Mr. Arkedis is either being outrageously disingenuous or is in serious denial. He accuses neocons of "overspending" in hard power, yet defense budgets under Obama keep growing at an inordinate pace.

He says that neocons are alone in overestimating the effectiveness of military force and says that progressives view foreign policy as a holistic enterprise, but how is a no-fly zone holistic? The realist argument, clearly made by Prof. Walt, was not that the US should only intervene where there is material gain to be made, but instead that even the best and most altruistic intentions don't change the fact that forceful regime change or other forms of military intervention, unilateral or multilateral, don't work as advertised, and instead can amplify the suffering of those we were meant to be saving and, as an added bonus, have dangerous unintended consequences beyond the borders of the targeted area for intervention. When you act because you feel morally compelled to do so but don't take into account the consequences of your actions, you are still responsible for the damages you do.

For all this talk of smart power, being a beacon of democracy and not compromising your values, Obama has kept Guantanamo up and running, stepped up the use of targeted killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan (so much for due process eh?) and adopted a very interesting double standard in his support of popular uprisings in the Middle East. When standing by your values and not alienating your allies are found to be incompatible goals, such as in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, guess who wins? By the way, R2P up until now is only a convenient label, not a guide to action. Just compare the swift action on Libya and the almost total paralysis on the crisis in the Ivory Coast, not to mention again US allies in the Gulf.

Institutionalised humanitarianism is dangerous hogwash. Any interference is interference and restrains natural development. It is perfectly reasonable for the UN, the Vatican or any group to express unhappiness at this or that behaviour and nations that feel offended can apply sanctions individually or collectively, but If citizens of one nation feel the urge to join a struggle to support citizens in another they should do it each on his own account, as many did during the Spanish Civil War. In the case of Libya, the acclaimed international support consists of the US and its slavering supporters, a couple of feral states out for the pickings and, a bunch of Arab despots anxious to mollify their own restive citizens. Libya in an African country but Africans who seek to support Gaddafi are demonised and dismissed as mercenaries. The UN is a farce and if this were an aquatic environment Ban Ki-moon would be a sardine.

Mr. Arkedis' article supports Mr. Walt's assertions more than it dispels them. Mr. Arkedis rightly points out how the approach is different but in the end the actions are the same as will be the loss of life, money and prestige at yet another failed military adventure. Libya is the same as Afghanistan and Iraq: what are the goals? Who are we supporting? What is the desired outcome? Mr. Arkedis has no answers to these questions just as President Obama didn't last night.

So Progressive warmongers unlike Neocon warmongers are multi-lateralists, but so what? Adding buzz words like 'holistic' and 'smart power' don't change the reality of the actions being taken. The words used to describe the war (it is a war, we attacked a sovereign nation) don't change it's reality or it's likely outcome.

"The fact is that we do indeed believe that international institutions make the world a safer place for the United States and other democracies by entrenching liberal norms around the globe".

International institutions like UN?

If there is an intervention, and you find yourself scratching your head as to why we would want to be involved, then it is a liberal intervention. Here are a couple of rules to help you:

1. If an intervention will provide little or no benefit to the US, then it's probably a liberal intervention.

2. If an intervention will provide a direct benefit to the US, then it's probably a neocon intervention.

The US, Israel and the West are, by definition, bad because their outcome is superior. They have cheated to attain their status. No proof needed or wanted. Any intervention by the West must not be allowed to contain some kind of direct benefit. Warm and fuzzy indirect benefits are allowed.

All poorer countries are victims by definition. They have been victimized by the West. Bad behavior by these countries is only a reaction to the West. Since the West caused the problems in the first place, the West may only stop excessive killing.

The first problem with both Walt and Arkedis is the belief that all issues can be understood through whichever Procrustean bed they happen to endorse. Instead, we need to think about outcomes and how to attain them. If the goal is desirable, then the second step is to consider the cost of getting there. Along the way, it is also necessary to consider collateral effects of whatever approach is taken. What has made the discussion of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya, so messy is that there has been little willingness to consider the issues in this order.

In Afghanistan, the goal was to close down the al-Qaida training bases so it couldn't train jihadis to attack us. The approach was to invade and militarily destroy al-Qaeda's bases. This was achieved. What wasn't considered is that once that was done, there were issues of what happens to Afghanistan next. This was short-sighted, but what was wrong is not the need to remove al-Qaeda but the need to think about the aftermath. Establishing Afghanistan as a functioning democracy may have been recognized as an impossibility, so the need arose to take that case elsewhere.

In Iraq, the goal was to remove Saddam Hussein in the clearly unrealizable expectation that doing so would lead easily to a flowering of democracy in Iraq. This goal is separate from the case the Bush Administration made for going to war. Like with Afghanistan, Bush didn't address the "what happens after we have succeeded" issue. We have paid the price ever since.

In both Afghanistan and Iraq, had the US done the necessary planning and gone in with the resources necessary to address the "what happens next" issue, the results may have been very different.

