20. "Humanitarian crisis"

"To help avert a humanitarian crisis" is, President Obama explained, the reason our planes bombed Qaddafi forces heading for Benghazi. Now Qaddafi forces are using deadly cluster bombs against Misurata and Britain and France want him to join in on an air attack on them in order to "better fulfill the United Nations mandate to protect civilians" (NYT, 4-16-11).

When does a humanitarian crisis end? The first one must have ended when the Benghazi column was destroyed, since President Obama then turned operations over to NATO. No crisis, no reason for America to join in. Now, by the same standard of danger to civilians, we have another crisis. How long will they keep coming?

As I read yesterday's newspaper I kept hearing Carl von Clausewitz, the German war philosopher, telling Obama across 200 years that the crises will keep coming and likely get worse until one side gives in. Each side, according to Clausewitz, will think that its next inhumanity will be so unbearable that the other side will be the one to give in. Inhumanity (the right word for what's done to the enemy, soldiers or not) is the way to win, and once you start it, and trigger the spirit of revenge, it never turns itself off. Only the naive think war is anything but reciprocal inhumanity.

That's the law of war. But there's another law, applicable to observers considering intervention, which says that human beings can't bear to watch inhumanity. That law comes into play now when we (the U. S., Obama) consider what we might do to end the present inhumanity in Libya. One choice is to intervene and be so thoroughly inhumane to the Qaddafi forces that they give in. That could be quick. The other is to refrain from intervention and watch the Qaddafi forces be inhumane to the rebels. That could be quick too. Either way somebody is going to have to be seriously inhumane. That's the only way wars between determined people have ever been ended. Directed inhumanity by outside powers has ended many wars in the past. The difference this time is that we're all going to have to watch.

Watching the inhumanity could be so hard for the electorate to bear that the President will not be re-elected. How can he avoid that? By calibrating his intervention so that the visible inhumanity never becomes so hard to bear that voters hold it against him. (This is to read "humanitarian crisis" as "political crisis," and define it as "the point at which television images of inhumanity become unbearable.")

One danger to Obama in calibrating his inhumanity is that he won't ever inflict enough (it's the hardest kind of fine-tuning in the world) to keep the Qaddafi forces' infliction of inhumanity on the rebels from being successful. He'll discover that only through an unbearably visible infliction of inhumanity can he end Qaddafi's inhumanity. The closer this is to the election the more painful this will be.

The other danger is that his calibration leaves the two sides so balanced that low-grade inhumanity remains visible on the nation's screens for years. That might not endanger his election but it could well endanger his place in history, something Presidents are bound to worry about.

When you really feel for Obama in his pain, as I did after reading the paper, you have crazy dreams of what would soften it. I dreamed of an electorate that had studied Clausewitz. "There, there," they now say to him, "we know what war is. If you refuse to intervene we can stand to watch the rebels being slaughtered. We won't hold it against you. And if you intervene, as long as you do it realistically and intelligently — that is to say, with sufficient inhumanity — we won't hold that against you either."