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Reading/skimming Alan Gilbert's latest post, one finds this:
Obama right now relies on Bush's illegal "preemption," that is
aggression in Iraq, for his precedent for going it alone in
"humanitarian intervention"....
This is confused, but the confusion is perhaps somewhat understandable because the Obama admin's statements on Syria have suggested several different, albeit related, rationales for a strike against Assad: (1) norm enforcement, (2) punishment/deterrence, (3) protection of the Syrian population from further chemical weapons attacks, and (4) prevention of chemical weapons possibly getting into 'the wrong hands' and being used against the U.S. or its allies. Only #4, which has not been emphasized that much, has any connection to Bush's 'preemption' doctrine (which was actually a prevention, not a preemption, doctrine). #3 is the humanitarian intervention rationale, which also brings in elements of #1 and #2.
The notion of humanitarian intervention has a very long, albeit controversial, history/pedigree in international law and practice, a fact that is apparently not widely understood. (It long predates Bush's preemption/prevention doctrine, which has nothing to do with humanitarian intervention.)
In her 2003 book The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force, Martha Finnemore pointed out that "[b]efore the twentieth century virtually all instances of military intervention to protect people other than the intervenor's own nationals involved protection of Christians from the Ottoman Turks." (p.58) Over the course of the twentieth century the notion of who is 'human' and thus worthy of protection expanded to include non-Christians and non-whites. To quote Finnemore again:
...by the late twentieth century all human beings were treated as equally deserving in the international normative discourse. In fact, states are very sensitive to charges that they are "normatively backward" and still privately harbor distinctions. When Boutros-Ghali, shortly after becoming [UN] Secretary-General, charged that powerful states were attending to disasters in white, European Bosnia at the expense of non-white, African Somalia, the United States and other states became defensive, refocused attention, and ultimately launched a full-scale intervention in Somalia before acting in Bosnia. (p.83)
Whether what the Obama admin is proposing to do w/r/t Syria is a good idea is debatable. But it's wrong to suggest, as a Democratic congressman did on the NewsHour last night, that the admin is seeking to create a "new category" of "humanitarian war."
P.s. (added later): Whether the notion of humanitarian intervention would have supported or required earlier, more forceful action by the admin w/r/t Syria is a legitimate question but in a sense irrelevant to the main point of this post.
The PBS NewsHour has its ups and downs but this discussion from last Friday with Slaughter, Haass, and Malinowski is an example of the program at its best.
In a blog post written last March (which I linked at the time but did not comment on at any length), Michael Walzer rehearsed J.S. Mill's argument about non-intervention, an argument Walzer had also summarized in his Just and Unjust Wars (Basic Books, 1977), pp. 87-91. With the debate about the Libyan intervention, sovereignty, and R2P continuing to simmer (in the IR blogosphere and elsewhere), and with Gaddafi still at large and one or two cities in Libya still resisting the rebels (or revolutionaries, or anti-Gaddafi forces, whichever label you like), it may be worth going back to Walzer's post. The question whether the U.S. and/or NATO should intervene in Libya is now of course moot, but the broader issues will likely recur (and have already recurred in a way in the case, e.g., of Syria).
Mill's position was basically that oppressed peoples had to struggle for their own freedom without outside help; if they failed to secure freedom that proved they didn't deserve it, weren't "fit" enough for it. In his blog post of last March, Walzer wrote that if the Libyan rebels were on the verge of defeat he would not be willing to go all the way with Mill, i.e. to declare the rebels "unfit" for liberty and leave them to their fate after a Gaddafi victory. But Walzer said that when intervention became necessary -- and he wasn't sure exactly when that point of "necessity" would occur -- it should be done by neighbors, by the Egyptian and Tunisian armies, rather than by the U.S. and NATO.
Even though he was not willing to go all the way with Mill in the Libyan case, Walzer clearly has a lot of sympathy for the view that oppressed peoples should do their own struggling, with outsiders intervening only in cases of real "necessity" (however defined). In Just and Unjust Wars [JUW] (pp. 90-91), he wrote: "We need to establish a kind of a priori respect for state boundaries; they are, as I have argued before, the only boundaries communities ever have. And that is why intervention is always justified as if it were an exception to a general rule, made necessary by the urgency or extremity of a particular case."
