Iraq has wrecked our case for humanitarian wars
The US neo-cons have broken the Kosovo liberal intervention
consensus
Talk about it
David Clark
Tuesday August 12,
2003
The
Guardian
At a superficial level, the
split in the British left over Iraq reflects a long-standing divide between
those who, in certain circumstances, are prepared to regard war as a legitimate
instrument of policy and those who have often come close to opposing it in
principle. With rare exceptions, the latter group has always formed the
minority, and on this reading the current row will peter out, leaving the Labour
party largely unaffected.
In fact, something altogether more serious has occurred. For the
first time, a significant section of the mainstream left has been forced into
open defiance of its leadership over a decision to go to war. Many of these,
typified by the resigning ministers Robin Cook and John Denham, were committed
humanitarian interventionists who had supported the war in Kosovo. Pitted
against them were many of their former allies, using many of the arguments they
had developed together. It is the split within this camp that threatens to have
the most enduring consequences.
Before September 11, there was substantial agreement between
them about the principles that ought to underpin a progressive foreign policy.
There was consensus on the need to move beyond narrow realism by accepting wider
humanitarian obligations as part of a responsible global citizenship. There was
a belief that it was time to act on the promises contained in the universal
declaration of human rights. And there was a willingness to use military force,
in extremis, to achieve these objectives.
Moving from rhetoric to reality would have radical implications
for the state system as it had been historically conceived. If individuals as
well as states had rights in international law there could be no place for the
absolute inviolability of state sovereignty as a bar to the enforcement of those
rights. What had been invented as a means of protecting weak states from the
predatory interventions of stronger rivals had instead become a licence for
despotic governments to brutalise and oppress their citizens with impunity.
The disintegration of Yugoslavia into state-sponsored ethnic
violence during the 1990s acted as a spur to this debate and convinced most of
the mainstream left of the need for a new doctrine of humanitarian intervention
to prevent the large-scale abuse of human rights. But the machinery of the
international community proved unequal to the task. By the time the "ethnic
cleansing" had spread to Kosovo, the call for action in the security council had
run up against an immovable Russian veto. The intervention that followed
therefore took place without formal authorisation.
The rights and wrongs of this have been hotly debated, but the
interventionists were at one in maintaining that the values of the UN charter
should be upheld even if it meant bypassing its institutions, and they were
right to do so. Those who opposed them indulged in a form of procedural
fetishism by which a discredited veto system was considered more important than
the prevention of crimes against humanity. They also relied on a static
interpretation of international law that ignored its tendency to evolve in
accordance with custom and practice.
The international system must be capable of adapting in
situations where those seeking to act against the worst human rights violators
find themselves unreasonably constrained by the existing rules of diplomacy.
That does not mean that humanitarianism should be allowed to degenerate into a
free-for-all of subjective judgements backed by the principle of raison d'état .
There is a need for what the Canadian-sponsored international commission on
intervention and state sovereignty (ICISS) has called "threshold and
precautionary criteria" to impose limits on the right to intervene.
It is here that the humanitarian interventionists divided over
Iraq. Those who supported the war often cited the ICISS report, The
Responsibility to Protect, in their defence, but their case failed even to
approximate the criteria it sets out. The requirements of "just cause" and "last
resort" demand large-scale human suffering that cannot be averted by other
means. The Iraqi regime was certainly vile, and had the case for intervention
been made when Saddam Hussein was gassing his own people it would have been a
strong one indeed. But there was no immediate crisis to be averted in 2003.
The criterion of "right authority" requires, in the absence of a
UN mandate, an overwhelming degree of international support. The coalition that
invaded Iraq didn't even amount to the "quasi-totality" of Nato.
But it is, perhaps, the stipulation of "right intention" that
the pro-war interventionists have been most reckless in discarding, not because
their own motives were questionable, but because of their alliance with US
neo-conservatism. The neo-conservative approach to military intervention was set
out with admirable clarity by Paul Wolfowitz in his infamous 1992 defence policy
guidance paper: "While the US cannot become the world's 'policeman', by assuming
responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the pre-eminent
responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only
our interests, but those of our allies or friends..."
The gap here could scarcely be wider. Humanitarian
interventionists aspire to a world order based on the universal and
disinterested pursuit of justice. Neo-conservatives are motivated by the
selective and self-interested pursuit of their own geopolitical goals. This
rapaciously ideological project starts from the proposition that the American
social and economic mode represents the ideal form to which all other forms must
ultimately comply. In what the neo-cons call this "distinctly American
internationalism", US national interests and the interests of humanity are
indivisible. It remains to be seen what happens when this assumption collides
with the reality of an Iraq determined to make choices that conflict with the
White House.
As long as US power remains in the hands of the Republican
right, it will be impossible to build a consensus on the left behind the idea
that it can be a power for good. Those who continue to insist that it can, risk
discrediting the concept of humanitarian intervention and thereby render
impossible the task of mobilising the international community to act in the
future. Indeed, the backlash has already started. At last month's conference on
progressive governance, the assembled leaders rejected the section of Blair's
draft communique supporting the principle that the responsibility to protect
trumps state sovereignty.
The problem is this: the interventionists who supported the Iraq
war want those of us who didn't to believe that George Bush is a "useful idiot"
in the realisation of Blair's humanitarian global vision. We can only see truth
in the opposite conclusion.
· David Clark is a former Foreign Office special
adviser.
