I’d just like to comment, on behalf of my own party, The Militant Rationalists: “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” and “Bring me the head of John Humphrys on a stick!” before linking you to this news item.
By the way, can anyone see anything a little inappropriate about Michael Howard (Jewish) accusing Tony Blair (conspicuously Anglo-Catholic) of being part of a “cabal” of ministers planning war on Iraq? Surely he’s confused his religious/ethnic slurs? Tony Blair is part of an inquisition that put David Kelly to the stake. For God’s sake Michael, get it right. (While we’re at it, what about George Bush (Methodist) being part of a “crusade” to destroy Islam?)
Now that this ridiculous side show is over, getting back to the issue of why we went to war. Seeing as the audience includes a ‘militant rationalist’, I won’t insult your intelligence by talking about WMDs. The only thing left is this idea of a humanitarian intervention. Human Rights Watch recently put out a report on this very issue in reference to Iraq. It’s a very interesting piece that lays down some criteria for what constitutes a humanitarian intervention. And this comes from a human rights organisation that has a record for being the least averse to humanitarian intervention. You can read the report at:
http://hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm#_Toc58744952
I haven’t forgotten about the Nigeria thing, I’ll get back to you on that 😐
[UPDATE added 19:55 29Jan04: The following is a rambly reply I wrote while waking up from a bad dream. You could read it for historical interest, but you’re better off skipping to Claire’s which is much better.]
(In case people get the wrong idea, I am not manning PooterGeek at 5 o’clock in the morning. I am posting at this ungodly hour because I have just woken up from a nightmare in which I was being chased up a tree by a family of psycho killers: mother [“you don’t have a silver badge like the others”], father and daughter. The family that kills together stays together, that’s what I say. Look at the Wests.)
Anyway. Yes, this is indeed a real debate, Wiqqi. I agree that the question of when and where to intervene in “sovereign” states is one of the real ones we should be discussing. (The history and nature of statehood is also a real matter for discussion too, and one we have debated constructively in the past.)
My problem with the Human Rights Watch (HRW) article starts about paragraph 2. Funnily enough, in my nerdy way, I was going back through old issues of The Economist yesterday evening and reading about the issue of retrospective UN justification of military actions on foreign soil. In a piece on this subject, the pro-war Economist questioned the idea that the French were the real obstacle to UN agreement over action in Iraq and points out that Kofi Annan was prescient in his predictions of the effects the American and British “diplomacy” would affect the general legitimacy and effectiveness of UN. The Economist also deals with the issue of retrospective UN justification and implies that there is not much difference between accepting the occupying forces and approving other aspects of the Coalition adventure in Iraq.
The HRW piece naughtily elides the distinction between those recent interventions where approval was given in advance and those where it was given after the fact. I have other objections to what, in many ways, is one of the more thoughtful and serious writings I have read about this question:
1.HRW’s requirement that a humanitarian motivation be paramount in intervention is unrealistic, if well-intentioned.
2. Over and over again, people choose to ignore the fact that we were still legally at war with Iraq when we went to war with Iraq. That war was fully approved by the UN, the mandate given by the UN to the the Coalition forces was still in effect and the conditions of its termination were fully approved by the UN. Few disagreed that Saddam’s regime was in breach of those conditions and had been so for over ten years.
3. The requirement for imminence of genocide can rarely be met and is frequently in direct conflict with the requirement for minimizing casualties. We can win wars like this with so few civilian casualties because of our ability to bring overwhelming force to bear. HRW cannot have its cake and eat it, especially not retrospectively.
4. HRW’s suggestion that we should have attempted criminal proceedings against Saddam and his regime (while he was still in power) in preference to removing him is so silly I can’t believe I’m wasting my time typing out my objection to it, especially in the light of our recent efforts to take the mildest legal action against the long-retired professional torturer General Pinochet.
There are some excellent points made in the article about poor post-war planning, but there is so much carping about what can be described (with admitted coldness) as the “messiness” of the conflict itself that I have to, on balance, disagree with it. At least I can disagree with it and respect its author’s arguments, however, which is more than I can say about most anti-war reflections.
