Humanitarian intervention in Iraq?

In an article that originally appeared in the Washington Post, Eric Posner leads us to believe that Humanitarian intervention usually makes matters worse. And the glowing example to make his point? Iraq. No, that’s not a typo.

More than 40,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the rate at which civilians die has been increasing in recent months. Many thousands of innocent Iraqis have been detained, and some have been abused by American troops. Many others have been tortured or killed by Iraqi police. Yet, if the United Nations were to have its way, the Iraqi debacle would be just the first in a series of such wars — the effect of a well-meaning but ill-considered effort to make humanitarian intervention obligatory as a matter of international law. Today Iraq, tomorrow Darfur. Civilians suffer in all wars, but the suffering of Iraqi civilians in this war is particularly unfortunate because one of the main justifications for the war was humanitarian: to rescue suffering Iraqis from a tyrant.

For starters, humanitarian intervention was never a pre-invasion justification for going into Iraq. It was a sober, and well spun, after-thought as the original agenda of the attack (connection to 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction) was slowly proving to be nothing but a litany of lies.

Humanitarian intervention can and should only be called such when it is the sole justification for going in, in the first place. You can’t intervene for humanitarian reasons, after you’ve already intervened. Sorry, but that’s not moral intent, that’s an excuse and a cover-up for failure.

He then continues down the Iraq road:

Saddam Hussein was an especially bad tyrant, and Iraqi civilian casualties attributable to the U.S. intervention do not yet equal what he was able to accomplish, albeit over a longer period. The Kurds and many Shiites are better off. And many Iraqis continue to think that the war was worth it, according to polls. But polls do not reveal the opinions of dead Iraqis.

Polls also don’t reveal the opinions of the over 800,000 Rwandans killed in 1994. And that is who the humanitarian intervention debate is, and should be focused on.

There’s no doubt that intervention can be a slippery slope, yet that’s also why the first of the three pillars of the new ‘responsibility to protect’ is to ‘prevent’. The idea is to lead with diplomacy, not with a loaded gun.