Human Rights, Blah Blah Blah

Look, I think BHL is a pompous ass (close to its platonic ideal), but cutting off the key part of the quote is silly:

“Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah—but I also wanted them to see a Jew defending the liberators against a dictatorship, to show fraternity. I wanted the Muslims to see that a Frenchman—a Westerner and a Jew—could be on their side.”

The “blah blah blah” is a stylistic device for what he clearly wants to highlight as, if not the most important, definitely the most unusual/interesting reason for his support of the invasion. I think there’s all types of things wrong with this (not least–unsurprisingly–his slightly inflated sense of self), but taken together, this does not sound like someone bored. It sounds like someone rather taken with the cause and his role in it, still. That impression lasts as you read on. “Hillary got it” etc.

2014 was the year I went from being a skeptic on the use of force to being an extreme skeptic. We can bomb Iraq until judgement day and I just don’t see it leading to any positive change. Just more dead bodies and more enemies.

The Regiment of Fools.

Well, here you have one fellow who obviously isn’t fooled by his own propaganda. Which is a good thing. And isn’t he also the best friend of the new regime in Kiev that, finally, united neo-liberals and neo-nazis?

I am reminded of a wonderful cartoon in Raymond Briggs’ book The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman

https://gatheringbooks.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/img_5272.jpg

Of course, Egypt’s military intervention in Libya will turn out totally differently from the western intervention.

Not the other David
I wonder if we aren’t being too kind and indulgent to these people, who, like a large section of the western strategic community, are in my view essentially psychopaths, who enjoy the idea, and the spectacle, of killing and destruction, so long as other people do it and they themselves are in no danger. Like all psychopaths, they seek bogus rationalizations for what they do – the “blah blah” of BHL’s statement. He is unusually honest, in that he recognises that it was his own ego and his public image, not some abstract concern about human rights, that motivated his involvement. In general, perhaps we should stop looking for complicated explanations for western attacks on non-western countries over the last twenty-odd years, and simply accept that much of it comes down to the urge to kill and the urge to destroy.

See recent Atrios post headlined:

A Full List Of Our Recent Military Interventions That Have Had A Positive Impact

Read More

Click on the latter and it opens to a blank screen. Nuf said!!!!

“Christopher Hitchens prosecuted the war on terror?
I didn’t know he served. In what regiment?”

The 27th Cheerleader Battalion–saw some of the nastiest action on the armchair front.

A lot of this sounds like a rehash of the runup to 1914, especially the Fukuyama quote. Monstrous.

20: if you think the Fukuyama quote is “monstrous,” you have lived a blessedly sheltered life.

The book’s at home, but I’m not finding the quote in it via Amazon or Google; it was the last graf in his original article, apparently, but maybe he cut or reworded it for the book?

Regardless, he’s making a point about human nature – a point that unfortunately seems entirely too plausible. The “nostalgia” he describes is one of the seedbeds of fascism. For that matter, look at Russian opinion polls on Stalin.

To be fair to Fukuyama (and I never expected to write that) he wasn’t really advocating war, but reflecting, accurately I think, on what would have happened if his end-of-history thesis had ever come about , and we all lived in a liberal political and economic paradise in which there was effectively no politics, and nothing to discuss except ways of increasing our income. “History” in this sense doesn’t necessarily mean war or even conflict, but rather political and social life as we currently understand it, involving the clash of ideas and the need to compromise.
Because the order expected by Fukuyama has not come about, it’s not really correct to talk of nostalgia. Where nostalgia exists, as a political force, it is usually for a good reason. Most Russians look back to Soviet times as a period of stability and prosperity, and it’s hard to blame them .
But that’s a different issue from the psychopathic war-lust of our current elites and risks complicating something which, as I said, needs to be kept simple.

Fukuyama is specific about “the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal”, the lack of which would be “sad”. And that is a sentiment that you find awfully often among intellectual elites, usually just before a lot of people are getting killed due in part to the efforts of said intellectuals. You find it rarely among ordinary people, most of whom have no desire to risk their lives for abstract goals. There have been exceptions of course when the elite bloodthirstiness has indeed spread to the masses.

@26 OK, but you can risk your life for an abstract goal without hate and without wanting to start wars or kill people. The volunteers who fought in Spain, or the men and women of the Resistance in WWII would all, in general terms, have preferred to lead a different and less dangerous life. They were a minority of course, but it was a role forced on them, not a role they sought, and still less an excuse for violence.

