One of the great paradoxes of the Libyan war has been the U.S. effort to privilege the resolutions of the Arab League and the U.N. authorizing a no-fly-zone and, in the latter case, including some vague authorizations about using forces to help stop the killing of the rebels. At some early point, the allies privately realized that to remove Qaddafi they were going to have to go well beyond the spirit and perhaps the letter of the resolutions, by systematically targeting Libyan ground forces, increasingly in conjunction with rebel aims. Even as they denied all this, it remained true that to win (i.e., remove Qaddafi), the United States would have to do these things.

But if the war was intended to highlight the moral and legal omnipotence of the United Nations, it is having quite the opposite effect — one of rendering U.N. resolutions mere fig leaves that are praised as frequently as they are ignored by their very boosters. If we are not careful, the twin legacies of this misadventure will be to make U.N. resolutions irrelevant and, through half-measures, second-guessing, and finally abdication from the effort, to accept defeat (e.g., the survival of Qaddafi) by default.