seydou Sissouma, spokesman for Mali’s president. “He’s a great African.” Mr. Sissouma bristled at the idea that Libya was buying friends. “That’s not the case,” he said. “Libya has accepted to share its resources with others. Other African oil producers, like Nigeria, don’t do this.” Many members of the nomadic Touaregs, who roam across the deserts of Mali, Niger, Algeria and Libya, see Colonel Qaddafi as their champion. When thousands of Touaregs fled into Libya in the 1970s and 1980s, Colonel Qaddafi welcomed them with open arms. He gave them food and shelter. He called them brothers. He also started training them as soldiers. “It’d be very difficult in just two or three weeks to organize a system to pay and recruit mercenaries,” he said. Beyond that, he said: “Even if Qaddafi didn’t ask them, they’d go. He’s their chief, their leader, everything to them. If he’s out, they lose their protector.” Mr. Maiga — by day a small lender, by evening a rabble-rouser who sits on a cracked concrete stoop with a gaggle of young men who say they are eager for war — said he was envious of the Touaregs fighting for Colonel Qaddafi. “We wish we could be like them,” he said. “We’re just waiting on the means.” Indeed, all across this city, young men have formed into pro-Qaddafi organizations, and many said they, too, were eager to join the fight and were just waiting on “the means.”

Today I found a very simillar report from Nouakchott, the 700.000 person capital of Mauritania. Everywhere in the Sahara groups seem to emerge to fight with Qaddafi against "the colonialists".

So far to get an impression of ho has "active regional support".

In so many of these discussions I've heard in the last few days, Bahrain, Saudi, and Yemen are listed off as despotic regimes U.S. global interests would not allow it to confront. Why is Israel left off this list, especially by someone like Mr. Walt? The U.S. not only refrained from calling for a no-fly zone over Gaza, it rushed extra arms to Israel to help in its bloody attack. That one smacks of even more hypocrisy as U.S. interests in Israel are doubted by many.

Prof. Walt,

Thank you for this article that is insightful in the extreme. I re-read parts of this post and landed on a favourite line - "... [W]hen you have thousand of cruise missiles and smart bombs and lots of B-2s and F-18s, the whole world looks like a target set."

Now, I know I'm nitpicking, but shouldn't it be "thousands of cruise missiles" ?

you are providing us with helpful and insightful analysis, Prof. Walt. Let me add my $.02. If Obama had not been quite so forceful in his warnings to Mubarak not to injure protestors, he might have had more "wiggle room" with regard to Libya. Having come out so strongly with threats of possible intervention in Egypt, he essentially lost his freedom not to intervene in Libya. Had he failed to do so, he would have made himself and the United States look foolish and hypocritical. My point: actions have consequences and some of them constrain the actor to certain future actions, which may not be desired and/or desirable...

B and P

The entire foreign policy establishment, on both the right and the left, relies considerably on the support and patronage of big business, particularly the big multinationals. Ever hear the "serious" people at the CFR criticize MNCs? To the contrary, they are all hustling to get seats on corporate boards. It was clear weeks ago that Qaddafi has to go, because if he puts down the rebellion, then there's no way BP can continue to do business with him.

Democrats tend to support stem cell research and to think that it's OK to have a few gay guys in the country club. Otherwise, they're pretty much indistinguishable from Republicans.

Good analysis. I hope we can all agree on a middle ground when it comes to US Foreign Policy.

One small point. I'm not totally sure why the last 'China' point was needed. Your argument was really strong, and then you lost me. I know China looks scary, but I don't think they always look at us and shake their heads. It was just a bit of a non-sequitur.

Great article. Walt at his best.

Obama's tenure is largely characterized by dealing with the huge mess he had inherited. By being a weak president, he is merely consolidating it (by trying to fix Afghanistan and trying to conceal the huge failure in Iraq), but now he is adding to the mess with another war, which qualifies his as an outright awful president.

What will 2012 bring? The next guy - who will not be Obama, I hope - will have his job cut out. Obama's hand is tied on many issues, but the successor will be more crippled by public perception, debt and internal strife. Obama found (and lost) big public speeches to be a generous source of political capital, but the next president won't have even that kind of luxury.

Democracy is a double edged export and likely to lead the US up many a cul-de-sac because while it remains all but impossible for a people to reach consensus on what they want, it is becoming increasingly apparent they have no such difficulty coming together on what they do not want.

There are three analogs to the interventionist angle. I think Steve has nailed the identity between neoconservatism and liberal interventionism: the only difference is that the latter goes to Canossa.

