Delicate case for hitting Libya

Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.

It's hard to assess the wisdom of intervening in Libya.

First of all, the military action came with precious little public preparation. President Barack Obama warns Moammar Gadhafi, as he had warned Hosni Mubarak a month earlier . . . and then a couple of weeks later, with little public discussion, we unleash airstrikes. It's hard to say that in a free society this constitutes good communication or adequate opportunity for debate and reflection.

Second, the Arab League requested the intervention, and the United Nations authorized it. The endorsement by the Arab League is important, although so far the involvement of Arab nations in the fray has been underwhelming, to say the least. More on the UN later.

Third, Libya is a country with which the United States has a recent history of significant cooperation. In one important negotiation, we brokered the deal under which Gadhafi agreed to give up his quest for nuclear weapons.

This is clearly an internal Libyan conflict, and interventions in civil wars, revolutions and domestic uprisings are extremely dangerous, no matter how noble one side may be or how dastardly the other. As a nation, we don't have a clear doctrine governing intervention in internal situations. We intervened in Grenada under President Ronald Reagan. We didn't in Jordan, when a regime considered vitally important to the United States was threatened. We didn't intervene militarily in Egypt or Tunisia this year, and we haven't so far in Bahrain or Yemen. I isolate these cases, as opposed to Somalia, Lebanon and others, because they are so clearly internal, domestic conflicts with neither the reality nor fiction of involvement by foreign powers.

Finally, there's the issue of whether the president should have sought the approval of Congress. The line between what the president can do militarily with versus without congressional approval is fuzzy indeed, and it has remained fuzzy over the years with the connivance of the Congress itself. But in a situation like this -- when we are putting American lives at risk and bombing a country that hasn't attacked or threatened us -- the balance in my mind tilts toward yes: The president should have taken the issue to Congress and aired the issue publicly and fully. And while, yes, this would have delayed the intervention, that's one of the prices of democracy.

But even if the outcome of such a process were a U.S. decision for intervention, the approval of the UN is still needed to legitimize it. Without UN approval, intervention is indefensible.

The intervention was authorized under Article VII of the UN Charter, a broad provision about "threats to the peace" and "breaches of the peace." The resolution cites attacks against civilians. I'm sure many reflected, as I did, on how easy it was to authorize action against a madman with limited military resources, and how hard it would have been, say, even to contemplate action against China when it used violence against Tibetan civilians.

And none of this, of course, addresses the practical problems. How far will the U.S.-European operation go if Gadhafi's forces continue to overwhelm the rebels? Are the United States, France and Britain willing to consider the use of ground forces? If the rest of the world, operating under UN authorization, is going to try to stop -- and presumably topple -- Gadhafi, shouldn't the first ground troops be Arab League or African forces?

Taken together, the arguments for intervention seem to provide a margin of persuasiveness over the cautions against intervention. But I'm uneasy: In a democracy, should the fearsome and unruly dogs of war be unleashed on another country that hasn't attacked or threatened us when the margin of persuasiveness is so slight? Unless the neighboring countries are in there with troops and skin in the game, on behalf of the intervention they called for, I would say no. This is a close one, a difficult one; often it's the close ones that make history.