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Humanitarian Intervention: Crafting a Workable Doctrine (Council on Foreign Relations
This Council Policy Initiative frames the issues raised by the "ClintonDoctrine", which advocates U.S. military intervention against large-scale humanitarian abuses. The introduction offers a hypothetical memorandum prepared by a national security adviser to the president, setting forth relevant precedents and context. Three perspectives on U.S. policy options follow, written as speeches theU.S. president might make to the American one, humanitarian intervention can serve national interests; two, humanitarian interests alone do not justify military intervention; and three, strategic interest and moral imperative must be balanced.
108 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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April 7, 2022
I gave it four stars not because I "liked" its precepts, but because of its honest presentation of them. This is a compilation of policy papers addressed to President Bill Clinton by leading wonks of the Council on Foreign Relations, published in 2000. As such they may seem badly dated, but in truth they still engage policy makers - just as their ideas regurgitated older Wilsonian cliches. I'll quote some of their positions at length before I counter-intervene.
From Holly J. Burkhalter, with Physicians for Human Rights and a HFC staffer: “The central premise of a new U.S. policy on humanitarian military intervention should be that mass killing of unarmed men, women and children are a threat to vital American interests. Preventing and stopping them should be among this nation’s top foreign policy commitments . . . in my view, unchecked mass killing anywhere is a threat to global peace and stability, and thus to American interests [requiring] active and concerted diplomatic and political effort commensurate with the resources and international stature of the United States. [pp. 20-21.]
Again, the moral imperative – that must transcend geopolitical or material interests - is strongly stated: “Warring parties or abusive governments that inflict atrocities upon the innocent as a means of broadening or retaining their power challenge the conscience of the world. It is morally imperative that the American president proclaim and act upon the conviction that such crimes will not be tolerated. The inherent integrity of individual human beings is a universal value embodied in the founding of this country, in our Constitution, and in the international human rights treaties we have signed. Unrestrained depredations against innocent men, women, and children are an assault on these values and upon human dignity everywhere.” [p.21.]
The last sentence is certainly true; conflating it with “our values” in a “new U.S. policy” is such a height of contradiction that it defines hypocrisy. Would this have meant humanitarian intervention against an ally engaged in mass depredation in El Salvador or Lebanon? The rhetorical question is silly as the answer is obvious. The context of cold war “required” “hard-nosed assessment” and looking the other way – when not actively arming the perpetrators. This new posture was only made possible after the cold war changed the geopolitical configuration and the US could “assert global leadership.” Forget about us arming death squads or the Indonesian military – or about our own boys in Asia. “We’re different now.”
And yet the geopolitical rationales are the same. In order to stop Saddam Hussein from gassing Kurds the whole country must be starved and then bombed. To stop Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo the full force of NATO must be brought into play, to empower the Kosovar cleansing of Serbs. To prevent humanitarian disaster in Libya NATO intervention must again be deployed directly. Or, by arming “freedom fighters” who first sodomized the “hated dictator Qaddafi – to Hillary Clinton’s gloating “humanitarian” satisfaction – and then the entire country.
Of course, the CFR analysts are “hard-nose analysts,” too. CFR Senior Fellow Dov S. Zakheim warns that “reports that horrify their recipients are furnished by whatever side wishes to prompt an intervention by outside power. That was clearly the case in Kosovo. . . “ That we must “recognize that exaggeration and sometimes outright deception on the part of participants on both sides magnifies the actual ambiguity and uncertainty that inevitably clouds what actually is happening on the ground.” [p. 42.]
Yes, certainly – as if “the recipients” are so far above their own exaggeration and deception of what actually is happening on the ground; as if said recipients are not already waiting for a plausible excuse to jump in and, if necessary, help create it. Zakheim is honest enough to admit “that we are quick to bully smaller states” with missiles and bombers, “but have not been prepared to pick on someone close to our own size.” [p. 43.] While he means this as a statement of limitations even with the “best of intentions,” others can take it as a justification for great-power conflict leading to world war.
In the final analysis, the call for ramping up the good old Military-Industrial Complex are not hidden too deeply between the lines. For all of Zakheim’s caveats he urges: “America achieved its current military prowess thanks to investments and research funded in the [cold war] 1980s. Without ongoing investments, our forces will decline in both quality and quantity. Our comparative military advantage will erode.” Thus there must be new threats, new reasons, to justify this necessary investment. HI provided the turn of the century stopgap between the end of the cold war and the “war on terror.” It is still present, woven into the fabric of newer military interventions: we’re stopping the brutal dictator in Iraq, Abu Ghraib was just a “regrettable error.” We’re in Afghanistan to liberate women and girls, even by drone strikes that wipe out entire families, including such female members.
