In connection with Kosovo's declaration of independence, Matthew Yglesias offers some reflections on military intervention for humanitarian purposes. Kosovo, he says, appears to some as an alternative legitimating model of this after the chaotic consequences of the war in Iraq:
Today, there are few left-of-center defenders of the Iraq War as it actually exists, but there continues to be considerable concern about an "Iraq Syndrome" overreaction to the chaos that has followed the invasion. Kosovo, in this scheme, is supposed to be the "good war" that serves as a reminder of the positive potential of military force. Thus, even as center-left figures agree that the unilateralism of the Bush era must come to an end, there's a desperate search to find some new mechanism - perhaps a Global NATO or perhaps a Concert of Democracies - that could authorize a war that, like Kosovo, is fought neither in self-defense nor in defense of an ally nor with the approval of the U.N. Security Council.However, Yglesias continues, the Kosovo intervention itself hasn't been an unalloyed success:
In reality, Kosovo, though much less disastrous than Iraq, has, like Iraq, turned out to be more problematic than enthusiasts advertised and should, like Iraq, mostly inspire humility about what we can expect to achieve through force.I have three thoughts about this.
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[T]he debate in the United States remains oddly dominated by the specter of unilateral military coercion as a potential tool of humanitarianism, as if the only viable alternative to a callous indifference to the fate of foreigners is to have the Pentagon identify some "bad" foreigners and kill them.
First, if the UN Security Council can fail to decide and act effectively, then so in principle can any other collective body, whether a reconstituted Nato, Concert of Democracies or other multilateral grouping. If, therefore, you rule out unilateralism, then when there are genocidal or other humanitarian crises and the relevant bodies fail to do anything about them, you say that military action may not be used to try to bring these situations to an end. (I bypass the question of what counts as unilateralism: if a coalition of democracies - like, say, the US, the UK, Australia, Spain and Italy - are jointly involved, is that still unilateral?)
Second, Yglesias's argument takes off from the problematic outcome of the Kosovo intervention, with - in the background - the chaos in Iraq. This suggests that, had the Kosovo intervention been an overwhelming success, he would be more willing to consider it as a model of a 'good' humanitarian intervention. But doesn't this mean that that 'good' model must remain open as an option at least for cases where the chances of a successful outcome are, before the event, promising? Unless, that is, he intends the more general thesis that military intervention for humanitarian ends never works.
Third, between the first and the second of these two points above we move from the issue, broadly speaking, of procedure to that of substance: from what bodies may authorize and prosecute military intervention for humanitarian purposes to what actual decisions are made by them and what outcomes achieved. This is of critical importance. For there are situations where, if the procedure followed is correct, is legitimate, then ipso facto the outcome is too. Thus, in a competition between legal political parties, if the elections have been open and fair in the standard ways, then the outcome is legitimate. You and I may have voted Labour and the Conservatives have won a majority, but knowing about differences of opinion in a free society and the rules of democratic life, we accept the result; it's not what we want but it's fair according to rules that we are willing to abide by. Contrast that with this: a group of people is considering alternative decision procedures for whether some other lot of people should be tortured or not. There's no procedure that could legitimately be put in place for this - because the decision to torture someone is never an acceptable outcome. Or contrast it with this: if an innocent person is found guilty even after having had a fair trial, then the result is unjust though the proper procedures were followed. Those who know that the verdict is unjust will not be swayed by the consideration that the trial was a fair one, but will hope to see the verdict overruled.
If, now, genocide or some other humanitarian catastrophe is under way, then no mechanism, no procedure, the result of which is that nothing should be done to try to stop it can override the normative importance of... trying to stop it. No UN body, no Nato, no Concert of Democracies, can possibly carry more moral weight than the need to save a people from genocide or some other human-rights disaster. This does not mean that every military intervention will be justified: the likely consequences have to be assessed; there has to be a reasonable chance of success, of not making matters even worse than they already are. But what it does mean is that, with this and some other standard provisos, there is a right of humanitarian intervention, multilateral or unilateral as may be.