Rich Puchalsky @ 13 gets it. The real significance of the blah blah blah isn’t boredom or for highlighting solidarity (though the war was an act of solidarity with maniacs, that’s why it turned out how it did). It’s a straight admission the humanitarian objective was bullshit.

“Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah—but I also wanted them to see a Jew defending the liberators against a dictatorship, to show fraternity. I wanted the Muslims to see that a Frenchman—a Westerner and a Jew—could be on their side.”

Lévy said that he returned to Paris and told President Nicolas Sarkozy that humanitarian intervention wasn’t enough. “The real objective had to be to topple Qaddafi,” he told me. Sarkozy agreed, and Lévy became his emissary.

So predictably they stop a regime that wasn’t targeting civilians. Attack fleeing troops. Sponsor a rebellion that did target civilians…

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23387/lessons_from_libya.html

I can’t imagine that anyone in this discussion would disagree that “the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal” (leaving aside the ontological question of whether a “purely abstract” anything exists) is a splendid thing. On the other hand, the willingness to risk (or take) other people’s lives for a purely abstract goal is indeed, as others here have said, monstrous. Surely that distinction is in order?

Leon Wieseltier (a great fan of BHL, by the way), in one of his frequent fits of moralistic belligerence, excoriated pacifists for their unwillingness to die for a cause. It didn’t occur to him that what makes someone a pacifist is not unwillingness to die for a cause but unwillingness to kill for a cause.

LFC: “And even Kuperman in the very first executive bullet-point of his summary says that NATO, albeit misguided in various ways, was animated by an humanitarian impulse.”

That only makes it worse, since it discredits humanitarianism. One of the things that I really hoped we’d seen the last of with the Libyan intervention was the whole concept of R2P. There we’re some posts here by Conor Foley and the discussion was the worst train wreck I’d seen in some time — complete with (paraphrased) “how could you think badly of humanitarians lending their moral credit to the cause of bombing people.”

I wonder how many people had to die for that humanitarian impulse.

Stephen is entirely correct, and Hitchens is Exhibit A. He switched from being a bloodthirsty revolutionary/national-liberationist (at a safe distance, IIRC) to being a bloodthirsty imperialist (ditto) with almost no transition.

@Rich P.
[Warning prefatory note: This turned into a long comment, of close to a J. Thomas or B. Wilder length.]

I’m not an unqualified proponent of R2P, have mixed thoughts about it.

That said, it’s interesting that when it comes to, say, the Bangladesh crisis of 1971, the conventional wisdom on the Left — correct conventional wisdom, I would say — is that the Nixon/Kissinger ’tilt’ toward W. Pakistan (which was facilitating the opening to China at the time) was a moral outrage b.c in effect Nixon/Kissinger turned a blind eye to the genocidal or near-genocidal rampage of the Pakistani army through then-E.Pakistan, a crime that was only ended via Indian military intervention. Although the whole line of U.S. policy in that episode was abysmal from any kind of humanitarian/moral standpoint, there was, luckily, a nearby country w a sizable military, namely India, that could intervene and stop the massacres, which is what happened (though India’s motives of course were self-interested — it was being flooded w/ refugees — not esp. altruistic).

However, in some or many situations of perceived or actual humanitarian catastrophe, there is no single neighboring power with the force and ability to intervene. Which means that major powers from the West intervene, or a regional collection of countries (African Union, say) tries to, or a force under UN auspices does, or else no one does. In the case of Rwanda 1994, essentially no one intervened, and the results are well known. ‘The West’ was criticized for allowing a genocide to occur and doing nothing (perhaps the bad experience in Somalia a couple of yrs earlier was part of the reason). Similarly there was widespread criticism of the failure to intervene forcefully in Bosnia during the ex-Yugoslavia civil war (remember the Sarajevo massacre of male Muslim civilians by Serbs). It is worth recalling that in the first part of the 1990s, a significant strain of left-liberal opinion was that the Clinton admin. had not done enough to help avert catastrophes in Rwanda and Bosnia (it acted somewhat more forcefully in Haiti, however, in an arguably less urgent case).

In 1999 the U.S. and NATO did intervene in Kosovo, and then in another decade-plus there was the Libya intervention, both justified largely on humanitarian grounds and both heavily criticized. Certainly the Kosovo intervention has been criticized for high-altitude air strikes that ended up killing civilians b.c the planes were flying too high to be v. discriminate, even w fancy precision weapons. The Libya intervention also has been criticized on somewhat similar grounds; I haven’t read most of the Kuperman link, which presumably spells it out. (And the WaPo editorial bd criticizes NATO not for the intervention, but for basically washing its hands of Libya after Gaddafi fell, helping lead to the current mess there.)

