There's no such thing as humanitarian war

The UN Security Council authorised 'all necessary means' to protect civilians in Libya from Colonel Gadaffi's forces. Don't let's kid ourselves, this is not just about patrolling airspace. The UN Security Council has voted for WAR.

Vince Cable has said that this intervention is justified - and is different from Iraq - in that it is an intervention made on humanitarian grounds. Now I like Vince Cable - he's a nice chap. And even if he didn't quite predict the credit crunch as is often claimed, he was at the very least a voice of reason while Gordon Brown was indulging the banking sector and binging on credit.
 
But he's either hopelessly badly informed about international relations, or more probably just being disingenuous. There is no such thing as purely 'humanitarian' intervention (a more honest term is 'humanitarian war').  There can't be, for the simple reason that states large and small have as the purpose of their existence the imperative to act in their own interests. As someone wise once said; there are no friends in international politics - just interests.
Humanitarian intervention to stop genocide, or egregious human rights abuses that demean us all are right, and honourable - in principle. I’m all in favour of them – in principle. Even if a humanitarian good is the by-product, or secondary consequence of conflict I would welcome it – in principle.The problem is, of course, that principles, however high-minded, often run into reality.
 
Libya is not a case of one state attacking or invading another, as in Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion and annexation of Kuwait. The Libyan conflict is internal in nature and this causes problems for would-be interventionists.

Morally it is desirable for a better, safer world that madmen and murderers are at the very least stopped, better rolled back and ideally toppled. Even if the bloodshed is ‘internal’ to a nation state. That is the ideal. The problem is that the world is highly complex and inter-related, with a law of unintended consequences constantly hovering over every violent action, even if it seems clearly morally justified.

Conflicts often have religious, ethnic or tribal dimensions, stretching across borders, complicated by historical grievances, political and economic disenfranchisement, poverty, injustice and a sense of unfairness, and almost always a failure of political systems. The last of these is the most crucial. There may be monsters, but a polity that works would constrain them. Weak, failing or non-existent political systems, parties, elections and enfranchisement is frequently a causal factor, or at least a complicating one, in internal wars and conflicts. Libya is a case in point. And this makes the application of force to ‘protect’ or ‘save’ people a very blunt instrument indeed.

If I saw a poor man being beaten on the street by thugs I would intervene, or at least seek help. But the law of unintended consequence is very inconsequential indeed in this case. The tiny scale of the conflict ensures this. I’m assuming that street thuggery has few, if any, of the symptoms and causes outlined above. International war is a very different proposition.

On a practical level, going to war for humanitarian purposes is highly risky and rarely clear-cut. For a start the world cannot be divided into goodies and baddies quite so neatly. Take the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. The world stood by and did nothing while millions were murdered by howling mobs. Bill Clinton was widely blamed, even though the US didn’t actually arm or participate. America the superpower was expected to intervene. (That’s the thing about America – they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t). He has since said (apparently) that it’s one of his biggest regret. But on whose side should ‘we’ (the international community) have intervened? The Tutsis, against the Hutus? But what about when the boot was on the other foot and the Hutus were being chopped up? Should we have suddenly switched sides? Things are rarely that simple. And in the case of Rwanda, air strikes would not have stopped a few guys going into small villages and murdering with machetes. There were no large armoured columns for cruise missiles to hit. No – it would have taken a massive ground force, thousands strong, to take over the entire country and ‘keep the peace’. They would soon have made enemies, been the focus of attack and sucked into an ethnic war.

Personally I would still have favoured intervention in Rwanda – but it would have had to have been African troops, backed by the only force that could give them credibility – not the toothless UN, but NATO. But that’s the problem – NATO would have much to lose from such an open-ended and poorly-defined mission. And African states are amongst the most corrupt and kleptocratic on earth. There were few good options.

Wars aren't cheap; even minor skirmishes cost money and lives. There are the attendant risks: mission creep, defeat or stalemate, casualties, public scepticism and opposition, PR disasters, spiralling costs, national humiliation. Then there are the certainties: unforseen consequences and 'blowback'. I can fully accept that wars can, in specific circumstances, ease human suffering; which we're lead to believe is the purpose of humanitarian wars. But wars by their very nature are unpredictable. Even with the best will in the world no-one can predict where they will lead. And somebody, somewhere has to take these costs and risks.
 
A lot of people seem to think that there are lots of positive and encouraging precedents for this action. But there are not.

Take the Second World War was absolutely not fought for humanitarian reasons – to blunt or halt the ‘Final Solution’ any more than it was to ease the suffering of the peoples occupied and oppressed by the Nazis. These were fortunate by-products of the war’s central aim: the defeat of Nazi Germany. In fact a huge compromise had to be made to ensure this aim – a pact with the devil, Stalin’s USSR, without which we may not have triumphed. WW2 seems to have clouded the judgment of many people, probably because the Nazis were so heinously evil. But we blundered into war in September 1939 because German expansion threatened the delicate balance of power in Europe upon which British trade and prosperity rested. It really was just that, not a milky concern for the Czechs, Poles and Slovaks, that pushed a reluctant Britain into war. That doesn’t detract from the undoubted moral good of liberating (some) of the occupied peoples of Europe from the Nazis, but please don’t think that’s why we went to war.

Other quoted precedents are NATO’s bombing of Kosovo and Serbia. This was ostensibly to stop ethnic cleansing. It eventually did, although it initially accelerated it. It was the threat of a ground invasion that seemed to bring Milosovic to heel. But was it really as simple as that? It seems to me as though the threat of a wider Balkan conflict, possibly spreading across the Mediterranean to Greece, Turkey and even Italy was the deciding factor. Ethnic strife was a causal factor in these considerations. For sure the halt to ethnic cleansing was a laudable humanitarian aim, but it was the halt of Serbian nationalism and expansion that was the real aim. NATO couldn’t allow it any more, Milosovic’s war aims were too broad for the alliance to stomach. Ethnic cleansing crystallised that in their minds and fed outrage in the media, but there is evidence that all sides in the conflict practiced brutality.

So this leaves us with a very thin case for humanitarian war. The term is close to an oxymoron. It doesn’t detract from the moral case for halting Gadaffi’s campaign of oppression, which I believe is justified, but I think it’s important we’re honest about the real reasons. David Cameron came closest to enunciating this when he referred to how Britain (and Europe) could not tolerate a failed gangster state festering away just on the edge of the Mediterranean and exporting its human and political fallout to the continent. Well it was good he said that, because that’s the real reason we’re at war.  He should have continued with the theme and said a little less about how this is a mercy mission to save the inhabitants of Benghazi from genocide, even though it’s great that we’ve accomplished that. I don’t believe it’s a war for Libya’s oil, if it was we could back the ‘stronger horse’, Gadaffi, and have BP’s contracts intact. But we haven’t.

If we want to make a serious case for purely humanitarian wars we need a radical new international agreement on the exact circumstances for intervention that covers the whole world, with no exceptions. The UN will never accomplish this because the great powers that hold the reigns have widely diverging interests. Until such an agreement is reached, the West should seek to promote democracy and good governance through trade, knowledge transfer and open markets, and save bombing for when it really and truly is the least worst option.