On Libya

Who would have concluded in 1945 that Europe--bloody and bankrupt after some 400 years of sporadic conflicts, interspersed with some of the most brutal wars in history--was about to transform itself into one of the world's most successful societies?

That's the thought that strikes me when I hear all the wise pessimism spouted about the Middle East revolutions this year. And so I find it hard to share the sceptical attitude of most on the left, now that even the Libyan quagmire appears to be nearing its endgame. Aren't progressives supposed to be optimists?

I can see how things have got this way. After the 1990s Clinton/Blair doctrine of "liberal interventionism"--sending in the troops to end conflicts and encourage democracy--many will have felt hoodwinked when they saw this drift into the senseless bloodshed of Afghanistan and Iraq. If you sense that your government has been party to a terrible crime, it's tempting to set up a moral rule to ensure that crime can never be committed again.

The antiwar left is also right to note that the outcomes of conflicts are rarely as predictable as military planners suggest. There's a reason Julius Caesar compared the start of the Roman civil war to a dice game: every military action is a gamble, and a gamble with human lives. That being the case, it's morally comforting to tell ourselves that anything we could possibly do would worsen things, and to then use that as a justification for doing nothing. After all, you're only liable if you act--right?

Well, I disagree quite profoundly with that idea. I think if you don't act in a situation where you have capacity to act, you're morally responsible for your inaction. So I'd rather that "my side" had the blood of a hundred on its hands, than to see it stand by to preserve its own blamelessness, while the "other side" killed ten thousand.

Of course, the problem is that real-world situations can never be boiled down to such neat calculus. Perhaps Gadaffi's threats of a massacre in Benghazi and rebel provinces were just a bluff; maybe he had learned a lesson from 1996, when his forces gunned down 1,200 people in a few hours to put down a prison riot. Perhaps this new government will fail, or install a new dictator, or even dissolve into an Iraq-style civil war?

All those scenarios are possible, and there's little question that the people of Iraq have been worse off in recent years as a result of the 2003 war. But equally, I think the Balkans, Sierra Leone, and Liberia are better off thanks to their interventions. Ditto Europe, after the US succumbed to liberal interventionism in 1941. Afghanistan I'm not sure either way; while the invasion has been incredibly trigger-happy and brutal, I think I might prefer as a Rawlsian ignorant participant to be teleported into Afghanistan in 2001 over, say, Somalia.

The left is always going to be queasy about lending its support to the military. And it's surely too early to declare the war in Libya a success. But I don't think the comforting kneejerk certainty of opposing all interventions does justice to the left's professed concern for human welfare. Insofar as it does, it describes a morality that would rather preserve its own purity than get involved in the grubby, culpable, business of bringing about real-world change. Sometimes, beliefs need the support of our actions as well as our words.