TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Adam Garfinkle:

U.S. policy, on its face, suggests the absurd notion that if the Qaddafi regime stops targeting “civilians”, then we are fine with its continued incumbency. Yes, the President has said many times lately that Qaddafi has to go, but he never said that U.S. military forces were to be the proximate agent of that outcome. This is a lawyer’s cleverness bucking up against reality, however, and in this instance at least, the lawyer is bound to convince no one. (It was a lawyer’s way of thinking, too, to have privileged the attainment of multilateral cover above the need to know what the hell one was actually doing.) Clearly, the only way to reliably protect these “civilians” is to change the regime. Having started this foolish war, that is the only way it can end without producing sheer calamity—not that any end state that one can reasonably foresee is risk-free at this point.

(Via Ross Douthat.)

That’s the situation the Obama administration has talked itself into; noting Qaddafi’s proclamation that he will show no mercy for the opposition, Obama said we would protect civilians and that Qaddafi must go, but the administration has also said U.S. ground troops will not be deployed on Libyan soil (special forces, of course, do not count), and the U.S. will not attempt to bring down Qaddafi’s regime.

Those two statements are contradictory. If Qaddafi is willing to use his military to murder protestors—as he has already done—and our mission is to protect civilians, then we have little choice but to attack the regime. A no-fly zone alone will not protect them from tanks. Or pickup truck-mounted machine guns. Or rifle-toting soldiers. Either our mission is to protect civilians, and all that entails, or to enforce a no-fly zone, and that’s it (and if all we are doing is enforcing a no-fly zone, but not seeking to genuinely protect civilians, I’m not sure why we need a no-fly zone at all). There’s no middle ground that Obama is attempting to hold. It is one or the other, and unless he would like his stated policy to amount to little more than empty words, attacking the regime will likely be necessary.

While our official policy is contradictory itself, what’s worse is we don’t seem to even share that policy with our allies. France is the only country to recognize the rebels as the provisional government of Libya, while the British for their part said targeting Qaddafi is justified under U.N. resolution 1973. Those two things suggest they are seeking a little more than merely “protecting” civilians.

So, our intervention not only ties our hands, but our allies seem intent on regime change, too. We could, of course, refuse to uphold our words, leave the conflict to the British and French and extricate ourselves, but besides burning what little credibility we have, that presents even greater risks. Garfinkle explains:

So what happens if the French and British try but do not succeed in a reasonably expeditious way? What happens is about as obvious as it gets: not Suez happens. The Americans come and save the day, as they demurred from doing in October 1956. The French and British know in their heart of hearts that we cannot let them fail miserably at this, or that’s what they suppose. I suppose they’re right.

What this means is that the President may before very long be forced to make the most excruciating decision of his life: to send American soldiers into harm’s way to save the Western alliance—even from an operation that is not explicitly a NATO mission!—in a contingency that has no strategic rationale to begin with; or not, leaving the alliance in ruins and Qaddafi bursting with plans to exact revenge.

I think the President simply cannot allow that latter outcome. So this is no ordinary, run-of-the-mill mission creep we’re about to encounter if our allies cannot turn the trick

At this point, I’m not sure leaving Qaddafi in power is even a choice the U.S. or our allies can even make; it’s more than possible that if Qaddafi survives this tumult, he will turn back to a favorite trick of his—terrorism—and the nations who aided his opposition would be the primary targets. We may simply have gone too far.

That’s not an enviable position to be in, but it’s the path Obama has taken, and that says nothing about the contradiction he’s created between U.S. policy on Egypt and Libya—where the U.S. officially supported regime change in both cases—and Yemen and Bahrain, where the U.S. has made weak statements about “both sides” needing to show restraint1 and the need for reform. Of course, the situation in Yemen and especially Bahrain is complicated, and could serve as a flash point for a Sunni-Shia battle in the Gulf and an opening for the Iranians, but that only begs the question: when regional and U.S. interests come into conflict with the claims and aspirations of peoples under non-democratic regimes, what is the U.S.’s policy?

That’s not an easy question to answer, but the Obama administration’s actions make it necessary.

1. Jon Stewart had the best line about this—what does it mean for protestors to show restraint against soldiers firing upon them? To not step in front of the bullets? [↩]