So I won't pretend to have a stance at the moment. Besides the fact that I live in a congressional democracy and should take some position on the affairs of my country, I'm not a pundit and am under no obligation to offer an opinion.
That said, I've been following the debate on the left between pro-intervention and anti-intervention advocates, the former including Juan Cole and British anarchist Ian Bone and the latter including Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn. One reason that I'm remain uncertain is that each of them, who I often trust to offer me guidance, have written accounts of the intervention that have left me unsatisfied (although Cole's is the best).
I'll start with Chomsky's account. While trying not to succumb to crude utilitarianism, I have to note that Chomsky never offers an opinion about whether or not the Libyan rebels, the Libyans as a whole, or the region will be better off with or without Western intervention- whether the lives of actual human beings will be saved or improved. He posits that a new Libyan government will likely be heavily dependent on Western powers, but his main issues are 1) the illegality of some of the measures taken by the allies and 2) the ulterior motives of the United States.
In regards to 1), Chomsky may be objectively right that the allies violated international law by aiding the rebels rather than simply instrumenting a no-fly zone. But it's a curious argument to make, given that he goes on to say in the same interview that categorically abiding by UN resolutions is to consider "that states are sacrosanct in the form that has been established in the modern world" and accepting that "states are assigned the status of virtually holy entities." Given that Chomsky has sharply disagreed with the UN in the past (on the establishment of a Jewish state, on the invasion of Afghanistan, and presumably on the overthrow of Aristride in Haiti), it feels pedantic even in accordance with even his own views to condemn "participation on the side of the rebels" for violating international law in the face of impending massacres and rebel defeats. Of course a no-fly zone was implemented "on the side of the rebels" (seeing as they lack an air force), and it likely was a tacit go-ahead to the powers involved to begin a more aggressive campaign.
Frankly, I don't really care what realpolitik considerations lead to the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which is positioning itself as a partial rival to the US, to reject UN 1973. Unless we accept that "states are sacrosanct," then we have to make decisions not solely on the basis of legal and political abstractions but on the basis on concrete realities. In this case, we have to address how our decisions affect real Libyans and the people of the region. Chomsky hardly goes into this, but the actual rebels are asking for our support and the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt are threatened by a Qaddafi victory. We shouldn't become sentimental and lose sight of principles, but these are concrete realities.
As for 2), Chomsky carries out the rather simple exercise of showing that US motives are not altruistic based on his principle that states, as power centers, can only act on their self-interest. Yes, this is about oil and installing a reliable client. But states have often done good things out of their own self-interest; the USSR defeated Nazism, for example. As for the US, we gave relative autonomy to Western Europe and halted North Korean aggression. It's not impossible or inherently contradictory that we could again reconcile self-interest and positive utility. Chomsky, again, addresses the latter but not the former, leaving his account unsatisfactory.
A categorical distrust of Western power also motivates Cockburn. "As always," he writes, "many on the left yearn for an intervention they can finally support and many of them have been murmuring ecstatically, 'This is the one.' Of course the sensible position (mine) simply states that nothing good ever came out of a Western intervention by the major powers, whether humanitarian in proclaimed purpose or not." I'm not sure that even Cockburn accepts this- I imagine he's in favor of the US intervention in Europe to help defeat Nazi Germany- and he certainly hasn't minded intervention by another "major power": the Soviet Union. As he writes in The Golden Age is in Us:
"The Soviet Union defeated Hitler and fascism. Without it, the Cuban Revolution would never have survived, nor the Vietnamese. In the postwar years it was the counterweight to US imperialism and the terminal savageries of the old European colonial powers. It gave support to any country trying to follow an independent line. Without it, just such a relatively independent country as India could instead have taken a far more rightward course. Despite Stalin's suggestion to Mao that he and his comrades settle for only have a country, the Chinese Revolution probably would not have survived either."
So why is it that the US and the West are apparently structurally incapable of providing assistance to a force who wants it, while another superpower, who perpetrated horrors in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, was able to do so even though it was clearly acting out of its self-interest? (That the USSR "gave support to any country trying to follow an independent line" is appalling bullshit, btw- ask the Czechs or Afghans.) I have to say that this as well as his attempt, along with George Galloway, to paint the mostly working class rebels as Al Qaeda supporters (a claim discredited by Cole) suggests residual Trotskyism of the kind that infects the Anglo-Irish left as well as his inherited yet watered down Stalinism. His citation of a former CIA officer who suggests that support for the revolt would be opposed to American interests seems part and parcel of Cockburn's affiliation with libertarian isolationists. Along with Chomsky, he never makes an argument that intervention would be bad for the rebellion beyond his claim that "that nothing good ever came out of a Western intervention by the major powers," a categorical statement which reeks of his characteristic glibness that recently had him arguing in favor of the hate and conspiracy-mongering Glenn Beck.
Now for the pro-interventionists. Cole and Bone both compare the left's behavior in this situation unfavorably to it's support for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. As my friend Kevin put it, "the left used to fight." While Cole's comparison to the left's support for bigoted imperialist Winston Churchill during WWII is more tenable, the comparison to the left's support for the Republicans isn't entirely convincing. Their support was restricted to individually volunteering to fight under Republican leadership, not encouraging a superpower with ulterior motives and an ugly foreign policy record to invade and bomb the place from the sky. Bone's rhetoric in favor of the invasion also suggests too much of his historical hostility to pacifist leftism and not enough serious analysis.
Cole's analysis is more thorough, but it's still flawed. His argument that UN humanitarian intervention wouldn't create a negative precedent is unconvincing in light of the Iraq war (see the last paragraph of the linked article); his contention that this can't be about oil because Western companies already have access to Libyan oil fields under Qaddafi is unsophisticated and repudiated by Chomsky. His contentions that anti-intervention arguments "have the implication that it was all right with the world community if Qaddafi deployed tanks against innocent civilian crowds" and that "if we just don't care if the people of Benghazi are subjected to murder and repression on a vast scale, we aren't people of the left" is moral blackmail and reminds me of the "with us or with them" mentality of the Andrew Sullivan-types from the Bush era. One could be appalled at the treatment of Iraqi Shiites and oppose the Iraq war just as surely as one can be furious with the gunning down of protestors with aircraft while disagreeing with military force for a variety of complex reasons.
Perhaps the main reason that each of these accounts leaves me unsatisfied is that they don't satisfactorily deal with the real consequences Western intervention has for the future of the Libyan people. Cockburn denigrates them by linking many of them to Al Qaeda, Chomsky glosses over them in favor of more abstract principles and political truisms, and Bone and Cole cite concrete benefits of the intervention in the present but ignore the West's spurious record of liberation (see Cuba, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) that might give clues as to the future.
But I'm leaning towards supporting the intervention because the rebellion- a progressive and largely working class movement- has called for it. I respect their decision. We can't predict the future. Perhaps all we can do is trust the people involved and grant them the ability to direct the future as best they can.
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