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July 31, 2007

Today, the Guardian features yet another editorial about how the Iraq disaster has destroyed the concept of humanitarian intervention. It's a very well-written piece, stylistically, but woefully devoid of understanding of what humanitarian intervention is. As with so many other pieces on the "death of liberal interventionism," it starts off wrong by declaring that Iraq was a humanitarian intervention that turned into a disaster and thus proved, once and for all, that humanitarian interventions are, in the words of John Gray (today's Guardian author), "never much more than a combination of post-imperial nostalgia with crackpot geopolitics."

Once more, with feeling.

• Iraq was NEVER a humanitarian intervention. Not in any way. It was a power and resource grab, and a (successful) attempt to further enrich an economy built on waging war abroad and stockpiling weapons of war at home.
  
• For a military campaign to qualify as a humanitarian intervention it must; 1) take place in the context of massive, immediate, violent loss of life 2) be undertaken for humanitarian aims alone 3) be undertaken after carefully weighing the costs of doing nothing against the cost of intervening (so as not to make the situation worse) 4) be limited in scope and time. See HRW's great piece "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" for a more in depth explanation of the criteria I've listed here.
• The Iraq War meets none of the above criteria. NONE. There was no immediate mass slaughter going on at the time of the US invasion. The war's architects cared not one iota about humanitarian aims. The costs of the invasion were well-known and deemed irrelevant. And the war was waged not only without a defined end point, but without even regard for international humanitarian law.

I don't consider myself an imperialist crackpot, or a war-monger. On the contrary: I abhor militarism in all its forms. Yet, living in post-war Bosnia , I understand that massive loss of life sometimes demands intervention from the outside to bring the killing to a halt. A Bosnian friend once told me that he woke up almost every morning during Sarajevo's  siege, and thought that the US, the EU, or NATO would surely intervene that day to stop the shooting of innocent civilians in the streets, and the shelling of their homes, businesses, schools, and cultural centres. It was not until the siege entered its third bloody year that he stopped waking up thinking that an intervention was imminent. By that time, Sarajevo had been largely reduced to rubble and bullet-riddled metal hulks. Thousands of civilians had been killed and thousands more subjected to unimaginable cruelty in the occupied suburbs --especially Grbavica. There was no more anesthesia in the overcrowded hospitals, almost no food, and very little hope. The people were emaciated, depressed, and awaiting the end. The world had failed them.

I'll let Kenneth Roth of HRW conclude for me (scroll down if you click this link):

Humanitarian intervention appears to be here to stay—an important and appropriate response to people facing mass slaughter. In the absence of international consensus on the conditions for such intervention, governments inevitably are going to abuse the concept, as the United States has done in its after-the-fact efforts to justify the Iraq war. Human Rights Watch calls on intergovernmental organizations, particularly the political bodies of the United Nations, to end the taboo on discussing the conditions for humanitarian intervention. Some consensus on these conditions, in addition to promoting appropriate use of humanitarian intervention, would help deter abuse of the concept and thus assist in preserving a tool that some of the world’s most vulnerable victims need.

July 31, 2007 | Permalink

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