It is perhaps unfair to focus on something Walzer wrote 30-plus years ago, ignoring his more recent writing on these issues; still, the sentence just quoted shows a weakness, in my view, of his approach in JUW, namely the attachment of too much moral value to state boundaries. He recognized the (in some cases) "arbitrary and accidental character of state boundaries... [and] the ambiguous relation of the political community or communities within those boundaries to the government that defends them" (JUW, p. 89), but his basic position was that boundaries enclose communities which should be left to work out their political fates for themselves. There is definitely something to be said for this view but it is also necessary to acknowledge that the ways in which state boundaries are routinely penetrated or breached by outsiders, whether they be governments, corporations or NGOs, make the issue somewhat more complicated [note: some, e.g. Robert Jackson, would deny this]. Moreover, it is not the case that state boundaries are "the only boundaries communities ever have." Students of international relations have spilled much ink writing about all sorts of boundaries (ethnic, zonal, tribal, etc.). State boundaries retain a special place in international law and practice, but they are not the only boundaries communities have.
So where does this leave matters? Intervention should still be an exception to a general rule, and R2P, at least as I understand it, does not alter that. But in a world that some see as being full of cross-boundary 'networks' and transnational communities, the principle of non-intervention, assuming one wants to keep it, perhaps needs an updated justification, one that does not rely quite so heavily on a picture of self-enclosed national communities, each working out its own political destiny in isolation from the world outside. I'm not sure exactly what that updated justification of non-intervention might look like; perhaps political theorists and IR types have already produced one and with a little research I could find it. But laziness being the blogger's prerogative, I'm not going to bother searching, at least not now.
Back in Jan. '09 I blogged about an article that discussed the notion of 'demonstrative compellence' (as the author termed it) in connection with the G.W. Bush policy toward Iraq. The argument in a nutshell was that the invasion of Iraq was meant to signal to Iran and N. Korea that if they didn't straighten up and fly right they might be next. The strategy was, in essence, a complete failure, at least with respect to its intended targets. Iran continued its less-than-transparent nuclear program and N. Korea showed, on occasion, some apparent willingness to negotiate but basically continued on its path toward acquiring nuclear weapons.
Why bring this up now? Because some might think, not unreasonably, that one motive for the NATO intervention in Libya was to send a signal to possible emulators of Gaddafi that they had better not contemplate atrocities. The trouble is that the signal, if one was intended, has had little effect: the Assad regime in Syria has killed lots of protesters (though recent events in Syria, with some soldiers perhaps having mutinied and killed other members of the security forces -- it's still not entirely clear what happened -- point to the possibility of a split in the armed forces); the Saleh regime in Yemen killed lots of civilians before Saleh's departure; and the Bahraini regime used violence against protesters before (and after) calling in Saudi troops to shore itself up.
The case for the NATO intervention in Libya thus has to be made mostly on humanitarian grounds and in terms of Libya alone, it would seem, since from the standpoint of demonstrative compellence it's been a washout.
Many critics of U.S. foreign policy have long decried the close ties between the U.S. and the House of Saud. It's no secret that the Saudis have been uneasy about the U.S. role in helping nudge its long-time ally Mubarak offstage, and as David Ignatius mentioned in his Wash. Post column of April 27, Pres. Obama's national security adviser met with Saudi King Abdullah this month and gave the king a reassuring letter from Obama.
It has been plausibly suggested that the Saudis supported the initial proposal for a no-fly zone in Libya because they thought it would distract attention from what has been happening in Bahrain and elsewhere in the region. If that was their motivation, it doesn't seem to have worked. The Libyan intervention turned into a broader effort to protect civilians (and, in effect, indirectly aid the rebels), but it has not distracted attention from the ongoing violent crackdowns on protesters in Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. The simultaneous repressive actions by different governments, and the variation in international response, underscores something that should have been clear all along: humanitarian interventions are always a product of more than one motive and 'consistency' is not necessarily the main criterion by which they should be judged. That said, one hopes that real pressure is being brought to bear on the Yemeni and Bahraini regimes, with both of which the U.S. and Europeans have leverage, to modify what they are doing now.
DPTrombly has a post suggesting that, inasmuch as European states will be willing and able to enforce the Responsibility to Protect only within a defined geographic area, R2P will come to resemble a European Monroe Doctrine, with Europe attempting to ensure certain norms of behavior by states within its sphere of influence, i.e., "Sahara, Sahel, Mediterranean rim, and Balkans."
