The Argument about Humanitarian Intervention
Walzer, Michael
THERE IS NOTHING new about human disasters caused by human beings. We have always been, if not our own, certainly each other's worst enemies. From the Assyrians in ancient Israel and the Romans...
...the tasks of policing and reconstruction would be easier than they have been...
...Had the UN's Security Council or General Assembly been called into session, it would almost certainly have decided against intervention, probably by majority vote, in any case because of greatpower opposition...
...INTERVENTION tions on his list are indeed awful, and commonly known to be awful...
...In cases like these, anyone who can help should help...
...The people who have always lived there, wherever "there" is, have to be given a chance to reconstruct their common life...
...we have to argue about agents, means, and endings...
...But, to answer Luttwak's question, that acknowledgment doesn't do anything to the morality of the justifying rule...
...A slightly different version of this article was given as the Theodore Mitan Lecture at Macalester College, St...
...we simply assign responsibility in advance through some commonly accepted decision procedure...
...In Cambodia, East Pakistan, and Uganda, the interventions were carried out on the ground...
...The second occasion is exemplified by all those countries—Uganda, Rwanda, Kosovo, and others—where the extent and depth of the ethnic divisions make it likely that the killings will resume as soon as the intervening forces withdraw...
...But they come into a situation where the moral stakes are clear: the oppressors or, better, the state agents of oppression are readily identifiable...
...But that is properly the work of their own subjects...
...Does it matter that their motives were not wholly (or even chiefly) altruistic...
...we rightly calculate the risks in each one...
...But unilateralism may also follow from the need for an immediate response to "acts that shock...
...In the Cambodia, East Pakistan, and Uganda cases, there were no prior arrangements and no authorized agents...
...From the Assyrians in ancient Israel and the Romans in Carthage to the Belgians in the Congo and the Turks in Armenia, history is a bloody and barbaric tale...
...The moral urgencies are different...
...These days the intervening army will claim to be enforcing human rights, and that was a plausible and fully comprehensible claim in each of the cases on my list (or would have been, since interventions weren't attempted in all of them...
...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent...
...But perhaps, again, these descriptions are too weak: I am inclined to say that intervention is more than a right and more than an imperfect duty...
...Intervention is clearly justifiable but, right now at least, its radically unclear how it should be undertaken...
...The Kosovo debate focused on the United States, NATO, and the UN as agents of military intervention...
...Consider a domestic example...
...they have to be dealt with locally, by the people who know the politics, who enact or resist the practices...
...First objection: the "prescription that X should fight Y whenever Y egregiously violates X's moral and juridical norms would legitimize eternal war...
...If the intervention is expanded beyond its necessary bounds because of some "ulterior" motive, then it should be criticized...
...Still, on this side of the chasm, we can mark out a continuum of brutality and oppression, and somewhere along this continuum an international response (short of military force) is necessary...
...for individuals the duty remains imperfect...
...And fourth, when is it time to end the intervention...
...The last of these has dominated recent political debates, but it isn't the most illuminating case...
...F ITHER WAY, we still need an equivalent of the "in and out" rule, a way of recogI nizing when these longstanding interventions reach their endpoint...
...they are the ones who, in the strict sense of international law, begin the war...
...Perhaps this is a place where multilateralism can play a more central role than it does, or has done, in the original interventions...
...But this formula may be as quixotic as "in and quickly out...
...The answer to this question depends on what the word "arbitrarily" means here...
...The same rules apply here as in war generally: noncombatants are immune from direct attack and have to be protected as far as possible from "collateral damage...
...But consistency isn't an issue here...
...If the original killers don't return to their work, then the revenge of their victims will prove equally deadly...
...There are no "lower orders," no invisible, expendable citizens in democratic states today...
...we sit in our living rooms and see the murdered children, the desperate refugees...
...But we need to rethink it today, as the exceptions become less and less exceptional...
...I don't think the point is all that difficult, even if we disagree about exactly where the line should be drawn...
...What makes police forces effective in domestic society, when they are effective, is their commitment to the entire body of citizens from which they are drawn and the (relative) trust of the citizens in that commitment...
...So perhaps there is no obliga32...
...They are indeed discretionary, and we have to hope that prudential calculations shape the decision to intervene or not...
...We need to ask what the costs of intervention will be for the people being rescued, for the rescuers, and for everyone else...
