Right policy is defensive aggression for the Much Less Bad

Two interesting and warring perspectives on Libya and foreign intervention - I agree with main points of both.

The first by Shadi Hamid at Vox argues the intervention was a success - obviously not as compared to democratic Tunisia, but as compared to the most likely alternative scenario, Syria's, with two orders of magnitude more deaths. What I'd add to Hamid is that another alternative, complete victory for Qaddafi, would also have caused thousands of deaths, many more imprisoned and tortured, and active military intervention throughout Saharan Africa today by Qaddafi. Libya is obviously in bad shape, a 1980s Lebanon, but that's better than the alternative.

The second by Micah Zenko in Foreign Policy argues, accurately, that the seven-month military investigation quickly went beyond protecting civilians to regime change. I agree with the slippery slope between what was said and what was done (and quite possibly intended from the beginning). What Zenko doesn't do is analyze whether and where things were done right or wrong during the intervention, focusing solely on the issue of what Western leaders said they were doing. And the many predictions of a Western ground war intervention against Qaddafi, made by people who now proclaim how right they were to oppose any military action while ignoring Syria's outcome, were simply wrong.

Hamid says the solution to the problem identified by Zenko is defining aims broadly, maybe including regime change, but I disagree - the problem is moving from the original stated strategy. The foreign military intervention started too late and then intervened too much, doing too much of the fighting for the rebels. I don't know if doing less intervention may have led to more cooperation between rebel groups, or even negotiations with pro-Qaddafi tribes, but maybe Libya could've been better off.

The point is that there's a coherent policy that was almost followed in Libya and could be followed in Syria for military intervention - do it defensively in support of forces that are Much Less Bad than the dictator. Air strikes are appropriate to keep dictator armies from overrunning rebel-held cities, as was the case in Libya. Keeping it limited forces the rebels to win, hopefully through obtaining support, in new areas. Military support short of direct intervention, through weapons and training, but not the classic boots on the ground, could help them expand without taking too much of the leading role away from them.

You also don't need to have 100% confidence that the rebels are perfect Madisonian democrats, if they're clearly Much Less Bad than the people they're fighting, because you get a much better outcome, a Libya instead of a Syria. I'd say that the people we support at least need to give cursory support for democratic government though - otherwise there's little evidence that they're really better..

I am concerned that Clinton is oversupportive of military intervention, although she's miles better than anything on the GOP side. I hope she could support a limited and coherent doctrine for when intervention should and should not occur.

One last thought that I haven't seen elsewhere: people on the left who blame the current bad outcomes in Libya, Iraq, and Egypt primarily on Western actions are denying agency to the people and forces within those countries. Check your assumptions and possibly your biases. That's not to say Western and US leadership didn't screw up - they did - but the outside world is just a vector among other forces and not the all-responsible controller of what happens in other countries.

Accepting a limited role that may help to a limited extent is a much more realistic and better foreign policy, especially in what should be the very rare case of military intervention.