Critiquing liberal interventions
Here’s an interesting book review by Stephen Holmes critiquing liberal interventions. His primary focus is Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell, about the world’s reaction to genocide. Power highlight’s America and the world’s failure to act on humanitarian impulses to stop genocide, and argues that multilateral institutions and legalisms have only gotten in the way of preventing mass killings. It wasn’t the UN that ultimately intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo, but NATO:
Be this as it may, the proponents of humanitarian intervention, in the 1990s, were among multilateralism’s least forgiving critics. Power writes in this spirit. Clinton embraced ‘consultation’, she tells us, whenever his Administration lacked a clear policy of its own. In that sense, too, multilateralism is a sign of weakness. When it comes to atrocities, she implies, the US should simply have told its allies what it was going to do.
Holmes’s concern is that the advocates of humanitarian intervention allowed Bush to let slip the dogs of war.
By denouncing the US primarily for standing idly by when atrocity abroad occurs, they have helped repopularise the idea of America as a potentially benign imperial power. They have breathed new life into old messianic fantasies. And they have suggested strongly that America is shirking its moral responsibility when it refuses to venture abroad in search of monsters to destroy. By focusing predominantly on grievous harms caused by American inaction, finally, they have obscured public memory of grievous harms caused by American action.
Given this, Holmes ponders whether the prevailing historical analogy for American policymakers of the coming decade will be Munich or Vietnam, and whether the moralistic crusade and the free application of military power will lead us to another My Lai down the road.
Holmes also wonders if the interventionists are too concerned with the spectacle of humanitarian catastrophe: does this lead to short term military strategies to address the immediate causes — Hutu militias, Serbia paramilitaries — but fail to do the hard work of trying to build a humane society after we intervene? Does it cause the public — and through the public, political support — to lose interest in reconstruction? If so, then the moral cause is ephemeral. “Regime change”, as it’s currently bandied around, unfortunately means merely destroying the wicked, and not replacing it with something better that has a chance to endure.
What does all this mean now? Holmes wrote his review in late 2002, and now the Iraqi war has come and gone, and we are in the midst of a reconstruction that’s faltering. I want to believe that we’ll be able to pull off this reconstruction, even though it may take many, many years: even if it’s just a first step on a long path, it may be our only way towards safety in the end. So what do we do? Can we pressure the Bush Administration to take are of the unfinished business of rebuilding before it embarks on further adventures? Can we find a Democrat with a chance of winning, who’s actually interested in foreign affairs and believes that pouring more resources into a liberal Iraq is a necessity?