Opinion This time,the West got it right

The issue has divided friends and united enemies. Democrats under the age of 30 were almost as eager to go to war in Iraq as Republicans over 65,according to a Pew Research Center poll of October 2002,a moment when liberal hawkishness and conservative American hubris coalesced with disastrous consequences. It has been the focus of an age-old foreign policy debate between realism and idealism,prompted a deluge of finger-pointing,and proved a catalyst to the UN-endorsed notion of a responsibility to protect.

Like many of my generation,I became an interventionist in Bosnia. Sickened by carnage,and by the lies and ignorance of Western politicians who prolonged the carnage,I understood that caution — or more accurately hypocrisy masquerading as prudence — can be as criminal as recklessness.

A war with very specific reasons and equally specific crimes committed overwhelmingly by Serbian forces was dressed up as a millennial conflict beset by Balkan fog and moral equivalency in order for craven Western leaders to justify an inaction that killed.

We had been morally numbed by the Cold War. It seemed as inevitable as the earth’s rotation. Mutual assured destruction was ugly; it was also comforting in its limitation of choice. Now,with the demise of the Soviet Union,an ascendant West was faced with barbarism on European soil and had the disquieting latitude to act. It prevaricated. People died.

NATO finally bombed Serbian positions in 1995. The war ended soon after. The alliance bombed again in Kosovo in 1999. Soon after,Slobodan Milosevic’s murderous dominion ended. Western intervention in a cruel war in Sierra Leone led to the end of that conflict. Liberal interventionist had become the proud badge of a generation discovering the good war.

A new century began at this zenith of the post-Cold-War interventionist cycle. Peter Beinart traces how such cycles come and go — and how personal experience can be as blinding as it is illuminating. He quotes the brilliant historian,Arthur Schlesinger Jr,warning that the 1991 Gulf War that quickly drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait would likely cause “the gravest damage to the vital interests” of America,and quotes him again comparing arguments for a Bosnia intervention with those that led to the Vietnam disaster. It was through the prism of Vietnam,the war he lived most passionately and painfully,that Schlesinger saw the choices posed by subsequent conflicts.

Beinart describes how even in his adulation for Schlesinger,he in time became sickened by the Vietnam analogy with its recurring prescription for inaction. Shaped by Bosnia,he backed the Iraq war. The pendulum had swung. Vietnam-induced excess of caution had given way to Bosnian-induced hubris. I,too,fell under its influence. Mea culpa. Whatever the monstrosity of Saddam,and whatever the great benefit to the world of his disappearance,the war as it was justified and fought — under false pretenses,without many of America’s closest allies,in ignorance and incompetence — was a stain on America’s conscience.

Libya,in the wake of this damage,was a risk for President Obama. There were many reasons for not intervening — a third war in a Muslim country was not what America needed and the homegrown quality of the Arab Spring has been central to its moral force. But to allow Gaddafi to commit a massacre foretold in Benghazi would have been unforgivable.

The intervention has been done right — with the legality of strong United Nations backing,full support from America’s European allies,and quiet arming of the rebels. The Libyan people have been freed from a crazed tyranny. Unlike in Iraq,burdens were shared. Iraq was the wrong prism through which to look at Libya. I’m glad I resisted that temptation. Another cycle has begun.

There are no fixed doctrinal answers — a successful Libyan intervention does not mean one in Syria is feasible — but the idea that the West must at times be prepared to fight for its values against barbarism is the best hope for a 21st century less cruel than the 20th.