The Humanitarian War Myth

More than 40,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the rate at which civilians die has been increasing in recent months. Many thousands of innocent Iraqis have been detained, and some have been abused by American troops. Many others have been tortured or killed by Iraqi police. Basic services have been lacking in large portions of the country for three years. Civil war looms, conjuring memories of the 16-year Lebanese civil war, during which more than 100,000 people were killed out of a population of fewer than 4 million.

Yet, if the United Nations were to have its way, the Iraqi debacle would be just the first in a series of such wars -- the effect of a well-meaning but ill-considered effort to make humanitarian intervention obligatory as a matter of international law. Today Iraq, tomorrow Darfur.

Civilians suffer in all wars, but the suffering of Iraqi civilians in this war is particularly unfortunate because one of the main justifications for the war was humanitarian: to rescue suffering Iraqis from a tyrant. There were other justifications, of course, including the related but distinct idea that bringing democracy to Iraq would enhance America's long-term security. But the humanitarian justification was embraced by many who rejected the other justifications, including liberal elites as well as some conservatives, and it helped mobilize public opinion behind the war. Events have served the humanitarian justification poorly.

The idea that war can have a humanitarian as well as a national security justification has a long pedigree and surface plausibility. Some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century occurred in weak states whose governments could not have resisted a foreign military invasion. The genocide in Rwanda, which killed more than 800,000 people in a few months, was eventually halted by a force of Tutsi rebels; surely a Western army could have stopped it sooner. If nations can intervene at little cost to themselves because the target nations are weak and by doing so they prevent massive human suffering, then surely they should do so. The logic seems compelling.

But logic is no substitute for experience, and experience shows that humanitarian war is an oxymoron. The first blow to the idea was the failed intervention in Somalia in 1993. U.S. forces sent to maintain the peace while aid was distributed to millions of starving civilians were withdrawn after just 18 U.S. soldiers died. Policymakers drew the lesson that the American public will not tolerate casualties in a humanitarian war that has no clear national security justification. This lesson guided President Bill Clinton's refusal to authorize military intervention during the Rwandan genocide and his decision to limit U.S. military intervention in Kosovo in 1999 to high-altitude bombing, which ensured that no American pilots were killed -- at the expense of civilians on whose heads errant bombs fell. The Kosovo intervention, although regarded as a success in some quarters, has cost billions of dollars, required a seven-year occupation and could turn out to be a slow-motion version of Iraq.

The Iraq war itself has dealt the second blow. The problem with humanitarian intervention is not only that the costs are usually too high, but it turns out that the benefits usually are low. There are just too many risks and imponderables when war is used to prevent atrocities rather than to defeat an enemy. Military weapons inevitably kill civilians, and smart tyrants foil smart bombs by using their own civilians as shields. Dictators understand that a war premised on humanitarianism fails if they can make the invader kill their citizens. Removing the dictator risks civil war, which is almost always worse than the original abuses. Replacing him with another dictator only puts off the atrocities until another day. Long-term occupation breeds hostility, then insurgency and violence. In comparison with this, the original ruler might not seem so bad after all.

Saddam Hussein was an especially bad tyrant, and Iraqi civilian casualties attributable to the U.S. intervention do not yet equal what he was able to accomplish, albeit over a longer period. The Kurds and many Shiites are better off. And many Iraqis continue to think that the war was worth it, according to polls.

But polls do not reveal the opinions of dead Iraqis. The humanitarian effect of the war has been at best ambiguous against the baseline of the containment period that preceded it, and if current trends continue, the overall effect will be that of a humanitarian disaster.

Many people blame the humanitarian costs of the war in Iraq on the Bush administration's execution of it. This view is a psychological crutch that allows defenders of humanitarian intervention to keep the ideal alive for the next, presumably competent, administration of a President Hillary Clinton or John McCain. But complaints about this war are not noticeably different from complaints about earlier wars, where small mistakes (identifiable as such with the benefit of hindsight) resulted in enormous harm.

The Iraq war, consistent with experience, suggests that humanitarian wars will rarely yield humanitarian results. Why, then, is there a so-called "responsibility to protect" movement to make humanitarian intervention obligatory as a matter of international law? And why was this idea endorsed by the United Nations during its millennium summit?

The best humanitarians of our day recognize that we face a painful dilemma: to tolerate atrocities in foreign states or to risk committing worse atrocities in the course of ending them. From Rwanda, many people drew the lesson that failure to intervene is the worse option. The Iraq war may be the first step in unlearning this lesson. If not, an intervention in Darfur surely will be.

(This originally appeared here.)

Comments

[Kimball Corson]

Larry,
While your Hitler example is correct, it is truly hard to imagine that if we had not invaded Iraq a second time after 9/11, deaths would have been higher. 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since we commenced the second invasion, not counting American and coalition troops. That is a hard number to match under other likely scenarios.

[Kimball Corson]

Seth,

A factor that I believe also makes humanitarian "interventions" a hard sell to the American people is the notion that Americans are better than everyone else (remember the 3/5ths clause of the U.S. Constitution). Therefore, intervening to save an isolated and threatened group of Americans, for example, is wholly different than intervening to save thousands of Africans from genocide. We deem ourselves to count for more than others.

[RNB]

Food for thought: http://hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm

I'm restricting my comments to the miconception that Iraq is/was/could have been in 2003 a humanitarian intervention. As others have stated, it is hard to imagine anyone considering the invasion of Iraq a humanitarian intervention for a number of reasons.

