Confronting the Urge to Urge on the Libyan Intervention
An airstrike is one of the most horrendous phenomena on earth. But were I constitutionally capable of supporting them, I’d find it hard to resist those that the United States and NATO have called in on the Gaddafi regime.
Most progressives reflexively condemn foreign intervention by the United States; the use of armed forces is condoned only in self defense. In effect, though, they’re making common cause with a branch of conservatives — libertarians — not out of their principles of isolationism and respect for sovereign states (also known to libertarians as mind-your-own-business), but because of the United States’ poor track record.
However understandable, that response shuts the door on a room in our psyche. Perhaps I’m just projecting my own childhood trauma, but I think many of us have experienced the desperation of being picked on or bullied. We yearn for someone to intervene and come to your rescue. On a larger scale, no sadder story exists than the rescue that either doesn’t arrive on time or that isn’t even dispatched. In recent years, the classic case is Rwanda.
Because of the perception that she twisted the arm of President Obama to intervene and is considered a shill for humanitarian intervention thinly disguised as imperialism, Samantha Power is out of favor with progressives. But her 2007 book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was an eloquent plea to identify genocide before it happens and prevent it.
Worse from the standpoint of almost the entire political spectrum, the concept of a world government that stands at the ready to dispense armed forces to trouble spots without concerns for state sovereignty doesn’t cause an allergic reaction in me. In a 2008 column for the Financial Times Gideon Rachman acknowledged that world government represents “the kind of ideas that get people reaching for their rifles in America’s talk-radio heartland.” But, he wrote of the European Union:
So could the European model go global? . . . a change in the political atmosphere suggests that “global governance” could come much sooner than that. The financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty.
Add the imperative to abolish nuclear weapons to the financial crisis and climate change and you have a troika of causes making the case for global government. After all, under what authority do you think we on earth will be living 500 years from now? Sovereign states will be a distant memory. Let’s get on with it.
In fact, once states see the benefits that other states that have cast their lot together are receiving, suddenly state sovereignty loses its luster. Ian Williams explains in a 2009 World Policy Journal article.
Ironically, Albanians, Kosovars, and Serbs — along with all their neighbors in the Balkan cockpit of nationalities — unite in sharing the same overriding ambition. They all desperately want to join the European Union, which would entail them giving up much of the sovereignty that they have been so zealously squabbling over. . . . European Union citizens can live and work anywhere they want within the EU, claim education, healthcare, and welfare benefits — and even vote in many elections. For all those nations, whose working definition of sovereignty seems to include the right, indeed the duty, to harass foreigners at the borders and inside them, this is serious self-denial in the interest of a broader human or economic security.
At first, except for the small detail that I can’t stomach airstrikes, I let my imagination run away with me and fantasized the Libya intervention as a new model for coming to the aid of a people in peril. Predictably, though, a closer look cast some doubt on just how calumnious the villain is and virtuous the beleaguered are. Besides, did the latter truly represent a substantial segment of their country’s people?
At Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt spoke for those who question whether Gaddafi would actually massacre Libyans.
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