In foreign policy, there are two kinds of competence. Both of them are good things, but you cannot rely on one of them alone. At the same time, the presence of one can ameliorate a situation, keeping it from becoming the outright disaster it would otherwise be.
Let’s take the latest adventure in Libya for a case in point. The first area of competence would be whether or not the mission is constitutional, necessary, called-for, etc. The second area of competence has to do with how the fighting itself is conducted. In the classic terms of just war theory, it is the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Do you have a just basis for going to war, and do you conduct yourself in the course of the war as you ought to?
The apostle Paul takes an illustration from a bungled war to address a problem with confusion in the church when he says that when a bugle blows indistinctly, no one prepares for battle (1 Cor. 14:8). This is not only true in some churchly bedlam, but it is also true on the battlefield.
A war can be badly conceived and defined poorly, and still be fought well. It can be fully justified at the conceptual level, and articulated ably, and then fought poorly. Ideally, you would want to do both things right, but it doesn’t always happen that way.
Take the term competence then, define it broadly to include moral and constitutional issues, and then apply it in two areas — the first being the geopolitical level, and the second on the locopolitical level. My sympathies tend to go to the place where competence is in evidence, even if there is grotesque incompetence on the other end of their teeter totter. Tell me a story about some Roman soldiers trying to govern a Germanic village of barbarians in 50 B.C. and, unless the thing erupts into an atrocity from the Roman side, my sympathies will be, mutatis mutandis, with the guys trying to keep some kind of order in place. This is why, incidently, my sympathies are usually with Israel in their current beleagured state.
The idea of planting Israel there in the first place (on the geopolitical level) was almost the Platonic form of the dumb idea. But they are all there now — a first world nation plumb spang in the middle of a bunch of third world nations. “What could go wrong?”, thought the lords of the earth, as they were divvying up the Middle East at the beginning of the twentieth century. Well, as it turns out, lots. But we don’t get do-overs in history, and you have to play it as it lays. A lot of internationalist romantics are not so much idealists in geopolitics as they are cheaters at golf. But you can’t look at the twentieth century and take a mulligan.
Back to the present. The current action in Libya is ill-defined, unconstitutional, muddled, and being made up as we go along. If a Charlie Sheen rant were a war, this is what it would look like. But our military, in the main an extraordinarily competent organization, is trying to divine a coherent mission from the White House and State Department chaos, and is trying to execute something sensible. Good luck to them, says I.