International law and humanitarian intervention

While those of us in the Coalition of the Reality-Based mourn, gnash our teeth and rend our clothes this week, the world out there moves on, now aware that they face four more years of unilateral blustering and war-making by the Bush administration.

This brief article by an international law expert at the British Chatham House (formerly the Royal Institute for International Affairs) looks at the need for new standards for "humanitarian interventions," taking account of the problems that the Iraq War has created in that regard: Rules of Engagement by Elizabeth Wilmshurst Guardian (UK) 10/14/04.

What should be the law? A doctrine of humanitarian intervention which leaves to individual states the judgment on the seriousness of human rights breaches is open to abuse. States might camouflage a political agenda behind arguments of humanitarian necessity. The concept of sovereignty is often presented as the obstacle to protection of human rights, but it may be the only protection that a state has against abuse of power by a stronger state. Collective intervention is more likely to be disinterested than single-country intervention. [my emphasis]

Reducing human rights to war-propaganda slogans, as the Bush and Blair administrations did in the Iraq War, has been a major setback for those who were trying to build on the experiences of Rwanda and the Balkan Wars of the 1990s to create a new, more workable standard and practice to deal with humanitarian crises like that in the Sudan now.

This is also an informative point about the current state of international law and recent experience:

The security council may authorise military action only if the measure is necessary "to maintain or restore international peace and security". At first sight, a humanitarian crisis within a state's borders would not qualify. But on occasions the council has determined that there was a threat to the peace even if the situation was internal. In 1968, chapter VII was applied against the Ian Smith regime in what was then Southern Rhodesia. More recently, the council has adopted chapter VII resolutions for Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Rwanda (1994) and eastern Zaire (1996) and has determined that widespread human rights abuses can amount to a threat to international peace (former Yugoslavia 1993, Rwanda 1994 and East Timor 1999).

The Bush administration doesn't want to hear about any of this, of course, as it prepares for a new escalation in Iraq and possible wars against Iran and Syria.  But the real world isn't going away, no matter how hard those in the non-reality-based community may wish it to be so.