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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (21257)	6/29/2003 1:35:18 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 89467

I think Bush raised twenty million at a luncheon in Burlingame CA this past week...It cost taxpayers 1.5 million to get him there...hmm. since he went there to benefit himself, he should use some of those funds to pay back the govt....if things were fair...

To: American Spirit who wrote (21257)	6/29/2003 1:36:37 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

"The war in Iraq was neither legal nor legitimate."Mary Kaldor If we believe in the equality of human beings, then we also favor the extension of a rule-governed society to the global arena and, in particular, the extension of cosmopolitan law--that is to say, international law that applies to individuals. I am in favor of humanitarian intervention if it is understood as cosmopolitan law enforcement. But humanitarian intervention, understood in this way, is quite different from war. Individual governments cannot take the law into their own hands, any more than individual citizens can unilaterally decide when the law is violated. There has to be an agreed set of criteria to determine when a humanitarian intervention is appropriate, and there has to be an agreed procedure for determining whether those criteria apply. Moreover, means are as important as goals. Humanitarian intervention is about preventing humanitarian catastrophe. The aim is not victory over another collectivity but the protection of ordinary people and the arrest of those criminals responsible for the catastrophe. Thus humanitarian intervention is like policing, even though it requires the use of military force. War is about taking sides, and the lives of soldiers on one side are privileged over the lives of civilians on the other side. In humanitarian intervention, the soldier, like a policeman or firefighter, risks his or her life to save the lives of civilians. What would it mean to have had a true humanitarian intervention in Iraq? First of all, it would have meant taking seriously those provisions in the 1991 Security Council resolutions that referred to human rights by, for example, sending human rights monitors as well as weapons inspectors. Second, it might have been necessary to deploy troops on the border to put pressure on the Iraqi regime to comply with the resolution, but the potential task of those troops would not have been invasion and regime change; it would have been to protect civilians in the event that the government decided to crush an uprising, as happened, for example, in 1991. One argument often made against some people protesting that the Iraq war was illegal is that they favored the Kosovo war even though there was no Security Council resolution and even though the means--bombing--were more like war than humanitarian intervention, and Western lives were privileged over the lives of the people NATO forces were supposed to be helping. I supported the war in Kosovo, although I was unhappy with the means. I favored a humanitarian intervention of the type described above, with troops on the ground to protect civilians. Later, I was a member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, chaired by Richard Goldstone. That commission concluded that the Kosovo intervention was illegal, because there was no Security Council resolution, but legitimate because it resolved a humanitarian crisis and had widespread support within the international community and civil society. The commission went on to argue that a gap between legality and legitimacy is very dangerous and needs to be removed by specifying conditions for humanitarian intervention. Unfortunately, this was not done, which allowed those who favored the war in Iraq to claim a humanitarian justification along with all those other fast-changing justifications about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. The war in Iraq was neither legal nor legitimate. It did not meet the conditions for humanitarian intervention, and it did not command support either among civil society or the international community. To confuse pre-emptive war with humanitarian intervention, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair does, is a recipe for more violence and for global polarization. Mary Kaldor, school professor at the London School of Economics, is the author of Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Blackwell). thenation.com