HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION: REAL AND FAKE

When you look at the pro-War literature–e.g., the collection A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq–it comes across as a novel and unpleasant phenomenon. You have intelligent people like Christopher Hitchens, Norman Geras, Paul Berman, Tony Blair, Ian Buruma, Adam Michnik, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and others engaging in a smugly self-righteous, venomously left-baiting, discourse–a discourse that rests on a doubly dishonest verbal sleight of hand.

First, as in the book title above, War becomes reconceptualized as a form of “humanitarian intervention” or democratic revolution instead of what it really is, an alternative to humanitarian intervention and democratic revolution. Next, War having been arbitrarily reconstituted as “humanitarian” and/or “democratic” (or any other analogous euphemism), is now divided into two forms as though they’re actually separate from each other: intended violence, and gosh gee whiz unfortunate but perhaps unavoidable “collateral” violence. Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Both of these steps are intellectual frauds of the first order. First, armed assaults on bad guys are not humanitarian, and second, the makers of war–and its proponents--are directly responsible for all the violence it engenders.

As to the first, there is undoubtedly real humanitarian intervention involving armed force. Examples: ferrying of supplies to needy persons, and protecting the supply lines. Or, sending an expeditionary force to rescue or defend beseiged persons, on their request. In essence, these are no different from using violence to protect someone from being attacked, or raped. But this means correlatively that political interventions are not “humanitarian.” Whether we like them or not, they are matters of policy, and always questionable as such. For example, take the question of defending a legitimate government from being overthrown. Under some circumstances this can be thought of as an extension of the right of self-defense, and then that’s what it is, and perhaps sometimes it’s a defensible form of intervention in a civil war. But it’s still really a political choice, not a moral obligation, in the sense that deciding what “legitimate” means, and which governments are “legitimate,” is a profoundly political act based on political beliefs rather than moral or humanitarian standards of any kind–standards of which the current American regime has in any event simply none at all. So political intervention is not humanitarian intervention, and armed political intervention is War.

When is armed humanitarian intervention, specifically “in principle,” actually called for? There’s a great passage in a novel by AEW Mason, about mountain guides: “They obeyed a law, a law not of any man’s making, and the one law last broken--the law that what you know, that you must do, if by doing it you can save a life...If you can swim, sail a boat, or climb a mountain, and the moment comes when a life can be saved if you use your knowledge--well, you have got to use it. That’s the law.” By extension from individuals to societies I think that’s a good general principle. And in that case it is “a matter of principle,” as with the mountain guides, not of self-interested political choice. Rwanda may be an example of such a case--the French Army and the U.N. force both had the responsibility and perhaps (though possibly not) the power, and did nothing with it. To their shame.

War, contrarily, is the direct use of armed violence by one human group against another human group--excluding justifiable self-defense, which can fairly be conceptualized as a response to war, as long as it really is self-defense. (Always claimed to be, and rarely so.) The invasion of Afghanistan, e.g., might have been defensible as a limited police action, like any other justifiable punitive undertaking, but as an invasive War destructively overturning an entire society it is no longer self-defense, not even close.

Is there any way that war-making can be a “matter of principle”? It’s possible. It could be, say, in fulfillment of a treaty obligation--Sept 1, 1939. Or it could be in response to a cry for help. But has any country ever issued a call to invade it in order to help it? I can’t think of any. There’s the Bosnian case perhaps--“bomb us to help us.” That’s a very limited form of intervention--and the verdict of history is still out on whether it was a genuine matter of principle.

The clearest case of intervention in a civil war being a matter of principle is Rwanda, because now we’re talking about genocide, one people setting forth to wipe out another. Hitchens and the English writer Norman Geras have spoken of Saddam’s Iraq as though genocide was what was going on, but that’s a travesty of a morally serious argument. Whatever Saddam was doing, wiping out the overwhelming majority of Shiites–80% of the population!–wasn’t it. Ethnic cleansing of Kurds?–They seem to have survived remarkably well, and now we have ethnic cleansing of Sunnis, courtesy of the people who were going to bring “democracy” to Iraq. So in any event, what we did was not then an intervention in a civil war to prevent one side from wiping out the other.

