by Peter Jenkins
Once we came across a man-of-war anchored off the coast.…in the empty immensity of earth, sky and water there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent….There was a touch of insanity in the proceedings. – Joseph Conrad
In preparation for debates in the House of Lords and the House of [...]]]>
by Peter Jenkins
Once we came across a man-of-war anchored off the coast.…in the empty immensity of earth, sky and water there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent….There was a touch of insanity in the proceedings. – Joseph Conrad
In preparation for debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons on 29 August (which turned out to be heart-warming advertisements for parliamentary democracy), the British government released the advice it had received from the Attorney General on the legality of military action to deter and disrupt the further use of chemical weapons by the government of Syria.
The essential passage reads as follows:
If action in the Security Council is blocked, the UK would still be permitted under international law to take exceptional measures in order to alleviate the scale of the overwhelming humanitarian catastrophes in Syria by deterring and disrupting the further use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime. Such a legal basis is available under the doctrine of humanitarian intervention provided three conditions are met [convincing evidence; no alternative; proposed use of force must be necessary and proportionate]
Anticipating this argument on the website of the European Journal of International Law on 28 August, Dapo Akande comes to the conclusion that the doctrine of humanitarian intervention is an inadequate legal basis for the use of force in response to the outrages which took place in the suburbs of Damascus on 21 August.
In describing humanitarian intervention as a doctrine, the British Attorney General is trying to suggest that customary international law provides a legal basis for the use of force for humanitarian purposes. This is, however, far from being the case. The UK is in a small minority in advancing this claim.
Most states consider humanitarian use of force to be contrary to the prohibition on the use of force other than in self-defence that is a feature of customary international law (as well as of the UN Charter, absent specific authorization by the Security Council or in self-defence). For a doctrine to become customary international law, the support of a large majority of states is necessary.Furthermore on 28 April 2006 the Security Council adopted a resolution (1674) of which the ante-penultimate paragraph reads:
Notes that the deliberate targeting of civilians and other protected persons and the commission of…violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in situations of armed conflict may constitute a threat to international peace and security, and reaffirms in this regard its readiness to consider such situations and, where necessary, to adopt appropriate steps.
The meaning could hardly be clearer. In April 2006, the Security Council, of which the UK is a permanent member, took the view that situations akin to that which arose in Syria on 21 August should be referred to the Council, to allow the Council to decide whether the use of force to redress the situation is necessary and would be appropriate.
The outcome of the 29 August debates is seen in Britain as ruling out UK participation in military action against the Syrian government, absent UN authorization or the emergence of a different set of circumstance requiring parliamentary consideration. The shakiness of the government’s legal case played a part in creating parliamentary resistance to UK involvement in current circumstances.
Is there any chance that legal considerations will deter the use of force by the US, given the existence of at least one diplomatic alternative?
The fact that the war helped put Obama’s seal of approval on the American practice of going to war surreptitiously, without congressional approval or public accountability — as well as the possibility that perceived success in Libya might make the U.S. more reckless in intervening in the future — are both potential pitfalls that have little to do with the outcome of action on the ground. And that’s before we even speculate about whether the rebels’ victory will prove to be conclusive, or what Libya’s next government will look like.
This is not to deny that the fall of Qaddafi’s regime is good news — it is. But we should be very cautious about drawing sweeping conclusions or claiming vindication at this early stage, particularly in light of the disasters that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.
There is, however, one line of argument that I think we can confidently say has been discredited by the recent events in Tripoli. This is the argument — particularly common among leading neoconservative hawks who wanted to criticize Obama without lending support to “isolationism” — that the apparent stalemate in Libya demonstrated that Obama had been insufficiently assertive, and should have opted for a more forceful intervention. (This was also the position of the more hawkish Republican presidential candidates like Romney, Perry, and Santorum.)
At the moment, it seems clear that the upside of an American intervention with a heavier footprint, namely the possibility of shortening the war by a few months, would have been far outweighed by the downside. Not only would such an intervention have put U.S. troops on the ground at risk, it also would have risked discrediting Qaddafi’s opponents: imagine how much less legitimacy the post-Qaddafi government of Libya would enjoy if Tripoli had fallen to American tanks rather than to the rebels themselves.
]]>First, he suggests that the same sort of humanitarian considerations that war supporters are currently making about Libya were far stronger in 2003 with regard to Iraq; thus, if one supports intervention in Libya, one would logically be required to have supported intervention in Iraq:
Now, those opposed to U.S. involvement in the civil war in Libya are deemed indifferent to the repression and brutalities suffered by the Libyan people from Gadaffi and willing to protect his power. This rationale is as flawed logically as it is morally. Why didn’t this same moral calculus justify the attack on Iraq? Saddam Hussein really was a murderous, repressive monster: at least Gadaffi’s equal when it came to psychotic blood-spilling. Those who favored regime change there made exactly the same arguments as [John] Judis (and many others) make now for Libya…Why does that reasoning justify war in Libya but not Iraq?
