Point: To the shores of Tripoli

today’s paper, Jacob Reses argues

Obama could have chosen to stay out of Libya entirely, but even those commentators who are (with good reason) wringing their hands over American involvement generally concede that a clearer-cut case for intervention could not be found. The mad dictator of a pariah state was about to violently subdue a democratic uprising and had earnestly avowed his intention to hunt down the rebels “house by house, alley by alley.” I will assume, for the sake of brevity, that America had to do something more substantial than simply freeze Gaddafi’s bank account.

But it would have poisoned the endeavor for America to rush to war alone or with no more than a few West European allies. Given the record left by the Bush administration, it is politically impossible in the foreseeable future for American presidents to go to war in Muslim-majority countries without first being called upon to do so by the United Nations and — in the Arab world — the Arab League (whose fickle behavior in this matter has been little short of disgraceful). America had to appear to be dragged reluctantly into the conflict. It also helps that American cruise missiles flew in the wake of French fighter jets — and, as a rule of thumb, when Paris is keener to fly sorties than Washington, there’s probably an excellent case for military action.

The legality of the intervention was resolved by delaying action. The purity of the revolution was preserved by refraining from surface invasion. And the lurking question of whether we can even trust these rebels seems to have been answered in the affirmative: When an American F-15 Eagle crashed due to a mechanical failure, the pilots were greeted by cheering rebels who asked to shake their hands. This, I suppose, is what Donald Rumsfeld thought would happen when we went to war in Iraq.

Still, some serious confusion remains. The curious command structure of the mission has at least been resolved: NATO will provide the military hierarchy while fulfilling directives given by an ad-hoc council composed partly of NATO members and partly of Arab allies. I was glad to see that NATO had been given military jurisdiction, rather than the U.S. African Command, as was originally suggested, and that Arab nations were brought into the political council. The more America looks like an equal partner, the better. (Full disclosure: I was an intern at NATO military headquarters this past summer.)

But perhaps the most serious question — our objective — remains to be answered. Obama has repeatedly insisted that “Gaddafi must go,” so it would be easy to mistake this as our military purpose. But regime change was not the imperative delivered to coalition admirals and generals. They’re acting under the authorization of U.N. Resolution 1973, which calls for “all necessary measures ... to protect civilians.” Yet how do we protect the civilians without pushing Gaddafi out of power? The French have put an even more liberal spin on the wording and seem to be interpreting it as “all necessary measures to protect the rebel forces.” And arguably, this is the only real way to protect civilians.

The political reality required that we delay military action, but I fear we may have lost our moment to push the rebel wave into Tripoli. Stalemate on the ground seems an all too-probable outcome, given the (highly respectable) reluctance to commit coalition troops to a surface invasion. Faced with the prospect of a perpetually divided Libya, some pundits are sensibly wondering what good this intervention is supposed to yield.

For starters, the no-fly zone — which is really a remote bombardment of everything with Gaddafi’s name on it — spared the destruction of Benghazi, with a population of 670,000, and the likely massacre of a substantial chunk of its inhabitants. Secondly, five of the most senior generals in Yemen defected from their president within 48 hours of American Tomahawk missiles hitting Libyan tarmac. Furthermore, stalemate might eventually allow for the managed withdrawal of Gaddafi, perhaps on a one-way flight to Venezuela. It may yet become necessary to ask whether we should sacrifice peace to justice.

I was impatient for Obama to take military action in Libya, conditional on the understanding that no American boots should set foot on the shores of Tripoli. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates objected that this was an implausible caveat; apparently, he was wrong. I still regret that we had to delay military action on the approval of international committees, but I don’t see how we could have acted otherwise. And at the same time, I don’t think the delay has fatally hamstrung Operation Odyssey Dawn. Freezing Gaddafi in the West is better than letting him make hell in the East; we seem to have thoroughly spooked the Yemeni military, and even if we do find ourselves imposing a stalemate from the sea, this situation may yet be negotiated into victory.

Brendan Carroll is a philosophy major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarol@princeton.edu.