Iraq and the Responsibility to Protect

Ramesh Thakur is Senior Vice Rector of the United Nations University, Tokyo, and a member of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty.

“Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,” but shall rather “beat their swords into ploughshares.” This is the founding premise of international security within the traditional paradigm which views security in relation to the absence of wars between countries that routinely flout the biblical injunction. National security puts the individual at the service of the state, service including the ultimate acts of killing others and being killed as and when summoned for duty by one’s government. Human security puts the individual at the centre of debate, analysis and policy. S/he is paramount; the state is but a collective instrument to protect human life and enhance human welfare. The fundamental components of human security—the security of people against threats to personal safety and life—can be put at risk by external aggression, but also by factors within a country, including “security” forces where the state is too strong and, at the other end of the spectrum, structural anarchy under conditions of state failure.

 

The reformulation of national security as human security is simple, yet has profound consequences for how we see the world, how we organise our political affairs, how we make choices in public and foreign policy, and how we relate to fellow human beings from many different countries and civilisations. It also raises fundamental questions about the responsibility we have for the security and welfare of fellow human beings across political borders. In today’s seamless world, political frontiers have become less salient both for international organisations whose rights and duties can extend beyond borders, and for states whose responsibilities within borders can be held up to international scrutiny.

 

The worst act of domestic criminal behaviour by a government is large-scale killings of its own people; the worst act of international criminal behaviour, attack and invasion of another country. The international history of the twentieth century was in part the story of a twin-track approach to tame, through a series of normative, legislative and institutional fetters, both impulses to armed criminality by states, internal and external. Together, these measures attempted to translate an increasingly internationalised human conscience and sense of community into a new normative architecture of world order. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s record of brutality was a taunting reminder of the distance yet to be traversed before we reach the first goal of eradicating domestic state criminality; his ouster and capture by unilateral force of arms was a daunting setback to the effort to outlaw and criminalise wars of choice as an instrument of state policy in international affairs.

A New Moral Compass

But what if the second failure is a response to the first, if one country is attacked and invaded in order to halt or prevent atrocities inside its sovereign territory by the “legitimate” government (which already indicates a troubling appropriation and corruption of the word “legitimate”)? For answers to this painful dilemma, read The Responsibility to Protect (R2P).¹ R2P is not an intervener’s charter, any more than the United Nations Charter is a tyrant’s charter behind which dictators can shield their acts of atrocity with impunity. Embracing the principle of human security, R2P concluded that where a population is suffering serious harm as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the government in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the norm of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect. But in order to ground international intervention in a more widely shared international morality, R2P reformulates “humanitarian intervention” as “the responsibility to protect”, and identifies the conditions under which the principle of state sovereignty yields to the international responsibility to protect.

 

The 1990s were a challenging decade for the international community, with conscience-shocking atrocities in many parts of the world. We generally failed to rise to the challenge, and the price of our failure was paid by large numbers of innocent men, women and children. The debate on intervention was ignited in the closing years of the last century by humanitarian crises such as Somalia, Rwanda, Srebrenica and East Timor, the growing acceptance of human security as an alternative framework for security policy in today’s circumstances, and the perceived inadequacy of the codified instruments and modalities for managing world order.

 

A triple policy dilemma—complicity, paralysis, or illegality—may be identified and summarised thus:

 

• To respect sovereignty all the time is to risk occasionally being complicit in humanitarian tragedies.

 

• To argue that the UN Security Council must give its consent to international intervention for humanitarian purposes is to risk policy paralysis by surrendering the agenda either to the passivity and apathy of the council as a whole, or to its most obstructive member, including any one of the five permanent members determined to use its veto.

 

• To use force without UN authorisation is to violate international law and undermine world order based on the centrality of the United Nations as the custodian of world conscience, and that of the Security Council as the guardian of world peace.

 

Under the impact of contrasting experiences in Rwanda and Kosovo, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged member states to come up with a new consensus on the competing visions of national and popular sovereignty (reflecting national and human security) and the resulting “challenge of humanitarian intervention”. Responding to the challenge, Canada’s foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy set up the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) as an independent international body to wrestle with the whole gamut of difficult and complex issues involved in the debate. The ICISS report R2P seeks to do three principal things: change the conceptual language from “humanitarian intervention” to “responsibility to protect”; pin this responsibility on state authorities at the national level and on the UN Security Council at the international level; and ensure that interventions, when they do take place, are carried out properly.

