hy second
thoughts on intervention now? As we shall argue, the
prospect of regime change in the U.S. does not just raise
hopes for a different way of thinking about American
policies toward the rest of the world; it also could affect,
and ought to affect, the entire way we think about the
nature and conditions of humanitarian intervention in the
affairs of other nations.
First thoughts about intervention, as occasioned by the war
in Iraq, have tended to be more or less the same, and by now
are commonplace in intellectual and academic circles.
Intervention is “humanitarian,” or it’s more destructive
than it’s worth. It prevents the depredations of “rogue
states,” or it’s simply a cover for American imperialism,
the excuses for it serving the same purpose as parliaments
(according to Lenin) do for capitalism. It would be
acceptable if truly multi-lateral, but the same actions are
unacceptable if unilateral (read, “American,” or “American”
with a British cover). To foreswear it entirely would be
“neo-isolationist;” to endorse it in principle is to try to
become a “world policeman.” And so on. We argued strongly
against unilateral action by the United States (see Logos,
spring 2003) and we still hold to that position. But given
the grotesqueness of recent events, we want to stress our
own need for second thoughts about the question of
humanitarian intervention in general.
As we wrote before, principles of international cooperation
and mutual respect, such as multilateralism, are crucially
important, indeed now more so than ever, when they are being
systematically undermined by those who argue that any such
principles are simply out of date in the war on terror.
Still, to be a more effective guide to policy,
multilateralism needs an amendment. The disasters of
genocide, mass slaughter, famine, and so forth, will
sometimes seem to outstrip the capacity of international
agencies or coalitions to act in a timely fashion, and calls
will arise (as in the Sudan today) for the faster action
that only a great military power—the United States, most
obviously—can undertake. How should we respond to those
calls? Are there any principles that we can apply to the
call for unilateral action, that might differentiate
legitimate from illegitimate responses to those disasters?
We do not intend to offer a general theory of humanitarian
intervention, let alone of international relations. Rather,
we want to suggest two considerations that have often been
neglected in mainstream discussions. The first of these is
that the apparent human need for intervention, even the
demand for it from some of the parties whose lives are at
stake, does not by itself justify any particular response.
It sets the stage, but the stage now has to be populated
with the actual actors who propose to do the intervening,
and whose prospective policies, motives, and capacities have
to be analyzed. This sort of serious analysis was almost
totally lacking among supporters of the invasion of Iraq, as
though the existence of tyranny, or oppression, or potential
threat, had only to be recognized to generate action. This
is simply wrong; wishful thinking is not a policy, and
cannot justify mass killing. That is why most foreign policy
“realists” opposed the invasion: its proponents paid hardly
any attention to such essential aspects of policy-making as
the need to consider its likely short- and long-run costs to
the Iraqi (and American) people, the credibility of the
intervening power (i.e., the US), and the policy-makers’
understandings of the region in which they plan to intervene
(in this case quite obviously almost nil).
Here, however, we want to add a second consideration that
goes beyond both moralistic invocations of what is right,
and realistic considerations of what is possible. On the
ground, where people live and die, what matters is not
simply the ostensible content of principles and policies. It
is equally important, in our view, to understand the full
moral and legal significance of who puts those principles
and policies into action. With that amendment we
may, at least on some occasions, be able to get beyond the
seemingly insoluble dilemmas of the competing positions that
we described above.
As applied to Iraq, the dilemmas are seemingly insoluble in
the sense that the opposite of what appears to be a true
proposition seems always and equally true, and so we
intellectuals flailed futilely around us, trying to persuade
each other with concessions that were not only rhetorically
meaningless but empirically empty. How can you measure one
destruction against another? how can you honestly say that
the U.S. is not an imperial power? how can you honestly say
that American policy has never been based on anything but
nakedly imperial self-interest? how can you oppose the
spread of a democracy you argue for so ardently at home? how
can you be so naive as to believe that democracy can be
imposed on others by force? how can you be so elitist
as to doubt that others want democracy as much as you do?
