Humanitarian intervention and the Iraq Syndrome

Fairness and Accuracy in Media's (FAIR) Extra! for Jan/Feb 2008 includes an article by Julie Hollar on The Humanitarian Temptation: Calling for war to bring peace to Darfur.

I hope that American political culture will experience a major "Iraq Syndrome" in which the public and Congress will scrutinize US involvement in wars more closely, skeptically and realistically than what occurred with the Iraq War.

Hollar's article is a reminder that even wars for legitimate purposes, such as an international intervention to halt genocide, can go badly wrong. We're seeing right now in Iraq and Afghanistan that American military power has definite limits, more constricting limits than most Americans would like to believe exist.

Resolving a bitter civil war is not easy for outsiders to accomplish. It may require a broad range of counterinsurgency operations, all of which risk turning a humanitarian intervention into a nationalist war against the intervening power(s). Language skills are also a critical factor. So is religion. In the case of Darfur and the Sudan, it may be difficult for many Sudanese and for Muslims in other countries to look at an intervention on the part of armies from Christian or Buddhist or Hindu nations against an Arab Muslim regime as motivated by entirely benign purposes.

It's also the case that the Dick Cheneys and Richard Perles of the world will always find "humanitarian" glosses for their cynical and militaristic foreign policies. After all, the often savage acts of nineteenth century imperial powers was crowned with the rhetoric of civilizing supposedly lesser peoples, e.g., the "white man's burden".

And military forcies large enough and well-trained enough to credible undertake a humanitarian intervention in a hostile, difficult, "non-permissive" environment is also a military that the Dick Cheneys and Richard Perles can use for their own truly dark purposes.

And war is war. It's about killing the enemy. Whatever the legitimacy of the war aims, the notion of "humanitarian war", as Helena Cobban has observed, is a hideous oxymoron. She writes in The myth of 'humanitarian' war 07/15/04 at her Just World News blog:

But trying to claim that any war can be 'humanitarian' is fundamentally dishonest. No war is 'humanitarian', ever. War sucks. War kills people; and by design it is a blatant attack on their most basic human rights--their rights to life, to physical security, to the pre-conditions of material and mental wellbeing. To pretend that any war serves 'humanitarian' aims is fundamentally to ignore those most evident facts about war--facts that too many Americans seem to have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew them.

Interlude for a seldom-pondered fact here. Almost no governments have ever launched military adventures far from their own borders without citing 'humanitarian' war aims... Nearly all the distant imperial conquests undertaken by European powers in past centuries were cloaked in great clouds of 'humanitarian' rhetoric... Perhaps this is connected to the fact that no government ever invites its people to mobilize for an 'unjust' or even 'unjustified' war? Every government, after all, likes to present itself as good, not greedy, overbearing, and grasping. (emphasis in original)

In Crimes of War 2.0 (2007), former humanitarian hawk turned skeptic David Rieff co-authors the article on "Humanitarian Intervention" with Anthony Dworkin. Referring to the often-cited Rwandan genocide as one of his examples, they write:

In practice, humanitarian intervention has often served as a justification for States to act in conflicts where there is no domestic support for more straightforward political interventions. The public in North America and western Europe has, for all the talk of compassion fatigue, proved remarkably sympathetic to the use of force to avert of bring to an end a humanitarian disaster. On the other hand, humanitarian intervention has also been a justification for other political motivations. In Rwanda, in 1994, it was commonly assumed that the French humanitarian intervention dubbed Operation Turquoise used the humanitarian imperative as a cover for France's decision to continue to try to influence events in the Great Lakes region of Africa with military force and, more specifically, to save the French-supported, but genocidal, government. And, historically, many of the imperial campaigns launched by the European colonial powers in the nineteenth century were justified on humanitarian grounds. (my emphasis)

They conclude by observing:

After the American invasion of Iraq, the morality and practical efficacy of armed intervention seem more problematical to many people than they did previously, and the rich world's appetite for humantiarian intervention appears at least temporarily to have wanted. However, the continuing victimization of civilians in internal conflicts such as Darfur means the use of military power for humanitarian purposes is likely to retain an enduring appeal, even in these chastened times.

