The End of Liberal Interventionism

As the sand-storm season in Libya gathers power and pace, the bright early colors of the Arab spring are fading alongside the hopes and promise of change for peoples too long suppressed by despotic and inert governments. Despite more than three months of aerial attacks on Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s troops, a stalemate of sorts seems to have set in. Yet another “liberal intervention” appears to have lost its way.

The hopes that animated the intervention in Libya always seemed a bit out of place in a landscape steeped in ancient memories. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books about the coastal Libyan city of Derna, Nicholas Pelham described how between “the turquoise Mediterranean and the Green Mountains lie the ruins of the forums and churches Byzantium left behind.”