Chris Brown, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, has an interesting post up on the LSE's politics blog. Writing about how the idea of R2P is now looking after the Libyan intervention, he makes a point in passing that is worth drawing attention to:
Of course, it is far too early to say – but then it always will be. Consider Iraq – a success and 'mission accomplished' in the Spring of 2003, a disaster three years later at the height of the insurgency, and now? Too soon to say 'mission really accomplished', but it is noteworthy that Iraq is one of the few Arab countries which is not facing calls to establish a democracy, because it already is one, of a sort, and that the Foreign Minister of Iraq is now chairing the Arab League and leading the calls for reform in the region.
But it is Chris's concluding observation I want to focus on. He writes:
The Anglo-French position is that there will be no peace until Gaddafi goes, but that isn't what UNSC 1973 said – and it wouldn't have passed if it had said that. It is clear both (i) that Cameron and Sarkozy are correct on the substance of the matter (Gaddafi cannot be left to plot revenge), and (ii) that as soon as military action to bring about regime change comes on the agenda, the consensus in support of intervention collapses.
There is, I think, a wider point here. R2P and other consensus-oriented interventionist notions come up against this kind of contradiction because they are attempts to find non-political solutions to problems that are, in their very essence, political.
There are different ways of drawing out this point. One of them is to say, as I have said in previous posts (see section 4), that the requirements of international humanitarian law are often blocked by considerations of a blatantly political, rather than legal, kind. Another is to register that international humanitarian law has profound longterm regime-change implications, if we understand 'regime change' in the present context as not necessarily entailing anything about external intervention, though it also may - but as indicating merely that certain types of regime are not fit to govern human beings with fundamental rights (as human beings all do have).