This war—let us call it by its right name, for once—will be remembered to a considerable extent as a war made by intellectuals, and cheered on by intellectuals. The main difference this time is that, particularly in the United States, these intellectuals largely come from the liberal rather than the conservative side. Presumably, when the war goes wrong, they will disown it, blaming the Obama administration for having botched it, in much the same way that many neoconservatives blamed Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for his strategic errors, rather than blaming themselves for urging a war that never had a chance of transforming Iraq in the way that they hoped. The judgment of history will almost certainly be that it was Iran, not the United States, which won that war. And Libya? Anything is possible, of course, but the odds of this war, so grandiose in terms of the moral claims made for its necessity and so incoherent in its tactics, turning out in the way its advocates are promising seem remarkably small.

But in humanitarian war, which its supporters nonetheless continue self-servingly to refuse to think of as being war, that is, as something that invariably involves the slaughter of innocents even when this slaughter takes place in a just cause (and for all the talk of “smart” weapons, war from the air is particularly prone to kill civilians), the moral good intentions of those who would wage it is somehow thought to trump all other considerations. Again, this war is no longer about protecting the people of Benghazi, if it ever was. That goal was accomplished on the first day and NATO planes could have continued to protect it as they did in Kurdistan between the end of the First Gulf War in 1991 and the beginning of the Second in 2003. Rather, it is about overthrowing Muammar Qaddafi and installing the insurgent leadership in Benghazi in his place.