We Must! We Must! We Must!

Christopher Hitchens lays out some compelling arguments for a truly active military role for NATO (by which he means the US),  in Libya:

Now to Libya: Quite obviously Col. Muammar Qaddafi has joined the list of deranged dictators whose acceptability is at an end, and it is unimaginable that he should emerge from the current confrontation with control over any part of the country. Equally obviously, we shall have to go to Tripoli to remove him. But we will not be doing so in the rearguard of any victorious insurgent army. In Afghanistan we could call upon some fierce and hardened fighters in the shape of the Northern Alliance. In Iraq, the Kurdish peshmerga militias had liberated substantial parts of the country from Saddam Hussein under the protection of our "no-fly zone." But the so-called Libyan rebels do not just fire in the air and strike portentous attitudes for the cameras. They run away, and they quarrel among themselves, and they are not cemented by any historic tradition of resistance or common experience.

True, true and true. The rebels are an incompetent and at best probably well meaning group. And that assessment certainly deserves some very strong caveats. The chances of them toppling Qaddafi seem to be increasingly far-fetched.

In effect, this half-baked approach leaves the initiative with Qaddafi. It also means that the mounting death rate, which recently included the lost life of my much-admired Vanity Fair colleague Tim Hetherington along with several others, is not justifiable by any commensurate military or political gains. These are lives that are being frittered away. Hetherington's last tweet described what he saw in Misurata the day before his death: "Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO." How shameful. What is utterly lacking in Libya, still, is an entrance strategy.

Again, true. It seems that the rebels are just strong enough to prolong a stalemate. A stalemate heavily featuring the slaughter in Misurata.

I have heard it argued that the pursuit of Qaddafi runs the risk of civilian casualties, as I presume in theory it must do. But the failure to target him most certainly means a steady and continuous and increasing flow of civilian deaths. To refuse to soil our hands with this homicidal lunatic is an odd way of keeping them clean.

All indisputably true.

But the questions remain: To be paid for by whom? What national necessities obligate our participation in this? For whom are we fighting and would their reign over Libya be for the better or worst?

In short, "Why must we?". Is every humanitarian disaster within our purview, let alone our ability?