Jolyon Howorth Chile Paper

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Humanitarian intervention in the post-Cold War era: a provisional balance-sheet in light of Libya, Syria and Mali

Jolyon Howorth (Yale University)

Paper to be given to the Fundacion Chile 21

Santiago, 21 March 2013

Abstract

It is over twenty years since the “international community” embarked on what seems to

be an increasingly regular policy of intervening in the internal affairs of states on

humanitarian grounds. A massive literature has developed which analyses the theoretical,

political, legal, normative and strategic dimensions of humanitarian intervention. This

article engages with that literature and attempts to draw a provisional balance sheet for

this 21st century activity by examining a number of key cases and analyzing the

motivations and drivers behind the decision to intervene as well as the practical

consequences of the intervention itself. In the context of the recent crises in Libya, Syria,

and Mali, which are seemingly comparable situations but which have produced

significantly different policy preferences on the part of the international community, the

article concludes that there are few clear prescriptions as to when intervention is and is

not appropriate or justified. The cases examined suggest that, all too often, intervention

takes place hastily and in ad hoc fashion with too little thought about the medium and

long-term consequences, which often turn out to be in contradiction with the original

motives for intervention.

Keywords: humanitarian, intervention, responsibility to protect, sovereignty, human

rights, ethnic cleansing, genocide

“We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not.

[…]We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of

human rights within other countries if we want still to be

secure” (Tony Blair, Chicago, 24 April 1999)

“If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill

them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background

or their religion, and it’s within our power to stop it, we will

stop it” (President Bill Clinton, Skopje, 22 June 1999)

“George Bernard Shaw once wrote: ‘The reasonable man

adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in

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trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress

depends on the unreasonable man’. After a century of doing so

little to prevent, suppress, and punish genocide, Americans

must join and thereby legitimate the ranks of the

unreasonable” (Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell:

America and the Age of Genocide, New York, Harper, 2003,

p.516)

In March 2011, the “international community”, acting under the terms of United

Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1973, began a military intervention in

Libya to “protect” the civilians of the Eastern city of Benghazi and those of other urban

areas of Libya, whom it was believed were at risk of being slaughtered indiscriminately

by the heavily armed military forces of Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. At the

time of the Western intervention, it is estimated that anywhere between several hundred

and one thousand Libyans had already died in the month old uprising (Human Rights

Council 2011). The mission was the first United Nations-mandated operation explicitly to

invoke the principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) – a Canadian inspired emerging

norm (ICISS 2001), which had been unanimously endorsed by the UN at its world

summit in 2005. The Libyan intervention, Operation Unified Protector, formally

managed by NATO, lasted almost six months and resulted in the collapse of the forty-two

year old Gaddafi régime, the death of Muammar Gaddafi himself and the installation of a

transitional government which purported to represent the many diverse ethnic and tribal

groups in that country. This instance of humanitarian intervention was seen by some as a

normative and military success story which legitimized and consecrated the Western

tendency, since the end of the Cold War, to engage in humanitarian missions (Daalder &

Stavridis 2012; Westerveld 2012).

However, even as the Libyan intervention was getting under way in March 2011,

Syria, until then relatively immune from the contagion of the “Arab Spring”, also became

the scene of popular uprisings. These began slowly at first but increased in intensity by

stages over the course of the following two years. By February 2013, the United Nations

estimated that as many as 70,000 Syrians had died in the increasingly lethal

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confrontations between regime forces and the opposition. Yet, at the same time, there was

no serious suggestion, among Western politicians and experts, that a military intervention

in Syria to protect the population from the predations of Bashar al-Assad was either

feasible or even desirable. On the other hand, in January 2013, when Islamist fighters in

Northern Mali appeared to be advancing on the capital, Bamako, which hosted six

thousand French citizens and a further six thousand other Europeans, France intervened

strongly to drive the Islamists back. The “rebels”, profiting from both the free flow of

weapons and the absence of political control in the Sahel area which followed the demise

of the Qaddafi regime in Libya had, over the previous year, been subjecting the Malian

people in Northern towns to a regime of brutal Sharia “law”, including stoning of

adulterers, the amputation of the hands of thieves and the destruction of sacred sites in

Timbuctu. Strictly speaking, the Malian intervention was not motivated by

“humanitarian” norms or driven by the “responsibility to protect”. But it did involve

significant military intervention to prevent further humanitarian suffering. These three

examples, which we will assess in more detail below, must be evaluated in the context of

the growing numbers of humanitarian interventions which have characterised the twenty-

first century. Twenty years after the interventions in the Balkans, is it possible to draw up

a preliminary balance sheet of this modern version of “just war”?

1. Humanitarian intervention: a “post-Westphalian” construct?

It is widely believed that what has come to be called “humanitarian intervention”

is essentially a post-Cold War phenomenon. Henry Kissinger, objecting in classical

realist terms to the 1992 US intervention in Somalia, was categorical: “‘Humanitarian

intervention’ asserts that moral and humane concerns are so much a part of American life

that not only treasure but lives must be risked to vindicate them […] No other nation has

ever put forward such a set of propositions” (Kissinger 1992). Well, not quite… “Just

War” theory has been with us since Saint Augustine (Walzer 2006). Grotius and Locke

pondered the concept in the 17th

century and Immanuel Kant, in Perpetual Peace (1795),

stressed that “a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere”. In the

mid-19th

century, that great apostle of liberty, John Stuart Mill opined that “civilized”

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nations had a right to intervene in “barbarous” ones (by which he meant India and

Algeria) in order to mete out to them “such treatment as may fit them for becoming”

…civilized (Mill 1859). As Gary Bass has comprehensively recorded, “Western”

statesmen and intellectuals battled throughout the nineteenth century to find ways of

intervening to prevent or put a stop to massive human rights abuses: in Greece (where, in

1824, Lord Byron died fighting for self-determination); in Syria/Lebanon where, in 1861,

Christians were being massacred by both Druze and Muslim militias); in the Balkans,

where, in 1876, tens of thousands of Bulgarians were massacred at the hands of Ottoman

irregulars known as bashibazouks; in Cuba where, in 1898, Theodore Roosevelt invoked

Spanish atrocities against Cuban peasants, including the construction of the world’s first

concentration camps, as one justification for humanitarian intervention (Bass 2008).