One. The Crusades. Putin made this comparison and got yelled at but it is apt. The ideological justification had to do with supporting a superior morality and protecting Christians who were being brutalized, etc. etc. The practical justification was trade. There is no difference here, except the trade is for oil and the ideology is democracy.

Two. East European Empires. The reason the Prussian, Russian, Austrian, and Turkish empires established themselves throughout Eastern Europe is not because they were "evil", it was because there was a power vacuum in the region, that threatened to boil across boundaries, involved massacres, and -- wait for it -- involved trade. Basically, if you have what we would now call a "failed state" next door, you go in, and take charge.

Three. Colonialism. The main benefit of colonialism for Europe is that it solved the demographic problems for a couple hundred years, esp for those countries that controlled colonies. There were also of course massive benefits in terms of manufacturing and trade.

Now, to the extent that we interevene in Libya, or ANYWHERE, with a view to promoting a particular set of values, we are following in the footsteps of the avowed purpose of the Crusades. In the shadow of the Holocaust's symbology -- world standing by while a people were massacred -- that has a strong moral pull, but then the question is how do you go about doing it. It will be expensive, it will cost a lot of lives to (theoretically) save more lives, it will require many years -- perhaps even decades -- to replace the failed state with one more to our liking, and it will also require a degree of national mobilization that the US has so far failed to muster in either of its other post-9/11 wars, either in terms of the draft, taxes, or preferably both, and which would certainly be rejected by the American people if they were given a choice. "This is my idea of democracy' - Lincoln.

To the extent that Libya -- and many other Muslim states, and other states -- in for example Sub-Saharan Africa are failing, we can do nothing, or we can do what is required, but if we just do "something" we aren't really doing anything. None of these countries directly border the US or Europe so the problem is not identical to the early modern period in East Europe. But, one could easily argue, in the age of WMD, that is no longer relevant. So, theoretically, we COULD intervene in all of these countries, occupy them, and, in effect, COLONIZE them, but that would cost money, require assent, have massive human resource requirements (draft+) and neither the US or Europe is ideologically equipped for such a venture.

So the better path is to go hands off as much as possible and only intervene for humanitarian purposes / evacuations and so forth. But then we are still looking at a decades long commitment, e.g., UN Refugee bodies. Which at minimum will cost a LOT of money.

In short, we can intervene in these areas for moral reasons. And there might even be pressing economic reasons (oil, energy.) But moral reasons have little traction unless they are accompanied by large amounts of money, large amounts of people, large amounts of time, large amounts of commitment, large amounts of blindness to the unintended casualties crusades, empires, and colonies always involve, and large amounts of popular, DEMOCRATIC support; and NONE of these things are available either to the US or to the Europeans. Hence moral reasons become just another set of good intentions "with which the road to Hell is proverbially paved." - James

I am not as interested in the containers -liberal interventionists- as I am in good or bad reasons to wage war (or not.) While useful for drawing a line around a politic, I doubt if the people we are talking about self-identify as hawkish liberals, and set their agendas accordingly. "I am a neocon, therefore, I believe..." if we were speaking in broader terms, of Democrat, Republican, or independent, we could work backwards. It doesn't work here.

So, here is my question - is the US still promoting democracy, at the end of the barrel of a gun or otherwise? Don't assume here that I am saying this is a good thing, but that it just a continuation of longstanding policy. Contrast the situation in Iraq, a nearly airtight autocracy to the situations throughout the Muslim world, dictatorships leaning at a 45 degree angle. Or, even Libya in particular - as of last week, we had rebels begging us to invade. So, if this promotion of democracy doctrine is still in place, why would we stand by, just exerting political pressure?

Your points about cleanup are well-taken, and obvious to me, but I don't think fundamental policy failure in a former administration precludes success of different policies in the current one. War in not a policy, but an outcome. We don't do ourselves any favors by generalizing, and if this was Bush doctrine, we would be talking about WMDs by now. Because war failed to stand up a robust democracy when the constituents neither asked for it, or seem to be no more than tepid participants in it now, does not mean that toppling dictatorships is a bad idea.

To address some of the comments: going to war for oil makes about as much sense as colonialism, which is to say those arguments are completely devoid of reason. Assuming for a moment that there are only political motivations in play -that is, it is politically expedient to do one thing or another- there is no clear benefit to thrusting headlong into another potentially expensive, risky quagmire. How is this going to benefit anyone in the elections? There is no conceivable quid pro quo political or otherwise. Our "Empire" consists of countries that are bleeding us for money, and gas that comes at millions of dollars per gallon.

