Emergency shelter for women and children in the DRC. Photo courtesy Julien Harneis/flickr.com

June 2009

Humanitarian interventionists have blood on their hands. Their impulse to “free a nation from the tyrant’s grip,” to pick professor-cum-politician Michael Ignatieff’s formulation, helped to permit the Iraq War. True, humanitarian interventionists were not the war’s architects. Some opposed it altogether. But they may have enabled it. For five years before the invasion, humanitarian interventionists popularized assumptions that made the war seem innocuous at worst and virtuous at best. Quick doses of US military force, they claimed, would easily transform polities on the periphery, forging stability from genocide.

Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell, the wildly popular 2003 Pulitzer winner, epitomized the blindness. Power condemned a century of US inaction without describing how any intervention would have unfolded. The United States self-evidently enjoyed “vast resources” to stop genocide. She ignored the challenge of post-conflict reconstruction, mocked deference to public opinion, and devalued multilateral legal procedures. If these qualities sound familiar, it is because humanitarian interventionism was neoconservatism of the left. Swap the goals of stopping genocides and toppling tyrannies and the difference was scant.

Now, humanitarian interventionists are back in power — despite the Iraq war’s unpopularity and the US president’s pledges to end not just the war but also the ideology that spawned it. In 2007, Vice President Joe Biden called for US ground troops to end Darfur’s genocide. UN Ambassador Susan Rice has long championed US bombing for that purpose. Power directs multilateral affairs at the National Security Council. While President Barack Obama appears to value prudence and pragmatism, humanitarian interventionism may resonate with him. On entering the Senate, Obama recruited Power to mentor him in foreign affairs after she made her name writing on genocide.

Yet, although humanitarian interventionists are ascendant, humanitarian interventionism is quietly in crisis. Humanitarians and human rights activists face newfound hostility animated by President George W. Bush’s use or abuse of their cause. In the United States, an overstretched military leaves the movement little choice but to tread water. “Thanks to the war in Iraq,” Power conceded in 2006, “sending a sizable US force to Darfur is not an option.” Even the idealists speak like realists now. The shallow debate among humanitarian interventionists nonetheless suggests a skin-deep conversion, an adaptation to circumstances rather than a revision of principles. What will happen if the United States recovers? Old temptations may well return. For if genocide is so heinous that it absolutely must be stopped, why should quibbles about exit strategies, public apathy, or UN votes stand in the way?

The new administration needs a new posture toward humanitarian military intervention, and fast, before the next crisis erupts. It would be a disaster for US foreign relations if Obama created a quagmire of his own. Humanitarian interventionists, too, need a doctrine that both embodies their best values and redresses their past mistakes. After a lost decade, helping victims of violence remains a worthy aim. But if humanitarian interventionists fail to rethink their assumptions, the future will not be kind.

When Stopping Mass Killing Is Just

Humanitarian interventionists often adopt the language of absolute, abstract moral obligations. “Never again,” goes the post-Holocaust mantra. Ignatieff asserted a “duty to intervene” to stop genocide. Such attitudes imply an unconditional responsibility to act. They rest, first, on overestimates of Anglo-American power after the Cold War: surely the world’s current and former superpowers could keep, for instance, poor Africans from hacking at each other with machetes? Mostly, they express abhorrence of genocide, succored by an explosion in Holocaust literature. Genocide is regarded as a moral emergency of the highest order. It appears to transcend conventional politics. As the director of a Darfur advocacy group told Congress: “Genocide is not political. It violates every principle of humanity and should be addressed without political considerations.” This view descends from a decades-long tradition of activists who have imagined humanitarianism and human rights as operating on a plane separate from that of normal political contestation. Human rights were “antipolitics,” in Hungarian dissident George Konrбd’s 1984 appraisal.

Claims to extrapolitical status might be tenable for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which maintains rigid impartiality by acting only as states allow. Those who want to stop genocide, by contrast, are being eminently political. Thwarting a genocidal state is a political act, subject to practical constraints and moral imperfections. A duty to stop genocide cannot be plunked down a priori, abstracted from political realities and competing claims. The morality of intervention depends on accommodating such realities and trumping such claims. In short, humanitarian intervention is politics.

Embracing the political nature of humanitarian intervention concedes nothing of value. In fact, it is morally essential. A new doctrine should hold that humanitarian intervention can be just only if dispassionate and all-encompassing analysis projects it is likely (and not very unlikely) to help the persons affected and unlikely (and not very likely) to require excessive sacrifices of US security. The latter criterion, protecting US security, honors a genuine moral good. The provision of national security is necessarily the first responsibility of government by and for the people — which does not preclude some sacrifice on others’ behalf. The former criterion, though, needs explication. Humanitarian interventionists have long trespassed it.

An end is worthwhile only if the means to that end are worthwhile also. Intervention to stop mass killing requires imagining how an intervention will likely and could plausibly play out, integrating all relevant political dimensions. It means success cannot be assumed, even for a superpower. If troops are unlikely to help, they should not come. Totalizing exhortations about a duty to stop genocide are therefore as misconceived as they are hazardous. They imply the ends justify the means, any means — and thus the matter of how to intervene is irrelevant to the calculus of whether to intervene in the first place.

If this much sounds obvious, the straw man is all too fleshy. Many interventionists, often not fully consciously, have subscribed to the fantasy that their cause was more important than any obstacle and every other cause. Their moralizing cast of mind imbued stopping genocide with transcendent value, so ends were judged with scant consideration of means. Power’s book objected to inaction as such. Its explicit claim was that the United States should “do more.” But lifting a pinkie could hardly satisfy. Power really wanted genocide stopped, by any means necessary. Indeed, when the Bush administration in 2004 took several steps she had endorsed, labeling the Darfur conflict a “genocide” and pushing the United Nations to act, Power retorted: “The sin of past Presidents is not that they failed to use the word but that then, as now, they failed to stop the crime.”