However, there are at least two major differences between these examples and

those that have marked the post-Cold War period. The first is that (with the exception of

the Cuban example) these were all cases of Christian powers intervening against the

Ottoman Empire on behalf of fellow-Christians. Consider that in Bosnia Herzegovina

(BiH) and Kosovo, the Christian “West” intervened against Christian Serbia on behalf of

Muslim Albanians. The second difference is that the nineteenth century examples were

not followed up with stabilization and reconstruction operations, and even less so with

nation-building efforts. When we combine those three dimensions, it is clear that we are

looking at something rather new and different. Whether humanitarian intervention can be

made to work, however, or indeed whether it should be attempted in the first place, are

questions which give rise to legitimate debates.

2. The End of the Cold War and the “Return of History”

Virtually no instances of “humanitarian intervention” can be recorded during the Cold

War, with the possible exceptions of regional examples such as the 1971 Indian invasion

of what was to become Bangladesh in order to “protect” Bengalis in the delta (Bose

2011); the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978/79 to put an end to the genocidal

rule of the Khmer Rouge (Morris 1999); and the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda, also in

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1979, to put and end to the obscenity of Idi Amin Dada (Avirgan and Honey 1983).

Since the end of the Cold War, however, we have seen instances of intervention virtually

every single year (Table 1 below). Tony Blair, in his Chicago speech at the height of the

Kosovo War in April 1999, called humanitarian intervention the new “Doctrine of the

International Community” (Blair 1999).

Table 1. Post-Cold War Interventions

Year Intervention

1990 Liberia

1991 Kurdistan

1992/93 Somalia

1992/95 Bosnia

1994/95 Haiti

1998/99 Kosovo

1999 Sierra Leone

1999 East Timor

2001 Afghanistan

2003 Iraq

2003 Ivory Coast

2003 Congo

2004 Burundi

2008 Tchad/Central African Rep

2010 Ivory Coast

2011 Libya

2013 Mali

However, the issues which have given rise to the post-Cold War proliferation of

humanitarian operations are relatively unrelated to the Cold War itself. Taking a

historical perspective, we must go back to (at least) 1919 and recognize three essential

truths. The first is that the collapse of the four Empires, particularly the Austro-

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Hungarian and the Ottoman, represented a massive shaking of the ethnic and political

kaleidoscope in Europe and the Near East. As the new post-Versailles national borders

were constructed, all sorts of minorities found themselves on the wrong side of state

lines. The second truth is that, although there was some measure of challenge to these

borders before World War Two (particularly German challenges in Austria, the

Sudetenland and Polish Silesia), the fledgling states were so busy organizing themselves

that there was scarcely time to adjust to the new situation before the continent was once

again engulfed in mayhem. The third truth is that, after World War Two, the superpower

confrontation cast permafrost over the 1947/48 status quo, removing all prospect of

challenge from any potentially aggrieved minority. So, when 1989 happened, it was

finally possible to revisit 1919 and examine whether the Wilson-driven arrangements for

self-determination actually made sense. The French political geographer Michel Foucher

(1991) produced a report in 1990 which suggested that literally dozens of dissatisfied

minorities across Europe were burning to rectify their grievances – if necessary through

violence. Several years earlier, Benedict Anderson had already theorized the dynamics of

“imagined communities” (Anderson 1983) and a mere glance at the map of Central and

Eastern Europe suggested that the ghosts of 19th

century imperialism could still return to

haunt Europe (Wolff 1994). The break-up of Yugoslavia and the “Wars of Yugoslav

Succession” merely seemed to confirm these hypotheses.

At the same time, the end of the Cold War ushered in a period in which the

political arrangements resulting from decolonization would also increasingly be tested in

a context in which superpower interest in and protection of client states (largely but not

exclusively in Africa) was on the wane. The situation in Somalia presents a classic case

of this (Western 2002: 119). But in Francophone, Lusophone and Anglophone Africa we

also saw comparable developments. As the strait-jacket of Western oversight was

removed, all these areas generated internal crises which seemed, sooner or later, to call

for the intervention of the “international community”. Meanwhile, across the Middle

East, the artificial borders hastily drawn in the wake of the Versailles and Sèvres

settlements – in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and elsewhere – came under increasing strain and

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eventually led to military intervention, not always inspired by humanitarian causes

(Fromkin 2009).

3. Theoretical constructs and political drivers

Much of the academic literature on intervention (Vincent 1986; Wheeler 2000;

Welsh 2004; Lang 2004; Weiss 2007; Simms & Trim 2011; Bellamy 2011; Bellamy

2012) suggests that the issue of whether to intervene or not often boiled down to a

rational discussion between policy-makers coming from different theoretical

perspectives, one of which eventually won out over the others (Hoffmann 2001; Western

2002). There is something to this and Stanley Hoffmann certainly rehearses all the

possible permutations. At the end of the day, decision-makers are faced with an almost

epistemological dilemma: is order the pre-condition for justice (a realist perspective); or

is justice the pre-condition for order (a liberal perspective) (Jokic 2003). On balance and

as a general rule, realists are opposed to humanitarian intervention. They do not believe

that moral concerns should be allowed to affect international relations, and they fear that

intervention will produce further conflict and destabilization. Liberals are deeply split

between cosmopolitan interventionists (Michael Ignatieff, Bernard Kouchner, Jürgen

Habermas, Mary Robinson), for whom there is a moral and legal obligation to intervene,

and communitarian non-interventionists (Amitai Etzioni, Robert Keohane, Hedley Bull,

Michael Walzer), for whom intervention must always be a last resort. The former,

however, are very militantly in favor of sending in the cavalry, invoking both

humanitarian and regional destabilization motives. But this theoretical stratosphere was

not in most cases the framework within which decisions on intervention were actually

taken. The motivations, calculations and discussions surrounding actual instances of

intervention were usually informed by much more down-to-earth, essentially political

considerations.

