Humanitarian Intervention: Two Views

By John R. MacArthur and Ian Williams, In These Times. Posted August 4, 2003.

Editor's note: In this two part series, Ian Williams argues that progressives should not allow Bush's misappropriation of humanitarian intervention to force them to abandon a principle that is both moral and urgently required. John R. MacArthur counters that liberals have long been lobbying for interventions that would override international law.

Against Liberal Intervention
By John R. MacArthur

During the early phase of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, I came across a scathing critique of the war in a suprising locale, written by the unlikeliest (or so I thought) accuser of the Bush-Blair axis of imperialism.

The publication was Conrad Black's militantly right-wing, pro-war British weekly, The Spectator, and the author was named Hitchens—not the putatively "leftist" one named Christopher, but his supposedly "reactionary" brother, Peter.

In its high rhetorical pitch the essay was pure Hitchens, regardless of given name. But there was no confusing the brothers after the first paragraph. Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to Peter Hitchens, was a "left-wing war," a destructive enterprise that provided "the excuse for censorship, organized lying, regulation, and taxation," a "paradise for the busybody and the narc" that "damages family life and wounds the Church, all the while polluting the minds of millions with scenes of horror and death."

Remarkable, especially coming after my old ally C. Hitchens' celebrated defection from the leftish, anti-American peace camp to the bipartisan war party. But a left-wing war? Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al. in the same ideological basket as Eugene Debs, William Sloane Coffin, and Michael Moore?

At first glance, Peter Hitchens' thesis was preposterous—the application of raw, unilateral military power (and the subsequent war profiteering by big business) seems a rather authoritarian idea more in keeping with the brutal dogma of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan than with nice liberal notions of international cooperation, humanitarian aid, and peaceful disarmament. But on closer examination I realized that Peter Hitchens was on to something, for if you think that namby-pamby niceness is all the liberal left has been pushing the last two decades, you haven't been paying attention.

Indeed, liberals have been lobbying since the early '80s for more aggressive "humanitarian" interventions that would override the niceties of international law, the sovereignty of nations, and even U.N. peacekeeping efforts. To the extent that the Bush-Blair doctrine of pre-emptive war encompasses human rights and the "right" to overthrow tyrants, this one was very much a "left-wing" war.

Of course, I don't buy George Bush's human rights rationale for Gulf War II any more than I bought his father's epiphany in 1990 that Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler. Too many murderous American clients, including Saddam, have gone in and out of favor since 1898 (the year we "liberated" Cuba from Spain) for me to take seriously the altruistic prattle emanating from this White House.

But a surprising number of liberals did take Bush at his word (as they had his father) whenever he turned misty-eyed about Baathist atrocities (real and fabricated), as well as the urgent need for "liberating" the Iraqi people. Behind their dovish compassion lay a ferocious streak of Wilsonian hawkishness that had first presented itself during the Bosnia crisis in the early '90s.

It was then that human rights hawks adopted the principle of "liberal intervention" laid down in the '80s by two Paris-based intellectuals, the international law professor Mario Bettati and the physician-activist Bernard Kouchner. Eventually, as Ian Buruma recently wrote in the New York Review of Books, the rhetorical grandstanding by Kouchner—"the day will come ... when we are able to say ... ‘Mr. Dictator, we are going to stop you preventively from oppressing, torturing and exterminating your ethnic minorities'"—took hold and nice liberals started sounding like nasty, pre-emptive militarists.

I recall a hair-raising speech by the currency speculator-turned-human-rights-promoter George Soros, in which he argued for creation of a U.N. rapid deployment military force that could intervene anywhere in the world on a moment's notice to prevent the powerful from killing the weak—by killing the powerful. Around the same time, it became fashionable on the left (especially in the neighborhood inhabited by Susan Sontag and David Reiff) to denounce the U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia for not being sufficiently anti-Serb, the Serbs being ultra-nationalist "fascists." At a human rights group board meeting I heard a well-known U.S. television journalist actually refer to the blue-helmeted soldiers in Sarajevo as "capos in a concentration camp," who functioned as oppressors, not protectors, of the noble Bosnians.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »