Which Doesn't Belong and Why? (A) Bosnia, (B) Kosovo, (C) Iraq, or (D) Libya.

Two months ago, at the start of the Arab uprisings, opponents of the 2003 invasion of Iraq raced to their keyboards to assure their readers that the protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt were not a residual benefit of the Bush "freedom agenda." The previous administration's misguided foreign policy would remain on the ash heap of history, we were told. 

But, that was then. This week, such a task got a bit more difficult. The current president has just gone to war with an oil-rich Arab nation and Obama apologists must now make clear distinctions between the Libyan action and the Iraq War if they are going to support the former while maintaining their opposition to the latter. This is complicated, because one of the immediate consequences of the Libyan War for Obama supporters is that a majority of their criticisms of the Iraq invasion will collapse. There will be no stockpiles of WMD found in Libya. Libya isn't an imminent threat to the United States. Libya hasn't attacked any Americans in decades. Libya had nothing to do with 9/11. Right now, the defense of the Libyan War lies on strictly humanitarian grounds - making the ample humanitarian justifications of the Iraq War impossible to dismiss, because, if one accepts the Libyan campaign, the lack of WMD or a link to 9/11 shouldn't disqualify the justness of the Iraq cause. Opposition to the 2003 invasion must rest elsewhere. Yesterday, the Atlantic commissioned Daniel Serwer with just that task. Here is his opening:

A coalition of the willing attacks an Arab country; French warplanes strike armored vehicles; American cruise missiles take down air defenses. It all sounds to some too much like Iraq redux. But it's not. The proper analogy is Srebrenica. This is the international community acting under international law to prevent mass murder.

The current military action against Libya is clearly approved by the UN Security Council.

NATO's military actions following Srebrenica were not approved by the UN Security Council. Six sentences in, and Serwer is already making a false analogy. If Serwer thinks the 1995 Bosnian action was justified, and is a proper analogy to Libya, then UN approval is irrelevant. Therefore, a lack of UN approval can not be used to delegitimize the Iraq War. The most he can say is that UN approval is preferable, but not a necessity - otherwise, Clinton's wars also become unjust.

Serwer's failed attempt to note a meaningful difference won't deter Obama apologists, because the problem of distinguishing Libya from Iraq must be solved. One way they might proceed involves a bit of irony, for the major distinction between the two conflicts once gave leftists qualms - the United States will rely on the Jupiter Complex (i.e., bombing enemy nations from a safe distance). The leftist opposition to this tactic, when used in Japan, Germany, Korea & Vietnam, relied on the argument that all lives are equal, and while massive bombings might minimize U.S. deaths, they multiply overall casualties. However, in recent decades, smart bombs and satellite targeting have reduced civilian collateral damage, along with this objection, so we've come full circle. Since we're less likely to repeat Dresden, the left now tolerates air-only campaigns launched by Democrat presidents (who knew American defense spending could save lives!). Therefore, opponents of the 2003 invasion may use the higher American death toll as a means of distinguishing that war from air-only campaigns live Kosovo, Bosnia & Libya, which have fewer U.S. casualties. But, an obvious point remains: why would a just cause become unjust simply because United States troops were killed in combat?

The answer is: it wouldn't. The number of American casualties doesn't determine whether a war was morally right or wrong. It would only tie-in to whether the war was prudent or effectively administered. After all, America's deadliest conflict, the Civil War, is simultaneously considered just, and one of the most incompetently administered. This issue created a conundrum for opponents of the Iraq War a few years back, for how can you demonize a just war when the unexpected casualties are still much lower than most other American conflicts? In an effort to solve the problem, the following line of argument came into fashion (emphasis added):

For far too long President Bush’s disastrous war of choice in Iraq has leached resources and top-level attention from the war of necessity in Afghanistan.

That is The New York Times editorial page in 2008. I can count numerous other examples of this type of rhetoric coming from The Times and other publications in recent years (The Economist, for example). The thinking is that when a war is a "necessity", you can tolerate unexpected casualties, but when a war is a "choice," any unforeseen events will lead to a denouncement of the effort. Therefore, the Union incompetence in the necessary Civil War doesn't delegitimize it, but the supposed-mishandlings in Iraq do (even if Iraq had a humanitarian justification at the start, and far fewer casualties overall than the Civil War). The "wars of choice" in Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya are all OK, because they were air campaigns - with minimal American casualties (i.e., if you are going to pursue a war of choice, don't get too many Americans killed in the process).

Voila! Simultaneous support for bombing Libya while denouncing the invasion of Iraq can be accomplished with a minimal amount of cognitive dissonance. While it may be true that all wars are choices (just ask Gandhi, or the Amish), enough have accepted the choice/necessity nonsense that they won't scrutinize it now. Obama's apologists are not ready to rethink Iraq, so pretzels must be twisted. What all this will mean for a future attack against Iran is a topic for a later date.