 

Because R2P is not an intervener’s charter, it does not provide a checklist against which decisions can be made with precision. Political contingencies cannot be fully anticipated in all their complexity, and in the real world, policy choices will always be made on a case-by-case basis. With that in mind, R2P seeks to identify those conscience-shocking situations where the case for international intervention is compelling, and to enhance the prospects of such interventions. In turn, this means that the circumstances have to be narrow, the bar for intervention high, and the procedural and operational safeguards tight, because the probability of international consensus is greater under conditions of due process, due authority and due diligence.

The Semantics of Intervention

“Humanitarian intervention” is what humanitarian agencies like the International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees do; they object to the phrase being appropriated and debased by states engaged in military intervention. “Humanitarian bombing” is immediately obvious as a conceptual oxymoron to everyone. Yet the discourse over NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was framed largely in the language of humanitarian intervention, when in fact that intervention consisted of three months of bombing. So if that was humanitarian intervention, then surely it must necessarily also have been humanitarian bombing?

 

It is easy to dub a war a “humanitarian intervention” and so label critics as “anti-humanitarian”. “Humanitarian intervention” conveys to most Western minds the idea that the principle underlying the intervention is not self-interested power politics but the disinterested one of protecting human life. However, it conjures up in many non-Western minds historical memories of the strong imposing their will on the weak in the name of the ideals of the day, such as the “civilising mission” of spreading Christianity, or the cultivation and promotion of human rights. The phrase “humanitarian intervention” is used to trump sovereignty with intervention at the outset of the debate: it loads the dice in favour of intervention before the argument has even begun, by labelling and delegitimising dissent as anti-humanitarian. But the ex post facto shift in justification for the war in Iraq, from Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda before the war, to liberating Iraqis from his rule afterwards, had the net effect of delegitimising “humanitarian intervention” instead of legitimising the Iraq intervention.

 

Military intervention for human protection purposes is a polite euphemism for war: the use of deadly force on a massive scale. Politics is at the core of the contested aspects of such interventions, including threshold of abuse, legal authority for the intervention, and replacement of the repressive regime with a more progressive one. For example, if law and order are to be restored, whose law and whose order will they be? The answer to this central question provides the best clue to the genuineness and degree of the transfer of sovereignty from the US occupying power to an Iraqi government in June 2004.

 

In any event, decisions on all the above issues are profoundly political in content, and they are made by political actors on the basis of political judgements and calculations. Moreover, the privileging of some crises as worthy of action over others that are not reflects the interests and perspectives of the powerful and the rich at the expense of the weak and the poor. How else do we explain the attention-surfeit syndrome with respect to Iraq alongside the attention-deficit syndrome with regard to the Democratic Republic of Congo or the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region?

 

This bias to the powerful also explains why the risk to the soldiers of the intervening, warring‑by‑choice countries is minimised by transferring the burden of danger to the civilians and soldiers of the other side. And it explains why the United States, which wields enormously destructive power well beyond its borders, refuses to permit such a global exercise of power to be accountable to world bodies like the new International Criminal Court, let alone to those who suffer its consequences. Thus, it is acceptable for six hundred Iraqis, mainly civilians, to die in attacks on Fallujah in vengeance for the killing and mutilation of four Americans. If done by Saddam Hussein, such an act would have been called mass murder, even if the provocation had been identical.

 

From this to abuse of Iraqi prisoners is not such a long step. Such deeds result from the attitude that “we” are superior beings above the law and “they” are an inferior species not deserving of its protection. The American humorist Rob Corddry of US television’s Daily Show characterised the mainstream US response to the Abu Ghraib revelations thus: “Remember, it’s not important that we did torture these people. What’s important is that we are not the kind of people who would torture these people.”² Repressive regimes can be held accountable for their internal use of force by countries that insist on exempting their own external use of force from any independent international accountability. In the case of Saddam Hussein, in order to oust a regime based solely on might, established institutions and conventions for ensuring that force is legitimately exercised were set aside by a power supremely confident of its might.

