Andrew Sullivan is furious with the Obama administration for not consulting Congress before agreeing to carry out air strikes on Libya.
When will the US Congress be able to debate and vote? When will the congressmen and senators actually take a position for the record? Or is that kind of democracy the kind of thing we only export and don’t actually follow ourselves?
The National Interest argues that the days of hawks and doves are over – it’s all about the Valkyries now.
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[A] troika of female advisers – Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power – are, by and large, responsible for persuading President Obama, against the advice of Robert Gates and other members of the military establishment – that bombing Libya is a good idea. Power has condemned American foreign policy for failing to intervene sufficiently to avert genocidal wars, particularly in Bosnia and Rwanda. Bill Clinton has himself said that his biggest regret was not intervening in Rwanda to stop the carnage.
While the memory of Rwanda lies heavily upon the Clintons and US policy, it is Bosnia that dominates the thinking of David Cameron and the coalition, according to Ian Birrell, the Prime Minister’s former speechwriter.
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[O]ne of the books that left its mark on the Prime Minister recently is Unfinest Hour, a howl of moral outrage against Britain’s failure to intervene amid the bloodstained break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The book, which argues Bosnia ranks alongside Munich and Suez in the litany of Conservative foreign policy disasters, underlines that doing nothing can be a fateful choice
The author of Unfinest Hour, Brendan Simms, argued in last week’s New Statesman that the Conservatives have made a “fundamental break” from the realist policy approach that blighted the government’s policy in Bosnia in the 1990s. However, away from Cameron and his hawks (or should that be Valkyries?), many in the Conservative Party are more cautious.
Rory Stewart, writing in the London Review of Books, argues that the decision was taken in spite of Iraq and Afghanistan and the neocon agenda, rather than because of it. Stewart errs on the side of intervention, with a caveat.
But today, though I am in favour of the no-fly zone, it seems as though the real danger remains not despair but our irrepressible, almost hyperactive actions: that sense of moral obligation; those fears about rogue states, failed states, regions and our own credibility, which threaten to make this decade again a decade of over-intervention.
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, also offered cautious support for the intervention – but left himself space to wriggle and revert to a realist stance, should it all go wrong: “The best we can say of this venture is that it is the lesser of two evils – or so it seems at the moment.”
Both Stewart and Johnson are tipped as potential prime ministers as often as they are labelled pompous buffoons. If Libya goes wrong, then Cameron will have no shortage of critics within his party ready to say, “I told you so – sort of.”