Humanitarian Intervention: A Forum (Page 11)

Ramesh Thakur

The traditional "humanitarian intervention" debate focuses more on the intervening state than on the urgent needs of the putative beneficiary of the action. To redress this imbalance, the independent International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) came up with the notion of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). R2P refocuses the international searchlight on the nation-state's duty to protect its people from murder, rape, starvation and exile. The duty to intervene is activated when a particular state is either unwilling or unable to fulfill its responsibility to protect its people, or is itself the perpetrator of crimes or atrocities, or where populations living outside a particular state are directly threatened by actions taking place there.

ICISS identified just two threshold cases where the atrocities are so grave as to require international intervention: large-scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing, whether actually occurring or imminent (but not retroactive). And it argued that all military interventions must be subject to four precautionary principles: right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects. Iraq is unlikely to have passed all four of those tests.

Under R2P principles, only the UN, preferably the Security Council, can authorize the use of military force in the name of the international community. The task therefore is not to evade or circumvent the Council but to make sure that it works better, that it too is held accountable for its responsibility to protect.

In the months before the war on Iraq, the people of the world found the US case for war wanting and put their faith in the UN, affirming the centrality and relevance of the world body. But were not the scenes of joy and jubilation in Iraq at the fall of Saddam Hussein an embarrassing indictment of the UN's failure to support the war? Not really. The course and outcome of the war were a strong vindication of the UN. The big story of this war was the lack of proof that Saddam Hussein possessed usable weapons of mass destruction and the fact that he did not pose an imminent threat to regional, US or world security of an urgency and gravity that required instant war to topple him. The UN inspectors could indeed have been given more time and personnel to complete their job.

Moreover, the speed of the victory by the "coalition" vindicates those opponents of the war who argued that Saddam had been so weakened since 1991 that he was not a threat to anyone outside Iraq. To credit the lightning victory to brilliant coalition generalship rather than basic Iraqi weakness is a triumph of spin over substance.

Thus the euphoria in Iraq following Saddam's defeat does not damn the UN's failure to authorize war--unless of course the coalition governments are prepared to admit that their real goal all along was regime change. But that would mean that for six months they engaged in an elaborate charade at the UN in claiming that the issue was the threat posed by Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

The ouster of Saddam flowed from strategic, not ethical, calculations of foreign policy. The liberation of Iraqis is a collateral benefit amid the carnage of destruction to the agreed principles and established institutions of world order. It is difficult to be joyous at the descent from the ideal of a world based on the rule of law to that of the law of the jungle. One can see why the lion would welcome such a change. But how many others are ready to accept the doctrine that the Administration of the day in Washington decides who is to be which country's leader, and who is to be toppled?

Ramesh Thakur, vice rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo and one of the commissioners of ICISS, contributed this as a personal comment. Go to www.iciss-ciise.gc.ca for the full report.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.