Obama's Mission

Barack Obama was elected because the American people were tired of being bogged down in unwinnable foreign wars. He was elected because a majority of American voters had come to view the Iraq war as a mistake. This is a basic, bottom-line political fact. Therefore, it is not (and cannot be) Official Beltway Wisdom.

Obama also had a mandate to save the country after the economic crash. And he had some mandate to fix health care, which he had campaigned on doing, although this was not nearly as important as he thought. A lot of Obama's early political problems can be ascribed to the fact that he overestimated how much the country cared about health care and underestimated how much the country cared about financial reform and getting the troops home from Iraq. He would have been better served with bolder steps on the economy and a quicker timetable to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But even when he has misunderstood the voters' exact priorities at a particular moment, the voters' priorities have been real.

President Obama's address to the nation Wednesday night shows that he still remembers his mission. We're going into Syria to fight ISIS, but only with an air campaign and not with ground troops. Obama was immediately criticized by various talking heads and political opponents (in fact, was criticized even sooner than immediately, because the complaining started in advance of the speech) that Obama ought to commit ground troops, or not rule out committing ground troops, right away. They complained that Obama needs to be Serious, which means putting American soldiers and Marines in harm's way. But the American people made Barack Obama President specifically so he would not send troops to this kind of war. He is carrying out the mission we gave him.

There's been a lot of criticism in Washington about Obama's strategic maxim "Don't do stupid stuff." Hillary Clinton, who would be President if she had not voted to let George W. Bush do stupid stuff, has joined the criticism. But all this wise Washingtonians miss the basic fact. Obama was elected to keep the country from doing stupid stuff. And most of what passes for strategic wisdom in Washington these days is pretty stupid.

Committing ground troops into Syria is stupid. It is not even remotely a strategy. Sending our troops into a war zone with no plan for getting them out, or even a picture of what victory would look like, is not strategy but stupidity. And we've already lost too many American lives to stupidity like that.

People who want to invade Syria argue that supporting the moderate rebels is not enough, because the moderate Syrian rebels are not strong enough to win. Let me point out that if there is no existing force on the ground in Syria strong enough to beat ISIS even with our air support, then there is no force on the ground for us to hand Syria over to when our troops leave. It is the same problem as Iraq and Afghanistan. Going in with ground troops means going into a situation that will collapse again shortly after our ground troops leave. Staying in Syria until Syria is stabilized means occupying Syria forever.

If we don't have an ally that can win without our ground troops, then we don't have an exit strategy for our ground troops. Don't do stupid stuff.

More importantly, don't get American soldiers and Marines killed doing stupid stuff. That is our Commander in Chief's mission. Let him do it.

cross-posted at Dagblog

Fear Itself: Ukraine Edition

The single most important thing Barack Obama needs to do about Ukraine is not to panic. The single most important thing anyone else in the United States can do about Ukraine is not to panic Barack Obama. Developments in the Crimea are extremely dangerous, and that's exactly why everybody needs to calm down.

I have no idea whether or not Obama is handling this situation well or badly. Neither does anybody else who's not party to what he's telling other international leaders on private lines. How Obama is handling things is about what he's saying to people like Angela Merkel and about how those people responding. I don't think there will be any way to measure his success or failure for a while.

On the other hand, it's clear from the other side of the planet that Vladimir Putin has panicked and committed himself when he shouldn't have. There is virtually no endgame in which Russia doesn't lose more than this stupid adventure was worth. There are many endgames where things spiral out of control because Putin continues to panic or is too afraid of losing face to do what's in his own self-interest. He's dangerously unpredictable right now, and that is more than bad enough. What we really don't need right now is another nervous world leader scared to lose face. That's a recipe for a  spasm of pointless bloodshed that will leave scars on that region for a generation.

Of course, the American news media is essentially an industry of panic. So your TV is full of panicky or opportunistic people shouting loudly that Obama should panic right now. They're saying that Obama has to do something, by which they mean look like he's doing something. They complain that Obama is not tough enough, by which they mean that he does not act tough enough. Again, I have no idea how tough Obama is or isn't being behind closed doors. What I do know is that acting tough is seldom a sign of actually being tough. And acting tough because other people call you weak is absolutely a confession of weakness.

