Resolution 1973, Intervention, and International Law

“This debate has probably had far more influence on the Security Council’s recent decision than any ‘western plot to invade another country in the Middle East.”

A preemptive shot at those stupid, excitable conspiracy theorist non-experts, I presume.

All right. Leaving out the word “plot” — which implies some kind of Grand Conspiracy — how do you know this, exactly? Let’s imagine that the decision was made in the following way: the key political leaders in the Security Council communicate with each other and decide that for reasons of geopolitical stability in a key oil region, they’d better intervene in Libya. On the way out the door, one of them says, “Oh, yeah, better run this by the legal geeks and make it sound good with whatever humanitarian theory is current. Once the war starts it won’t matter anyways.” Then people like you go out and do your job, which is to tell everyone that technocrats are in charge and that the decision had nothing to do with those conspiracy nuts.

Got any evidence that your view is more true?

What is happening at the UN is a slow movement toward enforcement of a global charter for human rights reflecting the values of the European Enlightenment. Extrapolating the logic of the Libyan intervention leads to the de-legitimization of any government that forcibly suppresses freedom of speech and assembly. The Libyan intervention now provides a precedent for international armed force being used to remove any repressive authoritarian government.

The global enforcement of consent of the governed is being attempted. Whether this can be achieved in the near term is doubtful, but we are at an important inflection point in history, and it is largely the result of the advent of ubiquitous electronic communication technology. Zuckerberg may ultimately rank with Guttenberg as a great enabler of democracy.

Yeah, indeed, the UNSC is not an agency with a bunch international bureaucrats debating fine language and concepts. It’s a body with 15 member-states, 5 of them veto-wielding permanent ones. It seems hard to imagine that anything other than geopolitical interests of these 15 states had any effect on the decision.

R2P was first endorsed at the 2005 World Summit and by the African Union in the same year, affirmed by the UNSC in 2006, endorsed by Ban Ki-Moon in a January 2009 report, and adopted by the GA in July 2009. To say that Iraq “killed off” R2p, when the most significant movement on its inclusion in international law took place well after the invasion, is flatly and unarguably wrong.

“It seems to me that the Gaddafi government was in pratice quite favourable to the geopolitical interests of western states; on the other hand, if the rebellion (revolution?) succeeds, we can not know what the new government will do.”

I presented it as a sort of null hypothesis, Random Lurker. Other people here have claimed, credibly (at least to me), that at least some of it was due to domestic French political concerns. I could make up nice-sounding reasons why “realism” might be the case — avoiding chaos above all, for instance (because Gaddafi wasn’t as close to crushing the rebels as he liked people to think), or in order to ensure that western states had more influence over the shape of the eventual settlement of the situation, whether that’s Gaddafi back in power or a revolutionary victory.

Since I’m not privy to any great-power high-level political discussions, I have no idea what is true. But I do know that all of those seem more credible, as unsupported stories, then the unsupported idea that these humanitarian theories affected the decision in any way other than the technical wording of the document.

#R. Puchalsky

I can’t know what passes through the heads of politicians, however IMHO the whole set of insurrection in arab states cought the estabilishment umprepared, and in particular the situation on the ground in Libya evolved so fast that politicians had to respond immediately withouth time for tought.

This (http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/18/how_obama_turned_on_a_dime_toward_war) is helpful reading on what American policymakers, at least, were thinking. It appears that crude realism had more or less nothing to do with it.

Outside of polemical framing, serious scholarship on American policy in the Middle East has, to my mind, undermined the everything-is-about-oil thesis, in part by demonstrating the centrality of liberal commitments to the international imagination of the American political class. Take that together with the fact that the sort of realism you appear to be adhering to has, in my mind, been fatally wounded by recent constructivist critiques emphasizing the role of ideas in IR, and common-sense observations about how American policy would be different if oil were a central concern, and I think there’s almost no reason to believe it’s oil rather than a real commitment to ideas like R2P.

Straightwood: I don´t think it provides a precedent for regime-change, but it certainly takes the debate about ´protection´ of human rights into new territory.

Andrew: yes, ten votes in favour with five abstentions and none against is quite unprecedented given the sweeping nature of the paragraph that I quoted. And if you read the speeches of the country delegations it is quite clear that Brazil, at least, is defensive about abtaining rather than voting in favour.

Rich, yes to your final question (assuming it was not rhetorical) because I would have to be part of your conspiracy for it to be true and I know that I am not. Of course you may still think that I am part of the conspiracy (I would deny it wouldn´t I) but you asked for evidence and not proof.

Zack: I was bending the stick on R2P a bit, but there are a few caveats to the assertions in your first post. Some of the language of R2P was contained in the outcomes document from the world summit it is true, but the concept itself was not endorsed. The UNSC resolution of 2006 also explicitly stated that such interventions would only be legitimate if authorised by the security council (with its P5 vetoes).

Since the origins of R2P are the reports into Kosovo, where the intervention was not authorised, and the original report raised the question as to what would happen if the UNSC failed to ´fulfil its responsibility to protect´ (ie would this pass to others), I think that it is fair to say that the original doctrine has been sufficiently diluted in recent years. There is also a clear tension between the recommendation for reform of the UNSC to make it more representative and the fact that most of the countries most logically in line for inclusion (particularly Brazil and India) are strongly anti-interventionist.

My sense is that R2P is not really going anywhere and it has scarcely featured in the debates about the current intervention.

Or perhaps I am wrong – it may be that Conor has been masquerading as an excoriating public critic of intervention in Iraq and other places for the last many years, _precisely so that he could jump sides at exactly the right moment_, hence delivering a devastating knock-out blow to the enemies of imperialism &c&c.

“[R2P] has probably had far more influence on the Security Council’s recent decision than any ‘western plot to invade another country in the Middle East.”

I think western plot sounds pretty likely – I’m not sure it’s oil driving it so much as fear of a wave of immigrants, chaos in the Med, and being caught on the wrong side of a North African political realignment away from old allies. We know the vote was driven by France, UK, and the United States – and we know it took tham a lot of diplomatic work to get it.

A permanent member veto or two abstentions/no votes would have killed the resolution. China and Russia, are certainly hostile to intervention in a sovereign state and were leant on not to veto. Brazil and India abstained for the same reasons and Germany obviously has pacifist tendancies.

Of the 7 other for votes Bosnia, Portugal and Lebanon may have humanitarian motives (though if so, why no planes?) but due to EU politics and US aid are very easy for France/UK/US to lean on. And as for Colombia, Gabon, Nigeria, South Africa they don’t strike me as enthusiastic interventionists. I think a plot is a pretty likely explanation for why this vote went through. If you only count the G8+5 vote they would have lost, this was won through political manuvering not a global swing in favour of humanitarianism.

Andrew: the significance that I am attaching to the wording may just be because I have spent the last few months reading every single resolution on ´protection of civilians´ for a project that I have been working on for DPKO and it is a huge jump in legal terms from the previous resolutions. The country representatives at the UNSC will have been aware of this and so the strong vote in favour of it is also significant.

I am sure that there are other motivations driving the intervention (I would guess that hatred of Gaddaffi by his immediate neighbours was quite significant in influencing the Arab League and presumably is also a factor in British and US thinking, while Sarkozy may also be motivated by domestic political considerations and post-Tunisian embarassment). My post was not intended to be an exhaustive discussion of these.

Zack: I stand corrected on the Ban Ki-Moon statement, thanks for the link.

I was in New York at the time of th UNGA debate and I am basing part of my assessment of where R2P is going on some conversations and notes from the time, but since I don´t have them to hand, I will not push the point. You will probably remember the speech that Gareth Evans made in about 2007, though, when he said that R2P´s ´false friends´(ie Blair) had gravely weakened the concept.

Those notes/conversations sound interesting, Conor. Let me know if there’s a place I could read your more extended thoughts on them. And the Gareth Evans point is well-taken – my claim more that R2P proponents have managed to rehabilitate the idea by separating it from people like Blair who, as you rightly pointed out, damaged it by association with Iraq.

Important to note that “French domestic political” concerns were the adverse reaction to Sarkozy’s initial support for Ben Ali in Tunisia, combined with Sarkozy’s own political weakness. So, in practice this explanation is equivalent to some version of Responsibility to Protect.

Oil as an explanation for concern about Libya also seems implausible to me. Libya’s own oil is unimportant and Gaddafi’s downfall can scarcely be good news for the Saudi regime, even if they can get away with repression in the short term. If you want an explanation in terms of national interest, refugee flows are the place to look. But then, assuming the goal is to minimise refugee numbers, there’s a degree of commonality between European national interests and those of the Libyan people.

“Rich (and I thought you had left our comments sections in a huff) – before you start tossing around codswallop that Conor is flacking for Western imperialism, you might want to read his book to see what he actually says about this stuff.”

Here’s what I wrote: “Then people like you go out and do your job, which is to tell everyone that technocrats are in charge and that the decision had nothing to do with those conspiracy nuts.”

Flacking for imperialism? No. Not unless “realism”, domestic political concerns, Obama’s whim, and every other motive not involving the legal debate about humanitarian intervention are all classed under imperialism. But making what Conor does sound a lot more important than it is, in terms of actual political decisions? Yes. Describing the process in this way serves the valuable function, for policymakers, of insulating them from political concerns and responsibilities, such as whether people in their countries want to be involved in another war. Instead the intervention is described as the outcome of a process which no one not expert in it has heard of, and which the public had better not opine about because they don’t know much about it.

FWIW: Chomsky on R2P: http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20090723.htm

John: on refugee flows. This is the classic justification for a Chapter VII intervention by the Security Council in a humanitarian crisis. The argument goes that a conflict/natural disaster/combination of them both will cause refugee flows, which will de-stabilize a neighbouring country and, therefore, cause a threat to regional peace and stability. This may or not be true (it was true of the refugee crisis in northern Iraq in 91 when Turkey sealed its borders on that basis) and it was certainly cited in relation to Somalia and Bosnia – although probably with less justification. The legal point, though, is that the UN Charter does not provide for interventions solely in order to protect human rights or to ´interfere´ in a state´s internal affairs(see Article 2) and so there has to be some justification found for a Chapter VII action (threat to regional peace and security). The respect for national sovereignty is usually very strong in the wording of these resolutions (eg without prejudice to natioal government´s responsibility) which makes the wording of the current resolution so remarkable.

@politicalfootball (32)

“Tell it to the oil futures market.”

Brent crude’s up less than 2% today. Over time that kind of increase will tell, but in the short run, it looks like events aren’t moving prices dramatically either way.

“My sense is that R2P is not really going anywhere and it has scarcely featured in the debates about the current intervention.”

Not going anywhere in the sense of not going away, or not going anywhere in the sense of not gaining any traction?

‘Finally, the (assisted) success of the revolution in Libya will surely increase the pressure on the remaining repressive regimes.’

Maybe but not necessarily. If it strengthens the forces of the ‘West’ (i.e. the United States) then the only repressive regimes who will feel increased pressure will be Iran and Syria. As someone else above pointed out, if defeat for Gaddafi will be bad news for the Saudis why are the Saudis backing the ironically named ‘no fly zone’?* (Ironic because of course it is only the Libyan air force which cannot fly above Libya. The Americans can fly, and for that matter, bomb, with impunity).

*This is very different from the situation in Egypt, which really did increase pressure on the Saudis, as they made clear ‘off the record’.

Brent crude’s up less than 2% today. Over time that kind of increase will tell, but in the short run, it looks like events aren’t moving prices dramatically either way.

One day’s change in the oil futures market isn’t what I was talking about, but “less than 2%” is a substantial increase, and if you Google up a chart that goes back further than one day, you’ll find that Libya’s troubles coincided with a pretty dramatic jump in oil prices.

Anyway, my only interest in oil prices is to rebut Prof. Quiggin’s assertion that Libyan oil is an “unimportant” factor in the West’s deliberations on intervention. A stronger argument, I think, arises from the relative lack of interest in the West regarding human rights abuses elsewhere. (And in the West taking the opposite side in other oil states.)

If you think seriously about the realpolitic implications for any of these politicians you will find (similar to sev@28) that:
(1) The Libyan oil does matter. Spare capacity, if it still exists is now minimal, and the world could be on the brink of an severe oilprice shock. The fragile economic recovery would not withstand this. I’m sure this figures in the calculus of all those involved in making this decision. (Of course realists, and the market, know that much of Libyan oil production is lost for years, no matter the resolution of the current civil war.)
(2) The refugee flows into southern Europe are a big threat to the fragile EU economy. Again it is unrealistic to think any of the major political decisionmakers are unaware of this risk.
(3) The public support base of these politicians because of the before mentioned “facebook revolutions” are much more aware of the sufferings of the people in North Africa then was the case for previous events of this nature. That means, that the politicians have to be seen by segments of their own populations as taking the moral highground.
(4) If we take a realistic view of the whole “long war/war on terror”, its causes and probable resolution we see, that the cause was largely the repression of the peoples in MENA, and the inability to make progress against them. The Obviously favorable (to the west) outcome would be that those frustrations are removed. Even better if the revolutions that eliminate those frustrations are largelt secular. Again, those politicians for whom the whole war on terror thing is important domestically cannot miss this either.

So we have a conjunction of realpolitical calculus, with moral outrage. A pretty potent combination.

The situations in say Bahrain or Saudi Arabia are not comparable, at least not yet. Scale of repression matters. The fraction of the populations of these states at risk of losing their lives over this are far lower. This does matter as far as the calculus goes. Also the risks, of say destabilizing Saudi Arabia, are almost unthinkable, as far as the world economy is concerned. The Bahraini protestors are mostly Shia, and rightly or wrongly in western minds that is conflated with “puppets of Iran”.

Rich – what Conor actually does is to work on the ground with humanitarian and civil rights organizations in various spots of the world. His expertise is derived primarily from this experience on the ground. And his book – and related bits of advocacy over the last decade, has been precisely to argue, on the basis of his experience on the ground, against a misguided general assumption that a “responsibility to protect” is a good thing and justifies intervention in places like Iraq. Approximately 30 seconds of Googling would have allowed you to figure this out. For what it’s worth, actually going back and looking at his original posts for us (or this piece which I linked to from my original introduction), would have done the job quite nicely.

And you are (not for the first time, nor the second, nor the third, nor the ….) reading things into his post that simply are not there. The claim that Conor does not take for granted that there should be public discussion of going to war is a grotesque misrepresentation – and one that bluntly seems to me to have more to do with your own personal demons than with anything that he has written or can reasonably be taken to imply.

More precisely, he does not, under any reasonable reading, “dismiss skepticism about legalism” as a belief in western plots to invade. Instead, he makes a purely empirical argument – that the particular wording of this document has more to do with internal debates within the legal/expert community than with the purported desire of Western countries to get the oil. This is not a normative claim. It is perfectly compatible with the ancillary claim that these debates among experts have led in grotesque or fundamentally mistaken directions (Conor’s book is more or less just such a scathing criticism of earlier versions of the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine). It does not say that public debate is wrong or to be dismissed. It does say that a particular theory held by some in these debates is wrong, and to be dismissed. I trust the distinction is clear.

And I’m not telling you to shut up. I am telling you – again not for the first time, nor the second, nor the third – that actually engaging with arguments properly requires figuring out a bit about what the argument involves and why it is being made, rather than a ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ approach under which anyone who has ‘expertise’ and who makes an argument that you initially don’t like is trying to shut you (and by extension the Plain People of the Internets) out so that the argument can be settled behind closed doors by the technocrats. I do not plan to say any more on this topic in this thread, since I don’t want to derail it, but nor did I want to let the original sneer stand without challenge.

“Instead, he makes a purely empirical argument – that the particular wording of this document has more to do with internal debates within the legal/expert community than with the purported desire of Western countries to get the oil.”

If the claim is about the wording of the document, then I agree with it. But the document is not the decision. (Or did I misread “This debate has probably had far more influence on the Security Council’s recent decision than any ‘western plot to invade another country in the Middle East.” as referring to “decision” in the colloquial sense, as opposed to a sense in which written documents of this kind are referred to as decisions? That doesn’t really make much sense — no one would expect the Security Council to write “we have decided to seize the oil” in their official decision — but I guess it’s possible.)

So, assuming that I read the statement correctly, what you describe as his empirical argument in no way leads to the conclusion “It does say that a particular theory held by some in these debates is wrong, and to be dismissed.” How can a theory about the reasons for the decision be dismissed by referring to the document? Only if the document reflects the actual reasons for the decision, and is not an after-the-fact justificatory smokescreen for them.

Let’s see what you’ve summarized in your comment. It starts with someone with heroic experience in humanitarian work and expertise in a particular legal process, and ends by saying that “a particular theory held by some in these debates” is wrong, and to be dismissed. Why? Because expertise in how the document was written equates to knowledge of why the decision was made. And public debates need not end, of course, but certain people in those debates really have to give up talking about western plots to invade or they’re going to look silly.

Are you really sure that I read something into the post that wasn’t there? Because that was exactly it.

Reading this thread, I’m tempted to ask which is the blunter instrument, war or politics? (And wasn’t von Clausewitz’ take on the relationship between them just a teensy bit disingenuous after all?) I’m not entirely sure that Conor and Rich can’t both be right here. Under the circumstances, it beggars belief that R2P could be the basis of anything taken seriously by the governments of today’s major powers. It’s simply impossible for anyone even remotely familiar with the history of the world since 1945 not to snicker when asked to take such a proposition at face value.

And yet, and yet…. The obstacles to honesty in politics are such that people of good will in the various governmental and supra-governmental agencies, in the Institutes of This and That, the NGOs and think-tanks, etc. are such that any bending of the arc of the moral universe would necessarily take a lot of time, and a truly godawful number of the powerless hanging on the end of it to make any progress at all. Even so, that’s how progress is ultimately made — which I take to be the thrust of Conor’s argument.

Or to take an example which seems at first to be irrelevant: Galileo had to either recant or be disposed of, and no weeping over his fate, if any, until way later. Eppur’ si muove, however, eventually came to be a far more important marker of our civilization than the putative infallibility of the church. Something to ponder, I think, and although I more often think that Chomsky — and Rich — have the better case when probing the motives of the powerful, what they have to say isn’t necessarily all that needs to be said.

Ugh. Too hasty with the submit button. Please make that:

bq. ..NGOs and think-tanks, etc. *are reduced to prayerful pleading,* and any bending of the arc of the moral universe *must* necessarily take a lot of time, and a truly godawful number…

Apologies for the incoherence.

I thought he wasn’t in the habit of using major military equipment to repress his people until a couple weeks ago.

He hadn’t used “major military equipment” on his own people (at least not to this extent) in recent years, but arms aren’t just for using, they’re also a big sign saying “Rise up and these weapons will be turned on you”.

This point also applies to Alex @50. We don’t have to believe that Western political leaders are motivated by humanitarian concerns in this case, any more than when they decide to raise (or not to cut) welfare benefits. All that matters is that they judge it to be politically necessary to respond to those concerns.

Well, no. The political leaders of these operations need to have altruistic motivations else they won’t have the best interests of Libyans at heart. An example off the top of my head (assuming the motivation you suggest – though I’ve seen no polling that imply French public support) would be if there’s “collateral damage”, and the coalition try hiding the bodies/denying involvement/smearing the dead or wounded.

‘Something else that counts against RtP being the motivating factor here (or even the main one), is that at the start of the year many of these leaders were busy selling Gaddafi weapons to repress his people. Now all of a sudden we’re supposed to believe they’re motivated by humanitarian factors by intervening?’

Not just that, but the fact that they were selling Gaddafi arms, are now bombing him and trying to kill him, and not only are they not apologising for or explaining this inconsistency, but are not even admitting that anything has changed (it’s really impossible not to think of Orwell’s 1984 here). For example that babbling fool and (alleged) crook Blair was last seen in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun arguing that ‘I am right! About everything! Sell them arms! Then bomb them! Bomb them while we sell them arms! Bomb them because they accepted the arms which we asked them to buy! I am right right right right right I tell you! And I always have been! That will be £10,000’.

I paraphrase.

Cf. R. Payne’s post Libya: R2P or Regime Change?

@57, 60:

Re the they-sold-arms-to-Gaddafi-now-they’re-bombing-Libya-they-must-be-hypocrites theme: look, as others have pointed out, there’s a difference between being a repressive dictator and being a repressive dictator who starts shooting his own citizens en masse. Yes, there is a Western arms industry and mil-ind complex that sells lots of arms to unsavory people. Yes, the Western leaders are not exactly saints. This doesn’t mean the recent actions are all about oil and money and everything else is just a fig leaf. No.

I should emphasize that I’m not making a positive claim that we know that the intervention is about oil, or geopolitics in general, or any of the other possibilities including a narcissistic whim of Obama’s. I’m saying that we don’t know. This is particularly important within America because of recent American history.

Americans were recently lied into war in an egregiously deceptive fashion. The occupation resulting from that war still continues, after hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. And now people are assuring us that this time the humanitarian impulse is sincere? That we should read Obama’s Nobel speech, study the books written by his advisors, the legal reasoning behind the Security Council decision, as if all of that means something? There were many good comments since #50 or so, but I’ll quote Martin Bento: “Are we really to the point where it is a ‘paranoid conspiracy theory’ to suppose that politicians sometimes lie?”

I’m only going to write about America in this comment, since I know too little about what’s going on elsewhere. What would convince people that Obama was sincere? Well, first, he could address the war crimes committed by the previous Administration, including openly admitted waterboarding. Has he done that? No, in fact he’s effectively given them blanket immunity. Second, he could stop the U.S. from continuing its shameful treatment of people at place like Bagram and Guantanimo. But no, that would cost domestic political points, to put the best possible construction on it. Third, he could act consistently — if he thinks that this is a good reason for intervention, why not in other countries that seem similar?

We’ve just had the strongest possible proof that politicians lie about humanitarian intervention as a reason for war. And now we’re to accept legal justifications as reflecting the actual reasons for war, when none of the actions of the politician in question match them?

No. If protests worked, then this intervention should have been protested immediately. Bush and the Iraq War did damage to the American polity that Obama has not exerted himself to repair, but has instead exacerbated. I have no idea what the actual reasons for this intervention are, and at this point, politicians who want us to go to war again should have to demonstrate what those reasons are through actions that cost those politicians actual political effort, not hide behind legal smoke.

‘Re the they-sold-arms-to-Gaddafi-now-they’re-bombing-Libya-they-must-be-hypocrites theme: look, as others have pointed out, there’s a difference between being a repressive dictator and being a repressive dictator who starts shooting his own citizens en masse’.

Yes, but from the perspective of international law, a repressive dictator invading another country (who poses it no threat) is even worse, because of Westphalia etc. Now: Saudi Arabia has just invaded Bahrain to prop up the Bahraini junta. And the US approves. Why? And what does this tell us about the oh-so-selective ‘morality’ of ‘the West’?

(As a counter-example, imagine that Iran had just invaded Bahrain to protect the Shia population there. Would the United States’ reaction have been the same?).

bq. Yes, but from the perspective of international law, a repressive dictator invading another country (who poses it no threat) is even worse, because of Westphalia etc. Now: Saudi Arabia has just invaded Bahrain to prop up the Bahraini junta. And the US approves. Why? And what does this tell us about the oh-so-selective ‘morality’ of ‘the West’?

From the perspective of international law, this is not an ‘invasion’ – the Saudis have been invited in by the internationally recognized government of the country. The Westphalian system (which, as a historical sidenote, does not have much of anything to do with the Treaty of Westphalia), has no particular problem with an oppressive government seeking help from outside to maintain its repression – cuius regio, eius religio and all of that. From the point of view of ethics, it is of course entirely a different story. But that is a different kind of hypocrisy, I think, from the one you are suggesting is going on here.

_I can see at least two explanations for this:_

A third possibility:

(3) China and Russia believed that France, UK, USA would do it anyway, and would prefer that an action that they disagree with go ahead under the fig leaf of international law rather than seeing global norms further undermined. Since no essential interests of theirs are challenged, they are content to heckle from the sidelines.

‘From the perspective of international law, this is not an ‘invasion’.

Really?

http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/37/a37r037.htm

Jeremy Corbyn writing in The Guardian:

[…] One can’t help but be struck by the rush to military involvement by politicians of all countries and all persuasions. The contrast with the western treatment of the rest of the region could not be more stark. The Palestinian people have lived with occupation for 60 years, well over 1,000 died in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, settlements abound and Israel possesses nuclear weapons. I can’t remember anyone calling for a no-fly zone in Gaza in winter 2008-09 when phosphorous bombs were used against a largely unarmed and defenceless civilian population.

Saudi Arabia is the world’s biggest oil exporter, and the biggest importer of arms from Britain and other countries. The importance of Saudi Arabia to western economic interests cannot be overstated, otherwise why would Blair take such an extraordinary decision as to suspend the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the BAE contracts with Saudi Arabia? Britain is up to its neck in supporting the Saudi monarchy with all the denial of human rights and aggression that the regime has shown toward its opponents. Saudi armed forces have crossed into Yemen in recent times, and last week entered Bahrain to support the king in his suppression of democratic protest.

News today of huge demonstrations and growing isolation of the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, looks like almost a replay of what happened in Tunisia. I asked a young activist in Tunis just a few weeks ago if their revolution was asking for western help, his reply was: “No, we will do it ourselves; the problem with the west is, it never knows when to leave.”

CF comment 73: of course the hypocrisy as regards ‘Cast Lead’ is grotesque. But even more grotesque is the fact that the US invaded Iraq illegally (as is now admitted by almost everybody). If a ‘no fly zone’ had been put in place over the United States (and Europe) hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lives would have been spared. But who even suggested such a thing? Who could even think such a thing? And even if such a thing was thinkable, who could possibly implement it? Asking these questions goes a long way to helping us answer deeper questions about who runs the world, and in whose interests.

Henry @72: In the 2009 post you linked to, you write: “First are things like UN Security Council approval for the use of force. This is international law – but I don’t think that one can plausibly argue that it has much inherent legitimacy.” You go on to say that it may be a good thing notwithstanding, for practical reasons. But you don’t say why, exactly, it’s not inherently legitimate.

If you mean that granting a veto to five great powers (or former great powers) has little moral justification, I agree. But the clear purpose of the UN Charter was to disallow unilateral military intervention. Even if the mechanism is imperfect, isn’t the principle entirely legitimate and urgently important?

You’ve probably addressed these questions elsewhere. (You promised to in the 2009 post.) If so, could you mention where?

So there have been a few threads on Libya, with a surprisingly prevalent 2003-ish feel: obviously it’s complicated, and the US are not acting out of the purest motives nor without hypocrisy, but still, we are being told some pretty extreme things and as serious people we’d better go along with it with some minor reservations. We can always complain later once the bullshit in the lead up, and the lack of any resemblance between what was proposed and what ensues, becomes glaringly apparent rather than just overwhelmingly probable. (Given that I have been against the intervention from the start, I want to get my smugness aired quick, before some vaguely realistic casualty figures start rolling in.)

Just a few questions by way of a reality check:

How many civilians have been massacred by Gaddafi’s forces; where and when, and how do we know this? Anyone got any footage of mass demos, violence against the protestors, that kind of thing? (I don’t include this ridiculous performance, featured by Juan Cole in his own ‘oh, go on then’ blog post linked to by CB on another thread). I assume all the particulars of the atrocities so far, and a systematic reasoned assessment of what is to be expected, was laid out before the UNSC before they doled out open ended war permissions. The pre-ramble of the resolution (these things are genreally pretty laughable as legal documents, but this one is a cracker) makes it sound as though there has been a lot of civilian killing and general war crimey sort of stuff, unspecified human rights violations, etc – hence the resolution protecting those civilians from the Mad Dog who was, we are sure, poised to do a Fallujah.

Is there anyone who imagines that there is any real limit on what this resolution will be used to justify? As everyone was well-aware beforehand, no-fly-zone = bombing, and it never ends there. Protecting civilians means all sorts of other stuff, shit happens, stuff escalates, ground troops, mustn’t cut and run. The only thing supposedly ruled out is an army of occupation, and since I don’t suppose the US consider themselves to have an army of occupation in Iraq or Afghanistan, or for that matter in Saudi or Kuwait, that’s pretty meaningless.

Do we know much about the rebel army? E.g. how it got armed, what it wants (or various factions want), whether it can be relied upon to achieve its objectives without endangering any civilians? In particular what the high-level regime defectors in the mocvement are after, and who they are talking to, and whether the National Front for the Salvation of Libya has much of a role?

Is anyone surprised that the mission acquired the subsidiary objective of removing (read: hunting down and killing) Gadaffi with ink still wet on the resolution?

Is there any good reason to suppose that weighing in on one side of a civil war/coup attempt and continuing until the chosen (currently it seems losing) side has prevailed (and a particular person has been killed, by bomb or rope) is a good way of ‘protecting’ civilians?

Is it at all clear that the Gadaffi ceasefire offer was given proper consideration by the ‘Int’l community and by the opposing army, and was allowed a chance before being despicably broken by Gaddafi’s forces? I haven’t heard this actually asserted – inxstead I heard a certain amount of airy scepticism about G’s bona fides followed immediately by NATO bombing raids.

Can we expect a lot of outrage against the rebel army from those who abhor the Hamas paramilitaries’ habit of mingling with the civilian population (i.e. being located in Gaza)? After all, it appears that they based themselves in Benghazi, amongst the civilian population.

(+ bonus q. Has anyone noticed that when SAS troops are captured, it’s always when they are in the middle of doing nothing very much of any importance? They have always got lost and foolishly strayed over a border, or they’ve only just arrived, etc; never, of course, engaged in a top-secret military manoeuvre. In fact they always seem to look rather silly – consistent with the officially preferred ‘cock-up’ theory of history.)

“Why didn’t just Russia and China veto the war if they are opposed to it?

They gave reasons in ‘we are abstaining because of X’ speeches to the SC. Russia supports intervention, but the significantly different wording and strength of the resolution from previous practice that Connor notes was too much for them, so they abstained on the basis that while it’s not what they want, it’s better than nothing. China was opposed but didn’t veto as they respected the requests of Arab League and African Union (read ‘the requests of ‘ as ‘their commercial relations with’).

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm

Has there been any discussion around this topic that references the failure of the bourgeois democracies to aid the Spanish Republic against the Falange? The sticking point, from my point of view, is that the people from Libya who have called for UN/US/NATO intervention in Libya seem to be, almost without exception, members of the current ruling class in Libya. Call me a cynical old anarchist, but it seems that the likelihood of this whole mess turning into a pointless reshuffling of the face cards in the Libyan deck is rapidly increasing with every day.

Call me a cynical old anarchist, but it seems that the likelihood of this whole mess turning into a pointless reshuffling of the face cards in the Libyan deck is rapidly increasing with every day.

I disagree with “pointless.” I think that this reshuffling is, in fact, the point.

Gaddafi became a problem, internal dissent became powerful, and it’s time for the Powers to reshuffle the deck. If that leads to democracy, that’s okay, but it’s not the point of the intervention, any more than it was in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The intervention over Libya undoubtedly opens a new chapter on this debate

Except in the narrowest legal sense, how can this possibly be true? Haven’t most wars historically been justified in humanitarian terms? Has the US *ever* bombed or invaded a country except in the name of human rights and democracy?