In discussing the political motivations of decision-makers in the cases of Northern

Iraq and Bosnia, Jon Western (2002) counter-poses “selective engagers” (who place the

bar for intervention very high) against “liberal humanitarianists” (who place it relatively

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low) and there is undoubtedly much truth in this. But there is also much more to it than

this. For one thing, the Western article deals almost exclusively with the debate in the

USA, whereas, at least as far as Bosnia is concerned, the debate in Europe was more

significant (and much more complex). Secondly, these interventions need to be

understood in a wider geo-strategic and historical framework. Thirdly, it is helpful to

bear in mind cases where intervention which arguably should have taken place did not –

the obvious examples being Rwanda (Prunier 1995; Kuperman 2001) and Darfur

(Williams and Bellamy 2005). In these cases, which come very close to genocide, Robert

Pape has argued that, because the definition of genocide is so clear and verifiable, by the

time the international community is able to establish the facts, it is usually too late to do

anything about them (Pape 2011). The truth is that all cases of intervention have been

messy, ill thought-out, overly reactive and lacking in any clear long-term strategic

objectives. Although the first of these post-Cold War crises chronologically was the

intervention of ECOWAS in the first Liberian civil war in August 1990, this article will

concentrate on the circumstances surrounding the decisions concerning intervention in

Kurdistan (1991), Somalia (1992) Bosnia (1993), Kosovo (1999), Ivory Coast (2010),

Libya (2011), Syria (non-intervention 2012) and Mali (2013). It will also assess the

consequences – intended and unintended – of these missions.

4. Case Studies

4.1. Kurdistan

Let us start with UNSC Resolution 688 which opened the floodgates of

humanitarian intervention by creating, in this particular case, a window of opportunity for

a humanitarian operation in Northern Iraq (Kurdistan) in April 1991. This was the first

time the UNSC authorized intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign state for

purely humanitarian purposes. The Resolution did not explicitly call for a military

intervention force, but rather “insist[ed] that Iraq allow immediate access by international

humanitarian organizations […], request[ed] the Secretary General to use all the

resources at his disposal to address urgently the critical needs of the refugees and

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displaced Iraqi population [and] appeal[ed] to all Member States and to all humanitarian

organizations to contribute” to the effort (UN 1991). It is somewhat remarkable that this

resolution passed at all, given the extreme sensitivity of the stakes. The Resolution was

opposed by Cuba, Yemen and Zimbabwe, while China and India abstained. It

nevertheless secured 10 votes on the Security Council, including those of Russia, Zaire,

Ivory Coast and Romania, not normally considered at that time to be traditional bastions

of liberal humanitarianism. In the discussion, however, state after state made it clear that

this was an exceptional case and must never be considered or cited as a precedent.

What made this case so exceptional? First, Saddam Hussein, having lost the 1991

Gulf War and having then proceeded to massacre the Shi’ite Marsh Arabs (while

coalition occupation forces stood idly by), seemed to be about to get away with a second

massive humanitarian onslaught – this time against his long-suffering Kurdish population

(Kelly 2008). There was phenomenal pressure on the international community to “do

something”. Second, special letters addressed to the UN Secretary General from both

Turkey and Iran (the two most important front-line states) highlighted the dramatic nature

of the events and their potential for international spillover, thus constituting that “threat to

international peace and security” which can trigger UN action under Chapter VII. Third,

another letter – from Paris – largely inspired by the world’s most high-profile liberal

interventionist, Bernard Kouchner who, at the time, was France’s Secretary of State for

Humanitarian Action, demanded that the international community declare a “right to

intervention” (“droit à l’ingérence”), which considerably upped the interventionist ante.

Fourth, George H.W.Bush and three of his key officials (Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and

Brent Scowcroft) happened on the day of the UN Resolution to be in California at a

charity event. After several exhortatory phone calls from John Major and François

Mitterrand, they decided not to return to DC to convene a principals meeting but –

especially since they were all of one mind – simply to forge ahead and order the launch

of the military intervention mission (Rudd 2004: 42).

The mission corresponded perfectly to ideal interventionist norms, whether of the

Saint Augustine or Tony Blair varieties. It was eminently “doable” with virtually no

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threat to the intervening forces, and success was all but guaranteed; its objectives were

straightforward and clear – to protect the Kurdish population; all other possibilities (i.e.

political and diplomatic pressure on Saddam Hussein) had been exhausted; the

“legitimate authority” was in place in the shape of the UNSC resolution. It could even be

viewed as being in US interests in that, having expended considerable blood and treasure

in fighting the Gulf War in the name of regional stability, the operation in Kurdistan

could easily be presented as part of the same broad strategy. In short it ticked every one

of the traditional boxes for a just war. Thus, in many ways, “Operation Provide

Comfort” was unique. It was the perfect case. And there is no doubt that it saved many

thousands of lives. The nearest comparison would be the Libyan intervention in 2011

(see below).

However, the problem of “nation-building” in Kurdistan is one which has

defeated the best brains everywhere and currently stands as a major problem in the

constitutional future of Iraq (ICG 2009). One of the long-term unforeseen consequences

of the Western intervention was the de facto “ring-fencing” of Kurdistan which has

allowed it to emerge as a strong and potentially sovereign entity in the area – arguably the

last objective the intervening nations were pursuing in 1991. Protecting the Kurdish

people from the wrath of Saddam Hussein was by no means intended as a first step

towards the break-up of Iraq or the constitution of a Kurdish state, which would be seen

by all that state’s neighbors as profoundly destabilizing (Ottaway & Kaysi 2012). Yet, in

the broader and longer-term context of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the granting of

considerable autonomy to Iraqi Kurdistan in the 2005 Constitution, plus the abundant oil

reserves available to the Kurdistan regional government, the building blocks of precisely

such a Kurdish state have been effectively put in place. This first major instance of

Western humanitarian intervention has succeeded in creating a potentially far-more

destabilizing and explosive regional situation than was implicit in the initial problem it

sought to solve (Galbraith 2007; ICG 2012). The Kurdistan example of humanitarian

intervention does little to solve the theoretical dilemma of the correct sequencing of order

and justice.

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4.2. Somalia

The debate over Somalia has been exhaustively reconstructed, not only by Jon

Western (2002) but in a series of major monographs (Makinda 1993; Clark and Herbst

1997; Hirsch & Oakley 1995; Rutherford 2008). There seems little doubt that two key

factors triggered the initial decision to intervene. The first was the 1992 US election

campaign, in which the rising candidacy of Bill Clinton was linked politically to the

liberal noises he was making about the need for the US to take a lead in dealing with

humanitarian disasters. Clinton made political mileage out of both Somalia and Bosnia,

even though he was later to be haunted by both. The second driver, which Western

describes compellingly, was the way in which the liberal humanitarians rapidly took

control of the public agenda and switched the debate, even amongst the “selective

engagers” (particularly Colin Powell) in favor of intervention. From Bush Sr’s

perspective, there was also a poisoned chalice dimension in that the US president knew

by the time he made the decision that he would actually be handing over responsibility

for managing its consequences to Bill Clinton. Clinton, whose foreign policy experience

in his first year in office was virtually non-existent, proved unable to cope personally or

politically with the TV coverage of the Black Hawk Down incident in which dead US

marines were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. He simply reversed Bush’s

precipitate intervention decision with an equally precipitate US withdrawal. Somalia, the

second major instance of Western humanitarian intervention was thus a complete failure

and set the cause of humanitarianism back in a significant way. The US “abandonment”

of the area indirectly allowed it to become a haven for al-Qaeda affiliates. Moreover,

thereafter, the question of danger to the intervening forces was to become a key criterion

for decision-makers, and this was to prove decisive in 2012 with the Syrian case. Post-

conflict reconstruction, let alone nation-building were not even options in Somalia.