I don't know anything about the Ukraine situation. But some things are obvious:

1. There is not a military solution to this, and any military intervention will make things worse. The point is to keep the violence from expanding. And fighting a top-five military power on its own borders is not winnable; any "victory" would cost far more than it would be worth. It just can't be done.

Anyone demanding that Obama "get tough" by flexing military muscle needs to go to their quiet corner, get their binky, and soothe themselves for a while.

2. What's already happened cannot be reversed quickly.  Obviously, our preferred fantasy outcome is that the Russian troops just pack up and go back to Russia quietly, cleaning up their litter as they go. But that's just a fantasy. They may eventually leave peacefully. They will not immediately leave peacefully. Getting them out without bloodshed will take some time. Attempting to get them out by force won't be quick either, and there's no way to predict how it would go.

Anyone demanding, in essence, that Obama make this never have happened is simply freaking out, and should be disregarded.

3. No Russian leader is going to pull back an invasion force because the President of the United States tells him to. It doesn't matter who that President is. I mean, that's just crazy talk. This is not about us.

4. There is no workable solution to this that doesn't leave Russia access to its naval facilities in Crimea. Even if you, like me, know approximately zero about Russian history, you know that access to a warm-water port has been one of Russia's key strategic goals for centuries. That didn't change in the last six months, and it's not going to change in the next six months either. Putin's panicky invasion is at least partly a response to fear of losing key Black Sea bases, and that's a totally reasonable fear that he has acted on foolishly and unreasonably.

If this ends with the Russians backing out but keeping their naval bases, that is the best case scenario. Those bases are their only legitimate strategic goal. If you hear people complaining that Obama is "too soft" because this ends with the Russians keeping their main Crimean base, those people are out of their minds. If this ends with the Russians only in those naval bases, that would be the best outcome imaginable.

5. There is no military situation that panicking will not make worse.

Not panicking is not itself the solution. Obama can't turn this around simply through the force of his personal calm. But he can't do anything positive if he doesn't stay calm. This problem demands a cool head and a steady hand. Flipping out and getting emotional will only invite disaster.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Boston and the End of the War on Terror

cross-posted from Dagblog

Five weeks after a terrorist attack on Boston, President Obama has declared that the War on Terror, "like all wars, must end."  If I had told you a year ago that he would make such a speech a month and a half after a high-profile terrorist attack on a major American city, neither you nor I would have believed me. But the lessons of Boston drive home the wisdom of the President's decision. It showed us that a terrorist attack is meant to be lived through and that Americans are ready to live through one. And it showed us an excellent civilian response to a terrorist attack paired with a decidedly mixed paramilitary response.

The key lesson of the Boston bombings is clear: the best way to prepare for a possible terrorist attack is to build six or eight world-class hospitals in your city. Start in the 19th century if you can.

I'm phrasing that as a joke, but much of Boston's resiliency and quick response was built on the city's superb medical infrastructure. Every victim who was alive when a first responder reached them got to a hospital. Every victim who got to a hospital lived. That is simply remarkable. The city's medical personnel held the death count to the absolute minimum. That does not diminish the senselessness of those three deaths, or the grievous wounds that many survivors suffered. But the city's doctors and nurses prevented a fourth or fifth or sixth senseless death, and I am grateful to them for that.

Some of Boston's success at coping with the attack comes from specific post-September-11 training. Boston's emergency responders had drilled for this scenario, and all of the hospital trauma centers had some doctors who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan and had experience treating the kinds of severely traumatic injuries that they saw on April 15. You can only give the police and EMTs special training after you've built organizations strong enough to carry out the training. First responders did a superb and intelligent job in triaging the wounded, spreading them out between the six nearby trauma centers. But that could only happen because the first responders had the luxury of six top-tier trauma centers within a three-mile radius. There aren't many spots on the planet with that luxury; the attack happened at the heart of a medical epicenter.

