Human Rights, Blah Blah Blah

by Corey Robin on February 20, 2015

Of the war on terror, Christopher Hitchens once said: “I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.” Now comes Bernard-Henri Lévy, who, when asked by Jon Lee Anderson why he supported the intervention in Libya, says, “Why? I don’t know! Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah….” Never underestimate the murder and mayhem men will make, just to escape their boredom. Every enthusiasm, though, has a shelf life. Even imperialism.

{ 108 comments }

1

David 02.20.15 at 3:32 am

Men will tire of women and song long before they tire of war.

2

adam.smith 02.20.15 at 4:02 am

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.

3

Corey Robin 02.20.15 at 4:15 am

Wow, I read it completely differently. The blah blah blah is a reference to the first part of the quote. It’s the ending to a completely bored summation of the by-now usual, customary, run-of-the-mill reasons for so many wars by the US and Western Europe: human rights, prevention of massacre, blah blah blah. Usually when people end a litany like that, they’re signaling something like, “You know the drill, all that jazz, been there, done that.” To me, it sounds bored.

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.”

I hardly cut the quote off b/c I thought it would give the game away or undermine my point; it just seemed completely irrelevant to it. Or, actually, you could interpret it as confirming my point. Back in the day, it was human rights. Now BHL is onto the next thing: we Jews can support you Muslims. And tomorrow it’ll be something else.

4

MPAVictoria 02.20.15 at 5:01 am

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.

5

Liberal With Attitude 02.20.15 at 5:14 am

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

6

tony lynch 02.20.15 at 6:20 am

The Regiment of Fools.

7

Michael Drew 02.20.15 at 6:51 am

I don’t think you two are disagreeing really. I think you both actually think blah… refers to the humanitarian stuff… because it obviously does. A.smith is just saying it’s stylistic device meant to downplay it in favor of the other thing, while Corey is saying it is meant to convey boredom with the humanitarian concern.

A.smith is saying BHL is not bored because he’s interested in the Jews helping Muslims thing, and Corey is saying he’s avoiding boredom by moving on form the humanitarian thing to the other thing. So… pretty much the same point.

The point being that particular justifications can get boring (or go out of style as their results are witnessed), but war itself will always be interesting enough to invent new justifications for it.

8

Ze Kraggash 02.20.15 at 7:17 am

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?

9

RJL 02.20.15 at 8:19 am

Fukuyama on boredom.

“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual care taking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

10

Sasha Clarkson 02.20.15 at 9:57 am

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

11

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© 02.20.15 at 1:01 pm

Speaking of Libya

As always, it was for oil and Israel (don’t forget, Libya was on the neocon hit list of 7 countries in 5 years). As always, “humanitarian concern” was the pretext.
~

12

P O'Neill 02.20.15 at 2:43 pm

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

13

Rich Puchalsky 02.20.15 at 2:47 pm

I was interested to see the deranged parody of activism that comes from being well-connected and in favor of war. It seems to go something like this, just taking the linked article as my source:

1. BHL decides “I wanted the Muslims to see that a Frenchman—a Westerner and a Jew—could be on their side.” Go narcissism.

2. BHL talks to Sarkozy. “The real objective had to be to topple Qaddafi”. Sarkozy says sure, go ahead and be my emissary.

3. BHL and a Libyan “opposition leader” meet with Hillary Clinton, and she “gets it”.

4. Mission accomplished! “The NATO mission, as far as I am concerned, was as it had to be.”

The version from the other side is boring and not very fun:

1. “People want to topple a strongman in another country so that … he can be replaced with another strongman? Meanwhile huge numbers of people die? Oh great.”

2. Time to campaign against another war. A full 5% of the U.S. population demonstrated against the War in Iraq. Too bad that did nothing.

3. Endless fiddling with details of permits, protest routes, organization etc. “Hey, we turned out 300 people against this war for this protest — that’s good I guess? Let’s write to politicians too.”

4. Oh, too bad that did nothing.

I can definitely see which of these I’d play as a video game if I didn’t want to be bored.

14

David 02.20.15 at 2:49 pm

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.