There was no civil war in Iraq, just a loathsome tyranny, and the intervention there like any similar one became a war against a government you don’t like. Not liking the object of an attack, however loathsome, doesn’t make it any the less an attack, or War any less a War. An attack is not an intervention and massive bombardment (“shock and awe”) and destruction aren’t “humanitarian,” any more than a race is a stroll, or a fish is a bicycle. etc. (Actually, I think I’m being literal here--inter [between] vention [coming]--a coming between. Unless it’s a genuine coming between, the word is being hijacked.)

So the supposedly principled interventionist case, once you acknowledge that we’re talking about War, now goes like this: “It is ethically required that A wage war on B because B is being brutalized by B’s tyrant.” Are they kidding? This doesn’t come close to sounding anything like any imaginable “matter of principle.” Think of A and B as persons--principled intervention means we put ourselves between them to prevent A from hurting B. War means we throw a grenade at them and blow them to bits to stop the act of hurting, substituting our own act of hurting for theirs. That’s War. “We destroyed the village in order to save it.” Uh-huh.

This brings up the second part of the conceptual shell game practiced by the interventionists: their refusal to acknowledge the real nature of War. Assaults on another nation, in addition to not being “humanitarian,” are also not generators of regrettable “collateral damage”–“oh, I’m so sorry we killed all those civilians.” The damage, all of it, is the intention of the act. To say otherwise is to lie. There are no sanitary wars, and anyone who doesn’t know this is both a fool and a liar.

This is also true, inter alia, of occupations. This has been much misunderstood. The successful occupations of Japan and Germany after WWII are desperately taken as evidence that occupation can succeed more or less peacefully, without endless insurgency and violence. Totally false: the violence of the occupation of Japan was much much worse than the violence of the occupation of Iraq because it included the dropping of two A-bombs, not to mention the devastating fire-bombing of Tokyo and other cities, to sanitize the entire nation precedent to occupation by threatening it with mass destruction, regardless of whether there might have been inhabitants who were secretly but helplessly opposed to the war-making regime.

The same was true, to a lesser extent perhaps, of Germany: massive destruction of civil society along with massive loss of life as an expectable and desired outcome of total war (cf. Dresden), the complete smashing of the Wermacht after three years of all-out war on both fronts, and unconditional surrender by the leaders of a totally exhausted and completely demobilized society: which the Western Allies at least then proceeded to build up in a massive allocation of resources rather than an exploitation of its only resource (i.e. in Iraq, oil).

For an occupation to succeed, in other words, you must smash or terrorize the subjected society–the Nazis knew that!--and that is what has been going on in Iraq for two years: smashing the society, by visiting destruction on it in the name of “democracy!” Germany, contrarily, was not smashed in the name of “democracy,” because you can’t smash anyone in the name of democracy. It was smashed in the name of winning the War and ending the presumed threat to civilization. Democracy came later to Western Europe (and Japan), because there were actually regimes in the U.S. and Britain that were more or less democratic. (The Japanese Constitution was actually written by committed American democrats.) Conversely, thinking that George Bush might bring “democracy” to Iraq is like imagining that Stalin might have brought democracy to East Germany (see my earlier blog on "Second Thoughts on Intervention"). Fellow-traveling comes in many guises.

In other words, what’s grotesquely missing entirely from the “Iraq as Just War” position is the recognition that first and foremost War is War. It becomes everything else but in the commentaries of its apologists like Elshtain, Hitchens, Geras, and the like. You’d think they’d understand that if one is to have a “just war” theory, then the first step in just-ifying War is to acknowledge that it is a War, with all that entails, and that it will necessarily go way beyond your own alleged “intentions.” Waging War is the only intention that counts. The War may later turn out to have been just according to some theory or other, but you can’t possibly know that beforehand, and cannot claim the mantle of “justness” a priori. The alleged intention to do one thing rather than another can’t create the description of what has actually been done--that’s literally what logicians call the Intentional Fallacy.

