Administration on No Fly Zone

Hilary Clinton has wisely gone on record as saying that any no fly zone in Libya should not be a U.S. led effort.  The Arab League has supported it.  In my opinion if they want to enforce a no fly zone, then the U.S. should not interfere.  However, I don't think that we should go too far in supporting it.

My reasoning here is that the U.S. military serves a specific purpose, and that is to defend the lives and liberty of U.S. citizens.  The government of Libya, however odious, poses little or no threat to either.  By engaging in any type of military action against the government of Libya, we run the risk of angering people over any resulting deaths.  There will always be some risk of violent retaliation.  Hence military action places American lives in danger.

Military actions are also costly, by which I mean that they require some expenditure of money.  That money must be collected from people in the form of taxes.  This takes away the ability of people to use the money for any other actions they might want to use it for.  Hence the action will forcibly deprive Americans of their resources and put their lives at risk without contributing to their freedom or security.

This might seem like a selfish way to think about foreign policy, but I don't think that it is right to force people to donate their money and put their lives at risk in order to help others.  But let's say you disagree with me here.  Let's suppose we adopt some alternate, altruistic system of moral and ethical values.

Even if we were to posit some moral obligation to help others that the government had the right or obligation to enforce, not all ways of helping others would be equal.  Naturally we would want to help others in the manner that would carry the little risk of harming others.  We would also want to help others in an efficient manner.  That is we would want to help others as much as possible with the resources that we were to devote to this purpose.

In this respect military action would almost never be justified since there will usually be some way of helping others that is far more efficient.  If we think of the foreign lives saved as a value that we want to pursue, there are cheaper ways of saving lives than by attacking another country.  There are surely some relatively inexpensive life-saving medicines that we could purchase instead.  These would save many more lives per dollar of expenditure.  Even letting rich tax payers keep more of their money would enable them to make investments that would lead to job growth.

However, we should not oppose a no fly zone either.  Maintaining a no fly zone would stop the government of Libya from using aircraft to fire on its own citizens.  If we were seen to oppose such a zone and the government were to use aircraft to bomb its own people, then this would make us look like part of the problem.  Failure to act will be seen as a less serious offense that actively harming people.

In any case it doesn't seem like the proposal by the Arab League to get the Security Council to agree to this is likely to succeed.  China and Russia will likely block it.  This leaves NATO, to which I would say that this looks too much like American leadership.  In any case, some member states might oppose the action.

It looks a lot like the Arab League will have to enforce its own no fly zone.