An excerpt:
"...[T]he essence of the responsibility to protect is an insistence that the fate of people matters more than the sovereignty of governments. Traditionally, Evans explains, "what happened within a state's borders and its territorial possessions, however grotesque and morally indefensible, was nobody else's business." "In the history of ideas," he simply and accurately adds, "there have been few that have prevailed to more destructive effect."
4 comments:
The great British statesman, William Gladstone, could be a good metaphor here. He began his career as a Tory but wound up a liberal icon. As an anti-imperialist he worked famously for Irish Home Rule. Now the complications. He returned from semi-retirement to lead a highly publicized campaign against the Ottomans for their attrocities against Bulgarian civilians. And he railed against Disraeli's indifference. To Gladstone, Britain was morally obligated to do something. For Disraeli, it was a Turkish domestic matter. To muddle things further, Gladstone favored British diplomatic efforts to end the American Civil War through a negociated peace. The morality of self-determination seemed to trump the immorality of slavery.
Interesting article. It poses the question of whether we have a responsibility to protect citizens from the brutality of their own governments or whether all such efforts are all doomed to be just some new form of imperialism and oppression by a foreign power -- albeit with the best intentions. I think we might consider what an irate Steeler fan who accosted Willie Colon lost year at a Walmart said: "You've got to effin' PROTECT!"
(The anti-imperialist people are all, like, Bro, I'm just trying to get a loaf of bread here.)
This is such a complex matter that I can only offer something very simplistic to try to make some sense out of it. I'll take a cue from Peter "to muddle things further" with the American Civil War.
Let's say our Civl War would be fought in 25-50 years from now when the Chinese government has the largest economy and standing army in the world. How many atrocities would it take in this country before we would like the Chinese to intervene for our own good?
I agree. The problem with the article is that Richard Just fails to appreciate the practical difficulties of what he's proposing. The moral principle is clear enough: there's no morally defensible ground for the position that our concern for others should stop at national borders. For anyone who's given the matter half a thought, the notion that "charity begins at home" is mostly nonsense.
But once you get past the moral theory, things begin to break down. People are rarely going to believe you when you tell them that you are invading their country for their own good and not out of any national interest of your own. So, even the best intentions will be suspect. Not only that, but you actually weaken the side that you are intervening for because they will be seen as complicit in some foreign conspiracy. Obama made a very conscious decision not to weigh in on the side of those protesting the election in Iran because he didn't want to discredit the opposition.
And, if you look at the history of "humanitarian" interventions, it doesn't look pretty. Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan all had in part the humanitarian goal of ridding the population of a tyrant. And despite the fact that the US spends more for its military than the rest of the world combined, these efforts were hardly glowing successes.
I'm not saying that we rule out trying to protect populations from their own government, but we ought to think long and hard about it before taking action. Perhaps the only time the stars were aligned to permit this sort of thing to work was the NATO bombing of Bosnia and Kosovo in 1995 and 1999. Even these actions have received plenty of criticism as unnecessary and too costly in terms of civilian deaths, but they did seem to end Serb massacres of civilian populations.
In his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, McNamara lays out 11 lessons to be learned from Vietnam. Nos. 9 and 11 are particularly apt here:
9. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgement of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
11. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
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