15

jake the antisoshul soshulist` 02.20.15 at 3:17 pm

Fukuyama’s quote confirms my feeling that Neo-cons are basically psychopaths, if not fully sociopaths. I really do not know much about BHL. Other that being disappointed that he is viewed as a “public intellectual”. I suppose it should not be surprising that he suffers from the same delusions as the Neo-cons.

16

dweb823 02.20.15 at 3:18 pm

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!!!!

17

Anderson 02.20.15 at 4:28 pm

Re: Corey’s post, the epigraph to Judt’s Past Imperfect is only too fitting. He quotes Camus:

“Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else’s blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.”

18

BroD 02.20.15 at 4:29 pm

“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.

19

Tom Hurka 02.20.15 at 4:43 pm

Why would you think “I wouldn’t get bored doing X” implies that I’m doing X in order to escape boredom? That doesn’t remotely follow — unless you’re out to willfully misread someone you don’t like.

20

TM 02.20.15 at 4:46 pm

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

21

Tiny Tim 02.20.15 at 6:20 pm

One problem is that “The War Show” is either kind of boring due to lack of footage or horrifying enough that even these psychopaths eventually turn their heads. Fortunately the sequel will be better…

22

Anderson 02.20.15 at 6:46 pm

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.

23

TM 02.20.15 at 7:26 pm

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

Well possibly. I have lived a so far mostly good life without ever feeling the need to risk anybody’s life for any “purely abstract goal”, and blessedly have escaped my own life being risked by some asshole who feels that history is boring without a good massacre. Further I have never felt any nostalgia for the kind of history where progress is marked by mass graves – not that there has been any lack of that hallmark of art and philosophy in the decades since Fukuyama’s writing.

Now your point is – that Fukuyama is just “making a point about human nature”? Sure and Goebbels was just an objective reporter.

24

David 02.20.15 at 7:32 pm

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.

25

Stephen 02.20.15 at 7:36 pm

David @14:
“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.”

Very possibly true. But does that not also apply to a large section of cheerleaders for revolutions?

“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.”

Again, could be true. But does that not also apply to attacks by non-western countries on western countries, by non-western countries on each other, by elements of non-western countries on their fellow citizens, by elements of western countries on their fellow citizens?

26

TM 02.20.15 at 7:45 pm

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.

27

Ze Kraggash 02.20.15 at 7:57 pm

“But does that not also apply…”

I don’t think it does. For attacks by non-western countries on western countries, etc. you are free to invent explanations as complicated as your heart desires. As long as you don’t instigate any attacks yourself, it’s all good.

28

David 02.20.15 at 8:43 pm

@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.

29

Anderson 02.20.15 at 8:44 pm

“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.”

Your second sentence does a great deal of work there. Two world wars, the Napoleonic wars, the wars of religion, the Crusades, the Arab conquests ….

Sneering at the masses as not clever enough to care about abstract ideas is … curious.

30

Abbe Faria 02.20.15 at 8:55 pm

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

31

LFC 02.20.15 at 9:37 pm

Abbe Faria @30
The author of the policy brief you link to is Alan Kuperman, who has very pronounced and definite views on these issues — doesn’t mean he’s nec. wrong, might be right, but this is not some consensus-of-committee product. It’s by one person. 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. So to link Kuperman as if he agrees with *everything* in your quasi-rant @30 seems to be a stretch, to put it as circumspectly as possible.

32

geo 02.20.15 at 10:26 pm

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.

33

Abbe Faria 02.20.15 at 11:18 pm

LFC @ 31. That’s fair. You’re absolutely right Kuperman says intervention was animated by humanitarian impulses and became something else later. (Though the main reason for the link was to cite the claims about targeting). But if people want to choose between my view and his, please remember that in the New Yorker piece I’ve got access to a sourced claim that regime change was the aim before invasion which Kuperman never had.

34

Rich Puchalsky 02.21.15 at 12:12 am

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.

35

Bruce Wilder 02.21.15 at 12:37 am

AF:It’s a straight admission the humanitarian objective was bullshit.

That was sure how I read the blah blah blah, short quote and long. It has become ritualized boilerplate, a self-parody of pr covering for people who feel no need or responsibility for thought or judgment. Monstrous, perhaps, and hollow definitely.

36

John Quiggin 02.21.15 at 12:43 am

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.