The elaboration of R2P was, iirc, in some ways a response to the experiences of Rwanda and Bosnia. Then there was a hue and cry that the major powers had allowed outrages to happen and done nothing. The int’l situation now having changed, the U.S. having been involved in two long, frustrating wars (one of them illegal and unjustifiable from the outset), the way these issues is seen has also somewhat changed. Any intervention is suspect. And the current situations in Iraq, Syria and Libya just to name three, are so tangled that they don’t lend themselves to neat prescriptions. A fair amt of this can no doubt be blamed on the regionally destabilizing consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, but seeing that that’s the case doesn’t answer the question of what to do now.

The point of this potted narrative being that these issues are difficult and sloganizing about them will tend to reveal some inconsistencies across time. It’s not clear that one can consistently criticize ‘the West’ for not having stopped the Rwandan genocide and then also criticize it when it acts, however blunderingly, to try to avert (smaller-scale) massacres (even if there are other motives mixed in, which there will be in any intervention).

I also note, btw, that the French do not seem to have come in for much criticism for their intervention in Mali (Operation Serval), and I believe none other than Jon Lee Anderson wrote a piece in The New Yorker some time ago putting that intervention in a not altogether unfavorable light and talking about how Al Qaeda-in-the- Islamic-Maghreb ripped up the archives in Timbuktu and scattered priceless ancient documents to the winds, in addition to making life miserable for people in the areas they (AQIM) controlled (see “Letter from Timbuktu,” The New Yorker, July 1, 2013).

The NATO intervention in Libya might well have been a mistake (both moral and strategic) for a bunch of reasons, and I haven’t read the Jon Lee Anderson pce about it linked in the OP. Sending Western war planes over the skies of a North African country in the midst of a civil conflict, regardless of the justifications, does give off, on its face, a strong whiff of arrogance and ‘imperialism’. But what Bernard-Henri Levy said mostly goes to show that BHL is BHL. I don’t think the connections the OP implicitly draws — between Hitchens and the GWOT, on one hand, and the Libya intervention on the other — are necessarily right, even in the particular psychological angle that CoreyR. wants to highlight. They are in any case somewhat debatable, istm.

Anderson 29, do you think “Two world wars, the Napoleonic wars, the wars of religion, the Crusades, the Arab conquests” are evidence for the blood-thirstiness of the masses, as opposed to their leaders? It’s a difficult question actually and I don’t want to be simplistic here. There is clearly a feedback loop between the “masses” and their leaders. But most of the time the people used as cannon fodder weren’t the ones who clamored for war and started it all. They weren’t the ones eagerly looking for an opportunity to risk their lives for some “abstract goal”, and I strongly doubt that it occurred to them how boring their lives as workers or farmers were before they were sent to war. And if you think that is and indictment of their intelligence, well we’ll have to disagree.

Rich Puchalski@41: you write that Anderson “supported the Falklands / Malvinas War”, therefore anything he writes about hypothetical Nazi actions is bullshit.

I don’t know about his earlier post. Did he support the invasion of the Malvinas, against the wishes of their inhabitants, by a murderous military fascist regime? I can see that might stop him being taken seriously afterwards.

Or did he support the expulsion of the Argentine forces, with the liberation of the Falklands (and the subsequent collapse of the Argentine junta)? Why does that disqualify him from being taken seriously?

@Chris Bertram. All states have immunity against outside intervention, whether people in other states like them or not, otherwise international law and the international system have no meaning. This is a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion. The idea that some states we dislike should not have this immunity was “discovered” at the time of the 1998-99 Kosovo “crisis” (I was there) and the great and good, and the psychopathic interventionists, instantly “remembered” it to have always been true: an idea which would have scandalized the drafters of the UN Charter.
But as others have said that’s not really the point. Counterfactuals can be used to prove anything, according to one’s political objectives (small preventive war overthrows US government in 2003, prevents Iraq invasion and unimaginable suffering in Middle East). In the end it’s not support for a war, but motives for that support that we are discussing here. For too many people, from traditional militarists, through idiots like BHL, through poseurs and publicity seekers, to the new breed of humanitarian fascists, people support and encourage wars for reasons that seem to me to be highly dubious, if not downright psychopathic. Even if such gimmicks as R2P, humanitarian intervention etc. were defensible in themselves, that would not alter the point that they are simply manipulated, by a large and disparate coalition of dangerous people, to rationalise what is at bottom a lust for conflict and destruction.

