Making Good on the Promise of Libya

I was arguing earlier with a colleague who's more favorably disposed to the Libya intervention than I am and one thing we kept coming back to is Bahrain and Yemen where US-backed regimes have been killing peaceful protestors, often with American arms. And it seems to me that this point needs to be brought out of the dark shades of hypocrisy allegations and into the warm sunlight of policy proposals. In other words, if the point of intervening in Libya is to establish a precedent that dictators you can't massacre people to remain in power then the Obama administration needs to toughen its line on Bahrain and Yemen in order to make that work. If the point of intervening in Libya is to have a "demonstration effect" that bolsters the forces of liberalization in the Arab world, then the Obama administration needs to toughen its line on Bahrain and Yemen.

The point isn't that failure to do so is hypocritical (though it is hypocritical), it's that it's undermining the policy. Intervening in Libya strikes me as a bit of a reckless gamble with an essentially unbounded set of possible downside risks. But at the very least, the fact that we're doing it only serves to strengthen the case that we need to be taking the modest easy steps available to us to advance the same goals elsewhere in the region.