So the fact that neo-CONS give lip service to democracy, while actually not really caring about it allows you to count that as a "shared characteristic"?

Come on, give me a break.

I was heavily against the Iraq war, but I support the intervention in Libya. You can call me naive or stupid, or whatever, but don't attribute rationals to me that I (and I suspect many like me) don't hold.

Why do I support intervention in Libya? Nothing to do with oil. That may be why Hillary Clinton or some government official does, but I wouldn't call such a reason part of any "liberal ideology".

So, first and foremost I support intervention because *a significant rebel movement* against a known brutal dictator and sponsor of international terrorism had formed and showed signs of possible success, *IF* it had help, while also being clear that thousands if not more of the rebels would have surely been defeated and killed if they didn't get help.

Why not go around the globe intervening everywhere? Cause there aren't rebel movements that have taken over half of a country in other places. In addition, few other countries have regimes as well armed as Kadaffi who could and would have used such force against their own people.

If a similar situation broke out in North Korea I'd support the same actions there too.

Why not Saudi Arabia? Well cause there is no revolution going on there and the people haven't taken over half the country, that's why. Likewise, since we have a relationship with the Saudis (one that I'm against) obviously it would be more difficult to take sides against them in a fight with an uncertain outcome. Kadaffi is already our enemy, we don't really care if we piss him off, taking sides is a no-brainer, even if the rebels might be assholes too.

Why not Yemen, etc.? Again, same thing, plus it clearly wouldn't be as easy. Given that Kadaffi is already an enemy of the US and an enemy of pretty much everyone else too, this makes the case easier. The fact that it should be easier is a major contributing factor.

Now, why else is this a good idea? Well I think for the opposite reasons that the neo-con pushed for the US invasion of Iraq. I think that from a strategic perspective this is a good opportunity to use Libya as a "training ground" for international joint action, led by someone other than the US. This is a good opportunity to try handing this off and see how NATO and the UN can do.

Where I'm going with this is that I'd like to see the US downsize its military significantly. In order to do that we need to put the rest of our allies on notice that they will need to pick up the slack. This is a good way to start that transition to a "less powerful" American military. We should be sending a message to Europe that they will need to play a bigger role in policing their hemisphere and this is the wakeup call. Whatever this Libya action costs us, if done properly it can save us money down the road.

But, first and foremost is the issue of aid to the Libyan rebels, and protecting them from what would have been certain decimation at the hands of a dictator who had accumulated mass amounts of weapons from foreign sources, whose power came from foreign forces.

This is different from Rwanda, etc. also in that Kadaffi is largely a product of international forces, those in Rwanda were not. In a sense, the international community helped to create Kadaffi and thus has the responsibility of protecting his people from weapons and forces supplied by the international community. Not so with Rwanda, etc. not that I didn't also support intervention there too, but I think the case is stronger here, we (not the US as much as Europeans and Russians, but still us to a degree, including our oil consumption, even if not directly from Libya) have a responsibility to control a monster created by us (us, the whole international community).

Stop the nonsense, stop trying to make generalization that don't exist, and stop feeding the incessant need of everyone to claim that "the left is just as bad as the right". Its just another game of false equivalences.

Mr. Jenkins says "Mr. Obama chose a limited engagement, endorsed by a U.N. Security Council resolution."
The Security Council vote was 10 in favor with 5 abstentions clearly not unanimous. As opposed to what Mr. Obama did when he was confronted with an unquestionable resolution of the Security Council with 130 other cosponsoring nations to condemn Israel for their West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal settlements. Mr. Obama ignored the international community's overwhelming unanimous resolution to stop the crimes against the Palestinian people when he inexplicitly vetoed the resolution and sided with their oppressor.

wireless door video
http://www.espow.com/wholesale-security-surveillance-alarm-system.html

This article refers to Hillary Clinton as "liberal". That is hard for me to stomach. It is my contention that, unless she had publicly indicated otherwise, that as a public figure, who ran for president and now is secretary of state, she shares responsibility for, and implicitly endorses, the policies of her husband Bill's administration. To me that was a policy of half a million dead children due to the sanctions on Iraq, deregulation of the banks, and a policy of so-called "free trade" that has undermined the economic and job base of America, as well as its sovereignty. I haven't followed the careers of the other so-called "liberals". Maybe I need to adopt a new defintion of "liberal".