All wars are terrifying gambles, but the wars justified with moral claims of humanitarianism carry a distinctively harrowing set of risks and problems — above all, the challenge of preventing massive human catastrophes with limited means. In Libya, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron and President Obama are already beginning to confront many of the classic dilemmas that bedeviled their predecessors facing massacres and genocide in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda.
The big democracies usually stand idly by during the worst atrocities, including the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda. Simply to defend core national security interests, the Western allies might have been better off this time concentrating on threats in North Korea, Pakistan or Yemen. (After the United States invaded Iraq, Condoleezza Rice reportedly warned George W. Bush about Darfur: “I don’t think you can invade another Muslim country during this administration, even for the best of reasons.”) If Western strategists saw a more complex interest in furthering the democratic impulses of the Arab revolutions, Libya still may not have seemed of paramount importance compared with, say, Egypt or Tunisia.
But what seemingly counted most in Libya was that civilians in Benghazi might, as Obama said last month, “suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This raises the first inevitable problem: Since the goal is the defense of humanity, and there are humans facing violence in many places, how do you intervene in one spot and not another without drawing accusations of hypocrisy? After all, horrific mass atrocities happen all over the world; there are other countries that have endured worse slaughter than Libya without eliciting Western interventions. As the writer David Rieff has noted, during debates about rescue in the Balkans in the 1990s, skeptics would say, “I’ll see your Bosnia, and raise you one East Timor.”
Obama has rightly said that the duty to rescue endures, even though “America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs.” Yet this offers only the beginning of an answer. Why strike in Libya but not do more for Congo, or Ivory Coast (where up to 1 million people have fled post-election violence), or Bahrain, for that matter, where the United States has largely stood behind the monarchy as it crushes peaceful protesters? Moreover, other critics will inevitably ask, if the threat to innocent human life in Libya was so great that it justified emergency violations of national sovereignty, then why settle for half-measures such as a no-fly zone?
A major reason for limiting the number of interventions — and for giving each intervention a limited mission — stems from a second classic problem: Western democratic leaders have powerful political incentives to do humanitarianism on the cheap. Sarkozy, spectacularly unpopular at home and facing a presidential election next year, may score political gains for his leadership, but there is more for politicians to lose if the intervention goes badly than there is to gain if it goes well. Whatever credit President Bill Clinton might have gotten from the American public for saving untold thousands of Somalis, he retreated fast after 18 U.S. troops were killed in Mogadishu in October 1993. And particularly after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is scant French, British or American public appetite for more military adventures in Muslim lands.
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