Alan Wolfe takes a long and thoughtful look at the position of the so-called liberal hawks - at the case for liberal or humanitarian intervention in the light of what has happened in Iraq. It's worth a read, though there isn't anything novel or startling in it for those of us who have been thinking about these issues over the last few years. What most struck me about Wolfe's main emphases, in fact, is that they relate to points that would have been pretty much taken for granted even before the Iraq war by anyone who had thought seriously about the justifying conditions for military intervention on humanitarian grounds. In these two passages, for example, Wolfe insists on the importance of national self-determination and the principle of sovereignty:
Alas for liberal hawkishness, safeguarding the individual against the evil designs of tyrants all too often comes into conflict with the desire of nations to manage their own future. One may argue that tyrants cannot possibly represent the will of their people because they do not allow their people to express their will. But this is not how most people in most societies around the world see the issue. For them, occupation is occupation, however benign it may appear to the occupiers.
.....
But our failure in Iraq points to a third lesson that we ignore at our peril: state sovereignty is not the worst of all principles, either. While focusing on the universality of the human desire for freedom, we cannot ignore the paradox that sovereign states, which so often repress the desire for freedom, also make freedom possible. Freedom cannot exist in the absence of some kind of order, and states are still the most appropriate mechanisms for achieving it. As the Bulgarian-French writer Tzvetan Todorov reminds us, there is one danger in the world greater than state sovereignty and that is anarchy.
These are elementary propositions even for a liberal hawk, at least one with any claims to being taken seriously. National self-determination is not necessarily the same thing as democratic self-government, and intervention simply to overturn an autocracy cannot be justified under the rubric of humanitarian intervention. Saying the same thing otherwise, the principle of sovereignty is to be respected except in extremis. This is why the principle of humanitarian intervention carries with it a threshold condition. We may argue about what this threshold should be - whether humanitarian crisis or a certain scale of human rights violation - but in any case it lies beyond the absence of democratic government, at a point where people are in grave daily jeopardy. It is not a standard belief of those defending the idea of humanitarian or liberal intervention - including here many supporters of the Iraq war - that national self-determination and sovereignty are values to be taken lightly.
Wolfe writes further:
Liberal hawks have to recognize that once we intervene to help people abroad, we run the risk of either establishing a state too fractured and fragile in its authority to bring about order, or one so determined to keep order that it violates the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. This is a dilemma that can perhaps be managed, but it first requires recognition that it is a dilemma. We may still decide that stopping genocide is a more important objective than avoiding anarchy, but we cannot pretend that stopping genocide is a moral imperative so clear-cut that it must always and at all times govern our actions without condition and regardless of consequence.
... Our actions in dealing with such states must inevitably be utilitarian, based on which of many unpleasant choices will bring the greatest benefits at the lowest cost. Sometimes that will mean leaving dictators in place and recognizing that the same sovereign structures that make it possible for tyrants to oppress their own people also make it possible for them to begin to make incremental improvement in the lives of their countrymen.
Once again, I would say that no liberal hawk would be worth taking seriously who didn't understand that the consequences of a projected intervention matter and that intervention should not even be contemplated unless it is thought to have a very good chance of making a difference for the better. Genocide is an extreme enough condition that one might think preventing it would usually be justified. But even here no nation would want to intervene to prevent a genocide if its intervention would actually make things worse. The precise circumstances have in each case to be evaluated. Most supporters of the Iraq war, believe it or not, did know this.