Does that mean HI is a moral excretia that must be shoveled aside? I would disagree; but in my opinion is not, as these policy wonks maintain, a Kiplingesque burden any one people can take on itself without dropping. Would anyone have taken Soviet humanitarian intervention seriously in El Salvador or Lebanon? Perhaps those on the ground might have been grateful for Red Army troops trouncing the military martyring them; yet the immediate good would be overshadowed by resulting power configurations. The US has not – and can’t – escape similar derision as its power actions consistently mock healing and compassion for the suffering.
From Holly J. Burkhalter, with Physicians for Human Rights and a HFC staffer: “The central premise of a new U.S. policy on humanitarian military intervention should be that mass killing of unarmed men, women and children are a threat to vital American interests. Preventing and stopping them should be among this nation’s top foreign policy commitments . . . in my view, unchecked mass killing anywhere is a threat to global peace and stability, and thus to American interests [requiring] active and concerted diplomatic and political effort commensurate with the resources and international stature of the United States. [pp. 20-21.]
Again, the moral imperative – that must transcend geopolitical or material interests - is strongly stated: “Warring parties or abusive governments that inflict atrocities upon the innocent as a means of broadening or retaining their power challenge the conscience of the world. It is morally imperative that the American president proclaim and act upon the conviction that such crimes will not be tolerated. The inherent integrity of individual human beings is a universal value embodied in the founding of this country, in our Constitution, and in the international human rights treaties we have signed. Unrestrained depredations against innocent men, women, and children are an assault on these values and upon human dignity everywhere.” [p.21.]
The last sentence is certainly true; conflating it with “our values” in a “new U.S. policy” is such a height of contradiction that it defines hypocrisy. Would this have meant humanitarian intervention against an ally engaged in mass depredation in El Salvador or Lebanon? The rhetorical question is silly as the answer is obvious. The context of cold war “required” “hard-nosed assessment” and looking the other way – when not actively arming the perpetrators. This new posture was only made possible after the cold war changed the geopolitical configuration and the US could “assert global leadership.” Forget about us arming death squads or the Indonesian military – or about our own boys in Asia. “We’re different now.”
And yet the geopolitical rationales are the same. In order to stop Saddam Hussein from gassing Kurds the whole country must be starved and then bombed. To stop Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo the full force of NATO must be brought into play, to empower the Kosovar cleansing of Serbs. To prevent humanitarian disaster in Libya NATO intervention must again be deployed directly. Or, by arming “freedom fighters” who first sodomized the “hated dictator Qaddafi – to Hillary Clinton’s gloating “humanitarian” satisfaction – and then the entire country.
Of course, the CFR analysts are “hard-nose analysts,” too. CFR Senior Fellow Dov S. Zakheim warns that “reports that horrify their recipients are furnished by whatever side wishes to prompt an intervention by outside power. That was clearly the case in Kosovo. . . “ That we must “recognize that exaggeration and sometimes outright deception on the part of participants on both sides magnifies the actual ambiguity and uncertainty that inevitably clouds what actually is happening on the ground.” [p. 42.]
Yes, certainly – as if “the recipients” are so far above their own exaggeration and deception of what actually is happening on the ground; as if said recipients are not already waiting for a plausible excuse to jump in and, if necessary, help create it. Zakheim is honest enough to admit “that we are quick to bully smaller states” with missiles and bombers, “but have not been prepared to pick on someone close to our own size.” [p. 43.] While he means this as a statement of limitations even with the “best of intentions,” others can take it as a justification for great-power conflict leading to world war.
In the final analysis, the call for ramping up the good old Military-Industrial Complex are not hidden too deeply between the lines. For all of Zakheim’s caveats he urges: “America achieved its current military prowess thanks to investments and research funded in the [cold war] 1980s. Without ongoing investments, our forces will decline in both quality and quantity. Our comparative military advantage will erode.” Thus there must be new threats, new reasons, to justify this necessary investment. HI provided the turn of the century stopgap between the end of the cold war and the “war on terror.” It is still present, woven into the fabric of newer military interventions: we’re stopping the brutal dictator in Iraq, Abu Ghraib was just a “regrettable error.” We’re in Afghanistan to liberate women and girls, even by drone strikes that wipe out entire families, including such female members.
Does that mean HI is a moral excretia that must be shoveled aside? I would disagree; but in my opinion is not, as these policy wonks maintain, a Kiplingesque burden any one people can take on itself without dropping. Would anyone have taken Soviet humanitarian intervention seriously in El Salvador or Lebanon? Perhaps those on the ground might have been grateful for Red Army troops trouncing the military martyring them; yet the immediate good would be overshadowed by resulting power configurations. The US has not – and can’t – escape similar derision as its power actions consistently mock healing and compassion for the suffering.
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