37

Anderson 02.21.15 at 2:59 am

R2P could have done some good in Rwanda. But it’s so fact-dependent & subject to anise that I can’t see a way to a practicable rule

Still, here’s an exercise: Hitler never attacks Poland, WW2 never starts, but in 1942 the Nazis start gassing the German Jews. What next?

38

LFC 02.21.15 at 3:03 am

@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.

39

LFC 02.21.15 at 3:03 am

(have a long comment in moderation)

40

TM 02.21.15 at 3:22 am

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.

41

Rich Puchalsky 02.21.15 at 4:43 am

Anderson: “Still, here’s an exercise: Hitler never attacks Poland, WW2 never starts, but in 1942 the Nazis start gassing the German Jews. What next?”

We’ve been through this particular argument before, and as was established then, it turned out that you supported the Falklands / Malvinas War. So the “What about the Nazis?” thing, much less Nazi alternate histories, is BS. Anyone can make up whatever counterfactuals they want, and WW II is the one war that almost anyone who is not a pacifist agrees should have been fought by the Allies, for reasons of actual existential threat if for no other reason. But that doesn’t mean that we should have fought any of the wars we’ve fought since then.

As for Rwanda, we’ve been through that before on CT. There was an actual humanitarian intervention in Rwanda. People just like to forget about it because it made things worse, as military humanitarian interventions generally do.

42

Stephen 02.21.15 at 9:23 am

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?

43

Chris Bertram 02.21.15 at 9:43 am

I’m somewhat with LFC here. Murderous regimes don’t have an immunity against outside intervention, as hardline sovereigntists would claim; but the track record of actual interventions is poor and they have often made things even worse, and people have agendas.

44

David 02.21.15 at 10:06 am

@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.

45

Abbe Faria 02.21.15 at 10:44 am

“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.”

Iraq and Syria are so clear cut, and people just can’t see this because of the lies in 2003.

What happened in 2014 was largely a straight ground invasion of western Iraq against an ISF who fled. If the US hasn’t left in 2011, but withdrew from an active role and left a support force it wouldn’t have happened. The US army aren’t great against counter insurgency, but a ground invasion wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Iraq begged the US for airstrikes against ISIS in May-14 and the US refused, because bringing attention to Iraq wasn’t good PR. As a consequence Mosul, Samarra, Qaraqosh etc. were conquered and we get a wave of atrocities which could have been prevented.

The Kurds in Rojava vs ISIS is just such a clear cut case of good vs evil it’s ridiculous. This a bunch of feminist democratic socialists fighting invasion by a misogynist Islamic theocracy, and winning because of close US air support. You only have to read anything published on the topic October to see how deluded much of the left were and are on this, and how they abandoned their comrades in the YPG. The “airstrikes will not save Kobane” line is the recent equivalent of “us troops will be met with flowers”.

46

Stephen 02.21.15 at 11:04 am

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?

47

David 02.21.15 at 11:46 am

@Stephen. I’m afraid this is the “so you just want to let them die” argument, which has been trotted out as a form of moral blackmail for the last twenty-five years or so. It relies on the relativistic idea that laws are all very well when they suit us, but can be quietly abandoned when they don’t. (Others can do the same to us of course). The Iraq war of 1991 was fought to defend the eternal principle that frontiers were inviolable. The 1999 Kosovo war was fought to defend the eternal principle that they were not, although the same people generally supported both; they had just changed their moral software in the meantime.
The point, of course, is that these are not really abstract disputes. You can certainly point out that a law is either binding or not, but can’t be both at the same time. But the reality is that these arguments are nothing more than pretexts to be seized cynically by wealthy and powerful states (the Kosovo case was so cynical that it chilled the blood of even hardened observers). But this is where the BHLs of the world come in, stirring up popular hatred and legitimizing demands for violent revenge. They are both the useful idiots and the licensed clowns of brute-force interventionism, capable of providing a moral gloss for any war or invasion, no matter how outrageous it may be. But like most psychopaths, they actually imagine they are quite sane.

48

Ze Kraggash 02.21.15 at 11:53 am

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.

49

Brett Bellmore 02.21.15 at 12:01 pm

” It’s not in their nature to protect foreigners, to prevent genocides, or anything like that.”