David@44: “All states have immunity against outside intervention”: well, but LFC brought forward a case, the Indian invasion of East Pakistan to prevent genocide, of extensive outside intervention which many people on the Left – including CB – would consider entirely justifiable, international law or not. (Which is not to say that every action of the Indians was justifiable, nor that all has been well in Bangladesh ever since.) Would you seriously argue that the Indians should just have left the Pakistani army to get on with their massacres?

We’ve dealt with this before: other cases of invasions that were on balance justified, well before Kosovo, would include the overthrow of Idi Amin in Uganda by the Tanzanian army, and the overthrow of Pol Pot by the Vietnamese (similar caveats of course apply). Do you really consider these to be serious violations of international law?

It would be helpful if this was clearly understood: states are not persons. ‘President of the US of A’ and ‘Barak Obama’ are not the same thing. States are complex institutions, but they are not human. It’s not in their nature to protect foreigners, to prevent genocides, or anything like that.

It’s not impossible, of course, that political pressures and strategists’ opinions line up, the Moon is in a right phase, Mars and Jupiter are low on the horizon, and – voila – genocide was prevented. But it still wouldn’t make ‘state intervened to prevent a genocide’ a correct statement.

You can say that Vietnam invaded Cambodia, but you can’t say that Vietnam invaded Cambodia to stop a genocide. Like you can’t say (other than metaphorically) that the sun rises to chase away the darkness.

Morally, your position is absurd. Legally it is dubious, at best.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4612530?sid=21105916423723&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4

I didn’t think Libya was a good idea at the time as my impression is that, as said above, the US et al have commitment problems, and most of the time mixed motives. In a perfect world without politics, without other interests and with the desire and capacity to commit to rebuild the society in question after the intervention, I wouldnt have a huge problem with R2P.
Still, at the time there were (imo) three options (1) Do nothing (2) support Qaddafi (3) support the opposition. Doing 1 is still taking a position as your non actions still have consequences. They explictly empower the stronger party in the conflict. Doing 2, which I’m assuming is Abbe Faria’s position, I think can be defensible morally and strategically, but in this case no more or less than number 3.
So I don’t see what the easy solution was in Libya that is causing such consternation, and overwrought language and posturing, here ? Kuperman (linked by Abbe) has argued elsewhere that the west should have supported Qaddafi, as his son Saif would have taken over and started opening up and modernising the country. I think this is naive to the point of idiotic. I don’t see why the assumption should be that a west non intervention or explicit support for the regime would have had a positive outcome. Most likely you would see an extended bloody conflict between the regime and oppostion, and within the oppostion, as you do in Syria. People were organising into militias , and elites from the Qaddafi regime were turning to the rebels, independently of western policy. You can’t imagine away these deep, meaningful contests that were developing at this time.
The problem is, as well, that politics does intervene, and so the solution you get is largely an aggregation of the perceived interests of the different countries, the elite and institutional preferences and domestic and geopolitical politics (bear in mind this is during the height of the Arab Spring where supporting a dictator against ‘the people’ , either explictly or implictly, has different connotations than it does today)
So there are no easy answers. The only way you can get an easy answer is to put the United States at the centre of everything, Imagine that whatever the United States did, if only the opposite had happened everything would be fine. Of course this is nonsense.

I gave always found sovereignty a weak argument against the humanitarian imperialists – why make it when strong arguments are available? The whole concept of sovereignty includes at its early modern inception the idea that it should not apply to the savages and their polities. It seems to me the supporters of Western bombing are the ones who applied the concept correctly – something they should be ashamed of.

” Everything would be fine indeed, in the sense that non-western societies would be developing and evolving on their own.”

Is it a conventional understanding of “fine”, that if a non-western society practices slavery, or commits genocide, it’s “fine” so long as they do so without any western input?

I don’t think that’s what most people mean by “fine”.

The Falklands War is a good example. The junta leader who started the war was indeed murderous: he’d had a death squad reporting directly to him. U.S. political leaders were equally murderous, since they’d funded the Argentine Dirty War with direct knowledge and support of the killings. The Falklands War had the consequential good effect of leading to the downfall of the junta, stopping the killings (and, I think, directly freeing some of the disappeared who were still being held in camps).

However, the Falklands War wasn’t undertaken from the UK side with the intention of overthrowing the junta. If the UK had decided that they needed to do that, they could have used their influence with the US to get the US to stop funding the junta or otherwise bring political-economic pressure to bear. Instead, it was undertaken for reasons of national honor — not a good enough reason for the deaths of the additional 900+ people who died during the war.

The Falklands War was not, of course, claimed to be humanitarian intervention. But there’s a similar disjunction between the actual motives of various countries involved and the claimed consequentialist outcomes in cases of humanitarian intervention. Maybe consequence, not motive, is what is important. But in that case the advocates of humanitarian intervention have to look at the actual consequences involved, and beforehand justify the killings with something like “Well, we don’t really have a plan for how this could save many more lives than the number we’re going to kill, but it could happen — we’ve gotten lucky in a minority of the wars before.” If people really want to go to war on the basis of “Hey, this war might have a lucky outcome!”, I’m not going to call that psychopathic or bring out any of the other arsenal of Internet diagnoses: let’s just say that killing people because you might get lucky and have the world be a better place afterwards is not really something I want to see generally adopted.

The idea that the proponents of R2P are ‘fascists and psychopaths’ is bizzare. As is the implication in the OP,as I read it anyway, that what drives said policy is ‘boredom, masculinity and imperialism’ (and BHL)
Personally, I guess I have three main problems with it. (1) the primary purpose of international institutions and norms should be to foster cooperation between major powers (or at least to regulate divisions) R2P has the potential to undermine that, for very little benefit.
(2) Its application is by nature selective and (generally) representative of major powers preferences and interests. That doesnt mean that every application of R2P is solely a new way to dress up imperialism, but it does provide cover for goals that aren’t the protection of civilian populations.
(3) It’s effectiveness (even taking goals at face value) is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to judge. In practice, and I think for a lot of proponents in theory, it means taking sides explictly, and leads to expanded missions, including regime change. There are all sorts of obvious problems with that.

Stephan: “you can, I think, meaningfully say that “the government of Vietnam ordered the Vietnamese army to invade Cambodia to stop a genocide”. ”

Now you’re just falsifying history. You can say that stopping a genocide was a consequence of Vietnam invading Cambodia, but the government of Vietnam certainly did not order the Vietnamese army to invade Cambodia in order to do so. I’ll direct you to the wiki page, I guess, even thought the study of history informs me that there’s sure to be somebody who takes the opportunity to sneer at wiki without pointing to anything better that’s easily available.

Stephen 61, I don’t know any details of the Vietnamese invasion. However, just from my general understanding of how this universe works, I would bet my monthly salary that “let them die” or “not let them die” didn’t play any role at all. Governments, Vietnamese or any other, don’t run on these sentiments. They operate with terms like ‘spheres of influence’, ‘stability across the border’, and so on. Like I said, they are institutions, not human beings.

“Incidentally, you still haven’t explained why Anderson’s opinion on the Falklands disqualifies him from having opinions on anything else.”

Oh, and I forgot to reply to this part: talking about counterfactual Nazis is talking in bad faith when an argument can be had over circumstances in which non-pacifists actually disagree. If he wants to defend wars of choice, let him defend the Falklands War, since he supports it — not a war that is the standard for both just war and wars of national defense.

LFC et al: call me back when action is taken to prevent the US/UK from killing brown people in yet another intervention or when Cheney and Rumsfeld are prosecuted for war crimes.

It wasn’t an instance of anti-colonial struggle, and I didn’t call it one. The Falklands Islands are a colonial possession, however, and a fight to hold onto them is not a fight for their self-determination.

P.s. also Oded Lowenheim, Predators and Parasites: Persistent Agents of Transnational Harm and Great Power Authority

Not a great title, but i think the bk is relevant to the issue of motives for states’ actions.

“But the idea that a white colonial settler state had a right to seize it and rule over the inhabitants” That’s a better description of what the CT editors do to common internet space than what the Thatcher was up to.