In this array of not-quite-satisfying principles that seem
to demand their own refutation as soon as they are stated,
there may often in fact be no firm ground to stand on except
historical outcomes that always arrive too late to be of any
use. As Hegel wrote, History will be the judge, but that’s
of help only to the authors of history books. If the Thomas
Friedmans and Michael Ignatieffs and Bill Kellers of the
world have changed their view of the War on Iraq, it’s
because the only excuse for the War as they imagined it in
the privacy of their imaginations was a particular kind of
victory, and that War has already been lost. And if
somehow it were to seem as though it might be “won,” they
would change their minds again. But all the while the
real “war,” the war of invasion and conquest mobilized by
the U.S. against a non-belligerent Iraq, was begun and goes
on as though they had never written, or even existed—if they
never had, nothing would have been changed.
How do we explain this total disconnection between the
educated intelligence and the obvious reality that it was
failing to observe? We believe the explanation is that many
of us, for or against, were asking only part of the right
question. We needed to focus more on who was implementing
interventionist principles as part of a matter the question
of principle itself. From that perspective we can see that
the invasion needed to be opposed even if in some sense it
might be said to have “worked.” We needed to understand that
in international affairs, it is not only the course of
action undertaken but also the nature and quality of the
regime undertaking it that helps to distinguish “right”
from “wrong.” And the nature or quality of a regime have
nothing to do with its stated purposes; with its intentions.
It is misleading, or even false, to say that “the road to
hell is paved with good intentions.” The road to hell is
paved with stated intentions of any kind, and
we set foot on it when we take them too seriously; when we
start believing what people say instead of paying attention
to what they are and what they do. Thus intellectuals such
as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman parroted
phrases about “democracy” and “ending tyranny” and “Saddam
the torturer” on behalf of a regime that was and is visibly
not pro- but anti-democratic; that had and has not the
faintest interest in preserving anyone’s individual
liberties; and that has lied about every one of its actions,
domestic and foreign, as a matter of course. When in the
minority, its representatives in Congress attempted a
constitutional coup d’etat against a democratically
elected president; when that failed they stole the 2000
election with a coup de main in Florida.
No one in their right mind would trust this regime to “bring
democracy” to the United States, let alone Iraq; or should
have trusted it to have humanitarian values deeper than
those of a thug; or to have any interest in replacing
destructive violence anywhere with non-violent stability.
On the plain record, the bedrock goals of the Bush regime
and its various factions are and were manifest: to install
and perpetuate plutocratic, one-party rule long enough to
enrich its friends and punish its enemies; to secure a
cordon sanitaire around Iran, in order to prop up a
faltering oil-based economy long enough to maintain the
nationalist delusions of empire that could sustain one-party
rule; to make the mid-East safe for Israeli dominance; to
cement its alliance with a neo-totalitarian Christian
fundamentalism. To forget all this while talking about
“America” and “its” “democratic” goals, as though a “nation”
were some imaginary ideal, were anything more than the real
people who manage to commit real atrocities in its name for
their own visible purposes, was and is a verbal swindle. It
is the same swindle that the Commander-In-Chief of Abu
Ghraib’s MP’s attempted to foist on the world by saying that
“they” didn’t represent the real “us,” as though a real “we”
are out there somewhere else, unnoticed by the rest of the
world, creating a peaceful “democracy.” (Although since this
commander-in-chief governs on behalf of a minority of
voters, he might have a point.) In short, the intellectuals,
journalists, and prime ministers who promoted the policies
of this regime deserve the epithet that Joseph Stalin
bestowed on Western fellow-travelers who thought Communism
was about a new world of human equality and pretended the
gulag didn’t exist: “useful idiots.”
