Sunday, July 13, 2003

How do you spell humanitarian intervention? Tony Blair is appealing to the heads of Western governments to agree a new world order that would justify the war in Iraq even if Saddam Hussein's elusive weapons of mass destruction are never found. It would also give Western powers the authority to attack any other sovereign country whose ruler is judged to be inflicting unnecessary suffering on his own people. (The Independent) There may be a legitimate role for humanitarian intervention in the 21st century, but this isn't it! Where do you draw the line between humanitarian intervention and imperialism? Either Blair is using the concept as a clumsy fig leaf for his and Bush's and Condi's misstatements re WMDs and Niger forgeries, or he has morphed into a megalomaniacal saint--not unlike those religious zealots who protected society from the wages of sin by burning heretics at the stake during the inquisition. Stanley Hoffmann, in the June 12 New York Review of Books, has a better idea.   The issue of humanitarian intervention for "regime change" has now been raised, and we cannot push it back into the bottle by deliberately avoiding it. But it is not an issue the UN is likely to deal with effectively. Too many states among UN members have bloody domestic records, and they can be expected to block any proposal for a forcible collective intervention to change a regime. What would be needed would be a new, two-stage system: (1) a group of UN members would ask the Security Council to authorize collective intervention to overthrow an evil regime, one clearly responsible for atrocities; (2) if the Security Council refuses or is unable to act, an appeal would be made to a new institution: an Association of Democratic Nations that would, in addition to members of NATO, be made up of Asian, African, and Latin American liberal democracies, such as India, South Africa, and Chile, as well as Australia and New Zealand. Only liberal democracies would be admitted as members. If such an association approved a collective intervention to change a regime, it would report its reasons and its decisions to the secretary-general of the UN, and could proceed to act. Such an association of democratic nations could also provide useful advice to new democracies, and bring before the International Criminal Court or a special international court military or civilian leaders involved in crimes against humanity, war crimes, or genocide. Alas, the Bush administration cannot be expected to try to work out such a needed reform. Unilateral intervention--without the fig leaf of a concert of democratic nations-- is a recipe for blowback. 3:09:03 PM    comment []