And you can't build a Tier One trauma center in any hospital. You need an institution and a staff that can support it. Boston could only dedicate such impressive resources to crisis medicine and emergency response because of the profound depth in the city's overall medical resources. Boston was ready to tend its wounded on that terrible day because Boston works on tending the wounded every day.

Boston's response to the Marathon bombings, its ability to absorb the body blow and respond effectively, was built on its peacetime strengths. It was a victory of the open society. On the other hand, the paramilitary response to the bombing suspects once they were identified, the manhunt and the city-wide lockdown, showed that we've already reached the point of diminishing returns. Getting tougher, giving the police heavier weapons or more military training, is not going to help; we're already at the point where those things are beginning to offset their own benefits.

I certainly can't fault the various police forces engaged in the manhunt for their caution; the bombers had already murdered a police officer, and they'd thrown IEDs at others. They had no choice but to assume that Dzokhar Tsarnaev had a gun and at least one more bomb. But the daylong lockdown, which paralyzed a major urban area and temporarily stopped its economy dead, was at least partly counterproductive. The lockdown itself helped hide Tsarnaev. He was found almost immediately after the lockdown ended, by one of the neighbors who'd been locked down. The militarized search took all the civilian eyes off the street. As soon as those eyes were back, the fugitive was easy to find.

After every attack, there are calls to get "tougher." But there's no tougher to get at this point without undermining ourselves. We're already at the point where the "toughness" is starting to hurt as much as it helps. Sending more cops with more body armor wasn't going to speed up that search. If they'd called in the National Guard, the bomber would probably still be hiding in that boat now.

And that's basically where we are as a country with the larger situation. Bringing more muscle than we've already brought to the War on Terror isn't going to get us better results. In fact, we've hit the point where more muscle and more security restrictions are going to bring us slightly worse results, while continuing to drain our resources.

There have also been calls to "toughen" immigration, because the bombers were immigrants, and there will be a new minor rule change designed to hassle foreign students between terms. That is not going to meaningfully cut back on terrorism, though it will play into the terrorists' argument that we're a country hostile to foreigners.

Of course, the people screaming about tougher immigration rules are ignoring the immigrants who played important positive roles during the Boston events. The terrorists were actually located because the hostage they took in a car-jacking, a Chinese national, was able to escape them and was quick-thinking enough to help the police track the terrorists with his cell phone. I don't see how keeping that guy out of the country would have made things better.

Nor can any reasonable person believe that those world-class hospitals that saved so many victims' lives on the day of the bombing are run by exclusively American-born doctors and medical staff. A world-class research hospital, by its nature, attracts talent from across the world. Some of the people saving lives in those six trauma units were immigrants. I'm pretty glad those people were here.

We're not going to be make our country safer by keeping foreign medical students out of the country. We can only make ourselves a little less safe by doing that, becoming a country with less young medical talent. We're not going to make ourselves safer by making it even more of a hassle to fly; we can only weaken ourselves a little by discouraging foreign talent and foreign business from coming. Closing our society down doesn't make it safer from terrorist attacks. It only weakens our power to weather those attacks.

Terrorism will never go away. It only takes a few disgruntled people willing to murder strangers. And we will always need to invest some resources in stopping terrorism and repairing the damage. But the question is how we allocate those investments. Some anti-terrorism spending goes toward things that have no other use in themselves, such as the x-ray machines in the airport, and that function as a drag on the overall economy, such as making airline travel more difficult and complicated. Frankly, most obvious military and security measures fall into these categories. On the other hand, spending money on things like hospitals improve the country's effective security while improving the general economy. Build excellent hospitals, with some extra money for things like trauma response, and you make the city better while also making it less likely that people in that city are killed by terrorists. Investments that protect us against terrorism and its effects while also strengthening our open society are apure gain. Spending on fortifying the country always involves some dead loss; spending on strengthening the public commons makes us safer while benefiting us in other ways. There will always have to be some straight-up security measures that will function as sheer cost; those costs are hedges against risk. But those measures can never diminish risk to zero, and at a certain point they start to cost far more than they save. On the other hand, money spent on building our country, rather than walling it in, is a secure investment in every sense.