...So it is, and should be, or else we would indeed be fighting all the time and everywhere...
...Ignatieff offers a stronger human rights justification of humanitarian warfare than I have provided, though he would certainly agree that not every rights violation "shocks the conscience of humankind" and justifies military intervention...
...The answer that best fits the original legal doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and that I defended in Just and Unjust Wars (1977), is that the aim of the intervening army is simply to stop the killing...
...Once the intervention has begun, it may become morally, even if it is not yet militarily, necessary to fight on the ground—in order to win more quickly and save many lives, for example, or to stop some particularly barbarous response to the intervention...
...In the old days, "humanitarian intervention" was a lawyer's doctrine, a way of justifying a very limited set of exceptions to the principles of national sovereignty and territorial integrity...
...neighborly unilateralism seems entirely justified...
...My own answers to those other questions can certainly be contested...
...it is an exercise of sovereign power...
...Deciding whether to volunteer, they may choose to apply the same test to themselves—who can, should—but the choice is theirs...
...Paul, Minnesota...
...These people have all sorts of reasons, but none of them, it seems to me, are good or moral reasons...
...The rest of us watch and are shocked...
...In the contemporary world there is very little that happens far away, out of sight, or behind the scenes...
...Who is this "we...
...Peacekeeping is an honorable activity, but not if there is no peace...
...they may even be said to provide a kind of background support for it...
...Second, who are its preferred agents...
...Anyway, political motivations are always mixed, whether the actors are one or many...
...It isn't the power of the oppressors that interventionists have to worry about, but the amorphousness of the oppression...
...But the main point that I want to make is that the questions themselves cannot be avoided...
...But these interventions also served humanitarian purposes, and presumably were intended to do that too...
...Wouldn't each state involved in the decision process also act in its own interests...
...This obvious truth about international society is often used as an argument against the interventions that do take place...
...But the claim is, for the moment at least, greatly exaggerated...
...Won't they act in their own interests rather than in the interests of humanity...
...In the Kosovo case, if a 34 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 NATO army had been in sight, so to speak, before the bombing of Serbia began, it is unlikely that the bombing would have been necessary...
...When intervention is understood in this minimalist fashion, it may be a little easier to see it through...
...perhaps there is a right to intervene but also a right to refuse the risks, to maintain a kind of neutrality—even between murderers and their victims...
...The historical record makes it clear enough that protectors and trustees, under the old League of Nations, for example, again and again failed to fulfill their obligations...
...In the history of humanitarian intervention, unilateralism is far more common than its opposite...
...These are indeed three political collectives capable of agency, but by no means the only three...
...We should not allow ourselves to approach genocide by degrees...
...If the risks are clear, they have a right to respond...
...There are a lot of people around today who want to avoid these arguments and postpone indefinitely the kinds of action they might require...
...It's not immoral to act, or decline to act, for prudential reasons...
...Since there are in fact legitimate occasions for humanitarian intervention, since we know, roughly, what ought to be done, we have to argue about how to do it...
...Still, in this regard, the twentieth century was an age of innovation, first—and most important—in the way disasters were planned and organized and then, more recently, in the way they were publicized...
...Conclusion I have tried to answer possible objections to my argument as I went along, but there are a couple of common criticisms of the contemporary practice of humanitarian intervention that I want to single out and address more explicitly, even at the cost of repeating myself...
...Third objection: "What does it mean," Luttwak asks, "for the morality of a supposedly moral rule when it is applied arbitrarily, against some but not others...
...If one accepts the risks of intervention in countries like these, one had better accept also the risks of occupation...
...I don't think that it is particularly insightful, merely cynical, to suggest that those larger interests have no hold at all (surely the balance of interest and morality among interventionists is no different than it is among noninterventionists...
...There is no technological fix currently available, and therefore no way of avoiding this simple truth: from the standpoint of justice, you cannot invade a foreign country, with all the consequences that has for other people, while insisting that your own soldiers can never be put at risk...
...Foreign politicians and soldiers are too likely to misread the situation, or to underestimate the force required to change it, or to stimulate a "patriotic" reaction in defense of the brutal politics and the oppressive practices...
...When is it time to go home...
...But military interventions across international boundaries always impose risks on the intervening forces...
...That's the moral argument against no-risk interventions, but there is also a prudential argument...
...and then they wait for something to happen on the other side...