If a man intends to rape a woman non-violently--if she would just give in and not make a fuss--and then somehow winds up beating and knifing and killing her because she resisted--I don’t think even Hitchens would credit his “intention.” That’s the US in Iraq. Is and always was, as all of us who opposed the invasion pointed out time and again. The just war theory of the Iraq invasion simply makes the Iraqis into non-people, objects of the moralizing fantasies of Western intellectuals who are prepared to sacrifice any number of people to a convenient theory.

As for the hideous conduct of the War, are these high-IQ thinkers actually surprised? Since the invention of the bomber, the flame-thrower, the fragmentation bomb, the distinction between just and unjust means has collapsed, though it’s amazing how many self-styled public intellectuals refuse to notice this. There’s no such thing as a partial war, except when one side completely defeats the other’s armed forces in a purely military zone (the 6-Day War, perhaps, which in the immediate sense was self-defense and did not initially involve invading someone else’s territory–until its historically disastrous conclusion). Otherwise, all persons are targets, all weapons that destroy persons are used if they have to be.

There may be a “just” war but there is no clean war, and all plans for war are therefore plans for Total War. A man who goes into the woods with a .22 rifle looking for rabbit may actually be said to be hunting rabbits. Substitute a phosphorus grenade launcher or a napalm sprayer for the rifle and no matter what he says he “intends,” he’s no longer hunting rabbits, he’s destroying a woodland. This is the truth of war, “just” or “unjust” as history may later decide. In either case, there is nothing about it that is “humanitarian,” whatever the rights or wrongs on either side.

The baffling thing is that all this is perfectly self-evident to military professionals (and politicians too, though the latter simply lie about it). Only intellectuals focused on airy abstractions could manage to miss this point. That they do so with such consistency is, I imagine (and to be charitable), attributable to a misguided desire to avoid falling into the pit of a supposedly irresponsible pacifism, which seems to beckon if one accepts the clear truth that no war can any longer be sanitized. In truth, the premise does not lead inexorably to the pacifist conclusion. It certainly does lead to the less drastic conclusion that even wars in a just cause will necessarily encompass large elements of injustice, and that the latter must be accepted with open eyes as part of any pursuit of the former. Not whitewashed with the euphemism of “humanitarian,” or “democratic.” And weighed against the results that may or more likely may not actually come about.

Once you acknowledge that you chose War, then you acknowledge also that you chose what War does: you chose to kill everyone who is to be killed, and to destroy everything that is to be destroyed. You posited a chimerical end and invoked its fantasized achievement to justify any means at all, and as for the human beings who insist on getting in the way, well, to paraphrase Norman Mailer, “fuck em.”

And what about those of us who said No, you are about to engage in butchery and national destruction in the name of seizing power in a One-Party State? Did we therefore, as Norman Geras alleges, in our own way choose to endorse Saddam’s killing and torturing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Kurds? The way the Reagan Administration chose to endorse that by arming Saddam during the Iraq-Iran War? No, that was Saddam’s choice. If I could have stopped it I would, but I couldn’t, and neither could you, or you. That’s the tragedy of history. Only the Iraqi people could have, perhaps with less social destruction; now we’ll never know.

We are not the accomplices of every brutal killer across the world if we are helpless to stop him by armed violence without becoming brutal killers ourselves. We didn’t invade South Africa to free the Blacks, we don’t invade Israel to free the Palestinians, we didn’t invade Argentina to overthrow the torture regime of the Generals, we don’t invade China to end the regime of oppressive slave labor, we didn’t invade East Timor to stop the slaughter there (hell, we winked at it), we didn’t invade Germany to save the Jews, we don’t invade Pakistan to stop the brutalization of women–and all these, sadly, were the right, because the only possible, decisions.

AEW Mason said it best. If what you can do can save a life, you do it. By pressure, by sanctions, by disinvestment, by assassination, by the interposition of yourselves as witnesses (the Quaker way), even by selective military intervention–interposition of armed selves between the victims and their attacker. But if all you can do is change the identity of the massive life-takers, and aggrandize your own self-interest meanwhile, you don’t do it. Or if you do, we know who you are: not an “humanitarian,” but just another murderous imperialist–or his fellow traveler.