Invasion: Incoherent Edition

From all manner of sites and places, I landed on Jonathan Chait's attempt to specially plead for bombing stuff without any post-bombing scheme or pre-bombing argument:

Why intervene in Libya and not elsewhere is a question that needs to be asked. But it's not a question that needs to be asked to determine the wisdom of intervening in Libya. Should we also spend more money to prevent malaria? Yes, we should. But I see zero reason to believe that not intervening in Libya would lead to an increase in in American assistance to prevent malaria.

Libya will suck up billions of dollars and further dispirit the kind of people who would like to spend money on malaria prevention. Furthermore, Libya confirms that America's foreign policy elites, whatever their motivations -- Power and Susan Rice aren't Bolton and Rice but they act like, are more interested in bombing things than, you know malaria prevention.

He goes on to "argue' that

But suppose there's no answer whatsoever. Does it matter? If it were the 1990s, and the Clinton administration were contemplating an expansion of children's health insurance, would it be important to determine exactly why we're covering uninsured children but not uninsured adults? No. The question is whether this particular policy intervention is likely to succeed or fail.

This is remarkably incoherent. First, the obvious answer is yes, we would want to ask why kids and not adults and, second, killing people and blowing things up is nothing like providing access to medical care. They are, in a very real way, the opposite of each other.

Staying on point he concludes that

[t]he question of whether or not we ought to intervene in some other country, or in some other way, is an important foreign policy issue, but not an argument against intervention in Libya.

So if someone argues that this invasion is unlikely to work, and proves by pointing slightly eastward of Libya, and proves that there is a better method, that's not an argument against blowing stuff up? If even in his imagination Chait cannot imagine that there is an argument against blowing stuff up, why doesn't he just argue for blowing up those uninsured kiddies and the malarial mosquitoes?