...A few repetitions, on key points, will make my conclusion...
...If they go after only the ones they think they will be able to catch without endangering themselves or anyone else, their arrests will be "determined by choice or discretion," which is one of the meanings of "arbitrary," but surely that determination doesn't undermine the justice of enforcing the speeding laws...
...The leaders of states have a right, indeed, they have an obligation, to consider the interests of their own people, even when they are acting to help other people...
...The Kosovo war provides an alternative model: a war fought from the air, with technologies designed to reduce (almost to zero...
...it doesn't require any boundary crossings...
...Third, how should the agents act to meet the occasions...
...If what is going on is awful enough to justify going in, then it is awful enough to justify the pursuit of military victory...
...We are instant spectators of every atrocity...
...And that is not work for the short term...
...A war fought entirely from the air, and from far away, probably can't DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 33 INTERVENTION be won without attacking civilian targets...
...Cases multiply in the world and in the media: Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo in only the past decade...
...But leave that aside for now...
...That prospect is surely a great disincentive to intervention...
...And then the outcome would be determined by bargaining among the interested parties— and humanity, obviously, would not be one of the parties...
...And then why shouldn't the obligation simply fall on the most capable state, the nearest or the strongest, as in the maxim I have already suggested: Who can, should...
...Interventions will rarely be successful unless there is a visible willingness to fight and to take casualties...
...they are not, however, bound to risk their lives...
...But I won't pursue this line of argument here...
...For multilateral occupations are unlikely to serve the interests of any single state and so are unlikely to be sustained any longer than necessary...
...they don't require us to consult Lenin's, or anyone else's, theory of imperialism...
...After all, the survival of the intervening state is not at risk...
...Yes, they probably will or, better, they will act in their own interests as well as in the interests of humanity...
...they are efforts to prompt but not to preempt an internal response...
...Perhaps horrific crimes are still committed in dark places, but not many...
...The UN couldn't or wouldn't stop the killing when it was actually taking place, but had it done so, the "in and quickly out" test would not have provided a plausible measure of its success...
...But intervention is a political and military process, not a legal one, and it is subject to the compromises and tactical shifts that politics and war require...
...When the oppressors are too powerful, they are rarely challenged, however shocking the oppression...
...The international community needs to find ways of supporting these forces—and also, since what they are doing is dangerous and won't always be done well, of supervising, regulating, and criticizing them...
...the UN generates skepticism among the sorts of people who are called "realists" because of its political weakness and military ineffectiveness...
...Postwar Kosovo would look very different...
...A pure moral will doesn't exist in political life, and it shouldn't be necessary to pretend to that kind of purity...
...We should assume, then, that the Indians acted in their national interest when they assisted the secession of East Pakistan, and that Tanzania acted in its own interests when it moved troops into Idi Amin's Uganda...
...One reason for this is obvious: the great reluctance of most states to cede the direction of their armed forces to an organization they don't control...
...It's the first kind of "arbitrariness" that ought to qualify humanitarian interventions (and often does...
...So military observers were sent into Bosnia to report on what was happening...
...Imagine a case where the shock doesn't have anything to do with human evildoing: a fire in a neighbor's house in a new town where there is no fire department...
...But is it preferable in fact, right now, given DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 31 INTERVENTION the UN as it actually is...
...I don't say this to justify the Vietnamese estabINTERVENTION lishment of a satellite regime, but rather to explain the need, years later, for the UN's effort to create, from the outside, a locally legitimate political system...
...In fact, most of the countries whose inhabitants (or some of them) desperately need to be rescued offer precious little political or economic reward to the states that attempt the rescue...
...Should the army aim only at stopping the killings, or at destroying the military or paramilitary forces carrying them out, or at replacing the regime that employs these forces, or at punishing the leaders of the regime...
...I am not going to join them...
...In "good Samaritan" cases in domestic society, we commonly say that passersby are bound to respond (to the injured stranger by the side of the road, to the cry of a child drowning in the lake...
...As in the argument about occasions, minimalism in endings suggests that we should be careful in our use of human rights language...
...And in the absence of a clear threat to the community itself, there is little willingness even among political elites to sacrifice for the sake of global law and order or, more particularly, for the sake of Rwandans or Kosovars...
...Nonintervention in the face of mass murder or ethnic cleansing is not the same as neutrality in time of war...
...Perhaps foreign forces can't do the work that I've just described...