Does the analogy work? I'm not convinced. The U.S., as DPT indicates, relied on Britain's naval power to enforce the Monroe Doctrine for most of the 19th century. And not too long after the U.S. became capable of using its own navy to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed in 1904 his famous 'corollary' to the Doctrine which "declared that misgovernment (or 'chronic wrongdoing')" by Latin American governments would be grounds for U.S. armed intervention (Penguin Dictionary of International Relations, 1998, p.337). Applying this principle via his paternalistic pronouncement that "we must teach the Latin Americans to select the right man," Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines into Mexico in 1914 (ibid., p.573).
By contrast, R2P is less paternalistic than the Monroe Doctrine as applied by TR and Woodrow Wilson. R2P's application is limited to four circumstances: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (see M.W. Doyle, "International Ethics and the Responsibility to Protect," Int'l Studies Review 13:1, March 2011). It is not a question of teaching the inhabitants of country X "to select the right man [or woman]." A leader can drive his or her country into the ground and can be as corrupt as all get-out, but as long as he or she does not engage (or very credibly, by his or her own pronouncement, appear to be right on the verge of engaging) in genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity -- all of which, with the possible exception of ethnic cleansing, have accepted definitions in international law -- the question of R2P does not even arise.
Of course, application of R2P will be selective and considerations of the sort mentioned by DPT will influence the 'selections'. But that does not mean that R2P will be used to legitimize interventions of the kind that Wilson ordered in Mexico. Thus "European Monroe Doctrine" may not be the right description, inasmuch as it may conjure up a history of paternalistic, imperialistic interventions that I think few have any interest in defending or repeating.
Anne Orford of Univ. of Melbourne, author of a recent book on R2P, had a post at the London Review of Books blog (link to it here); see my brief (and admittedly rather too flippant) comment on it here.
This post at the blog connected with the journal The American Interest [hat tip: DPT] argues that 'the responsibility to protect' (R2P) is a "nebulous norm". One way norms get less nebulous, however, is by being invoked and debated, as Badescu and Weiss suggest in a piece in last November's International Studies Perspectives (abstract here).
According to them, R2P should not be seen as synonymous with humanitarian intervention by military means (too narrow), nor as synonymous with human security generally (too broad). Rather, R2P is "about taking timely preventive action, about identifying situations that are capable of deteriorating into mass atrocities and bringing to bear diplomatic, legal, economic, and military pressure" (p. 367). Given the speed with which the Libyan situation unfolded, an argument can be made that there was not time to do these things in sequence -- i.e., first the diplomatic and economic, then the military measures -- but that, rather, an effective response required a deployment of these different means pretty much all at once. That, at any rate, seems to me to be the most plausible argument that the military intervention and accompanying actions (e.g., freezing of assets) do represent a legitimate application of R2P rather than a misapplication. It will be interesting to see how Pres. Obama frames the issue in his address tonight.
P.s. After listening to the speech, I realized that my reference (above) to the measures being taken "pretty much all at once" is a bit of an overstatement; the asset freeze etc. did precede the military action -- but not by a prolonged period. As Obama noted, the entire sequence of events from the start of the Libyan protests to the intervention took only 31 days.
...which is a long-winded way of saying that Stephen Walt seems to be a bit offbase here. He cites an unpublished working paper by Alexander Downes which concludes that "foreign-imposed regime change" tends to "ignite" civil wars. That may well be, but it's of limited relevance to Libya because in Libya there already is a civil war. Kindred Winecoff beat me to this point, but I figure it's worth repeating.
Conor Foley, in a post that I have previously linked to, mentions the situation in Sri Lanka toward the end of the government's war with the Tamil Tigers (LTTE).
Hundreds of thousands of civilians were blockaded into an area the size of New York Central Park, where at least 20,000 were killed over a three month period. The area was shelled incessantly and hospitals and food-distribution points appear to have been deliberately targeted. Many more died from starvation and disease because the government blocked humanitarian access. Others were summarily executed during the final assault.... There was never even the remotest prospect of a ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Sri Lanka and I only include it in the discussion to show that the option of doing nothing also has moral consequences.
What happened in Sri Lanka at the end of its war is certainly worth recalling. Nothing on anything approaching a similar scale has occurred in Libya. The intervention there may be said to have relied on a reasoned prediction ("reasoned" of course not meaning "infallible") about what might occur in the absence of intervention. Seen in this light, the intervention is defensible, though the continuing debate about it is probably a good thing. Interventions of this sort are necessarily controversial and an absence of debate would be surprising.
