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August 15, 2005
I've been off-line since Thursday. I've spent the last few days cruising the Eden Valley in South Australia checking out the riesling and other wines. Hence the lack of posting. I've just got back to Canberra and to dial-up internet access, which is better than nothing.
I would like to post these paragraphs from this review article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books because they raise uncomfortable questions. Ones that I'm struggling to answer in relation to an international system governed by the rule of law and backed by military force to ensure global order in a world of individual sovereign States. Judt says:
Those of us who opposed America's invasion of Iraq from the outset can take no comfort from its catastrophic consequences. On the contrary: we should now be asking ourselves some decidedly uncomfortable questions. The first concerns the propriety of "preventive" military intervention. If the Iraq war is wrong—--"the wrong war at the wrong time"---why, then, was the 1999 US-led war on Serbia right? That war, after all, also lacked the imprimatur of UN Security Council approval. It too was an unauthorized and uninvited attack on a sovereign state---undertaken on "preventive" grounds---that caused many civilian casualties and aroused bitter resentment against the Americans who carried it out."
That puts the issue clearly doesn't it. It is an issue I've tended to let slide, probably because I do not know why there is a difference.I do know that it is not a clear cut choice between imperialism or barbarism.
Judt continues:
The apparent difference---and the reason so many of us cheered when the US and its allies went into Kosovo---was that Slobodan Milosevic had begun a campaign against the Albanian majority of Serbia's Kosovo province that had all the hallmarks of a prelude to genocide. So not only was the US on the right side but it was intervening in real time---its actions might actually prevent a major crime. With the shameful memory of Bosnia and Rwanda in the very recent past, the likely consequences of inaction seemed obvious and far outweighed the risks of intervention. Today the Bush administration---lacking "weapons of mass destruction" to justify its rush to arms---offers "bringing freedom to Iraq" almost as an afterthought. But saving the Kosovar Albanians was what the 1999 war was all about from the start.
Yep, I go along with that even though it is an intervention within sovereign states. But then Judt undercuts my comfort zone:
And yet it isn't so simple. Saddam Hussein (like Milosevic) was a standing threat to many of his subjects: not just in the days when he was massacring Kurds and Shiites while we stood by and watched, but to the very end. Those of us who favor humanitarian interventions in principle---not because they flatter our good intentions but because they do good or prevent ill---could not coherently be sorry to see Saddam overthrown. Those of us who object to the unilateral exercise of raw power should recall that ten years ago we would have been delighted to see someone--anyone---intervene unilaterally to save the Rwandan Tutsis. And those of us who, correctly in my view, point to the perverse consequences of even the best---intentioned meddling in other countries' affairs have not always applied that insight in cases where we longed to see the meddling begin.
He's right. Isn't he? I would give East Timor as another example of humanitarian intervention to prevent terror.
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I may differ from some others in how I analyze this, but...
If I thought that the Bush administration (which, sadly, is my government) were seriously concerned and motivated to prevent atrocities in Iraq, and had a credible plan for doing so, I would have inclined towards supporting the effort. (Though in such situations the burden for "credible plan" is tremendously high--it's hard to tell if the Serbia case met it--the law of unintended consequences is a bastard.) Sovereignty means little to me--national borders are morally arbitrary.
But that was never the motivation or the paln. And that hasn't been the effect. (We may have, at best, traded off some atrocities for others.) We knew that the war was an excuse to get control of oil, give lucrative contracts to particular firms, and serve as pretext for the elimination of domestic civil liberties. More, it fit in with an agenda of fundamentalist Christianity that seeks the elimination of Islam (and plays to American race prejudice more generally).
We knew it was a sham from the start. Thus the opposition.
--Brian