Lemuel, but Conor’s point is not that the justification for war is new; it is that the UNSC, by this action, is further realizing and cementing an exception to the protections of sovereignty.

Tim, the US commander also disavowed any military effort to find or to kill Gadhafi, but my read is that this is driven more by a concern to keep the scope of the mission limited – for now – than legal issues. If the coalition wished to interpret “protect civilians” very broadly – holding that the destruction of the loyalist forces was the only way to achieve that protection – then it would make sense to target the command and control processes of the loyalist forces. The process itself would be the target, but Gadhafi, as a part of the process, might turn out to be targeted as well. There is an executive order forbidding assassination, but that’s not much of an obstacle if the President wishes to modify it, or put forth a certain interpretation of what assassination means in the context of the original prohibition.

Alan Kuperman, by the way, made a point which is rather bothering me (in the context of running out the “strategic victimhood” thesis for an NYT column), which is that given the ubiquity of camera phones these days, and the large amount of footage of every other recent Middle Eastern revolution, why is there so little video evidence of Gaddafi’s atrocities against civilians? There is some footage of demonstrators being fired on on the Wikileaks site, and the Times apparently had footage of casualties in hospital with machine gun wounds, but we were meant to be going to war because people were slaughtered in thousands.

Incidentally since this debate could run and run, is there anybody who actually knows anything about international law writing here, who could comment on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? Is it generally agreed to have been an invasion, by modern international lawyers?

#92: the timeline in Afghanistan was 1) Afghan govt invites Soviet troops in 2) coup against Afghan government 3) Soviet troops overthrow new Afghan govt 4) Russia massively reinforces what is now an occupying army.

Can we get rid of the fatuous pretension that somehow just because the Bahraini and Saudi governments are not democratic, that they don’t constitute legitimate governments? And that somehow it’s a horrifying and exceptional event that one legitimate government is calling upon an allied legitimate government for assistance in repressing its own people, any more horrifying and exceptional than the act of repression itself?

I mean seriously, we can condemn Bahrain for repression, but let’s not get melodramatic every time the Saudis are brought in.

@Myles 97

No, a government that is not democratic can never be legitimate.

Attacking people who disagree with you in the terms you do is rather childish.

The only legitimate power comes from a mandate from the masses. That is not a pretension, that is how legitimacy is understood in the modern world.

In this case the Saudi intervention changes the situation because one illegitimate ruler has called on another to provide troops to suppress peaceful demonstration by his own people. As a result it is now a question of when, not if the monarchy of Bahrain falls. They have lost legitimacy amongst their own people. They are now a puppet of a foreign occupier.

“Has there been any discussion around this topic that references the failure of the bourgeois democracies to aid the Spanish Republic against the Falange?”

Historically ignorant. The left did not criticize the UK, France, etc. for not sending troops to Spain. They criticized them for *imposing an arms embargo*, preventing the Loyalist government from purchasing arms abroad with its own funds. Our support for non-intervention is consistent.

my broad position is that law and, more generally, social institutions do not have any legitimacy in and of themselves – they only have legitimacy to the extent that they express the results of some kind of democratic process of decision making (or, in the case of informal social institutions, that they arise from decentralized processes without blatant power asymmetries). Hence, I don’t see that UN Security Council resolutions have any real legitimacy

How does this apply to English common law? Or European law? Decisions of the (UK) House of Lords?

Is international humanitarian law legitimate?

Henry, no, that’s more or less what I wanted to know: thanks. But with respect to English common law (for example), one can be extremely sceptical about the romantic picture of its development that Posner (apparently) signs up to, and indeed agree that it is far from being Teh Awesome, without viewing it is illegitimate. But I take it that is your view. I would assume that’s a fairly radical position for a liberal or social democrat to hold (although it wouldn’t be for a revolutionary communist… so maybe you should think about joining the club?)

what is the basis for the argument that the UNSC – or any similar body in a world not composed of democracies – or some principle that is instantiated in the UNSC – is inherently legitimate?

The Security Council’s powers derive from the UN Charter, which has the force of law in all the countries that signed it, in 1948 or subsequently. (Especially the United States, in which treaties take precedence — or are supposed to — over statutory law.) This seems to me as legitimate as legitimacy gets.

It’s true, as I acknowledged, that the veto power of the five permanent members is as unfair and irrational as is the existence of the US Senate and other features of the American electoral system. But that doesn’t affect the Security Council’s legitimacy, any more than the Senate’s.