Idiocy Epitomized: Libya And R2P--And Why It Is A Western Artifact

The ultimate justification for the current inchoate effort by France, the UK, and others including the less than eager US is The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) which doctrine derives from a 2005 outcome document concerning the massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia which was adopted unanimously by the UN General Assembly.  This action can be seen best as a collective catharsis of collective guilt by an "international community" awestruck by what it had "allowed" to occur.

The heart of R2P is the notion that should a state fail to protect its citizens from "genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, or crimes against humanity," the international community has the obligation to undertake the protective task.  The doctrine as adopted by the UN is an outgrowth of the earlier concept holding that the UN could call upon member states to intervene should internal political disruption produce a potentially destabilizing refugee stream.  Both artifacts of the General Assembly fall far outside the mandate of the UN as conceived.

(It is worth noting in this context, the framework of R2P, that the three people in the senior ranks of the Obama administration who pushed hardest for the Libyan intervention are connected in one way or another with both the doctrine and the two slaughter ridden venues from which it emerged.  Former Harvard professor and current National Security Council heavyweight Samantha Power is a specialist in genocide, our Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice has long been an advocate of robust intervention to prevent any repetition of Rwanda, and SecState Hilary Clinton has been proud of her presidential husband's brave move in mounting out the air and later ground intervention in Bosnia.)

The foundation of both R2P and its precursor can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and companion international agreements or conventions including those falling under the general term "Geneva Convention."  Despite the grandiose title of the Human Rights document and regardless of the expansive goals of the others, the Geneva Convention and all the rest, are not consensus documents representing any global set of norms and values.  They are creations of the West, of Europe and the US along with other, Western leaning societies and cultures such as those of South and Central America.

The adoption of the several conventions and declarations by all members of the UN in no way obviates the basic reality that the ideas, the norms and values to which official assent has been given, are Made in the West and are the unique outcome of Western history.  This ground truth can be inferred from the assorted reservations which have garlanded the official acceptances on file.  Many of these reservations, such as those entered by various Muslim majority states, demonstrate a rejection of Western norms, values, and ideas regarding both "universal" rights and limitations on acceptable means of waging war.

Don't get your knickers in a knot over the use of the word "Muslim" in the preceding paragraph.  The uniquely Western nature of the norms and values embodied in the referenced documents owes little to religion per se.  Back down, Christians or Jews, this is not a slam on the ideals contained in your sacred writings.  The core of all religions is universally in favor of peace, love, flower power, and urge the eschewing of war other than those of the "just" kind.  Of course there have been wars fought over the meaning of the word "just."

The Western origin of the norms, values, and ideals embodied in the referenced conventions emerge not from religion and sacred sentiments but rather from a more base emotion: disgust.  Over the centuries Europeans fought wars of a uniquely bloody nature.  They also fought wars with nauseating regularity.  And, Europeans, particularly the English and, later, the Americans, fought wars with a single minded absolutism which came to the highest fruition with the hectatomb of World War II.

From the Thirty Years War to the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon to World Wars I and II, the Western Way of War provided object lesson after object lesson in the need to somehow regulate and modulate war so as to ensure the lowest cost of lives, particularly the lives of non-combatants, and the least possible damage to non-military targets.  As a result there was a development of norms which were far more often honored in the breech than in the observance.

The attempts to regulate both war and governmental treatment of civilian populations which proved most likely to fail were those predicated upon religious strictures.  The Catholic Church made numerous moves to limit and control war.  All failed.  Far more efficacious were limitations on war were those based on national self-interest.  The long centuries of very limited (and quite inconclusive) war which spanned the period between the Thirty Years War and the conflicts of Napoleon were the result of self-interest pricked by the recognition that unlimited, absolute war was as destructive of the victor as the vanquished.

In a companion way the limits that governments increasingly imposed upon themselves in the suppression of internal unrest or mere interpersonal violence were the consequence of a growing recognition that social and political good order and stability required polite and restrained behavior.  The code of the gentleman which emerged in England and was copied faithfully in the US was the result of this recognition.  The growth in fits and starts of representative and increasingly democratic government was likewise the consequence of a blossoming realization that inclusion was far more beneficial than suppression.

After the suppression of the Paris Commune and the ending of the American War Between the States, the internal good order was more and more facilitated by a concern on the part of the government for the rights, dignities, and status of the civilian population.  During the same period the first stumbling efforts to codify the off and on practices of limiting inter-state conflict were made as well.

But it took the massive, unprecedented industrialized mass murder of the two World Wars to prod the West, or at least those states in the West left standing when the Second World War ended, to make a concerted effort to impose their collective internal and international values, norms, and ideals in a set of international conventions.  It is from this soil of blood and guts that the plant of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the expanded Geneva Convention grew.  The UDHR was adopted quickly with the formal inauguration of the UN.  The conventions, like the UN itself, were the product of Western experiences over centuries and the expression of norms, values, and ideals were forged in the fires of war.

This, then, is the background of the current idiocy in Libya.

The question which must be addressed is simply this: How relevant is this Made in the West artifact to the situation in Libya (and Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, or others yet to be born?)

In plain point of fact R2P is a doctrine to be applied on an ad hoc basis only.  This means that there is no end to the implied hypocrisy of any specific application.  Is it not hypocritical to bomb one's way to peace, stability, and civilian safety in Libya but not the Ivory Coast?  Or, Yemen?  Or, should the body count cross some mythical line yet to be determined.  Bahrain?  Syria?

Then there is the necessary corollary of hypocrisy--base opportunism.  The existence of R2P allows cover for opportunism, for the disguised pursuit of national interest.  It is this rather than any legitimate apprehension of feeling the military wrath of the "international community" which propels the solid opposition of Russia and China to any UN interference in the internal affairs of a state.  Other countries, such as India, which have had experience with internal unrest and a concomitant bloodstained suppression, may view R2P and its precursor with a jaundiced eye.

The experiences of intervention under one name or guise or another also predisposes African and Latin American states against R2P and its companions.  The pervasive fear of intervention which can be seen throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Mideast is totally legitimate, every bit as legitimate and history based as the Western expression of "universal" norms and values.  The two are fundamentally antipodal and will remain that way into the future as far as one can see.

The uncertainties regarding the relevance of R2P as well as the potential narratives of "hypocrisy" and "opportunism" are in play with respect to the divisions which have become so evident in Europe.  The sharp distinctions between the Western created conventions and the culturally and historically determined "reservations" put in place by Arab and Muslim states have become every bit as high profile.  It is, for example, not naivete but a difference in perceptions of norms and values which provoked the expressions of shock and dismay from the Arab League over the reality that imposition of a no-fly zone required that bombs be dropped and missiles fired.

In short, the Libyan Affair has again demonstrated a long standing historical truism.  The best guide to foreign relations is self-determined national and strategic interest.  While principles can and have played a constructive role in determining both national interest and foreign policy, basing a war (for that is what it is, regardless of euphemism) on the "universal" principles embodied in R2P and its foundation conventions is not wise.  Nor is it likely to be productive in the longer term regardless of the specifics occurring in the shorter run.

In sum, President Obama was misguided in the extreme when he succumbed to the importuning and arguments of three special pleaders, Powers, Rice, and Clinton.  Grabbing the coattails of Sarkozy and his personal view of R2P was not a mistake: it was, as Talleyrand famously put it, "a blunder."