If you're writing about an issue where the humanitarian consequences of acting or not acting in a certain way are involved, it's probably better to have a name other than Slaughter. But your name is your name, and Anne-Marie Slaughter is discussing how President Obama's recent speech on Libya appealed to both America's interests and its values. You can see that in this passage from the speech:
To brush aside America's responsibility as a leader and - more profoundly - our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.
Moreover, America has an important strategic interest in preventing Qaddafi from overrunning those who oppose him. A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya's borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful - yet fragile - transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship, as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power. The writ of the United Nations Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling that institution's future credibility to uphold global peace and security. So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.
Having established the point that Obama was appealing to interests as well as values, Slaughter proceeds to examine the different contexts in which interests can be defined. It's worth a look.
To broaden out from her point, I offer you this analogy. Imagine that you lived in an apartment block in which you knew from the evidence of your eyes and your ears that most of the other residents were cruel to their dogs. As an animal-lover, or even just a humane person, you would have reason not to want this to be going on around you - because of your values. But if we suppose you couldn't stop it, it might well also be in your interests to go and live somewhere else. The daily dismay, or worse than dismay, you would suffer witnessing acts of cruelty could make your life feel hellish.
People can have an interest, by analogy, in not wanting to live in a world where a regime gets to massacre large numbers of its citizens without anyone in a position to do something about that doing something about it. It isn't only that the commission of such crimes without hindrance goes against their values, though it does. It's that the world feels like a much less congenial place to live in than it could be. So we all - or is it just most people? - have an interest in such things not happening.
Then again, there's always Simon Jenkins. 'Whether there would have been a genocidal massacre, as interventionists maintain, is not known', says Simon (and, by the way, on that score it didn't have to be genocidal, it just had to be very bad); but in any case he wants 'nothing to do with this'. Fair enough. No one should force him. However, look at what happens when the state of affairs is reversed. I picture some pro-intervention chappy in a roughly comparable situation where intervention hasn't happened and a regime is duly murdering civilians in large numbers; I picture him giving it out that 'Whether there would have been serious loss of life, including civilian casualties, in the event of military intervention, as opponents of intevention maintain, is not known'. And I wonder how these words of his would have been received. With scepticism at least, I'd say. The potential costs of non-intervention and the interest we may have as human beings in not wanting to see those costs paid by those who will have to pay them are rarely given their due weight in the advocacy in favour of letting these things take their course. (Thanks: SC and E.)