Nonhuman intervention

Human Rights Watch, a highly-respected human rights organization, includes among its beliefs support for the principle of "humanitarian intervention," that is, using military forces to intervene in a crisis for humanitarian reasons. In the last few years, it has twice advocated such intervention, in Rwanda and Bosnia. It has also expressed approval of the international peacekeeping forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, and Cote d'Ivoire.

It's against that background that HRW examined the US invasion of Iraq to see if recent White House claims that it was "humanitarian" stand up to scrutiny.

In a report issued last week, the group concluded, not surprisingly - at least it shouldn't be surprising - that they do not.

HRW set one main and five underlying factors involved in justifying humanitarian intervention. First,

humanitarian intervention that occurs without the consent of the relevant government can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life. ...

[B]cause of the substantial risks inherent in the use of military force, humanitarian intervention should be exceptional - reserved for the most dire circumstances.

If that high threshold is met, HRW says,

we then look to five other factors to determine whether the use of military force can be characterized as humanitarian. First, military action must be the last reasonable option to halt or prevent slaughter.... Second, the intervention must be guided primarily by a humanitarian purpose.... Third, every effort should be made to ensure that the means used to intervene themselves respect international human rights and humanitarian law.... Fourth, it must be reasonably likely that military action will do more good than harm.... Finally, we prefer endorsement of humanitarian intervention by the U.N. Security Council or other bodies with significant multilateral authority.

Their conclusion is that with the possible exception that it might have been reasonable to believe before the war the Iraqis would be better off afterwards, not one of those criteria was met, most importantly the main one.

The "humanitarian war" claim is just another lie. In fact, the report deals with that (albeit it very indirectly) in its introduction in one of the more cogent remarks of late.

Indeed, if Saddam Hussein had been overthrown and the issue of weapons of mass destruction reliably dealt with, there clearly would have been no war, even if the successor government were just as repressive.

Just another lie.

One more lie worthy of note here. In response to the report, the right wing trotted out it's usual blathering distortions, as noted by the Christian Science Monitor's Daily Update for January 27.

Radio Free Europe also cites Nile Gardner, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, as saying that HRW should be heralding Hussein's ouster. "The Iraqi people are immensely better off now that Saddam Hussein is gone, and it is quite extraordinary that a leading human-rights watchdog is claiming that this was the wrong thing for the West to do."

But who was it, the left or the right, human rights groups or neocon power-mongers, that was opposing, condemning, denouncing Saddam Hussein across the years of US and European support for his regime? Human Rights Watch, on its own behalf, notes that it's had

no illusions about Saddam Hussein's vicious inhumanity. Having devoted extensive time and effort to documenting his atrocities, we estimate that in the last twenty-five years of Ba'th Party rule the Iraqi government murdered or "disappeared" some quarter of a million Iraqis, if not more. ...

We have interviewed witnesses and survivors, exhumed mass graves, taken soil samples to demonstrate the use of chemical weapons, and combed through literally tons of Iraqi secret police documents. We have circled the globe trying to convince some government - any government - to institute legal proceedings against Iraq for genocide. No one would. In the mid-1990s, when our efforts were most intense, governments feared that charging Iraq with genocide would be too provocative - that it would undermine future commercial deals with Iraq, squander influence in the Middle East, invite terrorist retaliation, or simply cost too much money.

Who was it that rejected the realpolitik arguments for providing aid and comfort to the dictator? Who was it that was outraged when George Bush I said during the Kurdish uprising in the wake of the first Iraq war that the "no-fly" zone would not be applied to Iraq's US-supplied helicopters, clearing the way for their use in crushing that uprising - an uprising that the US encouraged? Who, the left or the right, has been the consistent opponent of Saddam's brutality?

I'll tell you this much, it sure as hell wasn't the Heritage Foundation.