Defeating Qaddafi is the easy part

Other veterans of Iraq are wary of such methodical exercises. Barbara Bodine, a seasoned diplomat who served as administrator of Baghdad and central Iraq in the first months after the war, says that many of the lessons she learned there, including “don’t fire the whole bureaucracy,” and “don’t fire the army,” may not apply to Libya. What is relevant, she said, is the endemic failure of political understanding. “We don’t know enough to engage in social engineering.” Bodine said. The Iraqi emigres whom the U.S. backed in the months before the war, like Ahmad Chalabi, proved to be a great deal less public-spirited and nonsectarian than they claimed to be. And while the Libyan rebels’ “transitional government” is currently headed up by former senior government civil servants and technocrats, a very different group may rise to the fore should the rebels finally succeed — or should the civil war turn into a protracted slog, as seems all too likely…

I’m not quite convinced that a country that missed out on 20th century state-formation is ready for 21st century solutions. Still, all these issues are worth debating. What is not worth debating is whether, having decided to intervene in Libya, the international community has both an obligation to prepare for the post-conflict situation and the capacity to do something about it. The fiasco in Iraq does not demonstrate that outsiders are helpless to shape such chaotic settings, but rather that you need to pay close attention to their very complicated realities, and approach them with due humility. If they ever do reach Tripoli, the Libyans whose heroic resistance to Qaddafi we are now apostrophizing are going to turn around and say, “Help us.” And it will not be enough to give Donald Rumsfeld’s cynical shrug and say, “Democracy is messy.”