So after an initial good news start - unusually rapid decision making by the international community and an immediate reversal in Colonel Gaddafi's fortunes - what has become known in the US, somewhat euphemistically, as "the Libyan Adventure" has gone fairly pear shaped.
Responding to the so-called lessons of history, the Libyan Adventure surprised so many with its initial successes. Unlike the spectacular failure in the international community's reponse to the Rwandan genocide, the UN and then NATO moved with lightning speed to agree, plan and execute a plan to save Benghazi. But also learning from the lessons of Iraq, misjudging a people's response to an apparently 'liberating' army, a plan was executed to avoid any kind of "Boots on the Ground" scenario. The outcome, while intially successful, has seen the rebels' early advances reversed as the Colonel's troops learned how to hide their columns among civilians, leading to the inevitable targeting errors that come when a campaign is being fought only from the safety of 30,000 feet in the air.
It seems history has hovered over this latest chapter like a ghost. At first the community was galvanised into action by memories of Rwanda, when a million people were butchered in three months before anyone in New York could decide what should be done; and memories of Srebrenica, when the Dutch UN peace keeping troops literally stood by as thousands of menand boys were massacred by Serbian troops. But the still-raw memories of Iraq - of western troops marching into a Middle-eastern and Islamic culture with the ever-present skeptre of oil interest - ensures that foreign boots will not form part of the solution.
But does history determine too much of the international community's response to disasters, which are not enoughy judged on their own merits? Iraq II was to some extent a response to Iraq I where problems were seen to have escalsated from an unwillingness in 1991 to finish the job, to invade the country and change the regime. The sense that leaving the job undone led to a need to revisit the problem so much more expensively years later. That mistake, in turn, could be construed as a repsonse to Vietnam and a fear that becoming embroiled in a quagmire, in a insurgency of asynchonous warfare, was not worth the risk. Ironic huh?
In some ways it is like a never-healing trauma. Iraq I itself was a repsonse to WWII. How often did George H. W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher talk about wanting to learning the lessons of 1939 by not allowing aggression to stand, as the international community had when Hitler invaded Czechoslavakia in 1938/9. How much was that appeasement driven by the need to avoid another European cataclysm?
Is history ever helpful in informing the day's decisions? Hitler himself was so keen to learn the lessons of history. He studied in obsessive detail the failed invasions of Russia before him, of Napoleon's disastrous adventure in 1812. He learned from the lessons of WW1 and was ever careful to void the Kaiser's mistake of attempting to fight a war on two fronts. He would have been more than haunted by the enormous irony that it was a two-front war that finally did for him.
It seems to me that learning from history is a tricky business. It is of course important to study histroy and understand where mistakes were made and what could have been done better. But at the same time, if you allow an obsession with the past to define all your decisions then it can blind you to detail of the present and cloud your judgement. I'm not sure if this means that the international community should not be involved in Libya today, or more involved than they are. But I certainly feel that everything that is being done is defined by events in the past rather than the present.