Barack Obama, Warlord of the 21st Century

cross-posted from Dagblog

You know who I really, really wouldn't run against on a national-security platform? A Nobel Peace Prize winner who killed Osama bin Laden.

But that's just me. Last week Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, in an extended and generally thoughtful interview with President Obama, asked the following question:

GOLDBERG: One of the aspects of this is the question of whether it's plausible that Barack Obama would ever use military power to stop Iran. The Republicans are trying to make this an issue -- and not only the Republicans -- saying that this man, by his disposition, by his character, by his party, by his center-left outlook, is not going to do that.

Three days after Goldberg published that interview, Obama's Attorney General gave a speech declaring that the Executive Branch could target American citizens for assassination whenever it liked, because (wait for it), the "due process" demanded in the Constitution is not the same as judicial process. By Holder's standard, as long as the President and his aides use a process when they're deciding who to kill, it's all good with the Founders. Which leads us to the question: how could someone with the disposition, the character, and the center-left outlook to order unreviewed drone strikes on American citizens ever bring himself to use military force?

Not seeing Obama as he really is has become one of our national pastimes, and both the Left and the Right play it at championship level. Some people on the Left cannot forgive Obama for not being the peacenik we (and I include myself in that "we") wanted to think we were electing. And I'm certainly not happy about the stands he's taken on targeted killings, or on executive detention. But to give Obama his due, he was absolutely up front with the voters about his military plans if elected. He wanted to get out of Iraq, but recommit to Afghanistan, and he's done that. He explicitly told the American voters, on TV, that he would hunt and kill Osama bin Laden. He didn't say capture or apprehend. He didn't even go with Bush's swaggering "dead or alive." Obama said "kill," full stop. And that's what he did. He also said, in both the primary and general-election debates, that we was willing to breach Pakistani sovereignty if that's what it took to get Bin Laden. Even if some of us don't have the President that we thought or hoped we were electing, on military questions we definitely have the President that the candidate told us he would be.

Right wing critics, on the other hand, fervently insist that Obama somehow is the peacenik that the Left thought he was, and that he's coddling America's military enemies. This coddling generally takes the form of relentless attacks with predator drones, and I suspect our enemies get tired of it pretty quickly. The idea of Obama as weakling is a strange but resilient fantasy, impossible to disprove because it's never been even remotely based on military reality.

So let's review what we, as voters, actually did in the 2008 general election:

We replaced George W. Bush with a better and more effective war leader.

This is not the story anybody tells. It is not what anybody believes happened. But it is what obviously did happen. Barack Obama has been a very effective war leader, given the mess he inherited. In fact, he's been much, much better at coping with the gigantic military mess that Bush II left behind than he has been at coping with the gigantic economic mess Bush left behind. (This only makes sense: Obama could start thinking about military strategies before he even started campaigning, but when the economic crisis hit we were already in the countdown to Election Day.) Obama succeeds because, unlike George W. Bush, he keeps his eye on the ball: achieving goals and taking out enemies while risking as few American troops as possible.

This is what we voted for, and when it comes down to it, what the average middle-of-the-road voter wants: more victories, fewer casualties. This country didn't turn away from George W. Bush and sour on the Iraq war because they had developed philosophical objections to warmongering or were worried about erosion of habeas corpus. They turned against Bush and his wars because those wars brought casualties instead of victories. Most American voters don't like Americans getting killed. And most voters like presidents who get things done. That's Barack Obama as Commander-in-Chief: soldiers come home and jobs get done.

So Obama gets behind the bombing campaign in Libya, and Qaddhafi gets toppled without American boots on the ground. Obama authorizes predator drone strikes and special forces raids and more predator drone strikes, targeted attacks with calculate risk against reward. He signs off on the Bin Laden raid deep inside Pakistan but insists on a backup helicopter. Which takes us back to Goldberg's question:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Look, if people want to say about me that I have a profound preference for peace over war, that every time I order young men and women into a combat theater and then see the consequences on some of them, if they're lucky enough to come back, that this weighs on me -- I make no apologies for that. Because anybody who is sitting in my chair who isn't mindful of the costs of war shouldn't be here, because it's serious business. These aren't video games that we're playing here.

