“Libya is a lesson in what the international community can achieve when we stand together as one.”
“I said at the beginning of this [Libya] process, we cannot and should not intervene every time there is an injustice in the world. Yet it’s also true, that there are times where the world could have and should have summoned the will to prevent the killing of innocents on a horrific scale.”Read the Article here.
I call humanitarian wars immaculate intervention, because most advocates want to see the outcome limited to preventing war crimes, not extended to include regime change or the imposition of alien values. They want a war of immaculate intentions surgically limited to a singular end without other consequences. And this is where the doctrine of humanitarian war unravels.Read more: "Immaculate Intervention: The Wars of Humanitarianism," republished with permission of STRATFOR.
A common fallacy among those who regard themselves as hardheaded “realists” is to dismiss the role of morality in foreign policy decisions and claim it is all about narrow interests, especially economic interests, and most especially, oil interests. Such cynicism, however, is itself a kind of naivete, a reductionism unequal to the complexity of war-and-peace issues.
In the Libyan case, the argument that it’s all about oil is particularly unpersuasive. First, only a very small amount of our imported oil comes from Libya, and in any case for many years Gadhafi has been a reliable supplier, both to us and to our NATO allies. Moreover, in recent years, he has played a valuable intelligence-gathering role in the war against terrorism, especially al-Qaida. So if narrow self-interests really explained the U. S. intervention, we should be fighting to save Gadhafi, not to overthrow him.
In short, there is every reason to believe that genuine moral concerns were an important component — probably the most important component — in explaining the administration’s decision to intervene in Libya.Read the column in the Buffalo New here.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon also said on Thursday that the justification for the use of force was based on humanitarian grounds, and referred to the principle known as Responsibility to Protect (R2P), "a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community's failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."
"Resolution 1973 affirms, clearly and unequivocally, the international community's determination to fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians from violence perpetrated upon them by their own government," he said.Read the article here.