You could say that. It’s kind of like saying it’s not in the nature of cholera to prevent diarrhea. It takes considerable effort, pushing uphill, to warp government into protecting anything but itself.

50

Chris Bertram 02.21.15 at 12:10 pm

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

51

Chris Bertram 02.21.15 at 12:18 pm

Incidentally, whatever the merits of the idea that seriously immoral laws should be ignored, there’s nothing “relativistic” about it.

52

mattski 02.21.15 at 12:20 pm

53

LFC 02.21.15 at 12:43 pm

David @44

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.

You were ‘there’ during the Kosovo crisis but evidently too busy to read up on the history of humanitarian intervention which, though always a debatable and contested idea, goes way back in time. Your framing of the issue is wrong to begin with, since the criterion is not “states that are disliked by some people.” N.b. I’ not saying anything about Kosovo specifically. (No time now for longer comment on this.)

54

Ronan(rf) 02.21.15 at 1:30 pm

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.

55

Tiny Tim 02.21.15 at 2:36 pm

It’s like the never ending stream of Tom Friedman columns about what we should be doing in Iraq. It’s possible (if unlikely) that General Friedman and Viceroy Friedman would have fought the perfect war, administered the perfect occupation, and created the glibertarian paradise that everybody was promising. But it was never going to be Tom Friedman’s glorious war and occupation. It was going to be Dick Cheney’s war and occupation.

Advocating sending in weapons and troops is advocating adding more arms to a situation where people are already killing each other. You don’t get to be in charge, even if you think you have the perfect military solution to a problem.

56

christian_h 02.21.15 at 2:43 pm

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.

57

Ze Kraggash 02.21.15 at 2:47 pm

” 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.”

If “the opposite” means the US and the West in general minding their own business and staying off, then I don’t think it’s nonsense. Everything would be fine indeed, in the sense that non-western societies would be developing and evolving on their own. Eurocentrism is racism, and a poison.

58

Brett Bellmore 02.21.15 at 2:54 pm

” 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”.

59

Stephen 02.21.15 at 3:36 pm

David@47: no, I don’t agree that the Indian intervention in East Pakistan was simply a matter of “pretexts to be seized cynically by wealthy and powerful states”. It was a response to a real problem: people are being massacred across the border, what should we do? I do agree that one solution would have been ” just let them die”. Forgive me for finding that morally repulsive, given that an alternative – invade and stop them being killed – was entirely practicable.

60

Rich Puchalsky 02.21.15 at 3:41 pm

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.

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Stephen 02.21.15 at 3:41 pm

Ze Kraggash@48: you can, I think, meaningfully say that “the government of Vietnam ordered the Vietnamese army to invade Cambodia to stop a genocide”. Which they did, and a good thing too. Unless you find “just let them die” an acceptable alternative.

Does that dispose of your objection?

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Ronan(rf) 02.21.15 at 3:51 pm

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.

63

Robespierre 02.21.15 at 4:09 pm

@Stephen:
I think Ze Kraggash meant one can say that the Vietnamese government ordered its army into Cambodia to remove a hostile pro-Chinese regime that had already made repeated border raids in which thousands of Vietnamese had died, and in order to secure its southern border in anticipation of Chinese invasion. Incidentally, this had the effect of removing a barbarous, auto-genocidal regime, but this last aspect did not feature in the calculations of the Vietnamese government.

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Rich Puchalsky 02.21.15 at 4:14 pm

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.

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Stephen 02.21.15 at 4:21 pm

Rich@60: forgive me for finding the idea that the UK government, pre-Falklands, “could have used their influence with the US to get the US to stop funding the junta” intensely comic, and entirely divorced from reality.

You are quite right in saying that the FW was not undertaken to bring down the junta, though of course it did have that effect (and how far that was foreseeable, I do not know). I cannot see how you can say “it was not, of course, claimed to be humanitarian intervention.” If the Falklands had been a lump of uninhabited rock, you would have been right. They weren’t.

At the time, the New Statesman (a British left-wing magazine) produced a piece called “Authors take sides on the Falklands war”, in imitation of an earlier publication about the Spanish Civil War. To do them justice, they published an item they may not have expected, from Arnold Wesker, an impeccably left-wing London Jewish playwright. He said: a brutal fascist tyranny has just invaded, without provocation, British territory with completely innocent inhabitants. It would never have occurred to him as possible that any British government, of whatever party, could ever do anything but fight; and the English language did not contain words strong enough to express his opinion of those who thought otherwise.

