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.

Intervene with Caution
By Ian Williams

Three years ago, U. N. Secretary General Kofi Annan asked, "If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica -- to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?" It was a good question. A year ago the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty tried to answer Annan's question. The commission's report, "A Responsibility to Protect," described intervention as self-evidently dangerous and susceptible to abuse, and went on to lay down strict "precautionary principles" to prevent perversion of the concept.

Anticipating such dangerous precedents as Iraq, the Canadian report concludes:

Military intervention for human protection purposes is an exceptional and extraordinary measure. To be warranted, there must be serious and irreparable harm occurring to human beings, or imminently likely to occur … large scale loss of life, [or] ethnic cleansing.

There were indeed grounds for such intervention in Iraq in the '80s, but at that time the United States and United Kingdom were supporting the Iraqi regime.

In the recent Iraq war, by contrast, one of the worst misdeeds that George W. Bush committed, in collaboration with Tony Blair, was to bring humanitarian intervention into disrepute. By invoking Saddam Hussein's tyranny as a pretext for attacking Iraq, as he did in his speech to the United Nations last September, the President reached fairly spectacular depths of hypocrisy, since it was his country, his party and indeed his father who had supported Saddam when he was perpetrating these crimes.

Sadly however, many so-called leftists have shown a similar lack of principle. Their answer to Annan's question is to deny that Rwanda or Srebrenica happened, or to justify them, or, more chillingly, to argue that such atrocities are the price that has to be paid to maintain the principle of (U. S.) nonintervention. It is difficult to understand why any genuine socialist would defend, especially on principle, the inalienable sovereignty of Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot or Slobodan Milosevic, since that would have required them to defend the Argentinean and Chilean juntas, and, indeed, the Apartheid-era leaders of South Africa. Surely a left or internationalist response to events such as those in Rwanda, East Timor, or currently in the Congo should be to demand more timely intervention, not to deny the principle. However, the part of the political spectrum that used to preach proletarian internationalism and the impending demise of the bourgeois nation state is now all too often the most resolute defender of national sovereignty, no matter how objectionable the rulers of a country may be.

Today, Cuba preaches the doctrine of national sovereignty to cover its executions and its imprisonment of dissidents, but its practice in Africa and Latin America was somewhat different. Che Guevara was killed while engaged in some deeply serious interference in the internal affairs of Bolivia, for which he had Havana's direct support.

There are indeed serious grounds to worry about the prospects of world peace if any nation were to claim an inalienable right to intervention. But until George W. Bush recently got dangerously close to espousing that concept, no one did. Even so, we should not let the President's misappropriation of humanitarian intervention alienate the concept from its natural owners, the left.

Let's consider the origins of humanitarian intervention. Historically, international law has been based upon the premise that what countries did to their own citizens, inside their own borders, was no one else's business. And until very recently, if you were a head of state, you were deemed to have total impunity for any crimes committed in your name. On the face of it, this cannot be a good thing -- unless you are a head of state with murderous tendencies.

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