First, the humanitarian justification was post-facto most notably once the WMD justification evaporated in the Iraqi desert. If that was a real justification it would have made sense politically (at least with our democratic international allies) to say so from the start. Taking into account the potential detrimental effect to a Republican base that such justification might have had domestically (remember Condi saying that US troops would notbe used in this Administration to walk kindergardeners to school?) the US could have used this justification behind closed doors with our intl allies. However, none have stepped up to the plate to say so and the USG has produced no evidence showing that it did.

Also, some relevant excerpts from a Human Rights Watch piece which I recommend and on which I welcome comments(http://hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm): In a humanitarian intervention, every effort should be made to ensure that the means used to intervene themselves respect international human rights and humanitarian law. The carpet bombing and torture committed by US troops are two examples of the violations of IHL and Intl HR law perpetrated by the US. Also, one can find even Fox news reports stating that torture was official policy. There was more of a conserted effort to violate intl law than to respect it. Secondly, it must be reasonably likely that military action will do more good than harm. Before the invasion even US Generals were skeptical about the ability of their own troops to remove Saddam and stabilize the country militarily with the troop numbers provided by Rumsfeld. Saddam was certainly no saint; he was an awful dictator. However, as Professor Posner rightly points out, "The humanitarian effect of the war has been at best ambiguous against the baseline of the containment period that preceded it, and if current trends continue, the overall effect will be that of a humanitarian disaster." Hmmm, sounds like the situation on ground wasnt that bad after all to justify intervening militarily on humanitarian grounds. Please do not misconstrue my point. The USG and the Inl community should have and could have continued to intervene in many ways short of war. Opposing military intervention DOES NOT mean doing nothing. This links nicely with my last point. To be a humanitarian intervention, war ought to be the last viable option. Cross-reference Samantha Power's continuum of intervention with the pre-war alternatives made use of by our Administration and you'll see that the USG skipped a few.

[Kimball Corson]

RNB, good comment.

[Kimball Corson]

Or, as one could say, we had to get all those Iraqis killed to save Iraq . . . which we still haven't done, as the killing is not over. Ineed, it is accelerating. If this is a humanitarian effort, pray that we don't engage in a dispotic one.

[Bob]

Shorter Eric Posner:

Since the Bush administration and its supporters claimed that the Iraq War was a humanitarian intervention in order to sell the war to the American public (was it an oxymoron then, or is it only an oxymoron now?), and since the Iraq War has been unsuccessful, no more humanitarian interventions anywhere, under any circumstances (no Darfur, no Rwanda, apparently no intervention to save 6M Jews from the Holocaust if it were to happen today, and no differences that anyone can draw between intervening in any of these situations and intervening in Iraq)! Quite a breathtaking claim when you take a step back.

I guess these are all pointless. http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/bnote.htm

(Also, Kosovo = Clinton's Iraq)

[Kimball Corson]

Will be out of pocket for 10 days, as I crew on this http://sailblogs.com/member/thewanderer I an not disinterested or without opinions; I am just gone.

[Kimball Corson]

I won't be able o spell when I get back either.

[David]

Kimball--

I've traveled extensively on all continents but Australia. So I know what life is like in the world. I'll grant that most countries have something that makes them interesting, and that some countries have some features that are better than the related features in the U.S. But I have yet to visit a country that has a better package of benefits for its residents and citizens than the U.S. I'm not trading my U.S. passport for another any time soon.

[LAK]

Come on David. You get 8 weeks off of work in France, plus the ridiculous cheese. And those Scandanavian countries definietly treat their average citizen much much better than we do. Extenisve vacations, some of which are free, if you are depressed.

I think you need to qualify that the US has the best life for those who can afford it.

[Bob]

Yeah, you get 8 weeks off in France and where do they go on their holiday...to southern Spain, another dump where nobody works fo a living. France is a trash heap, I've never seen so much garbage in the streets than in Paris. Maybe it's because all the trash collectors are on holiday? And service sucks, too. They have no work ethic.

[Erasmussimo]

C'mon, guys, this is so parochial. Yes, sure, America seems like the best place on earth -- to an American. And yep, Americans cannot understand why anybody would prefer calimari to a burger with fries. And Frenchmen cannot understand how Americans can survive without wine every day. Fijians can't understand how we can actually choose to live in such a cold climate.

This is called "culture". There's no place like home. Everybody thinks that their own homeland is intrinsically superior to everybody else's. I write this from Athens, and I don't see anybody here sighing wistfully at not being in New York City.

You want to know how to win friends and influence people in foreign countries? Tell them:

1. Their country is full of natural beauty.
2. Their food is the best in the world.
3. Their women are the most beautiful in the world.
4. Their language is so lovely to to hear, so lyrical and rhapsodic.
5. Their historical places are awe-inspiring.

It doesn't matter where you are, these five rules always work. And it helps to realize that you too are susceptible to them.

[LAK]

Bob,

I'd put Aix-En-Provence up against any city in the states for beauty and cleanliness.

And Paris is less filthy than manhattan, that is for sure. At least they don't pile garbage on the sidewalk.

[Dameon Vanscyoc]

Well when you think about war you dont exactly think of it as a humanitarian effort, but in war isnt really what your doing trying to help someone? Either way you look at it someway, somehow, in some light we are going to be looked as the bad guys because there are people who oppose are beliefs and believe that we are over stepping our boundaries and should withdraw, The same thing can be said about other topics as in school's and privacy, Illegal immigration. True, they are all in different fields but they deal with the same problem. "is it morally sound for us to shun one person and to accept another and to invade that persons privacy for a matter of security?"