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

66

Ze Kraggash 02.21.15 at 4:24 pm

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.

67

Rich Puchalsky 02.21.15 at 4:29 pm

The Falklands Islands are a colonial possession of the UK with about 3,000 people living on them. The Argentines were both warned by major powers not to harm the islanders and had propaganda motives of their own for making the islanders appear to be well treated under the rule of the junta, so it’s not as if the islanders were about to be massacred. There is no credible way in which keeping those people under colonial rule can be classed as humanitarian intervention: colonial possessions all over the globe have been lost by colonial powers, and wars to hold onto them have generally been both bloody and unsuccessful.

68

Rich Puchalsky 02.21.15 at 4:33 pm

“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.

69

mattski 02.21.15 at 5:40 pm

I don’t know any details of the Vietnamese invasion. However, just from my general understanding of how this universe works…

Why make the effort to study the real world when general understanding is so conveniently located & accessed?

*belch*

70

novakant 02.21.15 at 6:01 pm

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.

71

Chris Bertram 02.21.15 at 6:17 pm

I’ve changed my mind about the Falklands war a few times, but at present I think that the loss of life and expense to hold on to a few distant islands was out of proportion to the benefit. And clearly it wasn’t a “humanitarian intervention”. But the idea that a white colonial settler state had a right to seize it and rule over the inhabitants, and that this was an instance of anti-colonial struggle is extremely silly.

72

Rich Puchalsky 02.21.15 at 6:33 pm

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.

73

LFC 02.21.15 at 9:02 pm

@Ze Kraggash
The main issue is really not the states/people analogy or lack thereof. The issue you raise is whether governments can ever have, not as an exclusive motive but as one of several motives for action, a humanitarian or altruistic motive. You claim not. But this claim ignores a lot of history. (To keep things manageable, one can go back to the 19th cent., when, e.g., Britain intervened on I forget how many occasions to protect Christians threatened w massacre or persecution by the Ottomans. No doubt that 19th-c. Britain had an empire and was an imperial power, but that doesn’t mean humanitarian issues here were completely irrelevant. And of course it was Christians who were being protected — this is the 19th cent. (My history is not all it shd be in terms of the details [look up ‘the Bulgarian agitation’], but almost no one here is mentioning the long history of hum. intervention and how it has evolved. Britain after outlawing its own participation in the slave trade also took steps to stop others from being involved in it, iirc. I believe this figured in a campaign vs the Barbary pirates, could be misremembering.)

Suggested reading:
Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention
Michael Akehurst, “Humanitarian Intervention,” in H. Bull, Intervention in World Politics
Plus recent books by Gary Bass (long hist. of hum. int. — I forget the exact title) and Michael Barnett.

On the Bangladesh crisis specifically:
Srinath Raghavan, 1971
Gary Bass, The Blood Telegram

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LFC 02.21.15 at 9:09 pm

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.

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LFC 02.21.15 at 9:17 pm

Ze Kraggash 48:
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.

Bracketing the specific issue of Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia, this does not make a lot of sense. Governments/states as ‘corporate actors’ can have intentions, or at least leading policymakers as individuals can have intentions that get translated into policy. By contrast, the sun does not intend, by rising, to chase away the darkness b.c the sun, as far as we know, does not have intentions, period.

76

A lecturer 02.21.15 at 9:21 pm

“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.

77

LFC 02.21.15 at 9:24 pm

‘A lecturer’ @76
The “white colonial settler state” referred to in that comment is Argentina, if I’m not mistaken.

78

David 02.21.15 at 9:33 pm

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.

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Rich Puchalsky 02.21.15 at 9:37 pm

LFC: “The issue you raise is whether governments can ever have, not as an exclusive motive but as one of several motives for action, a humanitarian or altruistic motive. ”

Well, I’m not the person you directed this to, but of course it is possible for governments to have humanitarian motives. There is a question of how much these predominate as a reason for any particular war, and how anyone on the outside of the government can tell what the predominant motive is when nearly every intervention is routinely claimed to be justified by humanitarian motives. Governments have resources available to conceal and falsify their motives that most individuals don’t have.

