Humanitarian intervention

"Humanitarian intervention"  (Oxymoron)
Interest of	• Lloyd Axworthy • Federica D'Alessandra • Bernard-Henri Lévy • Samantha Power
The claim of intervening in other countries for their citizens own good. This falls flat when made by the same countries which fund or otherwise instigate these countries unrest. An old and increasingly tired excuse for wars of aggression.

Official Narrative

The so-called "Clinton Doctrine" justifies invasion not as a tool of empire and domination, but of liberation. When atrocities are ongoing, the moral duty of heavily armed, more principled nations is to intervene and forcibly bring an end to the wrongdoing. Under this doctrine, humanitarian intervention provides a justification for a stronger country to attack a much weaker one that poses no threat to it.

Problems

“Humanitarian justification of intervention does not benignly shape hegemonic foreign policy or reduce inter-state bellicosity; rather, it inflames both.”
Amy Baker Benjamin (2015) 

Like the idea of a "peace-keeping force", this notion harbours a contradiction. As Ivan Illich predicted in Yugoslavia, the doctrine would eventually lead to bombing nations into respecting human rights. Since our childhood days, most of us are familiar with the idea of adults going in to break up children's fights, but nations are not children and this is not a suitable way to consider foreign policy.

Wikipedia reports in its section on the "Obama Doctrine" that "As president, an important part of Barack Obama's foreign policy has been reaching out to Muslim countries". This is an apparently reference to his speech at Cairo University, where he "called for reform of undemocratic countries from within". This doesn't seem to fit with his instigation and escalation of armed conflicts around the globe such as in Afghanistan and Libya.

Selected Examples

As Zero Hedge observed in April 2018: “Suddenly, children in Syria matter a lot to the West, while Yemen's child victims are rarely ever mentioned. Suddenly there’s an urgent moral issue being rushed through the court of public opinion. This has all the hallmarks of the prior propaganda campaigns we’ve seen before. Scant evidence, immediate assignment of blame, and a quick rush to military action before anybody can really properly question the train of events.”

False flag attacks

Full article: False flag

Where there is no humanitarian crisis, "humanitarian intervention" is not a valid reason for invasion. A fairly regular pattern has been either the direct instigation or the indirect causation of such a crisis - or at least of something that could be spun as a crisis for domestic consumption by a compliant commercially-controlled media. One recent example of such a false flag attack is the Syrian Chemical Weapons Attack of 21 August 2013.

Public response

There is evidence that after a bunch of formulaic and mendacious efforts to use the "humanitarian intervention" card as an excuse for imperialistic resource wars, the public of would-be aggressor nations is seeing through it and protesting, sometimes before war plans has been announced. Most recently, the False flag chemical attack failed to incite support for a war on Syria in 2013. This could be interpreted as a sign of increasing sophistication on the part of commercially-controlled media consumers, or - less optimistically - simply because the formula has been so heavily overused in recent years, and the attempt to provoke a Syrian crisis was so soon after an earlier application of the "humanitarian intervention" card in Libya.

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author
Refugees International	“If I’m reading in the newspaper about a crisis somewhere in the world, it is of great consolation to me to know that, if not at this moment, then very soon I will be hearing from Refugees International about how we should think about the crisis and more importantly what we should do about it.””	Samantha Power

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Gilbert Achcar's Defense of Humanitarian Intervention	article	8 April 2011	Edward Herman	Astute and informed observations on the 2011 Libyan 'Humanitarian intervention' by US/NATO powers and the Rwanda Genocide of 1994. It is a good illustration of the gullibility of the well-meaning Western Liberal Left.
Document:Gilbert Achcar's Fantasy World	article	17 March 2011	Stephen Gowans
Document:Libya and the Return of Humanitarian Imperialism	article	8 March 2011	Jean Bricmont
Document:Obama’s Humanitarianism as Window-Dressing for the US “Deep State” Agenda - The Case of Syria	article	18 June 2013	Elizabeth Woodworth
Document:The US-Saudi Deal on Libya	article	2 April 2011	Pepe Escobar
Document:The bloody legacy of Bomber Blair	Article	1 January 2022	Alex Snowdon	"Petition for Tony Blair to have his 'Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter' rescinded" Such an honour rests upon expecting us to conveniently forget or ignore the enormous damage that Blair did. People are right to be angry.
Document:Twenty Years On, We’ve Learned Nothing From 9/11	Speech	17 September 2021	Ron Paul	20 years on from 9/11, Ron Paul says that The Establishment in the United States has learned nothing since the attacks.
Document:War on Libya: Official Lies and Misconceptions	article	25 March 2011	James Petras Robin Abaya	A rundown of the principal falsehood propagated by the official narrative on Libya
File:Afghanistan - Exit vs Engagement.pdf	paper		Unknown
File:Bloody Vengeance in Sirte.pdf	report	October 2012		A harrowing report on the final days of Muammar Gaddafi, notable less for its background analysis of the 2011 NATO sponsored Libyan conflict, or its recommendations which are standard fare but pointedly fail to even mention Foreign/NATO culpability which is assumed to have been legitimate, but rather for an authoritative account of just one small instance of the raw barbarity which NATO played such a major part in enabling - under the banner of 'Humanitarian Intervention'.

 

Official examples

Name
2011 Attacks on Libya
Asylum seekers with apathetic refugee children

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