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Humanitarian Crises and Intervention

A Nato source said not only would there be no decision on a no-fly zone by the notoriously slow-moving organisation, but it was unlikely there would be a joint communique either. Gaddafi, in spite of outrageous acts against his own people, had not done enough to trigger intervention under international law, the source admitted. ~The […]

A Nato source said not only would there be no decision on a no-fly zone by the notoriously slow-moving organisation, but it was unlikely there would be a joint communique either. Gaddafi, in spite of outrageous acts against his own people, had not done enough to trigger intervention under international law, the source admitted. ~The Guardian

It’s interesting that this is being admitted publicly, since it completely undermines the rationale for international intervention. Much of the discussion of intervention has concerned the practical problems or political opposition that would be encountered along the way, but aside from the hawks who believe that international law is a minor inconvenience most proposals have taken for granted that the Security Council ought to authorize an intervention. This report tells us is that the Council wouldn’t have a legal basis for authorizing such action at the present time.

David Bosco wrote a post Monday that touches on this question, which gets to the heart of the arguments to intervene for humanitarian reasons or because of a “responsibility to protect”:

Given the ubiquity of the phrase, it’s notable how little discussion there has been of the actual scale of the killing. Most estimates of the death toll run between 1,000 and 3,000. There is no doubt that security forces killed several hundred in the early days of the crisis. However, recent reporting suggests relatively low casualties from combat, and what combat there is appears mostly to have occurred between armed groups. If there have been large-scale attacks on civilians as the crisis has evolved, they have remained well hidden [bold mine-DL]. The fighting and the broader political crisis have clearly prompted large population movements, which carry their own perils. But is the suffering in Libya remotely comparable to that in other recent humanitarian crises?

Nobody has an incentive to be parsimonious in their phraseology. Politically, the drumbeat on the suffering in Libya helps to delegitimize the Gadaffi regime, which almost all major players now want to see gone. UN aid agencies are mounting a $160 million appeal for further funds based on the crisis. And after the last several decade’s dramatic bloodletting in Rwanda, the Balkans, and Darfur, nobody wants to be caught minimizing what has happened. The Libyan regime has clearly committed serious crimes and no doubt is capable of much worse. If warning loudly about an impending human catastrophe can help avert one, why be picky about language?

The danger of thinking of the crisis almost exclusively in humanitarian terms is two-fold. First, this perspective could generate pressure for outside action that is ill-conveived and unsustainable. As the international experience in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 demonstrated, intervening to avert humanitarian crisis–but without a clear political or military goal–can be disastrous. Perversely, military action designed around humanitarian need can be less effective in addressing those needs than intervention designed to achieve a decisive military victory. More broadly, a profligate use of the term “humanitarian crisis” may devalue the concept, making it hard for the public to distinguish between a situation in which hundreds of thousands are at risk and less grave, but still serious, episodes.

For those genuinely interested in promoting the “responsibility to protect” as a principle, there is a significant danger of crisis fatigue and an appropriate wariness of claims that “we must do something” about this or that conflict. Interventionists are always so eager, impatient, and insistent that Western governments take action right now. They desperately grab for any pretext or justification they can find to support getting involved in another country’s conflict, and as a result they repeatedly err on the side of exaggerating the crisis in order to make an immediate response seem more necessary.

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