Humanitarian Intervention: A Forum (Page 4)

Samantha Power

Three contested aspects of "humanitarian intervention"--legal authority, threshold of abuse and relevance of motive--demand reconsideration in the wake of the Iraq war. Although the human rights framework has long been premised on the recognition that states can't be trusted, the UN Charter left the task of authorizing humanitarian intervention to those same untrustworthy states. Relying for legal authority upon the Security Council, which includes Russia and China, two notorious human rights abusers, almost guarantees inaction, even where the human stakes are colossal. On the other hand, dismissing the Security Council altogether, as the Bush Administration seems intent on doing, invites pre-emption, chaos and, in the end, probably greater bloodshed. Absent long-overdue Security Council reform, we need a fallback mechanism for legitimizing interventions, to be found perhaps in the office of the Secretary General, which is the one UN body that has the capacity to transcend state interests.

When it comes to deciding when human rights abuses have become so egregious as to warrant intervention, most people agree in principle that genocide or massive crimes against humanity constitute a worthy threshold. Yet few in practice can agree when that threshold has been crossed. President Slobodan Milosevic was responsible for some 200,000 deaths in Bosnia; yet in the case of Kosovo in 1999, because his regime had killed "only" 3,000 and expelled 100,000 Kosovars at the time war was being considered, many critics of US foreign policy at home and abroad argued that NATO military force should not be employed.

Surprisingly, many of these same critics also expressed outrage at the Security Council's failure, in January 1994, to act on UN commander Romeo Dallaire's warnings about imminent extermination in Rwanda. If we are ever to prevent genocide, and not merely ritually lament it after the fact, we have to improve our capacity to imagine the costs of inaction, and to act upon evidence of direct and immediate mortal threats.

Iraq presented a ghastly challenge to humanitarian hawks. Saddam Hussein had carried out a savage genocide in 1988, killing more than 100,000 Kurds, and he was presiding over one of the cruelest tyrannies the world has known, murdering thousands more in succeeding years. Yet Saddam's cruelty did not satisfy the threshold for most of the war's opponents, either because, in opposing Bush, they chose to ignore Saddam's atrocities or because, in not trusting Bush, they believed the Iraqis, like the Afghans, would be abandoned in the end.

In assessing a humanitarian intervention, a third point of controversy involves the question of how much we should care about the motives of the intervener. Some overemphasize the relevance of motive, refusing to back any intervention that isn't "purely" humanitarian. Others downplay motive, arguing that states' true intentions are impossible to discern, and thus what really matters is humanitarian effect. Both approaches are wrong. Motives matter not because we can realistically expect them to be pure, but because knowing why a state is intervening gives us predictive power: The relative weight an intervening state gives to humanitarian concerns tells us an awful lot about the lengths to which interveners will go to spare civilian life, and the willingness of the intervener to follow through, expending the necessary political, financial and military capital to actually provide a secure environment on behalf of those in whose name a war is launched.

Once war has been waged, of course, results do matter. And in judging the long-term effects of such missions, it is important not simply to measure the humanizing and dehumanizing effects on the recipient country but also to look at those on the region, on the intervening country or countries, and on the international system as a whole.

Samantha Power, a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (Harperperennial).

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