David Rieff explains why the Libyan war is worse than America’s other wars:

The truth is that doctrines like humanitarian intervention and R2P are ways of waging war without taking responsibility (or accepting accountability, both moral and democratic) for doing so. That is why they are so pernicious, and why, even in cases where an intervention may be warranted, far from being an improvement on the traditional way that nations and coalitions of states have come to the decision to go to war and how they have waged war, they are actually a very large step in the wrong direction. They allow us to pretend we are not going to war, but, instead, are just trying to protect the civilian population from harm. War, however, is not police work, not armed humanitarianism, not human rights activism with an air force, and it should not be allowed to become anything of the kind. The Libyan precedent is so disturbing precisely because, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, or (again) Somalia, whether one supports U.S. actions in these places or instead favors withdrawal, it reflects such tendencies.

This is one of the worst things about “humanitarian” wars. By pretending to be something less or other than what they are, they trivialize warfare, and they make wars much easier to start and continue on the authority of a relative few people. Worse still, because they are “humanitarian,” one would have to be “heartless” (as Juan Cole put it) to object to such an arbitrary war. This abuse of language leads Harold Koh to say that the administration is complying with the War Powers Act, and then in the next breath assert that the War Powers Act does not really apply to the Libyan war, and then he very solemnly assures us that the executive doesn’t have the very sort of arbitrary authority to start a war that he is effectively defending.

On the question of moral and democratic accountability, this appears to be mostly an American problem. All European governments directly involved in the war have sought and received approval from their national legislatures, and the Canadian parliament has voted its approval twice. Even in France, Sarkozy has gone to the National Assembly and Senate to seek and receive ongoing authorization and funding for the war. French law did not require Sarkozy to seek prior approval, but it does require parliamentary consent when a foreign war lasts this long. None of the other allies has any need to twist and abuse language by pretending that this is not a war, because none of them is trying to disregard and violate the law.

Rieff also writes:

Just wars don’t have to be defensive. But they have to be wars, and the dismal folly of R2P and the Obama administration’s use of it in Libya, is that it involves war-fighting without either the seriousness (and the serious will to win) or the moral gravitas that war requires.

Indeed, the governments waging the Libyan war don’t even aspire to the seriousness that the doctrine used to justify it theoretically requires.