Instead, the West has been forced to engage in anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden

in an attempt to cope with some of the indirect consequences of its failed intervention

(Geiss & Petrig 2011).

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4.3. Bosnia-Herzegovina

Perhaps the most interesting case, in many ways, is Bosnia Herzegovina (BiH) –

for four main reasons. First, BiH is not situated in some remote ex-colonial outpost. The

former Yugoslavia is situated inside the geographical boundaries of the European Union,

bordered to the south by Greece, to the West by Italy, to the North by Austria and

Hungary and to the East by Bulgaria and Romania. It seems inevitable that, eventually,

all the various bits and pieces of former Yugoslavia will become members of the EU. The

second reason why BiH is interesting is that the war broke out in part because of

European support for dismemberment of Yugoslavia. Germany in particular recognized –

unilaterally – the sovereignty of both Slovenia and Croatia and, by implication, that of

BiH. These two factors ought to have had an influence on the third interesting element

which is that the Yugoslav collapse happened the very same year that the EU announced

it had developed a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), which prompted the

then foreign minister of Luxembourg, Jacques Poos, (in)famously to declare “It is the

hour of Europe; not the hour of America”. Poos, along with two other European

featherweights, the Italian foreign minister Gianni de Michelis and the Dutch foreign

minister Hans van den Broek, flew to Belgrade to issue a solemn warning to Yugoslav

President Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic refused even to meet with them and Europe

was immediately forced to face up to the shortcomings of its own highly normative – and

still embryonic – aspirations as an international actor. The reality was that “Europe” was

not only totally at sixes and sevens politically in debating what to do about Yugoslavia; it

also proved to have very little useful military capacity to bring to the problem as part of

the solution. Europe awoke, through the Balkans wars, to the realisation that it was very

far from being a consequential actor even in its own back yard (Glaurdic 2011).

The fourth interesting element is the EU-US stand-off which Bosnia provoked.

There were two key elements behind George H.W. Bush’s reluctance to get involved.

First, Bosnia did not have any bearing on US interests and could never be sold to the man

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from Peoria. Secondly, Bosnia clearly was in the EU’s interests and, in the US view, the

Europeans should assume primary responsibility for managing the crisis. We saw this

EU-US stand-off replicated exactly twenty years later in the case of Libya except that on

that occasion, the US actually followed its own precepts and insisted on the (largely

fictitious) principle of “leading from behind” (see below). What neither Bush nor Clinton

(nor in fact anybody else) appreciated was the woeful inadequacy of European military

forces to deal with this problem. Nor did anybody appreciate the almost total absence

(outside of France) of political will to get involved in humanitarian intervention

(Freedman 1994). That is why the minimalist mission that did take place (UNPROFOR)

fell to the United Nations (Boulden 2001). What the existence of UNPROFOR did

achieve was to put thousands of European troops, wearing blue helmets, on the ground

inside BiH. When the Clinton administration, for want of any better ideas, began to

advocate “lift and strike” (lift the embargo on arms to the Bosniaks so that they could

fight back; and strike Serb positions from 30,000 feet) this produced a massive row with

the Europeans, whose troops would thereby have risked double decimation from the

ground-fighting and from the aerial bombardment. The dialogue of the deaf between

Secretary of State Warren Christopher and a range of European interlocutors has been

faithfully recorded by Ivo Daalder (Daalder 2000: 5-36). And it remained a dialogue of

the deaf, while the citizens of Sarajevo were subjected to a horrendous four year siege,

the longest in modern warfare, in which ten thousand died, 56,000 were wounded,

including 15,000 children, and the national library was fire-bombed (Galloway 2008)

taking with it the written record of Bosnian culture. A case of Brussels fiddling while

Sarajevo burned? The cause of humanitarian intervention appeared to be withering on the

vine before ever it bore fruit.

What did it take to unblock all this? Essentially two things, one, I would suggest,

more instrumental than the other. The first was the massacre of Srebrenica in mid-July

1995 (Honing & Both 1996; Rohde 2012). The humanitarian “interveners” proved

totally powerless to prevent mass murder even before their very eyes in the very “safe

havens” for which they were responsible. The second, the more instrumental, was the

election, in May 1995, of Jacques Chirac as President of France. While Chirac’s

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predecessor, François Mitterrand, largely for historico-cultural reasons, had always

resisted any overt French military attack on Serbian positions, Chirac had no such

reservations. When in summer 1992 revelations about Serb concentration camps hit the

front pages, Chirac was one of the most vociferous advocates of armed humanitarian

intervention against Serbia, if necessary by France alone (Howorth 1994). One month

after his election as President, in June 1995, he spent an hour in one-on-one conversation

with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, leading in Richard Holbrooke’s words, to a “marked

re-evaluation of American policy” (Holbrooke 1998; Delafon & Sancton 1999).

Individuals can make a huge difference in history. The supreme irony was that it was a

“Gaullist” Frenchman who bulldozed his way through Washington DC that single day

and secured US agreement to do something that had never been done before: to use

NATO forces in combat. The brief NATO air operation, codenamed Deliberate Force,

lasted just three weeks in September 1995 and involved 400 aircraft and 5,000 personnel

from 15 nations (Dittmer & Dawkins 1998). Slobodan Milosevic, coincidentally facing a

mounting ground offensive from a Croat-Bosniak force armed by the USA, threw in the

towel. Strictly speaking, Deliberate Force was not primarily a “humanitarian” operation,

but it did put a (temporary) end to the agony of the Bosnian people.

The literature on the Bosnian crisis is plethoric. The political, cultural, historical,

religious, socio-economic, nationalistic and geo-strategic dimensions all cross-cut in a

myriad of ways which make it impossible to draw firm conclusions about humanitarian

intervention. There are two relevant thoughts that everybody can take away from Bosnia.