In a USAToday column (h/t T. Wilkinson), Alan Kuperman argues that the Libyan rebels started the uprising knowing they could not win on their own and hoping to provoke civilian casualties that would draw in outside intervention. This seems to be based on an analogy with what Kuperman argued happened in Kosovo, where for instance a KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) official admitted that the more civilians killed, the more likely the prospects for outside intervention. But on a quick reading of the USAToday column, I see no direct evidence presented for his assertion that the Libyan rebels were following the same modus operandi. Moreover, didn't the anti-Gaddafi movement start out as peaceful protests and then become an armed uprising once the protesters were violently attacked? Or am I just imagining that?
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Kuperman's 'moral hazard' theory of intervention (i.e., that the possibility of outside intervention gives rebels an incentive to provoke atrocities in order to bring on an intervention) has generated academic debate. See e.g. A. Grigoryan, "Third-Party Intervention and the Escalation of State-Minority Conflicts," Int'l Studies Quarterly 54:4 (December 2010). Abstract.
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P.s. For discussion and other links, follow the Wilkinson link (above) to the CT post and comment thread.
Also - Marc Lynch on Fresh Air this afternoon.
I don't regularly listen to All Things Considered (ATC) but I hear snatches of it now and again, often if I happen to be driving when it's on. This Saturday afternoon I heard Guy Raz, the ATC weekend host, interview Paul Wolfowitz. The ostensible subject was a piece Wolfowitz wrote for Foreign Policy (a piece I was aware of but have not read) apparently criticizing the "realist" view -- as Wolfowitz labels and interprets it -- that other countries' internal political arrangements are their own concern and should be off-limits to U.S. foreign policy. Or, to quote or closely paraphrase Wolfowitz from the interview, he was criticizing the notion that "other countries' internal affairs is [sic] their own business" and should be insulated from U.S. interference of any kind, including peaceful efforts to promote democracy, womens' rights, etc.
There are more than a couple of interesting questions that could have been raised about this. First of all, does any analyst or commentator or academic or whatever hold the view Wolfowitz is labeling "realist"? If not, why bother criticizing it? If so, who are they? Second of all and more important, how is Wolfowitz defining "internal affairs"? When is intervention, peaceful or otherwise, in another country's internal affairs warranted and when is it not? If no bright-line principle can be stated, what kinds of considerations should be weighed? How does Wolfowitz's approach jibe, if at all, with the well-known axiom that, from the standpoint of international law and diplomatic norms, a country's internal affairs are indeed mostly its own business? And so on.
Unfortunately, Raz did not ask most of these questions, preferring to spend time needling Wolfowitz about the Iraq war and his role in its planning. Now far be it from me to suggest that Wolfowitz does not deserve to be needled, badgered, and hounded about his role in the Iraq war. The fact that Wolfowitz's reputation has survived Iraq sufficiently unscathed to permit him to be a visiting fellow at AEI and a writer of pieces for Foreign Policy in itself is suggestive of how gross mistakes, no matter how blatant and horrible, go basically unpunished in Washington policy circles. Nonetheless, the subject of the interview was supposed to be the "realist" doctrine of non-interference in internal affairs -- actually less a "realist" doctrine than, as I've already indicated, a basic principle of international law -- and it would have been nice if Raz had pressed more on this subject. He could have conducted just as tough an interview if he had asked fewer questions about Iraq and more about what Wolfowitz came to talk about, since it's a subject that people have been debating forever. Toward the end Raz started to ask some pointed, relevant questions but by then it was too late. This was not one of Nat'l Public Radio's finer moments, IMHO.
But wait!, I hear you crying. Wasn't the invasion of Iraq an extreme case of intervention in another country's internal affairs and aren't questions about Iraq therefore very relevant to the subject? Well, no. The very fact that it was such an extreme case means that it's not especially useful as a point of interrogation -- in this context.
P.s. James Fallows links to the unedited, longer version of the interview. I'm not sure I'm going to listen to this 37-minute version (indeed, I'm almost certainly not going to), but I'm providing this link as a service to this blog's hordes of readers.
In a review of Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, William Easterly criticizes what he calls "the new aid imperialism," i.e., "the willingness to combine foreign military intervention with traditional aid work" in developing countries ("Foreign Aid Goes Military!" The New York Review of Books, 12/4/08).