80

David 02.21.15 at 9:48 pm

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.

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Ze Kraggash 02.21.15 at 9:54 pm

LFC, I’m pretty sure, by now, that we can’t agree on this. But I’ll say this to you: I concede that you have a point – a theoretical point – in that public sentiment is one of the political pressures that affect governments (I think this is what you’re saying), albeit in a small way. But the public sentiment is so easy to manipulate that it’d very hard to prove the causality. I know, by now, that when I say something that sounds like ‘this can never happen!’ people get annoyed (despite the polemical nature of this medium), including you, so can I modify it into ‘this is the last thing you should assume’?

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Rich Puchalsky 02.21.15 at 10:38 pm

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.)

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geo 02.21.15 at 10:44 pm

I think David @78, 80, and elsewhere is generally on the mark. I would answer Stephen’s “you’d just let them die?” objection a little differently, though. It’s a plausible enough objection. It might well seem that that’s the only alternative to (self-authorized) humanitarian intervention. I’m sure both Stephen and David know that the UN Charter’s prohibition against invading another country comes with an exception for Security Council authorization. But I’m not sure either of them takes that fact seriously enough.

The framers of the UN Charter knew perfectly well, as David points out, that most pretended humanitarian interventions, past and (undoubtedly) future, have other motives. But they also recognized that there must be a legal way for the rest of the world to stop genocide or other atrocities. They set up reasonable procedures for appeal to the Security Council and for the enforcement of its decisions. All that was needed for this scheme to work was good will, at least on the part of the great powers.

And there’s the rub. Of course there’s plenty of blame to go around, but in the immediate postwar world, the overwhelmingly most powerful and secure state, and therefore the one best able to create an atmosphere and tradition of law-abidingness and mutuality, was the United States. Instead of trying to create trust and establish useful precedents, the US 1) took advantage of a temporary Soviet boycott of the Security Council to obtain authorization for the Korean War, which it then proceeded to conduct entirely with the legally required periodic consultation with and reauthorization by the SC; 2) engineered the overthrow of elected social-democratic governments in Guatemala and Iran; 3) supported and then took over the French colonial war in Indochina; 4) organized an illegal invasion and embargo of Cuba; 5) assisted in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba; 6) supported Israel’s consistent defiance of UN resolutions; etc, etc, etc, right up to Iraq in 2003 and beyond. Of course the Soviets, the (much) weaker superpower, did not do much to create trust and strengthen international law either, but there was much less that they could do.

However one chooses to divide the blame, the authority of the Security Council, which the founders of the UN correctly understood was the only alternative to the great power rivalries that had recently come close to extinguishing civilization and would very likely do just that sooner or later, was undermined and is now close to zilch. What this means is that every decision about humanitarian intervention must address at least two concerns: 1) will it, on balance, save lives and reduce suffering, and 2) will it strengthen international law and entrench a culture of law-abidingness, whether through the United Nations or another, better structure?

It should be clear by now that the United States has no interest in abiding by international law whenever its ruling elites would be seriously disadvantaged by doing so, or the international financial and security structures which promote their interests would be threatened. As long as supporters of R2P and humanitarian intervention show no sign of understanding and acknowledging this, and no willingness to join leftists in changing it, it will be hard to work together.

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geo 02.21.15 at 10:47 pm

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

85

Donald A. Coffin 02.22.15 at 12:25 am

By the time I got to the end of the comments (so far), I had a Phil Ochs song playing I my head:

It’s always the old to lead us to the war
It’s always the young to fall
Now look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun
Tell me is it worth it all
.
.
.
Call it, Peace, or call it, Treason
Call it, Love, or call it, Reason
But I ain’t marching anymore
No, I ain’t marching anymore

.

86

Bruce Wilder 02.22.15 at 12:35 am

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

87

js. 02.22.15 at 12:48 am

Since I was going on about Aristotle in another thread last night, I happened to think of one of his characterizations of virtue. Slightly out of context: a virtuous act is one done “at the right time, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way” (NE, BK II).* When I see what seems like a virtuous government, I’ll be totally on board with their humanitarian interventions. Until then, I’ll (mostly) demur, its motives notwithstanding.