On humanitarian intervention generally, there’s humanitarian intervention, and, well, “humanitarian intervention. ” The second, and by far the most common, is the appropriation of the discourse and the moralizing stance, to enable crude power politics. The drafters of the UN Charter were well aware of the most recent examples – the German “humanitarian interventions” in Czechoslovakia and Poland to protect the endangered German minorities. In short, I don’t think there’s actually a history of genuinely humanitarian intervention to study. There are isolated cases of truly honourable behavior (the British suppression of the slave trade is one such) but even then (as in Sudan later) suppression of slavery tuned into a convenient excuse for imperial annexation. Indeed, much of the rhetoric behind colonialism itself is best understood as an early form of “humanitarian intervention” discourse, supported and encouraged by the grandfathers of people like Hitchens. As I always say to manic interventionists, if you are really worried about saving lives in non-western states, invest in clean drinking water and mosquito nets. It’s not war and human rights violations that kill half a million African children a year.

OK, let me add a word on the Falklands since I was working in government at the time. It illustrates rather well how governments use and abuse moral discourses to support their own positions.
Before the war, Britain and Argentina were allies. British arms sales to Argentina were justified by Thatcher with the argument that the junta was a valuable ally in the global war on communism, and her government was happy, indeed eager, for the junta to remain in power. Likewise, the Argentinian junta had no obviously hostile feelings towards Britain, which had supported them internationally.
What changed was the desperate unpopularity of the junta itself, which was close to losing power. A last desperate throw was to manipulate popular resentment against the seizure of the islands by the British in the nineteenth century by launching an expedition to reclaim them.
From their point of view, the British had no wish to fight their natural allies, but the government had no choice. It almost fell the day after the invasion, and the only way it could hang on to power was to launch an expedition, no matter how desperate, to recover the islands.
In each case, there was a ready-made discourse. For the Argentinians, anti-colonialism, and for the British the sanctity of national boundaries, self-defence against aggression and the struggle against fascism. For many intellectuals in Britain at the time, especially on the Right, the opportunity was too good to miss, and they could actually pontificate freely about “fascist aggression” as their fathers had done. The whole country went mad for a while.
Ironically, therefore, a war between two allied governments, who had been looking to solve the Falklands problem peacefully, nearly destroyed one, and completely destroyed the other, all to the accompaniment of discourses which each had previously rejected. It can’t be denied that the fall of the junta was a positive thing, but in reality that would not have been long delayed anyway.

David @80: “In each case, there was a ready-made discourse. For the Argentinians, anti-colonialism, and for the British the sanctity of national boundaries, self-defence against aggression and the struggle against fascism.”

Thanks — I’d known that the Argentine invasion was done as a domestic popularity-boosting measure, but I hadn’t known that the British government might well have fallen if it hadn’t gone to war. Needless to say, I think that all of the excuses are bad, that the Argentines should not have invaded the islands, and the British should not have replied with an expedition once they had. Certainly it wasn’t worth 900 people’s lives for the British government not to fall. Someone might argue that it would be worth 900 people’s lives in order to get the Argentine junta to fall, but this wasn’t intended and can only be argued after the fact. (I have no opinion on whether the junta would have fallen soon in any case.)

Sorry, should be: ” … entirely without the legally required periodic consultation … “

A government with a humanitarian motive would do something else, no?

David @78
As I always say to manic interventionists, if you are really worried about saving lives in non-western states, invest in clean drinking water and mosquito nets. It’s not war and human rights violations that kill half a million African children a year.

I agree with “invest in clean drinking water and mosquito nets”; I’d also point out that there is a connection, though not straightforwardly causal, between armed conflict and poverty. Countries with civil wars or other chronic forms of armed violence are likely also to have disproportionately large parts of their population in extreme poverty. So not necessarily ‘humanitarian intervention’ but effective peacekeeping and conflict resolution can contribute to poverty reduction. UN peacekeeping (broadly defined) has gotten better in recent decades, though there are still problems, and the issue tends not to get enough attention.

I don’t think there’s actually a history of genuinely humanitarian intervention to study.
‘Pure’ cases are probably uncommon, if they exist at all. Finnemore in her chapter on ‘changing norms of humanitarian intervention’ says at the outset that “all interventions are prompted by a mixture of motivations in some way” (The Purpose of Intervention, 2003 [pb 2004], p.56). Also, perceptions obvs. differ, and one person’s case of military action whose main goal is humanitarian is another’s case of (veiled or not-so-veiled) imperialism.

