3.2 The dilemma of intervention

‘Humanitarian war’ is a contradiction in terms. War and its consequences, bombing and maiming people can never be part of human rights and morality.

I indicated that critics of humanitarian intervention are not pacifists. They object to this kind of war, a war to protect human rights. They do not object to wars, say, in defense of territory. This position is somewhat anomalous because it requires separate justifications  for different kinds of wars. [...] Take the use of force in self-defense. What can possibly be its moral justification? Very plausibly, this: that the aggressor is assaulting the rights of persons in the State that is attacked. The government of the attacked State, then, has a right to muster the resources of the State to defend its citizens’ lives and property against the aggressor. The defense of States is justified qua defense of persons. There is no defense of the State as such that is not parasitic on the rights and interests of individuals. If this is correct, any moral distinction between self-defense and humanitarian intervention, that is, any judgment that self-defense is justified while humanitarian intervention is not has to rely on something above and beyond the general rationale of defense of persons.

[…] the arguments in support of unilateral humanitarian intervention do not stand up to close scrutiny. [...] By virtue of the Charter of the United Nations, only the Security Council is empowered to take forcible action against a State which is in breach of its international undertakings to respect human rights.

Intervention will be where and how US power chooses, the guiding consideration being: ‘What is in it for us?’ [...]. To be sure, the ‘vision’ is cloaked in appropriate rhetoric about ‘democracy’ and all good things, the standard accompaniment whatever is being implemented, and by whom, hence meaningless – carrying no information, in the technical sense.

The declared intent, the record of planning, and the actual policies implemented, with their persistent leading themes, will not be overlooked by someone seriously considering ‘humanitarian intervention’, which, in this world, means intervention authorized or directed by the United States.

The substantial denial of women’s rights – whether civil, political, economic, social, or cultural – has never served as the sole or primary basis for military intervention.

[...]

These calls intensified when the Taliban began imposing a form of gender apartheid in Afghanistan. It took the attack of September 11th, however, for the United States to mobilise Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Although the plight of women under the Taliban was not a prime motivator for the intervention, the rhetoric surrounding the intervention appropriated feminist concerns about the quality of women’s lives under Taliban rule to garner the support of domestic and international constituencies for the Operation. Indeed, the propaganda value of violence against women has long been recognised. To date, preventing harm to women has served only as a convenient makeweight argument in the service of interventions initiated for other rationales.