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Starting Wars for the Rights of Man

There is a New York Times article today that covers that “odd couple” of Sarkozy and Obama in Libya. For the most part, it’s not a bad analysis of the roles of the two politicians in the attack on Libya, but there was one sentence that read like an especially crude bit of propaganda: The […]

There is a New York Times article today that covers that “odd couple” of Sarkozy and Obama in Libya. For the most part, it’s not a bad analysis of the roles of the two politicians in the attack on Libya, but there was one sentence that read like an especially crude bit of propaganda:

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen offers a persuasive case for protecting Benghazi.

No, it doesn’t. No matter which version one reads, French declarations of rights have no more to say about the appropriate role of foreign governments in another country’s internal conflict than the American Declaration of Independence or Bills of Rights does. One can find justifications for what the anti-Gaddafi rebels are doing in these texts, but they have nothing to say about justifying armed intervention on behalf of rebels elsewhere or intervening to prevent another government from putting down a rebellion. These declarations don’t make the case for protecting Benghazi (or any other endangered foreign population), because they are concerned with entirely different questions.

At most, such declarations encourage the belief that armed insurrection against a government can be a desirable and laudable thing under certain circumstances. They lead people who believe that universal rights exist to sympathize with insurrections, and as a result universalists pick up the bad habit of endowing any and all armed uprisings with political virtues that they associate with their own revolutions. The argument for starting a war for humanitarian reasons when such an insurrection is on the verge of failure requires a lot more than a belief in universal rights, which is why skepticism about such a war extends far beyond those who reject universalism.

The article ends with a forced, stupid question:

Could it be, then, that French fries deserve to be called “freedom fries” after all?

No! This isn’t because the French hate freedom, as some of the temporarily anti-French supporters of invading Iraq claimed, but because it was always ridiculous to change the customary name of something to suit the ideological obsessions of the moment. Today the ideological obsession has changed, and the French are now supposedly idealistic and heroic. In 2002-03, the French government’s motives were perceived as utterly cynical and corrupt when it argued against starting a war. It is now taken at its word when it invokes human rights in order to start a war. If the French government happens to be willing to launch unprovoked attacks on Libyan conscripts and kill people who have done nothing to France, that doesn’t mean that French foreign policy has suddenly become idealistic. Then again, if we measure idealism by a willingness to kill foreigners that have done us no harm, we desperately need a different sort of idealism.

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