Humanitarian intervention
Humanitarian intervention | |
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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. |
Contents
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
Like the idea of a "peace-keeping force", this notion harbors a contradiction. As iconoclast Ivan Illich predicted before it actually came to pass in Yugoslavia, it will 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.
False flag attacks
- Full article: False flag
- 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 Chemica1l 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 imperalistic resource wars, the public of would-be agressor 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 - simplt 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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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2011 Attacks on Libya |
Asylum seekers with apathetic refugee children |