Hollar's article on various media appeals for armed intervention in Darfur observes:

A “humanitarian intervention,” as benevolent as it may try to sound, at its core means non-consensual military action against a foreign country—war under the banner of humanitarianism. The remarkable thing about nearly all of these media calls for intervention is that, beyond the appeals to urgency and morality, virtually no effort is made to explain exactly why or how one should believe that aggressive military action is what will bring peace to Darfur; readers, apparently, are to take that as self-evident. “If the United Nations is not willing to intervene,” the St. Petersburg Times asked (7/27/04), “how can it be taken seriously as a force for peace and humanitarianism?”

The equation of intervention with peace and humanitarianism is particularly remarkable in the wake of Iraq. Despite the [Sacramento] Bee’s declaration that “nothing” is more globally urgent than rescuing the people of Darfur, Iraq is unquestionably a much larger humanitarian crisis. Best estimates put the death toll in Iraq at over a million. (See page 22.) According the UNCHR, 4.4 million Iraqis are currently refugees or internally displaced, despite widespread media attention on a relative handful of Iraqis returning home.

The "liberation" of the Kurds and Shiites from a genocidal dictator was from the beginning presented as a key justification for the Iraq War, increasingly so as the WMD argument lost all credibility with the public. Even now, calls for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq are based primarily on claims that a pullout will “result” in a humanitarian crisis - as if one were not already well underway. (my emphasis)

Hollar also has some important observations about the experience of the Kosovo War, something on which I hope to post more soon.

I've written before about the distinctions that Steven Metz of the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute makes among various types of situations that may involved the US in counterinsurgency and the kind of careful realism that is required in evaluating those cases. He presents some of those arguments in the Winter 2007-08 issue of the Army War College journal Parameters, New Challenges and Old Concepts: Understanding 21st Century Insurgency. His distinctions are also relevant to humanitarian interventions, which are likely to involve some sort of counterinsurgency/anti-guerrilla operations, especially if "regime change" is one of the goals of the intervention. He sees three major categories of such cases:

Rather than a “one size fits all” American strategy for counterinsurgencies, the United States should recognize three distinct insurgency environments, each demanding a different response:

• A functioning and responsible government with some degree of legitimacy in a nation with significant US national interests or traditional ties can be rescued by foreign internal defense (El Salvador model).

• There is no functioning or legitimate government but there is a broad international and regional consensus favoring the creation of a neo-trusteeship until systemic reengineering is complete. In such instances, the United States should provide military, economic, and political support as part of a multinational force operating under the auspices of the United Nations.

• There is no functioning and legitimate government and no international or regional consensus for the formation of a neo-trusteeship. In such cases, the United States should pursue containment of the conflict through the support of regional states and, in cooperation with friendly states and allies, creating humanitarian “safe zones” within the region of the conflict.

And his concluding observation on counterinsurgencies are also relevant to humanitarian interventions:

Perhaps we need to transcend the idea that insurgency is simply a variant of conventional war and amenable to the same strategic concepts. Such a conceptual and strategic readjustment will not come easily. It will be hard to simply contain an insurgency and possibly witness the ensuing humanitarian costs when no salvageable government or multinational consensus exists that is capable of reengineering the failed social, political, or economic system. It will be particularly difficult to conform to the notion of serving as mediators or honest-brokers rather than as active allies or supporters of a regime. But to not do so — to confront new security problems with old ideas and strategies — is a recipe for disaster. (my emphasis)

Elaborating the same idea in the body of the article, Metz makes the important observation reminding us that the risk of protracted conflict a problem in itself:

Such actions suggest that the US military and broader defense community need a very different way of thinking about and undertaking counterinsurgency strategies and operations. At the strategic level, the risk to the United States is not that insurgents will “win” in the traditional sense, gain control of their country, or change it from an American ally to an enemy. The greater likelihood is that complex internal conflicts, especially ones involving an insurgency, will generate other adverse effects: the destabilization of regions; reduced access to resources and markets; the blossoming of transnational crime; humanitarian disasters; and transnational terrorism. Given these possibilities, the US goal should not automatically be the direct defeat of the insurgents by the established regime (which often is impossible, particularly when a partner regime is only half-heartedly committed), but, rather, the rapid resolution of the conflict. A quick and sustainable outcome which integrates most of the insurgents into the national power structure is less damaging to US national interests than a protracted conflict that may lead to the total destruction of the insurgent base. Protracted conflict, not insurgent victory, is the threat. (my emphasis)

That threat can be just as real in a humanitarian intervention as it is in a Cheneyist intervention.

Tags: anthony dworkin, darfur, david rieff, helena cobban, humanitarian intervention, humanitarian war