Reasons for Libya war keep shifting.
James Traub finds a justification for continuing the war in Libya:
The critics of humanitarian intervention who say that the outcome is likely to be messier and more protracted than its proponents imagine are right. You have to be prepared to live with the unforeseen consequences of your acts. NATO and the United States thus have to stay the course not only to deliver the Libyan people from Qaddafi but also to demonstrate that such interventions are not exercises in imperial hubris -- or "wars of whim," as my Foreign Policy colleague Stephen Walt mockingly puts it.
You can usually tell a military conflict has lost all strategic sense when its advocates can no longer offer any justification for it other than "credibility." In this case, the West is being exhorted to spend more money and put NATO lives at risk in a conflict of little impact on U.S. national security so that we can ... spend more money and put more NATO lives at risk in a similar conflict in the future. Makes sense!
And who needs convincing that the war in Libya is not a result of imperial hubris: the Middle East or Western liberals?
But aside from re-litigating the folly of this intervention, we are where we are. The question is - where should we go? Contra Traub, I don't think it's wise to press on merely to preserve the option for similar mistakes in the future. But there is now a growing threat to international security from missing pieces of Gaddafi's conventional arsenal and the very real prospect that the more time Gaddafi & co. have to stew, the greater their chances for international mischief.
(AP Photo)
