Humanitarian Intervention: A Forum (Page 10)

Stephen Holmes

The foremost foreign aim of Bush's national security team, in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, has been to re-establish America's damaged reputation for invincibility and to demonstrate the fatal consequences of challenging US power. But voters would not have backed a son et lumière invasion of Iraq staged largely to exhibit a don't-mess-with-Texas supremacy. To garner the public support it needed, the Administration had to concoct and market a self-defense rationale, namely, that Iraq was on the verge of a clandestine handoff of WMDs to Al Qaeda and therefore posed an imminent threat to America and Americans.

But if fear of mass-casualty terrorism is the opium of the masses, humanitarian intervention plays a similar role for liberals. The Administration has artfully mobilized disgust at Saddam's sickening atrocities to silence liberal critics of an intervention that had patently nonhumanitarian objectives. (Tom Friedman's recent column in the New York Times, presenting mass graves in Iraq as a retroactive casus belli, is a case in point.) So how should we be thinking about humanitarian intervention today, after having seen how easy it was for the Administration to steal the liberal agenda, packaging reckless bellicosity as liberation of the oppressed?

First of all, liberals cannot simply ignore the hostile takeover and go on preaching humanitarian intervention with moralistic rhetoric designed to shame doubters into silence. Yes, evil exists. But by treating the war against evil as the noblest aim of international politics, liberals have implicitly licensed our government, when dealing with distant and politically closed societies, to throw evidentiary doubts to the winds and unleash lethal force on the basis of hearsay testimony and circumstantial evidence. The call for humanitarian intervention to remove appallingly cruel regimes legitimizes recourse to otherwise forbidden means. Confidence in our good intentions excuses tunnel vision and a cavalier attitude toward downstream consequences. And single-minded focus on unspeakable atrocities encourages the United States to announce promises that cannot be politically sustained, given domestic political constraints, including the promise to manage the aftermath of interventions in the best interests of ordinary citizens in countries we invade.

Approval by the UN Security Council, moreover, cannot magically transform the war against evil into a legitimate rationale for military intervention. The very hope suggests the bankruptcy of the left, as if we can oppose this Administration's dangerous adventurism only by embracing patently obsolete and ineffective institutions. After all, American unilateralism is to some extent the bitter fruit of dysfunctional multilateralism, the EU's as well as the UN's. Rather than clinging to the dying past, the left should be redefining the liberal international agenda. What we need is applied humanitarianism, without moral posturing. Above all, we should be shouting from the rooftops that the Administration's unidimensionally military response to 9/11 has rendered America less safe, making it more difficult to deal with the two basic threats to our national security, namely proliferation and terrorism. Proliferation can be slowed only by treaty-based security systems, and terrorism can be managed only by international police cooperation, supplemented by policies designed to discredit extremist violence among ordinary citizens, especially in politically unstable Muslim countries. Liberal internationalism should focus on these problems, while also undertaking major initiatives in other areas, such as combating the HIV plague and reducing the domestic subsidies that damage struggling Third World economies.

Opportunistic manipulation of liberal sympathy for the oppressed has tongue-tied potential critics of Bush's foreign policy. But an honorable commitment to humanitarian intervention should not mesmerize the rest of us into supporting a duplicitous Administration bent on erasing the chastening memory of Vietnam, reawakening the latent messianic ambitions of Americans and disguising how hard it is to maintain public oversight of secretive military operations abroad.

Stephen Holmes teaches at the New York University School of Law.

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