Now, having said that, I think it's fair to say that the last three years, I've shown myself pretty clearly willing, when I believe it is in the core national interest of the United States, to direct military actions, even when they entail enormous risks.

Since Barack Obama used most of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech lecturing about Just-War Theory and when he felt justified launching military attacks, I'd think that's much more than fair to say. But here's the truth: that preference for peace over war, that refusal to risk people without a compelling reason, is part of why he is good at this. Weighing risk and reward is a virtue in almost any enterprise, but it's especially important as a military virtue. Good commanders don't take pointless risks. This is why George H. W. Bush, mocked on national television for using the word "prudent," won a war in Iraq and why his swaggering son did not. This is why John McCain, whose solution to seemingly every problem is to send more troops, never became an admiral like his father and grandfather, and why he did not become president.

The fantasy that Obama is weak on defense is deeply and dearly held by Republicans, and the three Republican presidential candidates who've managed to carry states have all begun, to various degrees, attacking that presumed weakness. But by "being stronger," the Obama-is-weak crowd mean "acting tougher, in a loud theatrical way." They mistake swagger for strength. They think George W. Bush was "strong" because he'd say dumb stuff like "Bring it on," and fearlessly send lots of other people into unnecessary danger. They think John McCain, who was angry at Obama for not sending American ground troops to Libya and who during the 2008 campaign urged a military intervention against Russia, is "strong," because he's an impetuous hothead who always wants more boys in harm's way. And this kind of tough-on-TV thing can pass for strength for a little while, because most of our country is so insulated from the sacrifices that our military make. But given time, and we've been at war for more than a decade, voters figure this out. In peace time, the guy who makes the biggest show of toughness in the bar gets treated as the tough guy. In war, people learn the difference and don't forget it. Sonny Corleone acts tougher than Michael Corleone, but that's no reason to get in the car with him.

The leading Republican candidates don't seem to have grasped this yet. And they (or their base) seem fixated on the idea that Obama's weakness as a war leader will make him vulnerable to attack. Attacking one of your opponent's strongest points because you've mistaken it for a weak one is pretty much the opposite of strategy. Ask Custer.

Let's remember what that naive peacenik state senator from Illinois said all those years ago when he opposed the second Iraq war:

I'm not against all wars. I'm against dumb wars.

If that's a platform you want to campaign against, good luck. You were never going to make a good commander-in-chief anyway.

Libya, Obama, and the Just War Theory

cross-posted from Dagblog

Barack Obama's decision to join the attack on Libya is very much of a piece with his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. There are various grounds on which a reasonable person could object to the Libya strikes (diplomatic reasons, military reasons, pragmatic reasons, reasons of consistency, even Constitutional reasons). But the decision absolutely fits within a coherent and very traditional moral philosophy. Obama walked through most of the key points of that position in his Nobel Prize speech, with one important omission. That omission is perhaps the key to understanding his conduct as a war leader.

The "just war" position is a theoretical framework dating back to the Roman Empire and elaborated by early Christian thinkers, based on the "necessary evil" or "lesser evil" principle. If choosing the lesser evil sounds like a bad thing to you, let me propose that choosing the greater evil is worse, and that choosing a randomly selected evil is an abdication of morality. (There are those who feel that such an abdication relieves them of responsibility for whatever consequences follow, because they did not positively assent to such consequences. I could not disagree more.) Most Western medicine works on the lesser evil principle: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments all cause you real harm in the best-case scenario and kill you in the worst; they are only worthwhile if they eliminate, or offer a reasonable hope of eliminating, a much worse danger to your health. On the same reasoning, just war views violence as acceptable, under sometimes perhaps obligatory, in order to prevent much worse violence. If someone walks into a workplace with an automatic weapon, a police officer is allowed to shoot that person, and should. If there were a way to disarm the shooter non-violently, that would be preferable, but if there is not, and often there is not, it is better for the shooter to be killed than for many other people to be killed.

