What is the argument about Libya and sanctions ‘really’ all about?

It’s a Negotiation, as a shrewd and well-placed reader has written in to say:

I was interested in your recent comment about Libyan Sanctions, which hits the nail on the head.

Plus you can be sure that the tighter the asset freezes and other actions by Western governments bite on Libya, the slower lots of other countries will be to implement them if they actually do implement them – there’s plenty of Libyan oil money be made out of not enforcing UNSC resolutions. Who out there cares if the Libyan people are collateral damage while that money gets made? If they are too weak to bring down Gaddafi, he has shown himself to be a Great Leader indeed!

Sanctions are seen as a low risk, easy option – something we do almost without thinking when we can’t/won’t do anything else. The fall-back defence, if one challenges them, is that they "send a message".

Which, whether true or not, is almost impossible to argue with. But what is the cost of sending that message?

Even "targetted" sanctions are a blunt instrument liable to result in all sorts of unintended consequences. Some of these unintended consequences are potentially as grave and as unpredictable as those of military action; yet we’d never take military action with so little forethought (hence all the reservations about a no-fly zone at present).

The financial action against Gaddafi and Co is a rare example of sanctions that might actually achieve something (even if usually the implementation is botched and the chances of contributing to policy success were minimal anyway), but only if they do succeed.

If they don’t, we get into precisely the scenario that you outline – and the snag is that we can’t very well withdraw the sanctions (even if an utter failure) without looking foolish, and a skilful Saddam-style opponent can then turn them against us. We lay ourselves open to the jiu jitsu that the classic asymmetric warrior practises.

So whilst UK (and other) action so far has been tactically impressive (quick, apparently effective etc) this will count for nothing if it’s the beginning of a strategic failure.

The stakes are higher than policy makers realise. The balance of risk is this: sanctions may tip the balance against Gaddafi, but if he manages to hang on they will almost certainly make things worse.

Spot on.

It leads nicely to this piece (via Browser) on what exactly is an ‘intended’ consequence from a philosophical point of view? And it gets complicated!

Thus:

… why should an account of a particular kind of intentional side-effect be rejected because it fails to apply to another kind of intentional side-effect?

As we have seen, experimental philosophers have generally attempted to account for all kinds of intentional side-effect cases through elegant theories that appeal to only one or two factors supposedly common to all side-effect cases.

But why should we expect the pattern of intentional side-effect cases to admit of a straightforward explanation, appealing to only one or two factors? Why should we suppose some uniform feature runs through all of the side-effects deemed to have been brought off intentionally?

Perhaps it’s time to give up on the ideal of a unified explanation.

These issues of predicting and managing consequences, intended or otherwise, is right at the heart of all policy-making.

And almost everywhere we look, we’re not getting it right:

No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence…