Privatised humanitarian interventions?

Great idea! Will you join the consortium?

It is a serious crime in Australia to recruit or promote mercenary services to act against the governments of other countries. Since the excesses of Colonel Callan in Angola I was under the impression this was true in the UK as well.

Of course, the point you are making against the Bush-Blair Regime Changers seems to be that there is not justification for them, partly on the grounds that if they are justified, that licenses any tomasina, dick or harry to go freelance regime-changing.

Which also seems to imply that, if the police raid a Brixton drug-lord, that licences any gang of vigilantes to raid similar drug gangs?

These slippery-slope rhetorical arguments are really fun aren’t they!

More seriously, I would point out that the slippery slope argument is not valid here because the “strong” humanitarian intervention case is explicitly based on a denial of any special status for nation states.

dsquared,
I wasn’t for a second thinking you needed any disclaimer on mercenary recruiting. It just seemed that the post is a cheap shot at the Regime Changers, but otherwise pretty weak.

However you said:
“The serious issue raised by this joke is, if we accept the logic of the “strong version”3 of humanitarian intervention, then why should we also say that it is only the job of states to carry out such interventions? Since, ex hypothesi, any special position for states is ruled out by the strong pro-war internationalist liberal stance, why shouldn’t groups of private individuals take action?”

A special position for states is not ruled out by the pro-war stance. The special position of the Iraqi state was that it had
1) failed to comply with a a number of UN resolutions regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction;
2)it was a sponsor of terrorism, though not necessarily a participant in planning 9/11 specifically;
3) its regime had a track record of invading two other STATES resulting in the loss of several million lives, thus de-privileging the special status of the Iraqi state itself.
4) I make no claim that the Iraqi state’s repression, mass murder or torture legitimised invasion, but surely they are the evidence that it was a criminal state.

I think that private groups are already suitable agents of regime change. That after all is what the American revolutionaries started as. Counterfascist revolutionary movements seem to have no trouble with the question of legitimacy, from their own viewpoint. For the oppressed of Poland, East Germany or Romania, what else was there?

The state is not privileged above the People.

1) failed to comply with a a number of UN resolutions regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction;

Israel. Check. Not quite exactly but has failed to comply with UN resolutions and actually DOES possess honest-to-god WMDs.

2)it was a sponsor of terrorism, though not necessarily a participant in planning 9/11 specifically;

Well plenty of people would call what Israel does state-sponsored terrorism. What else would you call the sort of “burn down the olive groves, torch the houses and kill any innocent who gets in the way” operations that they occasionally launch.

3) its regime had a track record of invading two other STATES resulting in the loss of several million lives, thus de-privileging the special status of the Iraqi state itself.

Israel has certainly done its fair share of invading other states.

4) I make no claim that the Iraqi state’s repression, mass murder or torture legitimised invasion, but surely they are the evidence that it was a criminal state.

Israel has certainly gone in for the repression and (I strongly suspect) the torture. Have they gone in for mass murder? Well the genuine Iraqi mass murder numbers keep shrinking, so where do you draw the line?

You are overestimating the “hypothetical” nature of your question.

The Iraq adventure was a public/private partnership. There are many sources on private corporate involvement in the effort. The NY Review of Books had a great essay, but it is only available to subscribers.

I invite Maynard to recruit others and go after the Israeli democracy, which has press freedom and allows others to express their opposition to those acts; and has elections, allowing Israelis to vote for other behavior.

Unlike Arafat’s PA thugs who sponsor terrorism.

The world needs a Human Rights Enforcement Group (policeman); ain’t nobody going after China no matter what their cruel gov’t does to other Chinese. Nor America; though I deny America violates HR as does China — and every Arab dictatorship.

The hypocritical UN hatred for Israel de-legitimizes it as an institution.

States are fictional — only people sign things, fire guns, kill, die, and kill innocents. The justice question is what good folk should do to stop evil from succeeding.
(“Nothing” doesn’t cut it…)
See The Moral Superiority War:
http://tomgrey.motime.com/1093544824#329796

How many will be murdered in Sudan before HRW calls it Genocide?
And what IS their criteria for regime change?

The US also forbids conducting a private foreign policy, although, back in 1954 in Guatemala, United Fruit tested exactly where the line between private and public foreign policy is. Still, I imagine hiring a mercenary force to overthrow a foreign nation must be a crime in the US, although your odds of prosecution are almost certainly contingent on how many friends you have in DC, whether or not you tried to overthrow a regime with more friends in DC than you have, and whether or not you got away with it.

As for the notion of private humanitarianism, I should note that countries controlled through the use of mercenaries have a long history of being the worst of the worst human rights violators. I should think that the whole history of the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1483 might count as an argument for leaving bad regimes in place rather than replacing them with states that depend on mercenaries. There are things worse than neglect and foreign occupation, and one of them is taking over a country on credit and then squeezing it to pay off your debts.

So are you suggesting that Mark Thatcher is the new Che?

If you’re prepared to overlook stupidity, dishonesty and disingenuousness (and I suppose you are), then yes, I suppose he is.

Maynard, the Israelis are too smart to commit mass murder. They get away with a lot, but nowadays exterminating masses of people at a stroke is hard to keep hidden. So they intend to slowly squeeze the palestinians until they succumb or disappear.

And, there are bonuses:
they can shrug their shoulders when asked and say, The Palestinians? Oh, they left of their own free will. Plus, they don’t have to get rid of the bodies.

I can’t believe a thread on private citizens overthrowing foreign countries went more than three posts without mentioning William Walker.

There. That’s out of the way.

Mr. Thatcher might have been able to get away with it on the grounds mentioned, if he hadn’t been living in South Africa. Because of the major problems caused all over Africa by South African mercenaries after the end of the Apartheit, the SA goverment made laws that very clearly made it illigal for South Africans or people living in SA to be involved in these kinds of things.

Of course, all the mercenaries have now changed their nationalities.

Hmmmm… nnyhav, do I know you from R’ville? r are there two people with that monicer around?