R2P, R.I.P. , By DAVID RIEFF, November 7, 2011
(DO- I am not sure what exactly the author wanted to say in terms of how
to improve R2P to bring the doctrine to global norm.
I guess
1.. The outside powers should have
made more diplomatic efforts before turning to use of force.
2.. do not act on double
standards. Do not pick and choose humanitarian crisis for self-interest. )
PARIS — The
decision by the U.N. Security Council and NATO to end military operations in
Libya on Oct. 31 concludes what appears to be the most successful foreign
humanitarian intervention since the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq
soured much of the Western public on such undertakings. At first glance, the
intervention in Libya looks like a textbook case of how the new U.N. doctrine
of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was supposed to work. The
doctrine’s supporters had hoped that it would codify the obligations of outside powers to intervene —
through nonmilitary means whenever possible, but with lethal force if necessary
— when a tyrannical regime threatens to slaughter its own people.
(DO-2005
Summit Outcome Doc. rather appears to focus on the duty of a State to protect
its own people)
Muammar
el-Qaddafi’s threat in March to unleash a bloodbath in rebel-held Benghazi was
just the kind of extreme instance that R2P’s framers had in mind. And the
U.N.-sanctioned NATO intervention did forestall a massacre. Yet it also did
much more. Not only were the (life of) citizens of Benghazi spared,
but subsequent NATO military operations brought down Qaddafi’s
42-year-long dictatorship, adding Libya to the list of countries in the
Arab Spring.
The White
House, 10 Downing Street, and, above all, the Elysée Palace, are now patting
themselves on the collective back. But a far more qualified reaction may be in
order. For one thing, it’s unclear whether the fall of Qaddafi will
usher in a better or democratic government in Libya; so far the revolutions of
the Arab Spring have not been promising on that front. For another thing,
unlike earlier versions of humanitarian intervention, R2P was about
protecting civilians, and emphatically not
about regime change. The Security Council resolutions that
authorized an R2P-based intervention to protect Benghazi did not authorize
outside powers to provide air support for the subsequent rebellion against
Qaddafi. And it is almost certain that without that support he would not have
been overthrown.
Those
skeptics like myself who are wary of this interventionist paradigm must
acknowledge that rejecting it (R2P) might allow dictators like Qaddafi to
stay in power. But its proponents must recognize that in the midst of
rebellions such as the one in Libya, people cannot be protected
without regime change. They have not recognized this, however, and
partly as a result the campaign in Libya has done grave, possibly even
irreparable, damage to R2P’s prospects of
becoming a global norm.
(DO- its
proponents à. skeptics ???)
Those who
believe that this is just as well, and that the last thing the world needs is
for powerful nations to claim once again the right to bombard weaker ones —
this time in the name of human rights and international humanitarian law — will
be relieved. But supporters of R2P should be mourning, not celebrating.
Although
elation often follows overwhelming military victories, it rarely is warranted.
Too soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, President George W. Bush
disastrously declared “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of a U.S. aircraft
carrier. Americans went on to pay dearly for this mindless triumphalism.
Kosovo-style
humanitarian military intervention
vs. R2P in Libya
Similarly
hasty self-congratulation about the Libya operation is now obscuring the fact
that NATO’s interpretation of R2P in effect puts the old wine of Kosovo-style
humanitarian military intervention in a new U.N.-sanctioned
bottle.
A straight
line runs between such unreconstructed liberal interventionists as Samantha
Power and Bernard-Henri Lévy, both vocal backers of the Libya
campaign, and the Tony Blair who claimed at the time of the war in Kosovo, when
he was Britain’s prime minister, that in the 21st century the West should
commit itself to fighting wars to support its values rather than its interests.
Self-interest is more like it. Blair and his counterparts in Paris and
Washington had no trouble ignoring their professed values and turning
a blind eye toward Qaddafi’s crimes when it suited them to do so.
And then they decided their interests would be best served
by backing the Libyan iteration of the Arab Spring. Regime change became the
West’s policy, and the civilian-protection mandate of R2P was its
cover.
Proponents of
the intervention in Libya often respond to such charges with a wink and a nod —
as if we could all agree that the main utility of R2P was always to serve as a
moral and political warrant for any humanitarian war they deemed necessary,
whatever its legality. The fall of Qaddafi was a good thing, right? Another
terrible dictator is felled, replaced by a regime committed to democracy; NATO
has once more proved its value; and, unlike the U.S.- and British-led invasion
of Iraq, the Libyan operation was genuinely multilateral. Win-win across the
board.
Moral
risk
R2P is a
doctrine born of good intentions, but one of its great drawbacks is that it
turns war into a form of police work writ large, guided by fables of moral
innocence and righteousness. War, even when it is waged for a just cause and
with scrupulous respect for international humanitarian law, always involves a
descent into barbarism (think of the way Qaddafi died). This is why even when R2P is applied well, it carries moral risks. And when
it is distorted, as it was by NATO in Libya, R2P is not a needed reform to the
international system, but a threat to its legitimacy.
Use
of force must remain to be a last resort
When R2P
supporters advocated the doctrine before the U.N. in the middle of the last
decade, they emphasized its nonmilitary aspects and insisted that the use of
force would be a rare last resort. Yet in Libya force almost
immediately followed the ultimatums issued to Qaddafi; for all intents and
purposes, R2P was NATO-ized. As a result, everywhere outside Western
Europe and North America, R2P is
losing what little ethical
credibility it ever commanded.
Double
standard
This should
surprise no one. A doctrine of intervention that both claims the moral high
ground and clamors its universality but under which the interveners are always
from the Global North and the intervened upon always from the Global South is
not moral progress; it is geopolitical business as usual.
Last month,
while officials in Paris, London, and Washington were congratulating one
another for a job well done in Libya,
in the U.N. Security Council, China and Russia were vetoing, and Brazil and
India were abstaining from, the imposition of far milder, nonmilitary sanctions
against Syria. Clearly, no
R2P-based, Libya-like interventions will get sanction from the U.N. in the
foreseeable future.
One would
never know it from all the victory talk in the West, but instead of
strengthening R2P as a new global norm, the NATO intervention in Libya may well
serve as its high water mark.
David Rieff is a New
York-based journalist and the author of eight books, including “A Bed for the
Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.”
R2P RIP?
Let’s Hope Not
by Kenneth
Anderson July 27th, 2009
The question
in that frame is whether R2P is to be understood as a doctrine of UN
collective security, in large part to address fundamental order in
disordered places where the US security guarantee does not extend, in which
case Darfur – and the failure effectively to intervene there – is the
prototype. Or instead whether it is a doctrine of the parallel US
security guarantee, invoked to provide a basis for the US, with its
NATO allies typically, with Kosovo as the prototype, to intervene when its
peculiar combination of ideals and interests lead it to want to do so.
