Hi Bruce. Your article states that, "Some people like to draw a sharp distinction between interventions for the sake of promoting human rights within a country and interventions to prevent security threats to other countries, and say that only the former are legitimate grounds for the violation of sovereignty. THIS DISTINCTION IS QUESTIONABLE BECAUSE IT PRESUMES THAT SELF_DEFENSE IS SOMEHOW LESS LEGITIMATE THAN THE DEFENSE OF OTHERS...."
I believe that statement makes too little of an important distinction. In self defense the issues are clear and well understood in the world. Is the threatening nation an imminent threat to the invading or attacking nation? That requires both present intent and the means to cause serious harm.
The guidelines for the use of force to "protect" those within a sovereign nation, in contrast, have never been clearly defined in the international community. It's true that there are some examples that are so egregious that no one would dispute the need for the WORLD to act, however, in cases like those that existed in Iraq, the issue is less clear.
You say, "This then is the theoretical basis for our violation of Saddam's Iraq."
Note first that in Iraq we did not ask the United Nations to vote for the use of force to "protect Iraqi citizens from Iraqi abuse." I wonder whether you think the nations of the world would have gotten on board based on this rationale for invading? I think it's clear we would have been laughed out of the U.N. meeting if we'd tried that tact. Iraq was simply not one of those cases where it was clear that the world had a duty to intervene for humanitarian purposes.
Secondly, note that we did not tell Hussein; "Stop killing your people or we'll be forced to use military force to overthrow your government and establish one that we like better." I wonder why that never occurred to us as a way of diplomatically "solving" that supposedly terrible humanitarian crisis?
As a final point, why do you think the world generally opposed our use of deadly force to invade and occupy Iraq? Could it have been because we hadn't really explored, much less exhausted, our diplomatic remedies, could it have been because they saw it as a power grab for oil as the true underlying reason, could it be because they thought, rightly, that Iraq posed no threat in the region and certainly not to the U.S., could it be because they saw no international law basis for the invasion, or could it be because they knew that a worse "failed state" was the likely ultimate outcome of our invasion? Likely it was a combination of the above, and it turns out that our "friends" who refused to stamp their approval on our actions were a lot more "right" than we were.
So while we can struggle to find some legitimate basis for our violation of the forming rules of nations, the fact is that there is no defensible basis for our actions except one; might makes right. To the extent we've now undermined the U.N. and established that principle, (or is it non-principle,) we'll pay some price in the future as the power of nations ebbs and flows.
The better question is why you struggle so hard to try to find a supportable basis for what we're doing in Iraq? Why not just admit that it was, at best, a bad mistake, and at worst a deliberate power grab in violation of recognized international rules of sovereignty? |