The first is that a case of drip by drip ethnic cleansing taking place in the very heart of

Europe was allowed to go on for so long. The second is that it took quite extraordinary

leadership and political will (as well as direct American military involvement) to put an

end to the longest running humanitarian crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

However, the post-conflict reconstruction and nation-building dimensions of the Bosnia

intervention have been very far from perfect and today, two decades after Dayton, it is

not at all clear that BiH actually has a coherent future as a polity (Gibbs 2009). While a

cool academic analysis of the introduction of democratic practices in the country can

presage a hopeful outcome (Coles 2007), a more hardnosed policy scrutiny of power-play

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in BiH, concludes that “[Republika Srpska’s] determination to limit Bosnia and

Herzegovina to little more than a coordinator between powerful entities may so shrivel

the state that it sinks, taking RS with it” (ICG 2011). In July 2012, an authoritative

summary concluded that “Bosnia’s leaders seem determined to pursue all-out political

war until one side’s final victory […] This will push Bosnia towards political chaos and

away from Euro-Atlantic integration” (Oxford Analytica 2012). While it is clearly too

soon to say whether, overall, Western intervention represents a glass half-full or a glass

half-empty, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that intervention in itself did not put a

stop to the ethnic, social and political tensions which plague Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Was Bosnia a precedent for future interventionist wars? Yes, but it was a bad

precedent, for two reasons. First, the wrong lesson was drawn from the NATO bombing.

It was assumed that Milosevic was essentially a playground bully who would back off as

soon as muscular authority arrived on the scene. That assumption was to prove

unfounded in the case of Kosovo Second, the Dayton agreement was secured far more

through the strong-arm tactics of Richard Holbrooke (Chollet 2005; Holbrooke 1998)

than through the considered political inputs of Europeans who were essentially going to

have to manage the consequences of Dayton (and who are still managing them today) but

who for reasons of expediency and time were utterly marginalized in the aircraft hanger

in Ohio where the Dayton Agreements were hammered out (Neville-Jones 1996-97).

4.4. Kosovo

And so to Kosovo, where the Balkans nightmare had actually started in 1989

(Silber & Little 1996). Ten years later, it came full circle. Several factors drove the logic

behind intervention in Kosovo (Daalder & O’Hanlon 2000). First, there was a recurrent

humanitarian crisis of potentially greater scale than in Bosnia and, after all, intervention

had (eventually) taken place in Bosnia. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians

were being driven into the mountains to freeze or starve to death. Ethnic cleansing

appeared to be an undeniable reality. Second, there was the “cry wolf” syndrome.

Slobodan Milosevic had been served notice several times to back off in Kosovo –

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beginning with President George H.W. Bush’s famous Christmas warning of 1992 – that

“In the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the United States will be

prepared to employ military force against Serbians in Kosovo and in Serbia proper”

(Dowd 2008). Bill Clinton had repeated this warning several times throughout the 1990s.

The credibility of the “West” in general and NATO in particular appeared to be on the

line. The Kosovo war was indeed partly fought in order to shore up the credibility of

NATO, a “justification” which some might consider to be extraneous to the nature of the

problem. Third, there were the simplistic and erroneous assumptions stemming from the

Bosnian example which we noted above. NATO planners assumed Milosevic would

throw in the towel after a few days, a week at most. The Western intervention would be a

short sharp application of what amounted to an international spanking. Fourth, the

humanitarian crisis had massive potential for destabilization of the entire Balkan region

as the influx of Kosovars, particularly into Macedonia (FYROM) sparked ethnic tensions

with likely spillover in several directions. Fifth, how much longer could Milosevic get

away with thumbing his nose at the West? (Branson & Doder 1999)

The problem was that these reasons all backfired. First, in terms of the

humanitarian crisis, it is estimated that, on 24 March, the first day of bombing, about

2,500 people had died in the Kosovo civil war. During the 11 weeks of bombing,

approximately 10,000 additional people were killed, mainly Albanian civilians at the

hands of Serb irregulars (Mandelbaum 1999). Second, the NATO credibility argument

was actually exacerbated by the illegality of the mission. There was no UN mandate and

NATO intervention per se commands neither international legality nor legitimacy

(Roberts 1999; Ignatieff & Skidelsky 1999; Portella 2000). Moreover henceforth, for

Russia at least, NATO as an organization became confirmed as what Moscow had always

believed it to be: a dangerous aggressive war-machine (Smith 2006: 77-88). Third, when,

after 78 days of bombing and no Plan-B, the coalition realized they had badly mis-read

the Bosnia precedent, they had no alternative but to plan on using ground forces, an

escalation the Clinton administration had explicitly ruled out. In retrospect, it is far from

clear that a campaign of bombing alone was a viable strategy. Military consensus has

always held that political problems cannot be solved solely from the air, and, contrary to

17

some revisionist analysts, Kosovo actually proved that rather than disproved it (Clark

2002). At this point, Russia, which was becoming deeply concerned about the

international ramifications of the crisis, intervened in the shape of the former Russian

prime minister and special representative for the Balkans,Victor Chernomyrdin who flew

to Belgrade, and persuaded Milosevic to stop (Jackson 2007: 306-307). Finally whereas,

when the bombing started, about 230,000 people had fled their homes, by the end of the

bombing campaign, that number had risen to 1.45 million (860,000 of them in make-shift

camps in Macedonia and Albania) – more profoundly destabilizing those countries than

had been the case before the war began (Mandelbaum 1999).

Worse than all this in terms of ultimate objectives, the West had always insisted

that Kosovo’s future should be as an integral part of Serbia. Policy-makers were mindful

of the dangerous precedent that could be set in many parts of the world by Kosovar self-

determination. Yet the Kosovars, whom the West objectively backed, were fighting

precisely for that objective. Therefore, the supreme irony was that, in the words of

Michael Mandelbaum, NATO “intervened in a civil war and defeated one side, but

embraced the position of the party it had defeated on the issue over which the war had

been fought” (Mandelbaum 1999: 5). Those chickens came home to roost with a

vengeance when, in 2008, Abkhazia and South Ossetia also declared independence under

the benign eye of the Russian military (Vukotic 2011). The number of potential examples

of this syndrome does not bear thinking about (there are 193 states in the world and 7,000

“nations”). In Kosovo, “the West” eventually found itself – much against its better

judgment – obliged to support the very objective it had set out to avoid: Kosovo’s

independence as a nation-state – which explains why the nation-building process now

going on has become a gigantic challenge whose outcome still remains unclear (Judah

2008). To date, Kosovo is recognised by only 91 of the UN’s 193 states.

