Trying to implement the Turkish model of a US dominated puppet state in Libya is not going to work.

Firstly, by supporting Al Qaeda NATO has created a huge entity which will resist every change except a sharia-based one.

Secondly, Libyans has a History in fighting colonialism. A US/NATO domination will be fought.

It is hard to work out, but the longer this conflict goes on, the greater the ratio of the cost in terms of lives extinguished to the benefit of lives saved. I do not believe that Gaddafi would have been quite as brutal as you and the Obama administration have made out, though I agree that many lives would have been lost. The question when all is said and done is whether that number would be larger or smaller than would have happened otherwise.

Given the rebels' tendency to show the same revenge killing behavior that was warned with regard to Gaddafi, I suspect that this campaign won't be a life-saving one. Instead of your exercise of positing oneself as having a family in Benghazi, how about one in Brega? Would someone with a family in Tripoli be happy about how things have turned out? I think not.

Marc Lynch here repeats the case that intervention in the Libyan civil war is worth it because Arab public opinion, and many of the Arabs he has met personally, favor it.

That's really about the whole of his argument. The rest of it is composed of counterfactuals and scary rhetoric about how a failure to intervene would have "emboldened" other Arab dictators. Just imagine how bad Syria would be now if NATO hadn't intervened in Libya (or, I suppose, if NATO had intervened with enough force to destroy the Libyan government and end, rather than prolong, the Libyan civil war)!

This is nonsense, and what is more Marc Lynch knows it is nonsense. Arab dictators in countries of any size respond to the situation and history of their own country, not someone else's. The Arabs genuinely moved by the plight of the Libyan rebels are Arabs far removed from Libya. That Arabs in American universities and Washington policy seminars have had their imaginations captured by the fight against Qadhafi I have no doubt; I suppose it is possible that Gulf Arabs and Moroccans look with favor on the possible demise of the one Arab leader widely disliked by most Arab governments.

Do they feel strongly enough about this cause to fight for it? No. Help fund the NATO governments attacking Qadhafi's regime? No. Support, or at least cheer, an intervention that involved NATO soldiers on Libyan soil and might quickly end a war that kills people just as dead as a purge of Qadhafi's enemies would have? Absolutely not.

So the Obama administration calibrates its intervention with great precision, to ignore the American Congress but revel in the heavily qualified endorsement of the Arab League. And among the Arab expats, he's more popular than, well, Qadhafi anyway. And why not? This whole project is being undertaken on behalf of a narrative that denies Arab agency or culpability in generations of bad, often vicious government, blaming this all on the Americans and European imperialism. According to the Arab spring narrative, just a nudge from the imperialist governments, a hint that they have repented of their ways, and Arabs can retake their countries and bring to them freedom and democracy. It's a narrative made for an expatriate.

In a world running down on oil and Libya reported to have the third largest remaining reserves of this black gold, it was only a matter of time before that the country would become a target. When the rebellion started, Chinese and India workers/engineers stopped work on their oil projects in Libay and were evacuated from the country. The Libyan government was caught by surprise and the rebels made gains before Gaddafi and his supporters arranged a counter-attack. The British and French in the mean-time opened talks with the rebels thinking that they would win easily. Gaddafi then offered in a speech the western oil concessions to China and by that stage had the rebels on the run. BP was quick to claim that their existing oil contracts in Libya were to be honored. That's when Britain, France and the Arab League also ganged together to demand Gaddafi's eviction and a UN resolution on a no-fly zone was passed. It's strange that the original UN resolution was to protect civilians but has now become a partisan regime change exercise for NATO where civilians are killed every day by the bombing. Whe the bombing stops, and whoever rules Libya, I would be expecting BP to be consistent and approach the people in charge of Libya and tell them that all prior contracts (including China's and India's oil contracts) should be honoured.

Mr. Lynch, you are a political science professor, I thought you would have discussed presidential power and the Constitution.
On reversing constitutional abuses of the imperial presidency, what some have called a 'constitutional dictatorship', Obama has failed, in fact he has made it worse. This statement sums up the state of our democracy. "There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that says you can violate the law as long as NATO blesses it," Sherman told FP. "The second most important thing is that we bring democracy and the rule of law to Libya. The first most important thing is that we have democracy and the rule of law in the United States."
I'm very disappointed in Obama on war and militarism...Obama promised to be an improvement over Bush's infamous record of presidential power abuse and countless constitutional violations...Obama's failure to reverse and address Bush's record and his embrace of many of the most constitutionally destructive policies of the Bush Admin. is very damaging to our democracy.
Where are our priorities? We're slashing spending on programs providing vital, indispensable health services for the disabled, children and elderly like Medicaid as hundreds of billions are wasted on militarism and war. This must stop. We can be an empire or democracy, not both.

Wouldn't that make the whole legitimacy issue a bit moot? After all, the U.S. was conducting strikes against Yemen in support of the official government, and noone every complained about the failure to obtain Congressional approval - let alone for drone strikes within Pakistan's borders.

I think that the deeper reasons for the Libyan intervention had little to do with the proffered humanitarian concerns: that was just a stalking horse. Pres. Obama--a very gifted politician--wanted 1) to support a longer term geopolitical push into Africa; and 2) at the rhetorical level, to strengthen the narrative of the Arab Spring, and our relationship to it, by underscoring the idea that the West,--not Al Qaeda--is aligned with justice and meaningful social change. All of this has superficial appeal.