It certainly is the case that supporters of the Iraq war manipulatively invoked humanitarian considerations in order to paint opponents of the war as callous. But is it really the case that the humanitarian case for war was much stronger in Iraq than it is in Libya? It seems to me that there is one important consideration that Greenwald doesn’t mention: Saddam Hussein certainly had more blood on his hands than Qaddafi overall, but by the time of the 2003 invasion his worst atrocities were in the past. He undoubtedly remained a brutal dictator with a horrific human rights record, but was no longer committing bloodshed on the scale of, for instance, the Al-Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s. Furthermore, in 2003 he was not imminently threatening to commit more atrocities; in Libya, by contrast, Qaddafi has been threatening to inflict mass violence on rebels (not to mention peaceful protesters) in the immediate future.
I would suggest that if any intervention of this kind can be justified — which is, of course, a question open to debate — its aim must be preventive rather than punitive. Such an intervention should not, in other words, be intended simply to punish a dictator for past atrocities, but must have the prospect of preventing atrocities in the imminent future. Thus the humanitarian argument for war in Iraq was deeply unconvincing in 2003, but it would have been far stronger if the year were 1988 and Saddam was in the process of slaughtering the Kurds. (This is not to say that an intervention in Iraq would necessarily have be justified in 1988, but simply that it would have been more justified than it was in 2003.) Of course, the fact that the Reagan Administration continued to actively support Saddam during his late-80s atrocities — with nary a peep from many of the same people who 15 years later would be piously invoking the humanitarian case for war — was one reason many war opponents were deeply skeptical of this argument for invasion.
Second, Greenwald mocks the notion that the US government is motivated by benevolence and earnest humanitarianism:
But what I cannot understand at all is how people are willing to believe that the U.S. Government is deploying its military and fighting this war because, out of abundant humanitarianism, it simply cannot abide internal repression, tyranny and violence against one’s own citizens….They just all suddenly woke up one day and decided to wage war in an oil-rich Muslim nation because they just can’t stand idly by and tolerate internal repression and violence against civilians? Please.
This is a frequent line of argument from critics of the Libya intervention on the left. It has the added virtue of being almost irrefutable: no one can seriously examine the US record of inaction when friendly governments commit atrocities against their citizens and conclude that American decision-making is motivated solely by some humanitarian calculus independent of geopolitical considerations. (I do, however, find the notion that this intervention is primarily about oil to be deeply unconvincing.)
However, even if we concede that Western policymakers are hypocrites and that their claims to be motivated solely by disinterested benevolence are disingenuous, what follows from this? Presumably, whether the Libyan intervention is just or wise must be decided on the basis of its concrete effects on the ground — and not on the basis of whether or not the people pushing it are noble and benevolent. That is to say, if we believe that the intervention will prevent mass atrocities without exacerbating the crisis, we should support it even if Western leaders are hypocrites for doing so. If, on the other hand, we believe that the intervention will only make matters worse, we should oppose it even if we believed that these leaders were genuinely well-intentioned.
As stated, there are many, many good reasons why someone could be opposed to the current intervention. But I don’t think that either of these arguments, which have frequently been made by opponents of the attack on Libya, are particularly convincing.
]]>Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the United States has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism.
The US [...]]]>
Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Gaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the United States has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance and imperialism.
The US “brought down” Saddam Hussein by invading and occupying his country. Pray tell, who are the “voices around the world” who are calling for the US to invade and occupy Libya? Perhaps Krauthammer can find some on the neocon right, but I would challenge him to find any Libyan representing any constituency with significant mass support who is calling for a US invasion.
Krauthammer goes on to draw the equally fatuous conclusion that “everyone is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda.” This has been a common tactic among neoconservatives desperate to vindicate Bush’s disastrous foreign policy: they take his freedom agenda simply to be the belief that all people should live under democracies — thus, whenever a people demonstrates its desire to shake off autocratic rule, they can claim vindication for the freedom agenda.
Of course, the freedom agenda was not merely the belief that democracy is a good thing — it was the view that the US should use military force, including the invasion and occupation of foreign countries, to bring about democracy. (Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that democracy promotion does not seem to have been a particularly central motive for the original invasion of Iraq, and that the freedom agenda quickly took a back seat — as in Palestine and Egypt — whenever it threatened to bring to power anyone the US didn’t like.)
Does Krauthammer see a massive public outcry, inside or outside the Arab world, for the US to invade Arab countries and establish democracy there by force of arms? Let me suggest that Krauthammer, and any other hawks eager to co-opt the various Arab protesters for their own political agenda, might do well to survey the protesters themselves on a few questions, such as:
1) Do you want the US to invade your country?
2) Did you support the US invasion of Iraq?
3) Would you be in favor of the US starting a war with Iran?
4) Do you believe that democracy should only be permitted in your country insofar as it conforms to Israel’s security needs?
One could extend the list indefinitely. In the meantime, let’s please drop these lame attempts at historical revisionism, which cannot possibly convince anyone who remembers the events of the past decade.
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