No Humanitarian case for Iraq?
Human Rights Watch World Report 2004: War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention
The Executive Director of Human Rights Watch provides a lengthy and damning commentary on the rationalization of the Iraqi invasion as a humanitarian intervention. Heady stuff.
In examining whether the invasion of Iraq could properly be understood as a humanitarian intervention, our purpose is not to say whether the U.S.-led coalition should have gone to war for other reasons. That, as noted, involves judgments beyond our mandate. Rather, now that the war’s proponents are relying so significantly on a humanitarian rationale for the war, the need to assess this claim has grown in importance. We conclude that, despite the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the invasion of Iraq cannot be justified as a humanitarian intervention.
In regard to our current and future policy towards Iraq, I believe that quibbling over the stated reasons for the invasion are pretty much moot. What makes this essay important is its cold and rational dissection of the humanitarian argument, peeling back dead tissue so that we can see the diseased organ of the president’s morally bankrupt foreign policy.
The decision to invade was not a foolish or arbitrary one — no bureaucracy the size of the US government is prone to such vicissitudes. Rather, like any major undertaking by a world power, it came about as part of a deliberately constructed policy structure with some basic assumptions and goals. The Bush administration is attempting to cloak that policy with lies and revisionist history. They do this in order to ensure that that policy (and, by implication, their administration) continues, for it is a policy whose ethical and intellectual foundations would be repugnant to the majority of Americans should it be openly embraced.
It’s up to all of us to tear off the mask.