But what is the real cost to the Republic of his approach to the problem, and of this strategy? By avoiding a broad-based, and rule-based, open political debate (preferably one that would grapple with grand strategy), Pres. Obama undermined at home the very values he purported to champion abroad. Could the Congress not have been asked for a declaration of war? Pres. Obama admitted that this was the correct constitutional procedure, and constitutional construction, during his presidential campaign.

He has plainly violated his constitutional oath of office. This is not a trifling matter if we wish to remain a self governing people.

Instead of a strategy that is consistent with his constitutional role and our deepest history as a people, he gives us pretext and alarm. (This, the same trope used by Paulson during the financial crisis.) Imminent massacre? Algeria lost over 200,000 people and we barely lifted a finger.

We're overstretched and broke. And Obama's not a king--or a strategist.

Consider the following purely as a strategic approach consistent with honest constitutional self governance: after 9/11, a robust debate demands fierce, punishing strikes on the Talliban, strikes which freely wander over to the Pakistani side of the border, given the actual facts and actual threat. The Quetta shura lies in smoldering ruins, as does Osama bin Laden and his entire command. Massive bombing of Taliban forces; poisoning of poppy fields. That's October 2001. Not a single American life lost.

We then honestly debate Iraq's threat to us, and decide that covert operations are about all it warrants. Eventually, Sadam Hussein is killed, as are his sons. No boots on the ground in either case. Hundreds of billions of dollars are saved, along with several thousand American lives. Iran's strategic position is not strengthened. We're up to about mid 2002.

Pres. Bush pushes $500 billion into energy R&D, funneling money through angel funds, hedge funds, and private equity firms. A decade on, we're close to commercially viable solar-thermal at competitive rates. By executive order--on national security grounds--the tariff on ethanol from Brazil is dropped; car companies are forced to produce only flex fuel vehicles; a $500 billion Manhattan project is launched to create space-based energy (solar, beamed back to earth through microwaves).

When the banks (and their investors) experience losses from unsound loans, they file for bankruptcy. Both Pres. Bush and Pres. Obama make a point of telling Wall Street that they should not expect a bailout--they voluntarily undertook these risks--and they do not receive a penny of public funds. Same for the car companies.

Some very wealthy investors take it on the chin, as they should. Some banks, and a couple of car companies go down. Others, however, survive. So be it.

Tell me why we would not be in a far superior strategic position today.

9/11 was hatched in Hamburg and Islamabad as much as it was in Kandahar. We never needed to invade Afghanistan to ensure our safety. Nor have we become safer by pretending that we'll transform Afghanistan on the cheap. We're just fooling ourselves. We have transformed neither the country nor the culture. And we're bugging out.

I don't believe that our move against Qadhafi represents a fundamental shift toward a more humane or enlightened foreign policy: David Shayler, formerly of MI-5, tried to blow the whistle on what he took to be an illegal plot by MI-6 to assassinate Qadhafi several years ago using Salafists from Benghazi. This would strongly suggest that a deeper, longer term geopolitical and economic motivation underlies the current push in Libya. Pres. Obama's Libya policy has little to do with a Samantha Power-like liberal internationalism, and more to do with a banking, oil, and defense/security system that plays its moves a decade ahead of time.

No wonder we don't hear much about the exact makeup of the "rebel" forces in the East: these are the same Islamists we used in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, and Western China. This is just the most recent example of using such groups to do our bidding, the earlier example, of course, being the Arab Afghans.

How's that strategy working out for you?

Let's look at Libya dispassionately. Have you seen the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people protesting in Tripoli in favor of Qadahfi? Have you seen the Kalashnikovs handed out to them by the government? Could the Obama/French strategy actually cause more deaths in the long run than any supposed "massacre" ever would have caused? We look at historical events like the Bay of Pigs and wonder how intelligent, experienced Presidential advisors could have banked on the notion of a general uprising. Wishful thinking, clouding analysis.

Is Egypt really the counter-example? The military wanted him out for more than a year according to George Friedman. They knifed Mubarak, threw him overboard, and put in one of their own. So much for Twitter.

If these societies in the MENA region present nearly intractable political problems, in part as a result of a culture of endemic corruption and brutality, then we have two primary choices: conflict, which requires overwhelming force to bring about change (think Germany and Japan), or drift, which requires luck, extensive coordinated action in support of such change, and many decades of hard work. These realistic options were simply unacceptable to the Obama administration and to the larger game plan of the West, so the Obama advisors did what all lazy strategists do--they decided that this one was an exception, and that they'd sell it through propaganda directed at their own people. I find Obama's stated rationale for going to war with Libya to be about as convincing as the existence of roving bands of Qadhafi fighters hopped up on Viagra.

To the extent there's a strategy, we'll eventually use the very existence of these Islamists in Libya as a ruse to move in militarily. We plan on crushing them at the appropriate time.

Of course, that was also our strategy for Al Qaeda between 1992 and 2001. In retrospect, do you think that strategy could have been improved upon?

Pres. Obama had no legal authority to go to war in Libya. It should be an impeachable offense. And no, I don't forgive him simply because he's billed as a kind Democrat and a Nobel peace laureate. This is the same unacceptable nonsense that Bush and Cheney pulled and we are the poorer for going along with it.

Obama promised to be an improvement over Bush's infamous record of presidential power abuse and countless constitutional violations...Obama's failure stavkovanie to reverse and address Bush's record and his embrace of many of the most constitutionally destructive policies of the Bush Admin. is very damaging to our democracy.

The Libyan government was caught by surprise and the rebels made gains before Gaddafi and his Tavares supporters arranged a counter-attack. The British and French in the mean-time opened talks with the rebels thinking that they would win easily.