After Iraq and Afghanistan, why would Libya go any better?

The Flying Rodent despairs off the ease with which supposedly sensible people embrace yet another halfbaked plan to bomb the democracy into a country:

Honestly. I thought that pretty much the only good thing that came out of the catastrophes of the last decade was a general awareness that war is a Big Deal; a last resort, an option that we don’t use lightly. Now it turns out that we don’t even have that, and that we’re still primed to go off like Two-Push Charlie the nineteen-year-old porno addict in a lapdancing club when somebody whispers airstrikes.

One of his commenters is more cynical:

It looks as if Iraq has had the opposite effect – it’s set an incredibly low bar.

In Iraq we walked into an obvious disaster and it all panned out exactly as opponents of the war had predicted. It will be a long time before a war *quite* that stupid is embarked on again. However, it means that the standard for deciding whether to go to war is now “Is this a less stupid idea than invading Iraq was?”. Bombing Libya passes this incredibly easy test, so off we go.

This certainly seems to be why Juan Cole supports the war against Khadaffi: because it’s nothing like the invasion of Iraq. The only thing Cole seems to have really learned from that debacle is how to blame the left for not being gung-ho enough.

It’s been …interesting… to see how quickly people like Cole, Conor Foley or Aaron “Zunguzungu” Bady have forgotten or discarded their objections to the Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and put their faith in the same people who fucked up then. It’s tempting to explain this in ideological terms, as liberals versus leftists, but that’s not quite the case.

The War on Iraq became such a clusterfuck that almost everybody sane whose job did not depend on ignoring what kind of clusterfuck it was sooner or later opposed it. In the process the genuine differences between various kinds of opponents got elided as we made common cause against the war. The same happened with Afghanistan, if less so. One of the things that got shoved under the carpet was the simple fact that quite a few people had no real qualms about wars humanitarian interventions, but just opposed these particular interventions. They still believed in intervention as a tool and might disagree about where and when to use it, but not about the necessity to have it available as a tool for responsible governments. In short, these were people who did continue to trust their own governments to act morally responsible once the people who had shown themselves not to be able to do so were out of power.

The rest of us on the other hand have learned the lesson never to trust any government with this power, as we have seen what happens if we do. We don’t see Iraq and Afghanistan as sad blotches on an otherwise good record, but as what usually happens when the west decides something needs to be done.

And the evidence is overwhelmingly on our side — about the only relatively succesful military intervention of the past two decades is the British involvement in Sierra Leone, while opposed to that is the mess in what used to be Yugoslavia, Somalia, the Congo, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Iraq… Why would Libya be any different?