4.5 Ivory Coast

Alex Bellamy and Paul Williams have recently drawn some preliminary

conclusions about the viability and increasing normativity of R2P by examining the cases

18

of Ivory Coast in 2010 and of Libya (Bellamy & Williams 2011). The case of Ivory

Coast is particularly revealing in a number of ways. The UN had been involved in that

country since 2003 when the messy process of succession to the first post-colonial

President, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, provoked outright civil war between the two main

challengers to the status quo, Laurent Gbagbo of the Front Populaire Ivoirien (FPI) and

Alassane Ouattara of the Rassemblement des Républicains (RDR). To cut a long story

short, limited French and UN intervention in 2003 shored up a relative and short-lived

stability under a Gbagbo administration beset by incipient civil war. New elections in

October and November 2010 generated a fresh confrontation between Gbagbo and

Ouattara, who was initially declared the winner, by the Electoral Commission, with 54%

of the vote. Gbagbo himself then claimed victory, with 51% of the votes, after his

Constitutional Council threw out 600,000 Ouattara votes as invalid. However, Ouattara

was widely considered – particularly by the African Union and by ECOWAS – to be the

clear winner. This is a key point. China had made it clear that it would oppose any R2P

intervention anywhere against the wishes of the incumbent government. The UN, by

backing the AU and ECOWAS in recognizing Ouattara as the legitimate president were

in effect creating the conditions under which they could send in R2P forces without

risking a Chinese veto.

Fresh outbreaks of violence across the country led the UNSC, under Resolution

1962 (20 December 2010) to beef up the UNOCI mission, which had been present on the

ground since 2003. This proved inadequate. Therefore, on 30 March 2011, a new UNSC

Resolution (1975) unanimously authorized the use of “all necessary means” to protect

Ivoirien civilians. Where the issue became controversial was that the outcome of this new

move saw the UN forces, backed by French troops, taking very clear sides in the civil war

in favor of Ouattara. There is abundant evidence that Ouattara’s forces committed

massive violations of human rights (ICG 2011a). The Western decision constituted,

according to Bellamy and Williams, a clear blurring “of the lines between civilian

protection and regime change”, thus posing profound questions about the political

implications of R2P . Eventually French and UN helicopters physically attacked

Gbagbo’s HQ, leading to his arrest on 10 April 2011. Russia was incensed at what

19

Moscow saw as an inadmissible misinterpretation of Resolution 1975 and even

threatened to veto Ban Ki Moon’s second term as UN Secretary General. China and India

also criticized the UN for breaching the impartiality of R2P. There were strident

criticisms of the UN’s decision to override the Ivory Coast’s Constitutional Council

ruling that Gbagbo was the winner – which, Bellamy and Williams remind us, was

largely justified by the decision of the regional stakeholders (AU and ECOWAS) to back

Ouattara. We were later to see the same regional actor impact in Libya. Anger was

expressed in various places when the chief prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo,

made a statement to the effect that if Gbagbo continued with his violence he would wind

up at The Hague – a statement which only intensified Gbagbo’s determination to fight to

the bitter end. This did not, in the event, prevent Gbagbo from being transferred to the

ICC, but it did appear to be yet another instance of the West taking sides in a civil war

rather than simply protecting the population against attacks from all sides.

Above all, critics of the operation asked all sorts of difficult questions about how

peacekeepers should go about the strictly humanitarian business of protecting civilians,

without getting involved in the domestic politics of the target country. Louise Arbour,

the former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and

Rwanda has recently asked whether regime change is not the logical end state of any

decision to invoke R2P. She insists that the official UN justification for invoking R2P is

that the target regime is either “refusing to” protect, or is “incapable of” protecting its

own population. But, argues Arbour, in most cases it is the regime itself which is

deliberately targetting its own civilians. How then, can the international community be

expected to protect them without going to the further and necessary lengths of ousting the

leaders responsible for the human rights violations. She notes, pertinently, that whilc the

UNSC frequently authorises “all necessary measures” to protect civilians, it has never

requested such measures to arrest or otherwise impede heads of state who are involved in

civilian slaughter (Arbour 2012). If humanitarian intervention is to morph into a

systematic policy of engineering regime change, then it might be considered to have

changed course in a significant way

20

None of the above examples can therefore be considered to be a clear-cut success

story for the cause of the interventionists. Although all of them were, at some level,

predicated on the protection of the rights of the suffering people of the area, they were all,

also, about many other things. Humanitarian intervention in its 21st century guise got off

to a strong and active start, but it appears to have posed at least as many questions as it

has provided answers. The cases of Libya and Syria do not help make the picture much

clearer

5. Libya, Syria and the “Responsibility to Protect”

The NATO campaign in Libya, Operation Unified Protector, lasted from late

March 2011 until the end of October 2011 and involved over 25,000 air sorties and

almost 10,000 air strikes on “regime targets”. There are five main reasons why the

operation took place. The main trigger normally cited was the seemingly murderous

intentions of Colonel Gaddafi to exact indiscriminate revenge on large swathes of the

Libyan people who had dared to rise up in protest. On 22 February 2011, Gaddafi had

threatened to “purge Libya inch by inch, house by house, household by household, alley

by alley, and individual by individual”. He denounced the demonstrators as “rats” and

“cockroaches” to be exterminated (Pape 2011: 28-29). There is some degree of

controversy over the precise numbers of the pre-intervention casualties (particularly over

whether they were rebel combatants or innocent civilians) and there is controversy over

whether, on the eve of the intervention, “columns of tanks” were or were not bearing

down on Benghazi (Brauman & Levy 2011). But there is no doubt that the threat of a

massacre was at the heart of the UNSC Resolution 1973 authorising the use of military

force. The Resolution opened by “Expressing grave concern at the deteriorating situation,

the escalation of violence, and the heavy civilian casualties” and by “Reiterating the

responsibility of the Libyan authorities to protect the Libyan population and reaffirming

that parties to armed conflicts bear the primary responsibility to take all feasible steps to

ensure the protection of civilians” (UN 2011).

