The Guardian leader today on Libya is a hoot. It wants to stay the right way up while standing on its head. Yesterday I drew attention to the statement by Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy; to how it projected regime change as a must (to which end Nato and its coalition partners had to continue building pressure) and at the same time denied that regime change was the aim of military intervention. The Guardian uses each side of this combination as suits its convenience: now to suggest that Obama is not Bush or Blair, thanks to the indirection of the regime change component, and now to argue that the coalition's course is regrettable because... because it does really have its eye on regime change.
So, to begin with, the 'sense that the casus belli is being breezily redefined while stalemate takes hold on the ground is eerily reminiscent of 2003'. However, this is soon set aside as a misapprehension: 'Libya... is not Iraq', and Obama 'has at least some regard for the rule of international law'. Fair enough; let's proceed. Does the paper accept the subtlety of the rationale being offered: to protect civilians; but with a need to get rid of Gaddafi in order to do that effectively? It might appear so:
It [the Obama-Cameron-Sarkozy article] acknowledged that the legal mandate was about protecting civilians, and was explicitly "not to remove Colonel Gaddafi by force". Nonetheless, the trio said, removed he must be, not as the objective of the action but as an inescapable precondition to securing the humanitarian goals. The argument is reminiscent of Catholic teachings about the difference between sought moral consequences and those that are merely foreseen. There was no place for such nuance in the born-again certainties of George Bush.
OK? Clear? What follows, however - follows immediately - is this:
Thus, not Bush, yet even so not good. And you'll now see why; because...But changing war aims via Jesuitical distinctions is too clever by half.
The deeper anxiety is that the perception of mission creep will retard the greatest struggle of the lot – for international relations governed by the rule of law... The three leaders' careful drafting might have satisfied their own lawyers, but if critics at home and abroad feel caught out by the small print that can only undermine the campaign's legitimacy.
The current attorney general would do well to remember the damage done during the Iraq affair, when dubious interpretations of resolution 1441 were used to license the course the superpower was already set on... The new language of regime change may leave the council descending into accusations of bad faith – and the planet slipping back into a more lawless world.
Mission accomplished, one might say. To hold on to the distinction between the Libyan and Iraqi interventions, one allows that there's something in the claim that regime change isn't the objective; and to hold on to opposition to the Libyan intervention, one grumbles that regime change is being put on the agenda and this is a blow both to the campaign's legitimacy and to international law. It's a game with its own special logical rules.