Rajan Menon: Libya: What the Intervention Has Wrought

Rajan Menon: Libya: What the Intervention Has Wrought
Libya's current politics offer two lessons -- ones we really shouldn't have to learn yet again. First, military interventions that topple repressive regimes invariably offer occasions to observe, though at others' expense, the law of unintended consequences. Second, the constituencies that clamor for such campaigns move quickly to other matters once those malign consequences become manifest.
The defenders of the Libyan intervention claim that the March 17 UN Security Council resolution authorized a no-flight zone in the face of imminent mass atrocities. But by now, no one seriously disputes that the assignment soon metamorphosed, allowing NATO and a few Persian Gulf states to take sides in a civil conflict, and in ways -- targeting Mu'ammar Gaddafi's forces, equipping and training the armed resistance, and even dispatching special forces -- that proved decisive.
NATO got a virtually risk-free opportunity to demonstrate that it still has a reason for being despite the Soviet Union's demise (never mind that the alliance's various "out-of-area" operations have divided rather than unified an organization that is becoming ever more anachronistic). Saudi Arabia (which has an abysmal human rights record and sent troops into Bahrain in mid-March to help a Sunni monarchy that oppresses the country's Shi'a majority to survive a popular revolt) and the other Persian Gulf kingdoms got a chance to off Gaddafi, whom they despised as a parvenu and a radical. Neoconservatives, liberal internationalists, and "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) advocates were, all in separate ways, pleased to see their programs enacted.