Thanks for posting the link.
Now, from the psycho-killers of Baghdad back to the psycho-killers of Acacia Avenue.
[I reserve the right to revise any part of the above when I am fully conscious.]
Funny, someone just baited me with the HRW report yesterday, so my response is already on tap:
“Such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter. They shouldn’t be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past.”
Why? Whose rule is this? There are at least two good arguments for removing genocidal monsters whose atrocities are “in the past.” First, if they’ve done it once, they’re apt to do it again. At the time of his trial, Ted Bundy’s crimes were “in the past.” Hey! Let’s make him into the Dean of an all-girls college! Saddam Hussein tended to have outbursts of genocidal mania on a fairly regular basis, followed by several-year cooling off periods — the cooling off periods corresponding neatly with moments when a given population was no longer a threat to the regime, inasmuch as there was no one left to kill. Left alone he’d doubtless have upped the pace of the killing again. Why? Cause he liked it. Second, removing these genocidal monsters demonstrates to other genocidal monsters that unpleasant consequences do ensue from committing genocide. Genocidal monsters should never rest, should be hunted down like dogs — this just seems axiomatic to me. Should we stop hunting Nazi war criminals because all that unpleasantness is “in the past?” Should we have left Tojo in power because his crimes were “in the past?”
“Although Saddam was responsible for massacres, especially of the Kurds in 1988 and of Shia Muslims in 1991, Human Rights Watch said the killing had “ebbed” by the time of the invasion last year.”
Oh, bullshit. The killing was continuing at a brisk clip. Of course, it’s difficult to get credible and decisive information about the state of Iraq prior to the invasion — the regime didn’t exactly advertise its crimes; it prohibited the establishment of independent human rights organizations and refused to allow visits of human rights monitors. But we have a pretty good idea of what was going on based on defector and refugee reports and, of course, what we’re now discovering. At the very least we know this: The list of offenses legally requiring a mandatory death penalty in Iraq grew substantially in the years prior to the invasion, including anything that could be characterized as “sabotaging the national economy” — forgery, smuggling, etc. Membership in opposition political parties was punishable by death. By all credible accounts the nation was shot through with a pervasive fear of death for any act or expression of dissent. There were recurrent reports of the use of the death penalty for such offenses as “insulting” Saddam Hussein or the Ba’th Party. The regime continued to execute anyone thought to be involved in plotting against Saddam Hussein or the Ba’th Party, Defector reports indicate that civilians were murdered en masse “at random” on suspicion of conspiracy and buried in a mass grave near Baghdad as recently as January and February of last year. The regime continued to eliminate prominent Shi’a clerics and their followers: Opposition groups and defectors provided detailed accounts of this, including the names of thousands of people killed. Summary prison executions were carried out by the thousands to reduce prison overcrowding. This is well-documented. If the killing had “ebbed,” it was a matter of “ebbing” from “unfathomable” to “unspeakable.”
“Mr Roth said: “We know summary executions occurred in Iraq up to the end of Saddam’s rule, as did other brutality. These should be met with diplomatic and economic pressure, and prosecution.”
First sentence: Gross understatement. Second sentence: What does he think 12 years of sanctions, enforcement of no-fly zones, frantic maneuvering in the UN were, if not diplomatic and economic pressure? These strategies did nothing to achieve our goals, although they starved a great many innocent Iraqis to death.
“But before _ war, mass slaughter should be taking place or imminent. That was not the case in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in March 2003.”
Again, first sentence: Who says? And second sentence: False.
“In the report and in a speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Mr Roth expressed fear that the war in Iraq could taint future calls for humanitarian intervention.”
Why? Evidence? Argument? Logic? If anything, the successful prosecution of the war should have the opposite effect.
“Another Human Rights Watch criterion was whether war would make life better for the population being invaded. While life was better for Iraqis today, he said “the jury is still out” on whether life was going to be significantly better for Iraq’s people than it had been under Saddam.”
By definition, yes, of course it’s still out. The jury’s still out about any event that will take place in the future. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence, however, suggests that life in Iraq will be much, much better for Iraqis with Saddam gone. In many places, it already is.