The administration confronts the prevention problem
According to this Laura Rozen account, the Obama administration is making the case to outside experts that, absent intervention, Libya would have become the locus of another horrific massacre, much worse than those that occurred during the Balkans wars. "This is a limited humanitarian intervention, not war," White House Middle East strategist Dennis Ross, National ...
According to this Laura Rozen account, the Obama administration is making the case to outside experts that, absent intervention, Libya would have become the locus of another horrific massacre, much worse than those that occurred during the Balkans wars.
According to this Laura Rozen account, the Obama administration is making the case to outside experts that, absent intervention, Libya would have become the locus of another horrific massacre, much worse than those that occurred during the Balkans wars.
"This is a limited humanitarian intervention, not war," White House Middle East strategist Dennis Ross, National Security Council strategic planning official Derek Chollet, and two military officials told a group of outside foreign policy and Middle East experts during a briefing at the White House Roosevelt Room Tuesday.
"We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on steroids’ —the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone would blame us for it," Ross explained, according to one of the foreign policy experts who attended the briefing, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the administration is trying to keep its consultations private.
Faced with defending a complex and controversial mission, the administration strategy–arguing that much, much worse was in store–is natural. And these officials may well be right (although as Rozen’s article points out, the administration did not explain how it reached its estimate of 100,000). One of the real political problems with prevention is that it’s nearly impossible to identify it with certainty. Absent a cache of Libyan documents or the testimony of top officials elaborating plans for the Benghazi massacre, there will always be room for debate. Meanwhile, the political and financial costs of intervention are all too obvious.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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