Something arguably changed after the Cold War in not only the geopolitical but also the broader environment. Clinton went to Rwanda after the genocide and apologized for his administration’s failure to act (ibid., p.80). Sort of hard to imagine any U.S. president doing something comparable during the Cold War.

geo @83
the authority of the Security Council … was undermined and is now close to zilch

Actually the effectiveness of the Security Council began to increase in the late 1980s, when Perez de Cuellar, then UN Sec-Gen, managed to get all the permanent members to work together in trying to bring an end to the Iran-Iraq war, which of course some of those permanent members, notably but not only the U.S., had previously had a hand in helping to prolong.

Notwithstanding some glaring failures such as in Bosnia, the UN’s overall effectiveness on the peace-and-security front increased significantly in the 1990s. Then G.W. Bush was elected and things started to go backward. But the UN in general and Sec. Council in particular managed to operate well for a while, and in some cases still do. Where they don’t is where the interests of the permanent members are in direct conflict, and the new quasi-Cold War (acc. to some) betw. US and Russia does not help.

Your last para. raises matters that wd prob spill over a comment box’s reasonable limits, so I’ll let it go.

@geo, you are of course quite right about the Security Council exception, although that was really intended as a monopolistic act, to keep decisions about war and peace in a very small number of hands. The test was whether there was “a threat to international peace and security” as defined by the more powerful council members. Humanitarian considerations, to the best of my knowledge, played no part, except rhetorically. In effect, a major power can get action from the UNSC if the political correlation of forces is right (e.g.Libya) but not if it is lacking (e.g. Iraq). But it would be wring to analyze such incidents in moral terms – they are essentially power politics.
@LFC, I agree that conflict and miserable living conditions go together. This is true in the DRC for example. But it’s also true that the main killers (diarrhea and malaria) are simply-prevented illnesses that aren’t greatly aggravated by conflict. If, in a suburb of Kinshasa, you have one drinking tap for a thousand people, then the results are going to be mathematically awful. But as long as the dominant discourse is of conflict and human rights, these people will keep dying.
Finally, on Clinton’s tragic-comic visit to Rwanda, this was him groveling to the US NGO community whose help he needed for re-election. None of the combatants wanted an outside intervention force because that would have meant another peace treaty. Each wanted victory through extermination. The RPF won, by getting the Hutu extremists to kill their own leadership and lots of Tutsi, while the RPF slaughtered its way to Kigali. But the intervention discourse has been so powerful since, that people have completely rewritten the sequence of events in their minds.

“The second part of the quote — which is, actually, hardly all that unusual or interesting; Michael Ignatieff said almost exactly the same thing about why so many intellectuals, including himself, supported the war in Bosnia — is set off from the “blah blah blah” by a “but.””

It’s still a little odd that you didn’t complete the quote. It may have been an uninteresting thought, and better said once by Michael Ignatieff, but it would have helped you make sense of the “blah blah blah.”

It’s hard to say quite what the “blah blah blah” means. Boredom with human rights? Possibly, but the rest of his quote – and arguably the rest of his career – suggests not. Boredom with having to talk about his reasons for supporting intervention again? More likely. If so, it’s not a great attitude. But it still doesn’t warrant your thesis that those who supported intervention in Libya did so because they were excited by murder and imperialism.

@geo
Rather off topic, but I was a bit startled to pluck the hard-copy issue of Foreign Affairs from my mailbox today and find your review of ‘Excellent Sheep’. I mean, yours is one byline I really did not ever expect to see in FA. But good for them. Now they just have to get you to write on US foreign policy, for an injection of real diversity of viewpts. ;)

“The Falklands was many things, but it wasn’t a war of fascist aggression.”

It was an invasion, against the wishes of the invadees, by a fascist army. You can tie yourself in knots till doomsday, but a war of fascist aggression is exactly what it was.

I’m awaiting a polemic from Minnow castigating Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’. I expect he/she finds it hard to understand satire, irony or black humour.

Minnow @99:

What part of ” . . . but sinister” don’t you understand?

You’re being either deliberately obtuse (can’t help but think of the feminism threads, here), or just being an AH.

“I’m awaiting a polemic from Minnow castigating Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’. I expect he/she finds it hard to understand satire, irony or black humour.”

I am pretty sure that Chaplin was not trying to minimise the crimes of Hitler. But also pretty sure he would not have made the same movie once he had seen Auschwitz.

Ah, I see.

I imagined that the junta resembled a comic opera to its victims. I did not know I imagined that. Thanks for telling me.

Not just an AH, but a very creative, oh so serious AH.

Imputing false motives to those you disagree with just to score rhetorical points is dishonest, and that makes you a liar as well as an ass-hole.