He quite deftly makes the case and explores the idea that while the nations intervening in humanitarian wars position themselves are neutrals, in fact, because they almost always intervening to protect a minority from massacre, they are acting against the majority in contradiction to the idea of self-determination.
In searching for the Hot Strafor Babe for the article I remembered the movie Tears of the Sun and settled on Monica Bellucci for the honor. The events in the movie aren't exactly a true Humanitarian War, but they are close enough for my purposes.
It starts with Bruce Willis as Lt. Waters leading a SEAL mission to rescue some Americans, among whom is the Italian Dr Lorna Kendricks (American by a previous marriage), who are in Nigeria doing charitable work as it sinks into a civil war. He is supposed to rescue just them, but when he sees the villagers left behind getting slaughtered he turns his helicopters around and injects himself into the civil war to march them to the safety of Cameroon.
Hmmm... he disobeys orders and triggers an international incident and possibly tangles America in a war in the process? No wonder he's still just a lieutenant at his ripe old age.
I mentioned Bellucci playing a doctor. Naturally, this being Hollywood, being a female doctor selflessly helping third-worlders places her pretty much at the apex of moral authority and, by God, she exercises that authority in a relentlessly annoying matter. She hectors and berates Lt Methuselah, errr... I mean Waters throughout virtually the entire film. Geez lady, he tossed away his career to help you and the villagers, would it hurt to show a little gratitude?
It is an odd movie. There is a lot of violence in it, most of it Muslims slaughtering Christians and performing atrocities, and the SEAL team is shown being competent and as compassionate as you can expect a group of cardboard characters to be; still, perhaps primarily because of Bellucci's character, there is a whiff of disapproval about it all.
[EDIT: Apparently I didn't proof read this at all. I cleaned up a mess of typos and cleared up some mangled sentences.]
IMMACULATE INTERVENTION: THE WARS OF HUMANITARIANISM
By George Friedman. April 5, 2011
There are wars in pursuit of interest. In these wars, nations pursue economic or strategic ends to protect the nation or expand its power. There are also wars of ideology, designed to spread some idea of "the good," whether this good is religious or secular. The two obviously can be intertwined, such that a war designed to spread an ideology also strengthens the interests of the nation spreading the ideology.
Since World War II, a new class of war has emerged that we might call humanitarian wars -- wars in which the combatants claim to be fighting neither for their national interest nor to impose any ideology, but rather to prevent inordinate human suffering. In Kosovo and now in Libya, this has been defined as stopping a government from committing mass murder. But it is not confined to that. In the 1990s, the U.S. intervention in Somalia was intended to alleviate a famine while the invasion of Haiti was designed to remove a corrupt and oppressive regime causing grievous suffering.
It is important to distinguish these interventions from peacekeeping missions. In a peacekeeping mission, third-party forces are sent to oversee some agreement reached by combatants. Peacekeeping operations are not conducted to impose a settlement by force of arms; rather, they are conducted to oversee a settlement by a neutral force. In the event the agreement collapses and war resumes, the peacekeepers either withdraw or take cover. They are soldiers, but they are not there to fight beyond protecting themselves.
Concept vs. Practice
In humanitarian wars, the intervention is designed both to be neutral and to protect potential victims on one side. It is at this point that the concept and practice of a humanitarian war become more complex. There is an ideology undergirding humanitarian wars, one derived from both the U.N. Charter and from the lessons drawn from the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia and a range of other circumstances where large-scale slaughter -- crimes against humanity -- took place. That no one intervened to prevent or stop these atrocities was seen as a moral failure. According to this ideology, the international community has an obligation to prevent such slaughter.
This ideology must, of course, confront other principles of the U.N. Charter, such as the right of nations to self-determination. In international wars, where the aggressor is trying to both kill large numbers of civilians and destroy the enemy's right to national self-determination, this does not pose a significant intellectual problem. In internal unrest and civil war, however, the challenge of the intervention is to protect human rights without undermining national sovereignty or the right of national self-determination.
The doctrine becomes less coherent in a civil war in which one side is winning and promising to slaughter its enemies, Libya being the obvious example. Those intervening can claim to be carrying out a neutral humanitarian action, but in reality, they are intervening on one side's behalf. If the intervention is successful -- as it likely will be given that interventions are invariably by powerful countries against weaker ones -- the practical result is to turn the victims into victors. By doing that, the humanitarian warriors are doing more than simply protecting the weak. They are also defining a nation's history. [continued after the jump]