*Sorry, a bit too lazy to look up/transcribe a better translation just now.

88

LFC 02.22.15 at 12:52 am

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.

89

js. 02.22.15 at 1:01 am

clean drinking water and mosquito nets

Oh, I don’t know. I’d start with the US (or whoever) requiring of all its corporations that they have strong labor protections wherever they set up shop (or e.g. subcontract). The real problems to solve, it seems to me, are always just a little closer to home.

90

LFC 02.22.15 at 1:07 am

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.

91

mattski 02.22.15 at 1:50 am

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/04/george-w-bushs-legacy-on-africa-wins-praise-even-from-foes/

Even crass plutocratic class warriors can go against type now and again.

92

David 02.22.15 at 9:48 am

@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.

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Minnow 02.23.15 at 9:58 am

“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. ”

Yeah, those pontificators about fascism in the forties were really annoying weren’t they?

And if the invasion of the Falklands by fascists wasn’t an example of fascist aggression, what was it?

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Mark H 02.23.15 at 12:47 pm

“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.

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David 02.23.15 at 4:34 pm

“pontificating about fascist aggression …”
I thought I had made this clear. The right-wing intellectuals of the Cold War era were obliged to support all kinds of squalid wars in all kinds of squalid places, from South America, to South Africa, to South-East Asia, and to lick the toes of dictators from the Shah of Iran to Field Marshal Mobutu Sese Seku to General Pinochet, all in the cause of the global struggle against communism, to which they were hopelessly subservient, both politically and intellectually.
What an incredible luxury, therefore, to be able to support a war against a comic opera, but sinister, Latin American military dictatorship which had been committing large-scale human rights abuses, instead of having to apologize for them; and to be able to fall back on the dormant, but satisfying vocabulary of anti-racism and human rights, necessarily abandoned by the Right after the 1940s. As I say, I thought this was clear.
The Falklands was many things, but it wasn’t a war of fascist aggression. Argentinians of nearly all political persuasions regarded it as the recovery of occupied national territory. Ironically, the junta didn’t really want the islands back that much, except for reasons of political prestige. Even then , had they not been so desperate, and had they not realized the British would be advised to fight, they would never have done such a thing.

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LFC 02.24.15 at 12:50 am

@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. ;)

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LFC 02.24.15 at 1:01 am

And I can’t resist adding that there was something almost delightfully weird/ironic/whatever in finding your review separated from a review of Kissinger’s book (!) only by a glossy ad section aimed at encouraging investment in Malawi.

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Minnow 02.24.15 at 10:04 am

“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.

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Minnow 02.24.15 at 10:08 am

“What an incredible luxury, therefore, to be able to support a war against a comic opera, but sinister, Latin American military dictatorship”

I am guessing the Argentine state did not look so ‘comic opera’ to its political opponents as they were dropped from helicopters into the jungle far below. But then, one man’s ‘comic’, etc …

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Igor Belanov 02.24.15 at 12:10 pm

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.

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Stephen 02.24.15 at 12:29 pm

David

Germans of many political views regarded the occupation of the Sudetenland, and of formerly German Poland, as the liberation or recovery of national territory. I suppose you’ll be arguing those weren’t acts of aggression, either.

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William Berry 02.24.15 at 4:10 pm

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.

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Minnow 02.25.15 at 10:34 am

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

The obvious rejoinder is ‘what part of ‘comic opera’ don’t you understand? I won’t accuse you of being an AH for imagining that the Argentine Junta might have resembled a comic opera (even a ‘sinister’ one) to its victims, but I do think it betrays a staggering failure of the imagination.

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Minnow 02.25.15 at 10:36 am

“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.

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Igor Belanov 02.25.15 at 12:15 pm

Monty Python must be awful barbarians then, performing their ‘North Minehead By-Election’ sketch. Look it up Minnow, you might even laugh.

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William Berry 02.25.15 at 11:02 pm

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.

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Minnow 02.26.15 at 10:08 am

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

I think we have a duty to think of a state from their victims’ point of view. Considering the Junta a comic opera so long as you ignore its victimsdoesn’t give me much comfort, but I can see that sort of mental gymnastic is necessary to anyone who wants to minimise the horrors for political reasons.

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William Berry 02.26.15 at 4:30 pm

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.

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