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To: portage who wrote (21259)	6/29/2003 1:33:01 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 89467

Humanitarian Intervention: A Forum "It seems clear that the Bush Administration is uninterested in the pursuit of humanitarian goals for their own sake." Richard Falk The war in Iraq raised some difficult questions for many thoughtful Americans. Even if Saddam Hussein's regime posed no threat to our security or to the security of its neighbors, couldn't the war be justified on humanitarian grounds, as necessary to free the Iraqi people from a particularly odious dictatorship? And don't we, as a general principle, have a moral obligation to come to the rescue of people living under brutal regimes? Yet in expanding the notion of humanitarian intervention, is there not a danger of creating a rationale for a new form of American imperialism? And in any case, what right does the United States--or for that matter any nation--have to determine when and where to intervene? To promote a more informed debate about the emerging doctrine of humanitarian intervention, we asked twelve leading thinkers from around the world to offer their views on these important questions. --The Editors Richard Falk The 1990s were undoubtedly the golden age of humanitarian diplomacy. The cold war was over, opening political space for an array of international issues associated with acute human suffering, especially in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and the Balkans. "The CNN factor" finally pushed a reluctant George Bush Sr. to make moves to protect the Kurds in northern Iraq from the vengeful violence of Baghdad in the aftermath of the Gulf War and, later, to rescue a starving Somali population caught in a maelstrom of internal armed struggle and political anarchy. Bill Clinton arrived at the White House advocating a "muscular multilateralism" that was determined to restore governance in Somalia and put an end to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. But after the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" incident in Mogadishu, in which eighteen American soldiers (and hundreds of Somalis) were killed, the US government all but abandoned humanitarian intervention, even using its leverage to prevent the United Nations from making an effective response in Rwanda, where it might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. The UN role in Bosnia was kept unacceptably passive, culminating in the 1995 Serbian massacre of some 7,000 Muslim males in the supposed UN "safe haven" of Srebrenica. These events were too much for the conscience of the world to bear, giving rise to a role for NATO in Bosnia, Washington's coercive diplomacy that hammered out the Dayton agreement and the NATO effort that successfully rescued the Albanian Kosovars from the menace of Serbian ethnic cleansing. Bush Jr. came to the White House determined to resist this trend, arguing against "nation building" and generally skeptical of the entire humanitarian agenda, opposing any connection with the International Criminal Court and seeking to minimize the relevance of the UN. After September 11, the American approach to humanitarian intervention morphed into post hoc rationalizations for uses of force otherwise difficult to reconcile with international law. The new dynamic was first evident in the aftermath of the Afghanistan war, when the victory claims of Washington subtly shifted from the destruction of Al Qaeda to the liberation of the Afghan people from the brutalities of Taliban rule. But in Iraq this dynamic has reached an extreme, virtually ignoring the pre-war rationale stressing an Iraqi threat while playing up the postwar justification of the liberation of the Iraqi people. There is no doubt that the Iraqi people have been liberated, although for what remains obscure. I believe the Bush Administration has been doing its best to wreck world order as it had been evolving, and that part of the wreckage is the abandonment of legal restraints on the use of international force, the heart and soul of the UN Charter. The Iraq war epitomized this process. The world needs the international will and capabilities to rescue vulnerable populations from impending humanitarian catastrophes, but it doesn't need imperial wars that hide their true character in the fog of a moralizing rhetoric. As long as US foreign policy is run from a Bush White House, the best chance for humanitarian intervention to fulfill its potential is for the US government to get out of the way, as it has seemed to be doing in relation to the genocidal events in Congo, allowing France to take the major responsibility. Not only is this beneficial for the people in tragic circumstances, but it may be healthy for the UN to become less dependent on the United States. It seems clear that the Bush Administration is uninterested in the pursuit of humanitarian goals for their own sake. As the Iraq war demonstrated, to proclaim such goals as a cover for imperial objectives is dangerous for world order and undermines international law and the UN, while at best achieving humanitarian results as an accidental byproduct. Richard Falk, a visiting professor at the University of California, is the author of The Great Terror War (Olive Branch). www.thenation.com

To: portage who wrote (21259)	6/29/2003 4:14:14 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Iraq's resistance war was planned ___________________________ Jason Burke, Baghdad Sunday June 29, 2003 The Observer The bodies of two missing American soldiers were found yesterday as news emerged that a growing campaign of Iraqi resistance to coalition occupation may have been planned before the war began. Allied officials now believe that a document recently found in Iraq detailing an 'emergency plan' for looting and sabotage in the wake of an invasion is probably authentic. It was prepared by the Iraqi intelligence service in January and marked 'top secret'. It outlined 11 kinds of sabotage, including burning government offices, cutting power and communication lines and attacking water purification plants. What gives the document particular credence is that it appears to match exactly the growing chaos and large number of guerrilla attacks on coalition soldiers, oil facilities and power plants. At least 61 US troops have died in Iraq since major combat was declared to be over on 1 May, including at least 23 in attacks. The latest death came on Friday when a soldier was killed in an ambush, and another shot in the neck and critically injured. Grenades were thrown at a US convoy as it passed through the Thawra area, a poor, mainly Shia Muslim part of the capital that had been largely free of anti-American violence. US officials dismiss their casualties as 'militarily insignificant' and point out that there are 55,000 US troops in Baghdad. But the repeated attacks damage the forces' image of invulnerability and lead to harsher security measures that risk alienating swaths of the population. A series of major operations involving hundreds of arrests have apparently failed to quell the unrest, much of which is believed to be committed by criminals hired by wealthy former Baath Party officials. Some attacks are also sponsored, security offi cials believe, by hardline religious groups. It is not known who was behind Friday's attack although the prime suspects are Sunni Muslims from the west of Baghdad, where resistance to the US has so far been strongest. It is possible that they chose to attack Americans in a Shia Muslim area to bolster the impression that Iraq's majority Shia population, who have hitherto been relatively supportive of the occupying forces, are joining the fight against the coalition. The spiral of violence has also hit British troops after six military policeman were killed and eight other soldiers injured in the southern Iraqi town of Majar Kabir. Yesterday UK troops returned to the village where the men were killed after dropping leaflets promising that there would be no 'mass punishment'. Military officials insisted they were not offering an amnesty to those who were responsible for the killings. 'The priority is to win back the hearts and minds of the people,' an Army spokesman said. 'But by doing that one of the benefits will be that hope fully we will be able to catch the people responsible. There is certainly no amnesty.' There is still no explanation of why the RMP detachment was not assisted by the substantial British forces near by when it was surrounded by an angry mob. Sources within the RMP in the UK told The Observer they suspected that the detachment may have been short of ammunition. One soldier recently returned from Iraq said that a shortage had led to ammunition being taken from military policemen to give to frontline units. 'When I was in Kosovo we had to borrow ammo and grenades off the Para Regiment to feel as though we were suitably armed when isolated. Apparently we were "policemen not soldiers", so we weren't issued it,' one source said. 'I know from friends in the Gulf that they had had a lot of ammo withdrawn because of this attitude. It cost them their lives.' British military officials dismissed the claims last night. 'The idea that we send anyone out without enough ammunition is simply rubbish,' one said. observer.guardian.co.uk