 

’Twas ever so, and perhaps ever will be. William Dalrymple, in his fascinating book on mores governing social intercourse between Europeans and Indians in the eighteenth century, quotes a French writer as to why Napoleon Bonaparte planned to invade India and how he would have been received by the natives:

 

General Bonaparte, following the footsteps of Alexander, would have entered India not as a devastating conqueror … but as a liberator. He would have expelled the English forever from India so that not one of them would have remained and … would have restored independence, peace, and happiness to Asia, Europe, and to the whole world … All the Princes in India were longing for French intervention.³

 

The above was penned by Louis Bourquien in 1923: plus ça change … They came to liberate us from our local tyrants and stayed to rule over us as benevolent despots to save our souls. In the name of moral enlightenment, they defiled our lands, plundered our resources and expanded their empires. Should they be surprised that their fine talk of humanitarian intervention translates in our historical consciousness into efforts to resurrect and perpetuate rule by foreigners so they can inculcate their superior moral values in us heathen savages? That we are suspicious of military action guided by an enduring belief that one is a virtuous power, the common refrain uniting the great European colonisers? That we should look for the ugly reality of geostrategic and commercial calculations camouflaged under the lofty rhetoric of spreading Christian humanitarianism? Should we be mute accomplices when they substitute their mythology of humanitarian intervention for our histories of colonial oppression? Do they think we do not remember, or do they simply not care?

 

Where “humanitarian intervention” raises fears of domination based on the international power hierarchy, the responsibility to protect encapsulates the element of international solidarity. It implies an evaluation of the issues from the point of view of those seeking or needing support, rather than from that of potential interveners. It refocuses the international searchlight back on the duty to protect the villager from murder, the woman from rape and the child from starvation and being orphaned.

Sovereignty as Responsibility

Intervention for human protection purposes occurs so that those condemned to die in fear may live in hope instead. It is based on the double belief that the sovereignty of a state has an accompanying responsibility, and that if the state defaults on the responsibility to protect its citizens, then the fallback responsibility to do so must be assumed and honoured by the international community. Basing its analysis on changes in the real world and evolving best practice in international behaviour, ICISS concluded that it is necessary and useful to reconceptualise sovereignty, viewing it not as an absolute term of authority but as a kind of responsibility. Crucially, R2P acknowledges that responsibility rests primarily with the state concerned. Only if the state is unable or unwilling to discharge its responsibility to protect, or is itself the oppressor of its citizens, does it become the responsibility of others to act in its place. Thus, the responsibility to protect is more of a linking concept that bridges the divide between the international community and the sovereign state, whereas the language of humanitarian intervention is inherently more confrontational.

 

The doctrine of sovereign equality and the correlative norm of non-intervention are European in origin and construct, and received the most emphatic affirmation from the newly independent developing countries (although the United States is second to none in the jealous defence of national sovereignty against international encroachments). At one level, the developing countries’ attachment to sovereignty is deeply emotional. In the age of colonialism, most Afro-Asians and Latin Americans were the victims of Western superiority in the organisation and weaponry of warfare. Most developing countries are former colonies which achieved independence on the back of protracted nationalist struggles against the major European powers. The anti-colonial impulse in their worldview survives as a powerful sentiment in the collective consciousness of the nation. The continuing scars in the collective memory of the formerly colonised countries are difficult for many Westerners to comprehend and come to terms with.

 

At another level, the commitment to sovereignty is functional. The state is the cornerstone of the international system. State sovereignty provides order, stability and predictability in international relations. It mediates relations between the strong and weak, rich and poor, former colonisers and colonised. With independence, and following the globalisation of the norm of self-determination, the principle of state sovereignty was the constitutional device used by newly decolonised countries to try to reconstitute disrupted societies and polities, and to restart arrested economic development.

 

Yet even during the Cold War, state practice registered the unwillingness of many countries—not just the major powers, but also former colonies like India and Tanzania—to give up intervention as an instrument of policy. But the many examples of intervention in actual state practice throughout the twentieth century did not lead to an abandonment of the norm of non-intervention. Often, the breaches provoked such fierce controversy and aroused so much nationalistic passion that their net effect was to reinforce, not negate, that norm.

 

R2P’s core principle is that while the state has the primary responsibility to protect its citizens, the responsibility of the broader community of states is activated when a particular state either is unwilling or unable to fulfil its responsibility to protect or is itself the perpetrator of crimes or atrocities. The foundations of the international responsibility to protect lie in obligations inherent in the concept of sovereignty; in the responsibility of the Security Council, under Article 24 of the UN Charter, for the maintenance of international peace and security; in specific legal obligations under international humanitarian law, national law, and declarations, covenants and treaties on human rights and human protection; and the developing practice of states, regional organisations and the Security Council itself. As a result of agreements they have signed voluntarily, states now accept many external obligations and much international scrutiny.

