" doing his best to lose the peace"

BLACKFIVE: Abdicating Iraq

Sums it up succinctly and well.

North Korea: Libya bombing makes nukes a necessity

North Korean radio has said that the bombing of Libya proves that North Korea must never give up its nuclear weapons, as Libya did in 2003.

A US State Department spokesman responded thus:

"Where they’re at today has absolutely no connection with them renouncing their nuclear program or nuclear weapons," said Mark Toner, a U.S. State Department spokesperson. “And in fact, it’s - frankly, it’s a good thing that they did, because if they had such weapons of mass destruction and they turn weapons so easily against their own people, then God help us."

Saddam Hussein did have WMDs. And he did use them against his own people. As Prof. Geras pointed out, the Libya intervention justifies the Iraq war.

But a broader point is that the war against Libya has given North Korea and Iran alike every incentive to keep their nuclear programs going at high speed, or even increase the pace. If Qaddafi had maintained his nuke program, would he have had a deliverable warhead by now? We can't know for sure. But had he announced say last year that he possessed even one atomic weapon atop a medium range ballistic missile, France and Italy would never have become so bellicose toward him a month ago.

Update, 3/26: Mark Steyn, as always, must be read:

Alternatively, suppose Gadhafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favorite party dress. If you're a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Gadhafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam's fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was "a strong partner in the war on terrorism," according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway.

The blood-soaked butcher next door in Sudan is the first head of state to be charged by the International Criminal Court with genocide, but nobody's planning on toppling him. Iran's going nuclear with impunity, but Obama sends fraternal greetings to the "Supreme Leader" of the "Islamic Republic." North Korea is more or less openly trading as the one-stop bargain-basement for all your nuke needs, and we're standing idly by. But the one cooperative dictator's getting million-dollar-a-pop cruise missiles lobbed in his tent all night long. If you were the average Third World loon, which role model makes most sense? Colonel Cooperative in Tripoli? Or Ayatollah Death-to-the-Great-Satan in Tehran? America is teaching the lesson that the best way to avoid the attentions of whimsical "liberal interventionists" is to get yourself an easily affordable nuclear program from Pyongyang, or anywhere else, as soon as possible.

Libya intervention will justify Iraq war

Who says that? Professor Norm Geras of the University of Manchester, a self-described old-school Marxist, "Stopping and punishing crimes against humanity." It's a short post, so here it is:

Some editorialists are now mooting the prosecution of Colonel Gaddafi for crimes against humanity. There is also a piece in the Independent by Geoffrey Robertson setting out the grounds on which Gaddafi could be indicted by the International Criminal Court, following a Security Council direction of the case to that body. Two particular aspects of what Robertson says are of special interest to me.

First, regarding the possibility of a charge for crimes against humanity, he writes:

He [Gaddafi] can... be fixed with command responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed by his troops over the past few days as they have shot and killed innocent civilians in a number of towns and cities.

Under Article 7 of the ICC statute, a widespread lethal attack directed against a civilian population amounts to a crime against humanity and the wilful killing of civilians in a civil war amounts additionally to a war crime under Article 8.

This confirms the puzzlement I expressed yesterday over the supposedly far-reaching implications of the ruling of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Terrorism - at least where it is a policy of an organization and not a one-off incident - must surely be a crime against humanity since it is directed, like Gaddafi's present actions, against a civilian population.

Second, Robertson says - just like that - that there is now a duty of intervention on the international community, existing under international law, 'whenever it becomes necessary to stop or to punish crimes against humanity'. He sees this as resting on the doctrine of a 'responsibility to protect'. Good for him. His opinion chimes in with that of shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy that one shouldn't let anger about the Iraq war block the possibility of future interventions, in the right circumstances, based on a 'responsibility beyond [our] own borders'. One would have thought this was an elementary logical point, given that most of those angry over Iraq didn't believe the war was legitimate as a form of humanitarian intervention in the first place. It should therefore have left the validity of that concept intact. But it doesn't do any harm to remind people.

No, indeed.