21

The second reason for the operation was the determination of French President

Nicolas Sarkozy to use military force against Gaddafi. There are many different views as

to why Sarkozy took such an uncompromising stance, ranging from electoral calculations

to conspiracy theory, from French regional Realpolitik to a desire to make amends for

France’s poor performance during the Tunisan and Egyptian uprisings earlier in 2011,

and from the influence of Bernard-Henri Lévy to Sarkozy’s desire to impress the United

States (Howorth 2012). The UK prime minister David Cameron, who was the first leader

to call for the imposition of a no-fly-zone over Libya, was also an active proponent of

military action, but it appears that he was dragged along at every turn by Sarkozy

(Cameron 2011). The third reason for the operation was that Barack Obama, initially

extremely reluctant (along with his Defence Secretary Robert Gates and the Chairman of

the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen) to allow the US to get involved, was eventually

persuaded of the compelling case for intervention by a trio of top advisers, all of them

women: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, and

especially Samantha Power of the National Security Council (Talev 2011). The US

president switched his position from firm opposition to enthusiastic support over a 48

hour period in mid-March 2011. Susan Rice then drafted the UN Resolution 1973. The

fourth reason why a UNSC Resolution on Libya became possible was the active support

for such a Resolution on the part of regional actors such as the Arab League and the

Organisation of the Islamic Conference. This implicit green-light from within the Arab

world made it possible for Russia and China to refrain from using their veto in the

Security Council.

The fifth reason for the operation was that it was judged relatively simple in

military terms. Libyan air defences were taken down in less than three days by B-2

stealth bombers, Tomahawk cruise missiles, A-10 close air support “Warthogs”, and F-16

fighters. Gaddafi’s forces could only travel along the one main road running from Tripoli

to Benghazi which passes through open desert country, making regime assets sitting

ducks for the sophisticated strike aircraft deployed by NATO. The terms of engagement

of the NATO air assets were extremely restrictive, geared to limiting to an absolute

minimum any collateral damage and, although there is also controversy about how many

22

civilians died as a result of the operation, there seems little doubt that these can be

counted in scores rather than in hundreds as had been the case in Kosovo (Quintana

2011). However, there were numerous operational, logistical and resourcing problems

which meant that the operation lasted far longer than initially anticipated and led to a

highly sobering internal NATO evaluation which carried serious implications for future

operations – and particularly for a hypothetical operation against Syria (Schmitt 2012).

Critics of both the mission itself and the way it was carried out were as numerous as

supporters and many an analyst predicted that the Libyan operation could be NATO’s

very last (Bacevich 2011; Metz 2011; Kaplan 2011; Rachman 2011; Applebaum 2011).

Whatever the eventual verdict on Operation Unified Protector itself, the mid-

April 2011 decision of Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron to extend its

objectives far beyond the R2P-focused terms of UNSC Resolution 1973 by announcing

their intention to engineer regime change (Obama, Cameron & Sarkozy 2011) led to a

confused and somewhat chaotic outcome in the aftermath of the death of Gaddafi and the

demise of the regime. It also infuriated Russia and China who felt they had been tricked

into supporting Resolution 1973 and vowed never to be so misled again. This had

consequences for the Syrian case (see below). Libya was never a unified entity before

the Italian colonial period and was only held together after that period briefly by a weak

monarchy and, for 42 years, by a brutal dictator. It is impossible in an article of this

length to do justice to the many analyses of political developments since the end of the

intervention but a number of telling factors suggest that nation-building will prove to be a

colossal challenge. The Transitional National Council (TNC) established in Benghazi in

late February 2011 and which changed its name after the intervention to National

Transitional Council (NTC) comprised over fifty members with representatives from all

Libya’s regions and major towns. But it was hotly contested politically and regularly

attacked physically. Attempts to hold elections (even in advance of the drafting of a

Constitution) proved extremely challenging and failed to meet several deadlines (Alunni

& Mezran 2012; El-Kikhia 2012). Eventually, elections were held in July 2012, leading

to the formation of a coalition government in November, under prime minister Ali

Zeidan, whose task of forging a sense of national identity is huge. Libya is awash with

23

heavily armed militias which run their own small parts of the country, largely based on

tribalism, and pay no allegiance to the central authorities (Oborne & Cookson 2012). In

June 2012, a sober overall assessment reported that:

“the current government faces a number of challenges, including a lack of

transparency, dialogue, and legitimacy. Its failure to address key issues, like

integrating armed militias into a unified police and military force and

articulating a framework for national reconciliation, has eroded public

confidence. The rights of women and ethnic minorities are at risk, and the

failure to establish a credible justice system raises questions about the

government’s commitment to human rights and the rule of law”.(St John 2012)

The attack on the US consulate in Benghazi and the murdering of the US ambassador in

September 2012 merely highlighted the instability of the situation. Meanwhile, the

regional destabilization resulting from the volatility in Libya is causing major knock-on

effects across both the Maghreb and the Sahara (Morone 2012). The initial humanitarian

objective of protecting innocent civilians seems to have been massively overtaken by

seismic forces of a different order of magnitude. The “lessons of Libya” are being

intensely studied in the context of the next major humanitarian challenge for the

international community: Syria.

The case of Syria seems in many ways to be diametrically opposed to that of

Libya. First, while decisions about military action in Libya were taken within one month

of the initial protests, the Syrian drama continued to unfold over a fifteen month period

(March 2011 to June 2012) with no decisive action taken by the international community.

Second, while as many as 15,000 people had died in Syria by June 2012 and while the

relevance of R2P principles was clearly much more acute in Syria than in Libya, and

while UNSC Resolution 2042, when it eventually came on 21 April 2012, spoke of

“widespread violations of human rights abuses [and] the death of many thousands of

people”, there was no mention even of the prospect of military intervention. Third, while

France, as the ex-colonial power in the region, expressed its deep regret about

developments in Syria (both Sarkozy and Hollande), Paris had no intention of rushing

into military action, either in a coalition or (still less) alone. The preferred European

course of action, shared by the US, was the imposition of sanctions. Fourth, Barack

24

Obama, echoing the line taken by France, preferred (especially in an election year) to

avoid any precipitate action. Fifth, the Arab League, far from calling for the West to

engage in military action, as it had in Libya, contented itself with a December 2011

“Peace Plan” involving the release of political prisoners and a cease-fire monitored by

Arab League observers. Within a month, those observers pulled out.