...Its not that its army or police have been defeated...
...Any country considering military intervention would obviously embrace technologies that were said to be risk-free for its own soldiers, and the embrace would be entirely justified so long as the same technologies were also riskfree for civilians on the other side...
...Perhaps there is no capacity to respond among the people directly at risk and no will to respond among their fellow citizens...
...I don't think that the case would be all that different if, instead of a fire, there was a brutal husband, no police department, and screams for help in the night...
...The "acts that shock the conscience of humankind"— and, according to the nineteenth-century law books, justify humanitarian intervention— are probably no more frequent these days than they were in the past, but they are more shocking, because we are more intimately engaged by them and with them...
...The standard cases have a standard form: a government, an army, a police force, tyrannically controlled, attacks its own people or some subset of its own people, a vulnerable minority, say, territorially based or dispersed throughout the country...
...This claim seems somewhat inconsistent with Luttwak's further claim (see below) that the necessity of fighting not only forever but everywhere follows from the fact that there are so many violations of commonly recognized norms...
...Is intervention only a war or also an occupation...
...If no coherent account of the occasions is possible, then it isn't necessary to answer the other questions that I have addressed...
...I don't mean to describe a continuum that begins with common nastiness and ends with genocide, but DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 29 INTERVENTION rather a radical break, a chasm, with nastiness on one side and genocide on the other...
...What should we do...
...Or perhaps humanitarian intervention is an example of what philosophers call an "imperfect" duty: someone should stop the awfulness, but it isn't possible to give that someone a proper name, to point a finger, say, at a particular country...
...For if we pursue the legal logic of rights (at least as that logic is understood in the United States), it will be very difficult for the intervening forces to get out before they have brought the people who organized the massacres or the ethnic cleansing to trial and established a new regime committed to enforcing the full set of human rights...
...The sanctions might be imposed by some free-form coalition of interested states...
...there is always something to be done before doing whatever it is that comes last...
...In any case, how would huINTERVENTION manity be better served by multilateral decisionmaking...
...n DISSENT / Winter 2002 tion here either...
...Means When the agents act, how should they act...
...The country is in the hand of paramilitary forces and warlords—gangs, really—who have been, let's say, temporarily subdued...
...But it is equally possible that the bargain will reflect only a mix of particular interests, which may or may not be better for humanity than the interests of a single party...
...their enemies are cruel...
...Once such authorities are in place, the intervening forces should withdraw: "in and finally out...
...Agents "We can only do what we can do...
...These are useful examples for testing our ideas about intervention because they don't involve extraneous issues such as the new (or old) world order...
...Every violation of human rights isn't a justification...
...Now "in and quickly out" is a kind of bad faith, a choice of legal virtue at the expense of political and moral effectiveness...
...their neighbors indifferent...
...These three objections relate to the occasions for intervention, and rightly so...
...The most successful interventions in the last thirty years have been acts of war by neighboring states: Vietnam in Cambodia, India in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Tanzania in Uganda...
...But though that may work for a time, it doesn't reduce the power of the killers, and so it is a formula for trouble later on...
...In each of these cases, there were horrifying acts that should have been stopped and agents who succeeded, more or less, in stopping them...
...The greater danger is that they won't be sustained long enough: each participating state will look for an excuse to pull its own forces out...
...The person who rushes into a neighbor's house in my domestic example and the political or military commanders of the invading forces in the international cases would still have to act on their own understanding of the events unfolding in front of them and on their own interpretation of the responsibility they have been given...
...I want to insist on this point...
...We will need to argue, of course, about each case, but the list I've already provided seems a fairly obvious one...
...this was old-fashioned war-making...
...Its leaders prove that their motives are primarily humanitarian, that they are not driven by imperial ambition, by moving in as quickly as possible to defeat the killers and rescue their victims and then by leaving as quickly as possible...
...So if, in any of my examples, the UN's authorized agents or their domestic equivalents decide not to intervene, and the fire is still burning, the screams can still be heard, the murders go on— then unilateralist rights and obligations are instantly restored...
...These can be bridges and television stations, electric generators and water purification plants, rather than residential areas, but the attacks will endanger the lives of innocent men, women, and children nonetheless...
...It would be foolish to declare the multiplicity morally disabling...
...The attack takes place within the country's borders...
