EXCEPT THAT THE LIBERAL ISN'T PRESIDENT ANYMORE:

Libya's escalating drama reopens the case for liberal intervention: Iraq gave it a bad name. Blair nearly killed it. But there are responsible versions of a much abused doctrine (Timothy Garton Ash, 3/03/11, The Guardian)

The whole debate about so-called "liberal interventionism" is bedevilled by two big distortions. First, intervention is usually reduced to armed intervention. That ignores a panoply of ways in which states can intervene in the internal affairs of other states. Even to offer humanitarian aid to the victims of what is beginning to look like a civil war in Libya is, in some important sense, to intervene.

Starting with this almost universally accepted work of humanitarian aid agencies, there is then a whole range of forms of intervention – from economic carrots and sticks, through diplomatic pressure, all the way to often controversial forms of overt or covert assistance to independent media and opposition groups, training in forms of non-violent action, and so on. Many of the most genuinely liberal forms of intervention – those which help people help themselves to be free – are to be found somewhere along this spectrum, but well short of armed force. We used them far too little in the Middle East over the last 30 years.

The other massive distortion in the debate about liberal interventionism is that the military actions now most closely associated with the term (Afghanistan, Iraq) were not really liberal at all – or, at least, they were not primarily liberal. Some of the justifications of them used liberal arguments, and some liberals supported these actions, but the core of the case was not liberal in the way that the west's military interventions in Bosnia (far too late), Sierra Leone and Kosovo genuinely were.

The irony is that it was W who believed in the liberal case and made it, but Tony Blair and Colin Powel;l believed the Left could only be dragged into doing the right thing by the threat (bogus) of WMD.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 4, 2011 6:12 AM