The just-war idea should not be confused with the idea of a holy war, which suggests that violence can be redeemed, or even redemptive, if done in the service of one's god or of some other "transcendent" or "noble" belief. Violence is never imagined as a good in itself; it can only ever be an attempt to lessen the overall violence. Neither does just-war theory suggest that violence can be justified by the wickedness of one's opponents. No one can be killed because they are bad people who deserve it. They might justifiably be killed as a last resort attempt to prevent them from doing a very, very bad thing. Muammar Qaddafi was an evil person last year, but that was not a justification for murdering him. He is currently killing and poised to kill many, many people, and if killing him would prevent that it would be extremely defensible from the just-war position. On the other hand, if Qaddafi managed to kill hundreds of thousands of his countrymen and then flee to Geneva and live peacefully, there would no longer be a necessary-evil justification for killing him. (Obviously, there would be reasons to try him, and there might even be coherent moral reasons proposed for executing him, but those are not lesser-evil reasons, because Qaddafi would no longer be a threat to others' lives.)

The Crusades were never imagined or seriously defended as just wars. They were Holy Wars. They were justified not as attempts to prevent worse evils, but as tributes to the glory of God. (Also, they were imagined as good things because Muslims were infidels and therefore The Bad Guys.) These two basic Christian conceptions of war, the Just War and the Crusade, have coexisted in Christian thought for the last thousand years, and occasionally borrowed each other's favorite metaphors, but they are profoundly different. In a crusade model, you commit acts of terrible bloodshed and tell yourself that they are acts of virtue, because your enemies are godless and because you have such good values. In a just war model, you remember that there's no such thing as a good war. There are only bad wars and even worse wars, and the only reason to fight a bad one is to stave off a worse one. War is like amputating a limb to save a patient's life: something to be done in extremis, when other options are gone.

George W. Bush is a Crusader, deep in his bones. His Iraq war flunks every test of a just war, six ways to Sunday. Bush operates out of the Crusade model where violence is absolved and redeemed by its lofty spiritual purpose. Barack Obama operates, mostly, from a Just War position, which is aimed at achieving as much good as practically possible and salvaging what can be salvaged from terrible situations. His Nobel acceptance speech walks through most of the basic conditions of the Just War theory, which follow logically from the underlying "necessary evil" principle.

The first condition of a just war is the magnitude of the evil being prevented. If you're going to fight a war, costing tens and potentially hundreds of thousands of lives, as the lesser evil, the threat of a greater evil has to be pretty huge. You don't amputate a broken arm; you only amputate an arm that will cost the patient his or her life. You don't attack another country over any bad act they've committed; it has to be an attempt to prevent massive bloodshed. There's a traditional self-defense clause here (you can fight an invading army rather than permitting them to kill your fellow citizens), but for third-party interventions there should be a reasonable certainty that many, many, many lives will be lost if you do not intervene. Clinton's interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo followed basically just-war rationales; they were fought to prevent large-scale deaths of civilians in "ethnic cleansing."

In the Libya case, it's very clear that Qaddafi intends to massacre large numbers of civilians for resisting his rule. That's a very reasonable justification for the rebels' armed resistance to him, and by extension for assisting those rebels.

The second condition is that the violence used be proportionate. You don't stop bloodshed by committing vastly more bloodshed. If they only way you can prevent the deaths of thousands of innocents is killing millions of innocents, there's really no way to say that you're choosing the lesser evil. You can't destroy the village in order to save it. You might be able to destroy a few houses in order to save it, but if you're going to do more damage than you prevent, you've lost your way. A related concept should be that the military conduct must discriminate between the enemy soldiers and the civilians who the war is meant to protect. A just war can only be just if it kills as few civilians as possible. Disproportionate and indiscriminate violence takes away any rationalization for a just war. There is no moral point to killing a bunch of unarmed civilians. You can't say they're better off. You can't justify killing them as an attempt to minimize bloodshed.

How Obama passes this test in Libya will be seen on the field, and it can be murky. But leveling Tripoli would be completely unjustifiable. And the American habit of using guided ordinance shows a simultaneous embrace of the "proportionate and discriminate" principle and failure to execute it. It's true that many of our weapons can be guided fairly precisely, but our dependence upon air power, cruise missiles, and predator drones also leads to inevitable civilian casualties.