Now we have Libya, where the goal is to prevent a bloodbath of Gadafi's opponents and the means is a "no-fly" zone. It should be very obvious that if Gadafi remains in power, it will be necessary to maintain this "no-fly" zone indefinitely since he will clearly seek revenge if we ever remove it. Thus, unless we're planning on staying in Libya indefinitely, we must pursue the removal of Gadafi.

That Obama denies that this is the goal indicates either that he is dishonest or he doesn't understand the issue. If he is being dishonest, how different is that from the claims that Bush lied about the case for going into Iraq? If he doesn't understand what he is doing, in what way is Obama "better" than GWB?

So what happens if Gadafi falls? That depends rather obviously on who replaces him. My understanding is that we have no idea who that will be. That means we have no idea how this will turn out and we may find ourselves facilitating an even greater bloodbath than Gadafi would have perpetrated. Will we also act to stop that?

If we don't have an answer to that, we don't have a policy.

Actually three. All that being said, how then do you explain:

"The Obama administration's actions in Libya are surely legitimate. The president chose to intervene after securing active support from the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the Gulf Cooperation Council, not to mention the U.N. Security Council. The international community's near-unanimity is an acknowledgement of the "responsibility to protect" (or R2P), a U.N. norm that obliges the international community to defend innocents in the face of humanitarian atrocities."

What about getting securing support from the US Congress?

And if this is a great and justified and better display of R2P, why aren't we doing the same thing in Yemen, Syria, the Ivory Coast(and the other HALF of Africa), etc...? Where do you draw the line and how do you determine which cause is more meritorious?

The danger in this article is that he is doing the same thing he accuses Walt of doing, on the flip-side of the coin: making huge generalities, and betraying his own point of view with an obviously flippant bias. It's not impartial enough to be a thought provoking rebuttal of good counter-points...

Cheers.

Then there is the matter of the endorsement of the Arab League, OIC, GCC, and UN, which Arkedis, and other self-described "progressives," sees as conferring legitimacy

To put it bluntly, none of these entities would lift a finger to prevent a bloodbath of any non-Muslim group. The Arab League has advocated in favor of one when the target was Israeli Jews and the OIC still endorses this. We're not hearing about bloodbaths of Christians by Muslims in Ethiopia or other parts of Africa or the ongoing attacks on Copts in Egypt. None of these groups has done anything about female genital mutilation or acted to protect women's rights in the Muslim world. For most of these "progressive" allies, uttering "rights" and "gays" in the same sentence is enough to warrant getting beaten up. Meanwhile, the UN has become the world's chief sponsor of anti-semitism. "Progressives" have responded to these assults on truly progressive ideals by endorsing them in the name of standing for "the people."

If Arkedis truly believes in progress, he would do well to denounce these groups for preserving their religiously-based biases against others.

I'm not holding my breath for this to happen.

The assertion that R2P is a national interest because it aligns with our values is ludicrous.

1. We have many values, why is this one worth using military force and others (live civil liberties, freedom of expression which are much more deeply held than the recent exposition of R2P) are not?

2. If it is a national interest we ought to engage in many places where it is being violated. Syria anybody? Ivory Coast?

3. A vital national interest is one that left unfulfilled would hurt the security or well-being of the US. 10,000 Libyan being slaughtered by a murderous regime stinks, and it s a tragedy, but it does not affect the security of the US....R2P is better thought of not as a national interest, but rather as a national preference.

4. Is there even a reasonable chance that ordinary Libyan;' swill be better off in 3 years time. Or will it juts be a new thug, or an Islamic thug that abuses the Libyan people? Remember one good thing Ghaddafi did was beat the snot of the Islamist insurgency in Libya...think they might surface again.? Or will the people be protected in we leave Libya in an unresolved civil war with de facto partition of the country creating simmering instability?

It seems that the only time the progressive left is willing to use military force is if there is absolutely no strategic rational or critical national security interest in doing so.

If one wanted to effectively intervene to overthrow the "Mad Dog" it needed to happen in the first 2-3 days, when his security forces could have been peeled away from the regime and when Tripoli was still in play. Now the atrocities committed by the security forces guarantee they will go down with the ship...if it goes down. But of course quick decisive action would not have allowed for the precious anointment of the AL and the UN. More "legitimacy" (meaning nasty-non-democracies say OK) is inversely related with success in situations like this where time is critical. Swift decisiveness is also not in the character of this commander-in-chief.

I don't think Mr. Arkedis really addresses the alleged common traits between neoconservatives and "progressive internationalists." As I read it, Walt's claim is basically that, despite talking about international institutions, liberal interventionists are basically projecting American values onto those institutions and using the institutions as a vehicle to advance a project to remake the world in our image. This response fails to address that point.

Both sides believe in the supremacy of western values, and both believe that US military might should be behind bringing them to the world. They take a different tactical approach to doing so, with progressives believing that international institutions are an important tool to accomplishing the goals of bringing western conceptions of human rights, democracy and free trade to the rest of the world while neocons see the institutions as little more than an obstacle to US power. But, aren't the two fundamentally alike in all of the ways that Walt claims?