...This is precisely the claim made on behalf of "smart bombs": they can be delivered from great distances (safely), and they never miss...
...The problem of imperfect duty yields best to multilateral solutions...
...and then UN forces brought humanitarian relief to the victims, and then they provided some degree of military protection for relief workers, and then they sought (unsuccessfully) to create a few "safe zones" for the Bosnians...
...But there are three sorts of occasions when this rule seems impossible to apply...
...Diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions, for example, are useful means of engagement with tyrannical regimes...
...But when what is going on is the "ethnic cleansing" of a province or country or the systematic massacre of a religious or national community, it doesn't seem possible to wait for a local response...
...On the other hand, if they only go after cars that have bumper stickers they don't like, if they treat traffic control as nothing more than an opportunity to harass political "enemies," then their actions "arise from will or caprice," another definition of "arbitrary," and are indeed unjust...
...We are best served, I think, by a stark and minimalist version of human rights here: it is life and liberty that are at stake...
...But now let's imagine a block association or an international organization that planned in advance for the fire, or the scream in the night, or the mass murder...
...it would have had to deal, somehow, with the aftermath of the killing...
...Most clearly in the Bosnian case, repeated efforts were made to deal with the disaster without fighting against its perpetrators...
...they simply don't exist...
...The new regime doesn't have to be democratic or liberal or pluralist or (even) capitalist...
...But these are still external acts...
...What is necessary now is to create a state, and the creation will have to be virtually ex nihilo...
...It may be possible to kill people on a very large scale more efficiently than ever before, but it is much harder to kill them in secret...
...still, they are not morally bound to do it...
...An independent UN force, not bound or hindered by the political decisions of individual states, might be the most reliable protector and trustee—if we could be sure that it would protect the right people, in a timely way...
...Sometimes, unhappily, it is better to make war...
...Collective decisions to act may well exclude unilateral action, but collective decisions not to act don't have the same effect...
...Sorting things out afterward, dealing with the consequences of the awfulness, deciding what to do with its agents—that is not properly the work of foreigners...
...The arguments here are overdetermined...
...With regard to these two, the language of rights is readily available and sufficiently understood across the globe...
...We might think of these attacks as examples of state terrorism and then consider forceful humanitarian responses, such as the NATO campaign in Kosovo, as instances of the "war against terrorism," avant la lettre...
...the camera crews arrive faster than rigor mortis...
...The police can't stop every speeding car...
...within those bounds, mixed motives are a practical advantage...
...I have been using both words, but they don't always go together: there can be rights where there are no obligations...
...The victims of massacre or "ethnic cleansing" disasters are very lucky if a neighboring state, or a coalition of states, has more than one reason to rescue them...
...So we will often need to accept more minimal goals, in order to minimize the use of force and the time span over which it is used...
...But the main ac"No Score War," Times Literary Supplement, (July 14, 2000), p.11...
...it will often override not only the benign intentions but even the imperial ambitions of potential interveners...
...we are usually unsure of the consequences of a war, but we know very well the consequences of a massacre...
...Everything depended on the political decision of a single state...
...they don't try to justify it by reference to a set of private norms...
...Still, we could as easily say that what is being en30 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 forced, and what should be enforced, is simple decency...
...This is the occasion for intervention...
...It seems preferable to the different unilateral alternatives, because it involves some kind of prior warning, an agreedupon description of the occasions for intervention, and the prospect of overwhelming force...
...THE DOMINANCE that I have ascribed to unilateralism might be questioned— commonly is questioned—because of a fear of the motives of single states acting alone...
...Even in the list with which I started, however, there are some nonstandard cases—Sierra Leone is the clearest example—where the state apparatus isn't the villain, where what we might think of as the administration of brutalINTERVENTION ity is decentralized, anarchic, almost random...
...It doesn't have to be anything, except non-murderous...
...The aim is to bring pressure to bear on a government acting barbarically toward a minority of its citizens by threatening to harm, or actually harming, the majority to which, presumably, the government is still committed...
...But now they act under specified constraints, and they can call on the help of those in whose name they are acting...
...The first is perhaps best exemplified by the Cambodian killing fields, which were so extensive as to leave, at the end, no institutional base, and perhaps no human base, for reconstruction...
...Possessive nouns don't modify morality in such cases, and there isn't a series of different moralities—the proof of this is the standard and singular lie told by all the killers and "cleansers": they deny what they are doing...