Easterly notes, among other things, that the "share of U.S. foreign aid distributed by the Pentagon increased from 6 percent in 2002 to 22 percent in 2005." What Easterly does not note, however, is that the overall amount of U.S. foreign aid increased from 2002 to 2005, so the Pentagon was distributing 22 percent of an expanded pie, not a shrinking one, which thus still left more in absolute terms for civilian agencies, such as the Millennium Challenge Corp. and AID, to distribute. Nonetheless, it's true that the line between military activity and foreign aid, as far as the U.S. is concerned, has been blurring in recent years.
Is this a good or a bad thing? Easterly thinks it's bad, and he does have a case to make. In using a review of Collier's book to make it, however, he runs into some difficulties. I'll mention a couple of them.
1) The basic argument of Collier's book, according to Easterly, is that the poorest countries in the world "are trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, civil war, military coups, looting of natural resources, and failed states. They need outside rescue by the rich nations." Easterly questions this argument on several grounds, accusing Collier's book of failing adequately to distinguish correlation from causation and of engaging in selection bias. Among other things, Easterly notes that poor countries have experienced "growth reversals...in both directions."
"Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, and Zimbabwe had good growth between 1960 and 1980, before falling prey to economic decline -- brought on by political disasters and other factors -- from 1980 to the present. Conversely, Bangladesh, India, Uganda and Vietnam [my emphasis] had mediocre to negative growth between 1960 and 1980, before registering impressive growth from 1980 to the present. If there is so much movement into and out of success and failure, it is hard to argue looking forward that the Bottom Billion are trapped in failure."
Vietnam? Why do you suppose Vietnam might have had "mediocre to negative growth between 1960 and 1980"? Might it have had something to do with the facts that virtually the entire able-bodied adult male population, at least of N. Vietnam, was mobilized for military service, and that the U.S., from 1965 to the early 1970s, dropped more bombs on N. Vietnam than were dropped during the entirety of World War II? These count as extraordinary circumstances that give the case of Vietnam no probative weight at all, in my opinion, on the point Easterly is adducing it to support.
2) Easterly writes:
"...[B]oth statistical exercises and case study analysis give ambiguous direction on military intervention [for humanitarian or ostensibly humanitarian ends]. I think the moral of the story is that, as tragic as poverty and violence are, social science does not have much to offer as a guide to using military force to stop them. This is not so surprising: why should social scientists have any strategic expertise on whether a contingent of foreign or international troops will pacify a country easily (Sierra Leone) or with great difficulty, or not at all (Somalia)? It is regrettable if social science is used to give spurious cover to military intervention."
Easterly is right to strike a note of caution, I think, but he may go a bit too far in dismissing social-scientific expertise: surely there are scholarly experts on Sierra Leone and Somalia who might have provided insights about the relative likelihood or unlikelihood of successful intervention in the two countries.
In making his case, Easterly himself draws on social science, namely the research of political scientist Alan Kuperman, who has written about "the moral hazard" of humanitarian intervention. In Easterly's words, Kuperman "argues that the hope of international intervention may embolden rebels to undertake military action that will inevitably catch many civilians in the crossfire between the rebels and the government before the interveners arrive. This is exactly what happened with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose members admitted in interviews with Kuperman that their violence against Serbs starting in 1997 was motivated by hopes of foreign intervention." (Although Easterly does not give a footnote citation to an article by Kuperman, I assume he is drawing on Kuperman's "The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans," International Studies Quarterly 52:1, March 2008, pp.49-80. Full disclosure: I have not read the article, only the abstract.)
Political judgments about whether, when and how to intervene in humanitarian crises such as genocide or ethnic cleansing must be recognized as political and not masquerade as purely scientific, neutral decisions: on this point Easterly is unquestionably correct. But in his concern to reveal the weaknesses of what he takes to be unduly optimistic and pro-intervention standpoints, Easterly may be in danger of condemning, by implication if not explicitly, all social-scientific efforts to understand the consequences of intervention and the possible conditions of its success or failure. Careful case studies backed up, where appropriate, by statistical analysis that does not claim too much for itself may still have a role to play in helping politicians reach defensible, intelligent, and practical judgments on these matters.
But you can read the Easterly piece for yourself (see link above) and reach your own conclusions.
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