 

The UN Charter is itself an example of an international obligation voluntarily accepted by member states. On the one hand, the international community, in granting UN membership, welcomes the signatory state as a responsible member of the family of nations. On the other hand, the state itself, in signing the UN Charter, accepts the responsibilities of membership flowing from that signature. There is no transfer or dilution of state sovereignty. Rather, the United Nations is the chief agent of the system of states for exercising international authority in their name.

Doing It Right, Doing It Well

The substance of the responsibility to protect is the provision of life-supporting protection and assistance to populations at risk. The goal of intervention for human protection purposes is not to wage war on a state in order to destroy it and eliminate its statehood, but to protect victims of atrocities inside the state, to embed the protection in reconstituted institutions after the intervention, and then to withdraw all foreign troops. Thus, military intervention for human protection purposes takes away the rights flowing from the status of sovereignty, but does not in itself challenge the status as such. It is always limited to a temporary period, until the capacity of the state itself to resume its protective functions can be restored and institutionalised. It may also be confined to a particular portion of the target state’s territory where the abuses are actually occurring, rather than extend to all of it—for example, Kosovo and not all of Yugoslavia. And it may be limited also in being aimed at a particular group that is the target of abuse, rather than at all citizens.

 

The traditional terms of the humanitarian intervention debate do not adequately take into account the prevention and follow-up assistance components of external action. Action in support of the responsibility to protect necessarily involves and calls for a broad range of measures and responses in fulfilment of the accompanying duty to assist. These may include development assistance to prevent conflict from occurring, intensifying, spreading, or persisting; rebuilding support to prevent conflict from recurring; and, in extraordinary cases, military intervention to protect at-risk civilians from harm.

 

The responsibility to prevent requires addressing both the root and direct causes of internal conflict and other man-made crises putting populations at risk. The responsibility to react requires us to respond to situations of compelling human need with appropriate measures, which may include coercive steps like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme cases military intervention. The responsibility to rebuild requires us to provide, particularly after a military intervention, full assistance with recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation, addressing the causes of the harm the intervention was designed to halt or avert.

 

Far from meeting the test of having engaged in conflict prevention in Iraq prior to initiating hostilities, Britain and the United States were the most insistent on keeping in place the comprehensive UN sanctions that inflicted considerable human misery on Iraqi civilians and negated any development efforts. The basic reason for this was Saddam Hussein’s refusal to comply fully with UN demands, but the price of his intransigence was exacted from his people. Any failure now to “stay the course” in Iraq until the security situation has been stabilised and a self-sustaining and economically viable democratic system of government has been instituted will cause still further retroactive erosion of legitimacy of the war.

Precautionary Principles

Military intervention for human protection purposes is an exceptional and extraordinary measure. To be warranted, human beings must be undergoing, or be in imminent danger of, serious and irreparable harm of the following kind:

 

• Large-scale loss of life due to deliberate state action, neglect or inability to act.

 

• Large-scale ethnic cleansing, actual or apprehended, whether effected by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror, or rape.

 

On these criteria, protective intervention would have been an acceptable option in Iraq in the late 1980s. The major difficulty, of course, was that Saddam was the West’s “useful idiot” at that time, supported politically and assisted materially as a bulwark against the revolutionary regime in Iran. The responsibility to protect does not confer retroactive validation more than a decade after the atrocities were committed.

 

Looking ahead rather than to the past, it would be futile to try to anticipate every contingency and provide a uniform checklist for intervention. Rather, the decision on intervention has to be a matter of careful judgement on a case-by-case basis. Even when the just cause threshold is crossed of conscience-shocking loss of life or ethnic cleansing, intervention must be guided by the precautionary principles of right intention, last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects.

Right Intention

The primary purpose of the intervention, whatever other motives intervening states may have, must be to halt or avert human suffering, if necessary by defeating a non-compliant state or regime. Right intention is better assured with multilateral operations, clearly supported by regional opinion and the victims concerned. There was and remains confusion about the mix of US president George W. Bush’s motives for war against Iraq. They might have been personal (revenge for Saddam’s failed attempt to assassinate George Bush Sr., the unfinished agenda from Gulf War I for the many policymakers from that era who were part of the US administration in 2003); to do with oil; geopolitical (destroying Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, eliminating an allegedly major node in the international terrorist network responsible for 11 September, securing an alternative to a suddenly less reliable Saudi Arabia for a large-scale US military presence in the region, securing Israel’s eastern flank, securing Iran’s western flank for intensified pressure on the Islamic Republic, consolidating the entire energy-rich region from Central Asia to the Middle East); or they might have been military–technological (using Iraq as the testing ground for the revolutionary new doctrine of strategic pre-emption). But there is consensus that the humanitarian motive was adduced after the fact with the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or to establish credible links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden or 11 September.

