The Fallacy
of ‘Humanitarian’ War
The new excuse for U.S. imperial wars is
“humanitarian” or “liberal” interventionism with
Hillary Clinton and other proponents citing noble
motives for destroying foreign societies, as ex-CIA
official Graham E. Fuller discusses.
By Graham E. Fuller
March 21, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Consortium
News"-
Rajan
Menon’s new book, The Conceit of Humanitarian
Intervention, launches a timely argument
against a dominant argument lying behind so much of
modern American foreign policy — “humanitarian
intervention” or “liberal interventionism.”
We are, of
course, well familiar with Republican and neocon
readiness to go to war, but the reality is that many
Democrat Party leaders have been no less seduced
into a series of optional foreign military
interventions, with increasingly disastrous
consequences. Former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton is today one of the leading exponents of the
idea, but so are many of the advisors around
President Barack Obama.
Menon
offers powerful argumentation skewering the concept
of “humanitarian intervention,” demonstrating how it
operates often as little more than a subtler form of
an imperial agenda. Naked imperial ambitions tend to
be recognizable for what they are. But when those
global ambitions are cloaked in the liberal language
of our “right to protect” oppressed peoples, prevent
humanitarian outrages, stop genocide, and to topple
noxious dictators, then the true motives behind such
operations become harder to recognize.
What
humanitarian could object to such lofty goals? Yet
the seductive character of these “liberal
interventionist” policies end up serving — indeed
camouflaging — a broad range of military objectives
that rarely help and often harm the ostensible
objects of our intervention.
Professor
Rajan Menon brings a considerable variety of skills
to bear in this brief and lucid book. Despite his
first-class academic credentials in the field, he
also writes in clear and persuasive language for the
concerned general reader. Second, Menon is no
theoretician: he has worked closely with policy
circles for many years and understands the players
and operations as well as anyone outside government.
In
rejecting the premise of “liberal interventionism,”
Menon is not exercising some hard-minded, bloodless
vision of policy — quite the opposite. He is deeply
concerned for the wellbeing of peoples and societies
abroad — who are often among the primary victims of
such liberal interventionism. He argues not as an
isolationist but rather as an observer who has
watched so many seemingly well-minded interventions
turn into horror stories for the citizens involved.
From a
humanitarian point of view, can the deaths of half a
million Iraqis and the dislocation of a million or
so more be considered to have contributed to the
wellbeing of “liberated Iraq?” As former Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright once said, she regretted
the death of 500,000 Iraqi children who, in Saddam’s
Iraq, had been deprived of medicines under a long
U.S. embargo, but, she concluded, “it was worth it.”
One wonders to whom it was worth it? Where is the
humanitarian vision behind such a comment?
Libya too
has been transformed from an unpleasant but
quiescent dictatorship under Muammar Gaddafi into a
nightmare of raging militias, civil war, anarchy and
a breeding ground of ISIS and al-Qa’ida. Afghanistan
is still mired in conflict. So Menon is arguing not
for a hardening of hearts, but for questioning the
real-world outcomes of such seemingly
“well-intentioned” wars.
Ultimately
the case for “humanitarian intervention” is
justified by the quest for international justice,
protection of civilians, and the broadening of
democratization and human rights. The U.S. has
regularly invoked these principles in justifying its
ongoing — indeed nonstop — wars over the past
several decades.
Yet the sad
reality is that the selective nature of
U.S. interventions raises serious questions about
the true motivation behind invoking such “universal”
values. U.S. calls for “democratization” more often
operate as punishment to its enemies (“regime
change”) but rarely as a gift to be bestowed upon
friends (“friendly dictators.”)
Menon
argues, buttressing his case with striking examples
from around the world, that such selective
implementation of “universal values” by a global
(imperial) power ends up tarnishing and diminishing
the very values they are meant to promote; as a
result they create broad cynicism around the world
among those who perceive them as mere instruments of
aggressive U.S. global power projection.
Yet when
many genuine humanitarian crises do burst forth, as
in Rwanda or in the ongoing agonies of the Congo
(five million dead and counting) Washington
has opted not to intervene because it did not
perceive its immediate national interests to be
threatened.
In short,
the selective and opportunistic character of liberal
interventionism ends up giving a bad name to
liberalism. And it cruelly deceives many in the West
who seek a more “liberal” foreign policy and yet who
find that, in the end, they have only supported the
projection of greater American geopolitical power —
and usually at considerable human cost to the Iraqs,
Afghanistans, Somalias, Libyas, and Columbias of the
world.
Any reader
of the book is eventually forced to confront a
deeper question: when is war in fact “worth it”? Few
would respond “never,” but many might respond
“rarely.” Yet Menon is not arguing against war as
such, so much as forcing us to acknowledge the
faulty “liberal” foundation of our relentless quest
for enemies to destroy — in the name of making the
world a better place.
The title
of the book, The Conceit of Humanitarian
Intervention, suggests that at the very least
such policies are self-deceiving, in other cases
perhaps deliberately meant to obfuscate. Menon here
poses the question whether, for whatever motivation,
great powers can ever sufficiently master the
complexity of foreign societies to truly engineer a
better life in the countries we target for
remodeling. And whether we can afford an enterprise
that might take decades at the least.
In the end
we become aware of the unhealthy nature of combining
broad ideals married to global power. In the case of
the British Empire, and now the American, this
combination readily leads to the manipulation and
then corruption of those ideals — discrediting U.S.
prestige and credibility and damaging the lives of
those living in troubled areas.
None of
this is to say that there is never room for
international intervention in arenas of horrific
depredations against civilian populations. But it is
only when such intervention is truly international
(essentially U.N.-sanctioned and not a mere maneuver
to insert NATO into another global hotspot) that it
can it take on a measure of credibility and
international respect. Otherwise it ends up
perceived as a U.S. proxy move against Russia,
China, Iran or some other adversary.
Menon’s
book constitutes essential reading for anyone
troubled by the ugly character of so much of the
international scene these days, and yet dismayed by
its exploitation by policy-makers who cloak
invasion, power projections and military operations
in the garb of humanitarian effort.
Here is a
cogent critique of the recent decades of U.S.
foreign policy misadventures in which our military
has become the primary instrument of U.S. policy —
and justified in the name of humanitarian goals. We
rarely get to hear these arguments so clearly
presented.
Graham E. Fuller is a former senior CIA official,
author of numerous books on the Muslim World. His
latest book is
Breaking Faith: A novel of espionage and an
American’s crisis of conscience in Pakistan.
(Amazon, Kindle) grahamefuller.com
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