...Maybe he goes too far here, because bureaucratic extortion, at least, has different meaning and valence in different times and places...
...The crisis that they have just been through should not become an occasion for foreign domination...
...nor have these arrangements been as temporary as they were supposed to be...
...nor would there ever have been the tide of desperate and embittered refugees...
...The intervening forces should aim at finding or establishing a form of authority that fits or at least accommodates the local political culture, and a set of authorities, independent of themselves, who are capable of governing the country and who command sufficient popular support so that their government won't be massively coercive...
...Endings Imagine the intervening army fully engaged...
...These are hard questions, and I want to begin my own response by acknowledging that I have answered them differently at different times...
...But note that Luttwak assumes now that the wrongness of the extortion, robbery, rape, and oppression is not a matter of X's or Y's private norms but can be recognized by anyone...
...soldiers have to accept risks to themselves in order to avoid imposing risks on the civilian population...
...We need to think about better ways of making sure that the purpose is actually realized and the requirement finally met...
...The fact that these people can't easily or quickly reduce the incidence of brutality and oppression isn't a sufficient reason for foreigners to invade their country...
...Do these singular agents have a right to act or do they have an obligation...
...the risk of casualties to the intervening army...
...They guard roads, defend doctors and nurses, deliver medical supplies and food to a growing number of victims and refugees—and the number keeps growing...
...they just aren't awful enough to justify a military invasion...
...I want to begin with the second of these innovations— the product of an extraordinary speedup in both travel and communication...
...the odds on success much better...
...We might hope that particular interests would cancel each other out, leaving some kind of general interest (this is in fact Rousseau's account, or one of his accounts, of how citizens arrive at a "general will...
...It wouldn't make much sense to call a meeting of the block association, while the house is burning, and vote on whether or not to help (and it would make even less sense to give a veto on helping to the three richest families on the block...
...And then, we can only do what we can do...
...If no one is acting, act...
...It is hypocritical, critics say to the "humanitarian" politicians or soldiers, to intervene in this case when you didn't intervene in that one—as if, having declined to challenge China in Tibet, say, the United Nations should have stayed out of East Timor for the sake of moral consistency...
...The third occasion is the one I called nonstandard earlier on: where the state has simply disintegrated...
...The common brutalities of authoritarian politics, the daily oppressiveness of traditional social practices—these are not occasions for intervention...
...Still, their purpose can sometimes be a legitimate one: to open a span of time and to authorize a kind of political work between the "in" and the "out" of a humanitarian intervention...
...In any case, Luttwak's objections apply (or fail to apply) across the board—that is, to the arguments I've made here as well as to Ignatieff's book...
...There is no aggression, no invading army to resist and beat back...
...they will only be dragged deeper and deeper into a conflict they will never be able to control, gradually becoming indistinguishable from the other parties...
...The intervening forces have to be prepared to use the weapons they carry, and they have to be prepared to stay what may be a long course...
...the "who" who can and should is only the state, not any particular man or woman...
...So let's use these cases to address the two questions most commonly posed by critics of the Kosovo war: Does it matter that the agents acted alone...
...But the UN's General Assembly and Security Council, so far, give very little evidence of being so committed, and there can't be many people in the world today who would willingly entrust their lives to UN police...
...The victims are weak and vulnerable...
...If we intervene only in extremity, only in order to stop mass murder and mass deportation, the idea that we are defending X's norms and not Y's is simply wrong...
...It is a good doctrine, because exceptions are always necessary, principles are never absolute...
...Now we are on the other side of the chasm...
...How should it understand the victory that it is aiming at...
...One almost wishes that the impure motivations of such states had more plausible objects, the DISSENT / Winter 2002 • 35 INTERVENTION pursuit of which might hold them to their task...
...And that sounds like a plausible maxim for humanitarian intervention also: who can, should...
...We can't meet all our occasions...
...Occasions The occasions have to be extreme if they are to justify, perhaps even require, the use of force across an international boundary...
...The principles of political sovereignty and territorial integrity require the "in and quickly out" rule...
...I am going to take Edward 36 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 Luttwak's critical review of Michael Ignatieff's Virtual War* as a useful summary of the arguments to which I need to respond, since it is short, sharp, cogent, and typical...
...Force was taken, indeed, to be a "last" resort, but in an ongoing political conflict "lastness" never arrives...
...We are more likely to understand the problem of agency if we start with other agents...
...the aim is the defeat of the people, whoever they are, who are carrying out the massacres or the ethnic cleansing...
...I want to stress, however, that we need, and haven't yet come close to, a clear understanding of what "minimum" really means...
...Humanitarian intervention involves the use of force, and it is crucial to its success that it be pursued forcefully...
...If there is no collective response, anyone can respond...
...Second objection: "Even without civil wars, massacres, or mutilations, the perfectly normal, everyday, functioning of armies, police forces, and bureaucracies entails constant extortion, frequent robbery and rape, and pervasive oppression"— all of which, Luttwak claims, is ignored by the humanitarian interveners...
...In 1995, in an article called "The Politics of Rescue," published in these pages, I argued that leftist critics of protectorates and trusteeships needed to rethink their position, for arrangements of this sort might sometimes be the best outcome of a humanitarian intervention...
...The stakes are too high, the suffering already too great...
...their victims are plain to see...
...Still, if we follow the logic of the argument so far, it will be necessary to recruit volunteers for humanitarian interventions...
...Whenever that assurance doesn't exist, unilateralism returns, again, as a justifiable option...
...The prisons of all the more ordinary dictators in the modern world should also be shut down—emptied and closed...
...DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 37...
...The interested states or the regional or global authorities bring pressure to bear, so to speak, at the border...
...This purpose doesn't cancel the requirement that the intervening forces get out...
...And so a question is posed that has never been posed before—at least never with such immediacy, never so inescapably: What is our responsibility...
...I won't stop here to consider at any length the reasons for the alternative model, which have to do with the increasing inability of modern democracies to use the armies they recruit in ways that put soldiers at risk...
...So, anyone acting to shut down the Khmer Rouge killing fields or to stem the tide of Bengalese refugees or to stop Idi Amin's butchery would have to act unilaterally...
...But if soldiers do nothing more than these things, they are hardly an impediment to further killing...
...Pol Pot's killing fields had to be shut down—and by a foreign army if necessary...
...Here too, the block association is of little use...
...Sometimes it is helpful to interpose soldiers as "peacekeepers" between the killers and their victims...
...If those goals are actually within reach, then, of course, it is right to reach for them...
...Then there would be particular people or specially recruited military forces delegated to act in a crisis, and the definition of "crisis" could be determined—as best it can be—in advance, in exactly the kind of meeting that seems so implausible, so morally inappropriate, at the moment when immediate action is necessary...
...Or perhaps we should work toward a more established regional or global authority that could regulate the imposition, carefully matching the severity of the sanctions to the severity of the oppression...
...In practice, even with a minimalist understanding of human rights, even with a commitment to nothing more than decency, there are more occasions for intervention than there are actual interventions...
...But the inability and the unwillingness, whatever their sources, make for moral problems...
...I want to step back a bit, reach for a wider range of examples, and try to answer four questions about humanitarian intervention: First, what are its occasions...
...contemporary horrors are well-lit...
...Obviously this isn't a strategy that would have worked against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, but it's probably not legitimate even where it might work—so long as there is the possibility of a more precise intervention against the forces actually engaged in the barbarous acts...
...Instead, the rescuing forces are the invaders...
...In this sense, unilateralism is the dominant response when the common conscience is shocked...
...The appropriate rule is best expressed by a phrase that I have already used: "local legitimacy...
...Perhaps there is not much to do beyond what the Nigerians did in Sierra Leone: they reduced the number of killings, the scope of the barbarism...
...I won't have much to say about cases like this...
...Hence, as I have already acknowledged, there won't be an actual intervention every time the justifying conditions for it exist...
...This is the form that multilateral intervention is most likely to take, if the UN, say, were ever to authorize it in advance of a particular crisis...
...At the same time, however, it's important to insist that the task is limited: once the massacres and ethnic cleansing are really over and the people in command are committed to avoiding their return, the intervention is finished...
...Social change is best achieved from within...
...They still assume the value, and hold open the possibility, of domestic politics...
...responding is certainly a good thing and possibly the right thing to do...
...But this simple proposition hasn't found ready acceptance in international society...
...The United States and NATO generate suspicion among the sorts of people who are called "idealists" because of their readiness to act unilaterally and their presumed imperial ambitions...
Vol. 49 • January 2002 • No. 1
