I AM NOT joking. The U.S. involvement in Libya is the logical outcome of policies, pursued under both Republican and Democratic administrations (Somalia under President George H. W. Bush, Bosnia and Kosovo under President Bill Clinton), in which war was never fully acknowledged to be war, with all the gravity that such an acknowledgment would have implied. Instead, we were told that what was taking place was a so-called humanitarian intervention, a kind of armed emergency relief operation (as in Somalia in 1991), or armed human rights intervention (in the Balkans and, now, in Libya). The latest version of this delusion is the so-called Responsibility to Protect doctrine, or R2P, as it is almost universally known, that was adopted by the United Nations World Summit in 2005 and ratified by the General Assembly in 2008 with the support of George W. Bush’s administration. R2P states that sovereignty is not absolute and, when a nation is committing crimes against its own population, where feasible and in those cases where all other (non-military) means are believed to have failed, outside powers not only may, but actually have a duty, to intervene. R2P is cited explicitly in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973—the same resolution Obama cited in his speech announcing that he had ordered U.S. military action in Libya.

Those who took a decent English 101 class in college may remember being instructed that a failure of language usually reflects a failure of thought. 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.

Of course, there are good reasons why humanitarian, democracy-building, and human rights justifications are so attractive to policymakers. In the past, nations went to war for four reasons: out of interest (including wars of conquest); because they were bound by alliances (World War I, to use an obvious example); in self-defense; and out of a belief that it was just to uphold some cause. War is still with us, but, with the exception of self-defense in the broad sense, all these justifications have been increasingly set aside. When the time comes for war, there is only the possibility of state violence couched in the language of peacemaking and peacekeeping. It is a world that George Orwell would have had no trouble recognizing, and the fact that those who champion R2P and other forms of humanitarian intervention have good intentions and are, to use an old-fashioned term, good people, does not make their demarche any less Orwellian.

There is an alternative. It is called just war, and it has existed since the days of St. Thomas Aquinas. If he had thought it right to go to war in Libya, Obama could easily have said something like this:

The insurrection in Libya is a just and decent cause in which the Libyan people have risen up to overthrow the Qaddafi dictatorship. We can’t overthrow every dictatorship, either because they are too powerful, as is the case with China, or because American interests run too deep, as is the case with Saudi Arabia. But, when it is feasible to assist a popular uprising against a tyrant, America should do so. And that is what I have now ordered our armed forces to do in Libya.

Americans might have disagreed with such an assessment. Principled interventionists and principled anti-interventionists would have known where they stood. But neither side, nor, indeed, the great American middle, could have faulted the president for trying to have it both ways, as he has tried to do with the current policy of Regime Change Lite.