Last Resort

If the first precautionary principle is not satisfied because there is no clear answer to “Why Iraq?”, the second remains problematic because of the failure to answer “Why now?”. Military intervention can only be justified when every non-military option for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the crisis has been explored, and when there are reasonable grounds for believing that lesser measures would not have succeeded. The verdict on Iraq is clear by now: all alternative options had not been exhausted, and the UN weapons inspectors under Hans Blix could and should have been given more time to complete their task.

Proportional Means

Third, the scale, duration and intensity of the planned military intervention should be the minimum necessary to secure the defined human protection objective. It is difficult to assess whether this principle was observed in the case of Iraq, since human protection was not the primary objective. But it does seem that the main war was conducted with military efficiency, civilians were never the chief target, and indeed the coalition forces have tried to minimise civilian casualties as best they can in an insecure and highly volatile environment. While this was true of the major combat phase at the start, civilians have increasingly borne the brunt of the crossfire between the belligerents in the post-war insurgency phase. With best-case estimates of ninety-eight thousand deaths excluding Fallujah, and then with the all-out assault on Fallujah in November 2004 (which drew a warning from the UN Secretary-General on the risk of civilian casualties), the equation clearly has changed.

Reasonable Prospects

And fourth, there must be a reasonable chance of success in halting or averting the suffering which has justified the intervention, with the consequences of action not likely to be worse than those of inaction. The Iraq War cannot be judged to have met this criterion. On the contrary, the continuing instability and the emergence of Iraq as a hotbed of terrorist activity as a result of the war were predicted by many analysts.

Right Authority, Due Process

As demonstrated yet again in Iraq, war is a major human tragedy that can be justified only under the most compelling circumstances regarding the provocation, the likelihood of success (bearing in mind that goals metamorphose in the crucible of war), and the consequences that may reasonably be predicted. And the burden of proof rests on the proponents of force, not on dissenters. In particular, the alternative doctrine that any one state or coalition can decide when to intervene forcibly in the internal affairs of other countries cannot be accepted, for down that path lies total chaos. The sense of moral outrage provoked by atrocities must always be tempered by an appreciation of the limits of power, a concern for international institution-building, and a sensitivity to the law of unintended consequences—of which Iraq offers but the latest example.

 

Given the enormous normative presumption against the use of deadly force to settle international quarrels, who has the right to authorise such force—on what basis, for what purpose, and subject to what safeguards and limitations? In other words, even if we agree that military intervention may sometimes be necessary and unavoidable in order to protect innocent people from life-threatening danger, key questions remain about agency, lawfulness and legitimacy.

 

R2P came down firmly on the side of the central role of the United Nations as the indispensable font of international authority and the irreplaceable forum for authorising international military action. Attempts to enforce authority can only be made by the legitimate agents of that authority. What distinguishes compliance enforced by armed criminal thugs from rule enforcement by police officers is precisely the principle of legitimacy. The chief contemporary institution for building, consolidating and exercising the authority of the international community is the United Nations. It was set up to provide the framework within which members of the international system can negotiate agreements on the rules of behaviour and the legal norms of proper conduct in order to preserve the society of states. The Iraq experience proves that it is easier to wage war without UN blessing than it is to win the peace. But victory in war is pointless without a resulting secure peace.

 

The task, therefore, is not to find alternatives to the United Nations as a source of authority, but to make it work better than it has. Thus, if the veto is the source of the Security Council’s ineffectiveness, it should be eliminated or its use curtailed. The council’s authorisation must be sought prior to any military intervention. Those calling for an intervention should formally request such authorisation, or have the Security Council raise the matter on its own initiative, or have the Secretary-General raise it under Article 99 of the UN Charter. The United Nations’ work can be supplemented by regional organisations acting within their own jurisdictions, for example the Arab League.

 

The burden of responsibility often falls on the United States and other leading countries, as a result of their having the power to make the most difference. The conceptual connecting rod that links power to authority is legitimacy. In this sense, the United Nations is the symbolic prohibition of what even major powers must not do. In the field of state–citizen relations within territorial borders, the totality of UN Charter clauses and instruments like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights restricts the authority of states to harm their own people. In the sphere of military action across borders, UN membership imposes the obligation on all powers to abjure unilateral intervention in favour of collectively authorised international intervention.

 

If the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time, alternative options are (1) consideration of the matter by the General Assembly in emergency special session under the “Uniting for Peace” procedure, and (2) action by regional organisations within their area of jurisdiction, subject to subsequent authorisation from the Security Council. In the case of Iraq, Britain and the United States tried but failed to obtain a second Security Council resolution explicitly authorising the use of military force, failed to seek and clearly would not have obtained majority support in the General Assembly, and would have been met with derision had they tried to get Arab League endorsement for war. Even the so-called coalition of the willing was extremely narrow.

 

R2P warns that the Security Council

 

should take into account in all its deliberations that, if it fails to discharge its responsibility to protect in conscience-shocking situations crying out for action, concerned states may not rule out other means to meet the gravity and urgency of that situation.⁴

 

This carries a double risk. The intervening states may not be guided by the just cause and precautionary principles identified in R2P, and so their interventions may be poorly executed, without due authority, diligence and process. Alternatively, they may intervene judiciously and well, and the people of the world may conclude that their actions were necessary, just and proper, in which case, as R2P observes, the stature and credibility of the United Nations may suffer still further erosion. Apropos Iraq, however, the opposite conclusion may now be proffered: that the United Nations’ refusal to authorise war on Iraq in 2003 has been fully vindicated and has restored the organisation’s authority and credibility. Had UN authorisation been given, it would have conferred the veneer of legality on the war but made the organisation complicit in an illegitimate assault on a sovereign member state.

Regulating Intervention

In sum, Iraq fails the test of a responsibility to protect–type intervention. Yet, paradoxically, it highlights the urgency of international endorsement for this principle. The United Nations is dedicated to peace but is not a pacifist organisation. The entire seventh chapter of the UN Charter focuses on the coercive instruments of statecraft against wilful transgressors of world order. Sometimes war will be necessary to meet and defeat the challenge from international outlaws. The responsibility to protect rests on the premise that one such context for the legitimate use of armed force is large-scale atrocities inside sovereign territory, necessitating the interposition of international military contingents between victims and perpetrators. But the resolve to wage war will weaken if force is used recklessly, unwisely and prematurely. Ill-considered rhetoric of “pre-emptive strikes” and of Iraq being an example of “humanitarian intervention” risks draining support from the responsibility to protect rather than adding to the legitimacy of such enterprises.

 

The world is changing, and changing fast, all around us. Calls for “humanitarian intervention” could arise from any one or more of potential flashpoints; carnage could be triggered by any combination of contingencies. The continuing tragedies of Liberia, Burundi, Sudan and the Congo, and potential tragedy in Burma, come readily to mind. Human nature is fallible, leaders can be weak and corruptible, and states can be frail and vulnerable to multiple and complex humanitarian crises. Our ability to act beyond our borders, even in some of the most distant spots in the world, has increased tremendously. This has produced a corresponding increase in demands and expectations that something be done.

 

An analogy with medicine is appropriate. Rapid advances in medical technology have greatly expanded the range, accuracy and number of available medical interventions. With enhanced capacity and increased tools have come more choices that have to be made, often with accompanying philosophical, ethical, political and legal dilemmas. The idea of simply standing by and letting nature take its course has become less and less acceptable, to the point where in many countries today parents can be held criminally culpable for refusing all available treatment for their children.

 

Similarly, calls for military intervention are made. Living in a fantasy world is a luxury we cannot afford. In the real world today, the brutal truth is that our choice is not between intervention and non-intervention. It is between intervention that is ad hoc or rules-based, unilateral or multilateral, consensual or deeply divisive. If we are going to get any sort of consensus in advance of crises requiring urgent responses, including military intervention, the R2P principles point the way forward.

 

To interveners, R2P offers the prospect of more effective results. For any international enforcement action to be efficient, it must be legitimate; for it to be legitimate, it must be in conformity with international law; for it to conform to international law, it must not be inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations. To potential targets of intervention, R2P offers the option and comfort of a rules-based system, instead of one based solely on might. The challenge is neither to deny the reality of intervention nor to denounce it, but to manage it for the better, so that human security is consolidated, the international system is strengthened, and the lot of all of us is improved, with our common humanity not diminished but enhanced.

Endnotes

1. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001).

 

2. Quoted by Eric Alterman, “Hawks Eating Crow”, Nation, 7 June 2004, p. 10.

 

3. Cited in William Dalrymple, The White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (New Delhi: Viking, 2002), pp. 147–8. In the event, Napoleon never got beyond Egypt.

 

4. ICISS, Responsibility to Protect, p. xiii.