Perhaps most importantly, a just war is a last resort. It's not okay to kill a lot of people because you're preventing even more death and violence. It's only acceptable to kill a lot of people because it is the only possible way to prevent even more death and violence. If you have another option for averting the violence, you should take it. You must take it.

Part of the last resort condition of imminence. War can only be justified if there is genuinely no time for any other kind of interference. You can't attack a country to stop them from massacring an ethnic minority someday. You can only attack a country to stop a massacre that's already getting underway. This is also logical ... the longer the time scale, the more chances you have to prevent the violence by peaceful means. This is why a police officer is authorized to kill a person who is committing a crime, and not someone who is merely likely to commit a felony someday. It's also why the "weapons of mass destruction" argument for the Iraq war, even if the weapons program had been underway, was not legitimate in just-war theory; even if Saddam Hussein had a weapons program, it was very clear that he was nowhere near completing, say, an atomic bomb, and therefore there were many different options for forestalling and preventing any such bomb. You don't get to bomb a country because you don't have the patience for sanctions and inspections. You only have a legitimate cause to bomb when it is genuinely now or never.

Whatever else is happening in Libya, it's happening in real time, and any intervention had to be timely. The regime is killing people right now. You can't save those people with six months of patient diplomacy; they will be dead by then.

The final major condition for a just war is realistic likelihood of success. This sounds like a practical rather than a moral reason, but we are discussing practical morality. If we're going to commit one evil to avert a greater evil, we need to have a realistic chance of actually averting that greater evil. And the more force we use, the better hope we need to have that it will pay off.

This is the condition that Barack Obama did not mention at the Nobel ceremony, and the one he apparently doesn't like to talk about. If you are going to fight a war to prevent even greater violence, you need to be able to prevent that violence.

Even the most scrupulous just war means committing a guaranteed evil, the violence that you will commit, for a chance of averting a larger one. Success in war can only ever be a probability, not a certainty, and if you fail to avert the greater evil you set out to fight, you will have only added more bodies to the pile. So you need to be damned sure of your chances.

If this sounds abstract, let me phrase it as a question: Why didn't Luxembourg try to stop Hitler? The answer is obvious: they could not. If they had attacked the German army in 1939, they would have been destroyed and the Germans would have gone right back to their destruction. They would not have lessened the evil that the Germans were doing; they would have added to it.

It is flatly immoral, in the just-war framework, to attack without any hope of success. Only success, or a good-faith expectation of success, can justify a war fought on the grounds that it is the lesser evil. In the same way, a just war must be planned in a way that permits success. If you send an expeditionary force to stop a genocide in a foreign country, but you send only a handful of troops, you are no longer fighting a just war. You're simply killing more people. And if the goal of your war is fundamentally unachievable, then there is no way to justify it. George H. W. Bush's intervention in Somalia was purely humanitarian and generous; the goal of distributing food and aid to the starving is fundamentally just. But there quickly turned out to be no way to achieve that honorable goal in that place by force of arms. And just wars are not about good intentions. They are about relieving suffering and deterring bloodshed.

Obama does not wish to discuss the expectation of success condition, because he is bogged down in two wars where success can no longer be achieved. Iraq is obviously something he has been saddled with, and it's clear to the whole world why he's there; he's there because his troops are hard to extricate. Afghanistan, on the other hand, is a war that Obama explicitly defends as a just war, fought for an appropriate cause. And one could certainly argue that the initial invasion of Afghanistan was a perfectly orthodox just war: the United States was responding to an actual threat to its citizens' safety, and the goals of driving al-Qaeda out of Iraq and disrupting their terrorist operations were eminently feasible. But there are no longer any obviously feasible goals in Afghanistan. What we hope to achieve by remaining, or reasonably can believe we might achieve by remaining, has become a mystery. Obama can't justify the continuation of his "good war" in the just-war framework, and he knows it. So he doesn't try.

The question is not whether we should use our military to protect Libyan civilians from wholesale murder. I think that goal, taken just on its own terms, is unimpeachable. The question, which has yet to be answered, is whether our military power can protect those civilians from violence. That's the most important question of all.