President Barack Obama gave a characteristically even-keeled speech Monday night to explain this month’s humanitarian intervention in Libya. The blogosphere and national media were abuzz Monday night and Tuesday morning, mostly continuing a condemnation of Obama’s handling of the Libyan intervention from either end of the political spectrum. This column called for a limited intervention more than a month ago on the basis of the United Nation’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine, and it happened in record time. The reasoning behind this intervention is complex but sound, and criticism from both the far left and far right deserves some clarification.

When the intervention began, national media outlets pumped out images of tracer rounds flitting across night skies and tomahawk missiles launching from warships that could have been stock footage from the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It seemed like yet another fireworks show from the American military, and I must admit a deep-seated cynicism about that institution’s humanitarian track record. The left has a tough bind: Human rights are important, but flexing American militarist muscle is nearly as unpalatable as watching atrocities occur. Cynicism about the use of military action is easy in this case — why have we intervened in Libya, a country with oil and strategic interest, of all the human-rights-violating regimes in the world, as a potential base of influence in North Africa?

The answer, from a philosophical perspective about intervention, is that we can’t intervene everywhere. In deliberating where and when to step in, national interest is a permissible factor among many others, however the theorist cooks up the list. Fairness toward other struggling nations shouldn’t preclude us from preventing extreme injustice when possible.

Charles Krauthammer, arch-right columnist and antiterrorism hawk, published a column on Thursday bashing Obama’s ‘Ivy League’ handling of the Libyan intervention. Recounting his argument isn’t really worth the ink, but the important point is that Obama is in fact handling the Libyan intervention from an academically sound perspective. A careful, multilateral approach is the only way to go about such a war in the 21st century. This will end up being messy and confusing, and some of the criticism about not having clear goals, exit strategies and unified mission is warranted, to a point. Waging a ‘professor’s war’ isn’t a bad thing at all — it’s the only way to save lives without compromising international law or mixing motives.

Obama closed his speech with an appeal to a standard claim for the importance of human rights — mutual, enlightened self-interest. If human rights are respected abroad, the world will be more peaceful and we’ll prosper as a result. This grounding for human rights is completely legitimate among many, but the American public ought to have the sensitivity to step up to a more basic, moral justification. Barbaric violations of human rights that Moammar al Gadhafi executed are morally abhorrent, and the international community has some duty to prevent them when possible, making ‘never again’ a reality. The line between crimes bad enough to justify intervention and those that are not is ultimately subjective, and it falls on our sentimental capacity to feel empathy for the Libyans he promised to hunt down door to door.

Obama’s speech was articulate and moving, and it laid out, more or less, a clear adherence to the best theory going on humanitarian intervention. He needed to reassure a public confused by a muddle of motives and an understandably contested moral discourse about military intervention. As that discourse reaches clearer conclusions and the public develops deeper sentimentality, speeches like Monday night’s will become less necessary and more clear — and the world will be a better place for it.

Scott Collison is a senior philosophy and physics major. His column appears every Wednesday, and he can be reached at smcollis@syr.edu.