Genocide forever

There's an argument that seems to have caught on with the dumb left when responding to appeals for international intervention to stop the killing and other horrors in Darfur. It goes roughly: 'You what? Didn't you see what came of military intervention in Iraq?'

I had better pause here to make clear that in talking of the 'dumb left' I don't mean to say that the left is stupid, only that there's a stupid section of it. To get a quick sense of the constituency I'm referring to, consult virtually any comments thread on Comment is Free when the post relates to current international politics. That, too, is also a popular venue for the argument I've identified.

Anyway, it's an entirely fitting one for members of the dumb left to make, because, to a man and a woman, its members didn't think there was any case for humanitarian intervention in Iraq - unlike many of us, including me, who supported the Iraq war from the left and did (and still do) think there was such a case. But as they didn't think there was one, and the argument for intervening in Darfur is being made on humanitarian grounds, the failures in Iraq are not directly to the point.

Except, of course, if you think military intervention is never justified, not even when there's a genocide unfolding, or not even when, short of genocide, there's a full-scale humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands already dead, the death toll rising, millions displaced and terrorized, and the rest.

If that's what you do think, you could say it - and recommend dumping the UN Charter and the Genocide Convention. Or you could say that what is happening in Sudan is not only not a genocide, it isn't even any kind of humanitarian crisis, so upping the threshold for what you'll count as a humanitarian crisis to a situation where it's more than 'merely' hundreds of thousands whose lives have been, and are being, destroyed or are in jeopardy.

Or you might want to say - more soberly and cautiously than that - that the failures in Iraq mean that further military interventions should not be undertaken lightly; and then move on to trying to show why intervention in Sudan now, even with the picture as terrible as it is, would count as lightly.

However, a simple 'after Iraq, no humanitarian intervention'... this is not a sound principle. If it were, you could amend it to 'no humanitarian intervention, period'. For the time specification is irrelevant to the case. If Iraq has shown that humanitarian intervention must always end in disaster, then it has shown it for Kosovo, Rwanda, and wherever.

See, in this connection, Martin Kettle:

The first [need] is to reassert the continuing importance and relevance of international humanitarian intervention, by force if necessary. This will not be easy, because the reflex not to create "another Iraq" will rightly be strong. But it will be as true after this conflict as it was before it that the world cannot pass by on the other side when millions are oppressed by their own rulers, or their lives are destroyed by sweeping civil disorder.

See also Nick Cohen on 'the moral corruption of a potentially noble institution'.