This corrective emphasis on the nature of the regime that
sets out to engage in “humanitarian interventions,” or to
“promote democracy,” casts a different light on some
arguments about both the long-run nature of American foreign
policy, and the role of the United Nations in this kind of
venture. As to the first, criticisms of the Clinton
administration’s (and Colin Powell’s) reluctance to
intervene in the Balkan wars without NATO’s support, and of
its half-hearted, ill-conceived responses to terrorism,
point precisely to the strength of what might be called in
retrospect the “Clinton Doctrine” (and the “Powell
corollary”): a desire, compared to the present regime, to do
as little as possible on behalf of American empire, even
while promoting and extending it. The reason for this
reluctance was that in its day-to-day behavior the Clinton
regime was everything the Bush regime is not: an
inward-turning activist and sometime reformist regime (even
if we disagreed with some of its reforms), committed to at
least preserving if not extending many traditional
constitutional protections as well as the social safety-net,
and above all being quite open about what it was doing and
why it was doing it. In this respect, it is significant that
the Clinton administration contemplated action against Iraq,
but did not follow through: not necessarily because the
leadership had moral qualms, but in part at least because
excessive overseas commitments would have undermined its
domestic priorities (and been undertaken by a discredited
president as well). Aggrandizing power to itself and
overturning existing world order were not its primary goals.
Contrarily, these were and are clearly the primary goals of
the Bush regime, and therefore to have given it credence was
to have been, as we have said, an idiot.
As for the United Nations, anti-war but pro-UN commentators
such as ourselves have sometimes appeared uneasily to
advocate a double standard, or a single standard that seems
bound to produce disastrous inaction, as in Rwanda-Burundi
or the Sudan today. Against this position unilateralists
point to the UN’s incapacities: its institutionalized
inertia; its numerical domination by nations that are only
marginally interested in the strengthening of what “we”
consider democracy; its tendency toward the usual
corruptions of a sclerotic bureaucracy, as supposedly
evidenced in the oil-for-food scandal. This last, though,
is actually a particularly salient example of the need for
regime analysis, as the scandal-mongers (William Safire most
notably) peddle their anti-UN wares while the administration
they support sells Iraqi assets off to its corporate friends
and allies on a rigged market where the highest bidder wins.
Nor is it a minor matter that the oil-for-food scandal is
hardly a blip on the fiscal radar compared to even the minor
taxation and expenditures record of the Bush administration,
or the theft of Iraqi oil that is going on at this very
moment.
That is merely a negative argument, though. More crucially,
the pro-UN argument is in one important respect at least
correct, despite its highlighted difficulties: for in a
sense these are precisely what make it a more appropriate
“world policeman” than the United States. Here too
regime analysis is essential. As regimes go, the UN is so
minimalist it barely qualifies. Its dangers are entirely of
a negative kind—that it won’t do anything. It’s no danger to
world peace or regional stability; it won’t attempt to take
over anybody or anything; it has no black helicopters at
all; and it is not at all clear that the things it won’t do
would be better done by the US or any other military power.
It surely ought to be strengthened, but at ten times its
current possibilities for armed intervention it would hardly
be competing with France, or Germany, let alone the United
States.
Not simply what the U.S. should do in the world, then, but
under what circumstances it might legitimately engage in
unilateral intervention; what it ought to do on behalf of or
in concert with the United Nations; and how such
cooperative, multilateral, action could be arranged, is the
question that all of us who believe that humanitarian
intervention may on occasions be necessary ought to
discuss. But it follows from what we have said that this
discussion can not even begin to take place in a serious way
until and unless regime change has take place in the United
States. If a pro-democratic rather than anti-democratic
regime were in power here, we could attempt to link its
political direction with arguments, directed at conventional
American nationalists such as John Kerry, about the
usefulness of the UN, prospective limits on the US’s
imperial sway and economic power, the validity of
multilateral interventions, and so on. But if George W. Bush
is elected in 2004, there is not a single imaginable foreign
regime, anywhere, of any kind whatsoever, that will be
better off for being the object of America’s attentions.
Rather, the United States will be among those nations in
dire need of humanitarian intervention.
Philip Green
is Formerly Sophia Smith Professor of Government at Smith
College, now Visiting Professor of Political Science at the
New School University Graduate Faculty, author of
Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence; Retrieving
Democracy: In Search of Civic Equality; Equality and
Democracy; Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in
Hollywood,
and other books and articles; member, Editorial Board of
The Nation.
Drucilla Cornell
is professor of Political Science, Women's Studies, and
Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She is
currently working on two books: one about the future of
freedom, equality, and global development; another about the
future of critical theory.
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