But there were also three further fundamental reasons for the inaction of the

international community in the Syrian case. The first was that, unlike in Libya, the Syrian

military is a highly efficient, well-armed and well-trained force with bases all over the

country. Any hypothetical Western intervention would be met with strong resistance and

would be unable to avoid heavy collateral damage. The second reason is that Syria is a

highly complex polity with many different religious and sectarian elements and a

President who had formerly been perceived to be trying to introduce some measure of

reform. The opposition, on the other hand, was extremely diverse, disunited and

fractious, thus making it difficult for the West to know with whom to engage. The third

and arguably the most important reason was that Syria has solid international backing not

only from Russia and China but also from Iran. It is also on the front-line of the

Israel/Palestine conflict and any external intervention would be almost certain to trigger

wider military conflicts which could be extremely difficult to contain once started. The

best the international community could manage was the “Annan Peace Plan”, first

formulated on 16 March 2012 after the appointment of former UN Secretary General

Kofi Annan as the UN/Arab League peace envoy for Syria. The six point plan called for a

political solution, an end to the fighting, the delivery of humanitarian assistance, the

release of political prisoners, unrestricted access for journalists and the right to

demonstrate peacefully. Although Assad initially agreed to the Plan, his subsequent

actions demonstrated that he had no intention whatever of acting on it. By the summer of

2012, the Plan was dead and the United Nations, meeting in Geneva on 30 June 2012,

was reduced to issuing a statement condemning both the regime and the opposition for

human rights abuses – in effect, a toothless whimper (dictated by Russia) which was

roundly denounced by the Western press (Nougayrède 2012). Meanwhile, Bashar al-

Assad continued to massacre his people before the wide-open eyes of the entire world.

25

In the case of Mali, the international community had been concerned throughout

2012 about the increasing control in the North of that state exercised by Islamist forces

linked to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and allied to Tuareg rebels aiming at

independence from the government in Bamako. While news reports of punitive atrocities

exacted upon those judged non-compliant with the extreme forms of Sharia law

introduced by the new masters of Northern Mali pricked the conscience of the West,

there was no talk of humanitarian intervention or “responsibility to protect”. Indeed,

France, the EU, the US and the UN were reluctant to get involved in another wobbly state

rife with ethnic contradictions. It was only in early January 2013, when the Islamists

appeared to be aiming to march South towards Bamako and take over the entire state, that

the situation became critical. Two basic reasons were given to justify the French military

intervention, supported (reluctantly) by the US and, in bits and drabs by several EU

member states. The first was the threat of the Sahel in general and Mali in particular

becoming a “new Afghanistan”, a vast base of operations and training ground for global

jihadists. The second was the existence in Bamako of 12,000 Europeans of whom 6,000

were French. This was “humanitarian intervention” with a difference. The military

campaign itself followed the preferences of France’s political class, which prioritised the

task of chasing the Islamists out of the major urban centres – a task which was achieved

rapidly and efficiently. The option preferred by France’s military leaders – that of

despatching ground troops to the four corners of Northern Mali and progressively

squeezing the Islamists into a central area where they could be captured or killed, was

overruled as too ambitious and too time-consuming. The result has been that the

Islamists, very few of whom were actually killed in the military operation to secure urban

centres, melted back into the deserts and mountains of Northern Mali, particularly the

Ifoghas range north of Kidal. This is ideal terrain for the launching of guerilla attacks.

France found itself, by March 2013, facing a long-drawn-out guerilla war with

unknowable consequences for the neighbouring Sahel countries, particularly Niger,

Algeria and Mauritania. Here again, intervention could be interpreted as having created

as many potential unknown problems as it solved known ones (Rémy 2013; Crumley

2013; Boukhars 2013; Korteweg 2013; Tinto & Nossiter 2013).

26

One particularly interesting new take on the broad issue of humanitarian

intervention in the cases of Libya and Syria comes from Robert Pape of the University of

Chicago (Pape 2011). Pape’s argument is relatively simple – but significant. He makes

the point that, prior to the Libyan case, the international community had seen civilian

protection more or less primarily through the lens of the genocide standard. Because of

the existence of the 1948 Convention on Genocide, this has been the standard against

which the international community has tended to react: is it, or is it not “genocide”? If it

is, then we must intervene, if not, maybe not. It is certainly undeniable that – as many

analysts have shown – by the time the international community has decided that genocide

is taking place, it is usually too late to do anything about it (Kuperman 2001). This has

been the case from the Holocaust to Darfur and Rwanda… So Pape argues that the

experience of the last ten years and particularly of Libya suggests we should lower the

bar and accept that R2P will kick in not if and when it has been established that genocide

is taking place, but if and when as few as several thousand civilians are in danger of

being subjected to mass homicide. He adds a number of important conditions, which

replicate once again variations on just war: intervention should only take place if it can

be effective; if it is limited to the specific mission of saving lives and does not morph into

regime change; if it is conducted multilaterally under an international coalition; and,

above all, if it does not pose a major threat to the lives of the intervening forces. This

latter criterion alone would be sufficient to rule out intervention in the case of Syria.

Conclusions

Humanitarian intervention is transforming, to some extent, Westphalian notions

of sovereignty. The notion that the “international community” has the right, wherever a

“sovereign power” is neglecting the sacred duty to protect the inhabitants of that

sovereign territory, to intervene and implement the “responsibility to protect” is nothing

short of revolutionary. As we have seen, around twenty cases of this approach have arisen

in the Cold-War world. But intervention is never exclusively motivated by purely

humanitarian objectives. It is partly (if not largely) about posturing and self-perception on

27

the part of certain great powers (what France in particular calls “rank”). Yet humanitarian

intervention is rarely if ever about balance of power politics. The principle itself is

rejected by a majority of UN member states and proposals for intervention are often

vetoed by Russia and/or China. Humanitarian missions are more often than not

embarked on hastily, with no clearly thought-out assessment of longer-term objectives or

even an ideal end-state. It is frequently the case that an intervention motivated largely by

humanitarian concerns morphs into a mission to overturn a given regime. Sometimes,

perhaps even often, the political consequences of the intervention run counter to the

stated principles and even the aims of the mission itself. At the very least it can be

concluded that the downstream ramifications of an intervention mission are unforeseeable

and usually escape the control of the intervening forces (Seybolt 2008). There are huge

problems with selectivity and double-standards, and it is probable that for every case of

human rights abuse where the international community decides to intervene, there are

two other cases where, for whatever reason, there is no intervention. Intervention has

serious potential for abuse. It is perceived with enormous suspicion by the Global South

(Ayoob 2004). International law has by no means embraced it as a new norm (Abiew

1999; DUPI 1999; Holzgrefe & Keohane 2003; Reisman 1990) and any future

interventions, like those of the past, are likely to be ad hoc. But, despite all its flaws and

the impossibility of drawing up an objective balance-sheet, I rather suspect that it is here

to stay.

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