The new foreign policy moralists aren't as far from Bush as they think | Mark Mazower | Comment is free | The Guardian

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As British involvement in Libya keeps expanding, it is worth looking more closely at the ideas that brought us there in the first place. The ideological basis for the Libyan intervention has been evolving since the war in Bosnia and the Rwandan genocide. The doctrine of a "responsibility to protect", commonly known as "R2P", first achieved official recognition at the 2005 UN world summit. In essence, it says that the international community has a responsibility to protect populations suffering gross human rights violations. It took Obama's triumph to hand US foreign policy into the hands of policymakers who actually believed in it. The new multilateralists include Hillary Clinton, determined to bring back the state department from under the shadow of the Pentagon, and her head of policy planning, Anne-Marie Slaughter – a Princeton professor who previously co-authored a call for a new Wilsonian agenda meshing national security with the spread of "American values" through international law, alliances of democracies and the market. In the National Security Council, there's also Samantha Power, a former journalist, academic and human rights activist, whose impassioned history denouncing America's longstanding passivity in the face of previous genocides won the Pulitzer prize. The 2011 crisis in the Ivory Coast looked set to be the first time R2P was put into action, until plans for an intervention were stopped by the African Union's hesitation. But then came the Arab uprisings of the spring, and the Arab League's call for some kind of international action in Libya. Security council resolution 1973, the basis for the Nato campaign in Libya, has been depicted by both President Obama and secretary general Ban Ki-moon as indicating that R2P has indeed become a new norm in world politics. And who could possibly object? R2P limits the rights of the sovereign state in the name of a greater good – the protection of humanity – and it insists on the duty of others to prevent evil, if necessary through force. Who would want to stand up against the memories of the Holocaust, of Srebrenica, of Rwanda routinely invoked by policymakers and their publics alike? And yet there are major problems with R2P. For one, the similarities between this new concept and the anti-WMD policies of the Bush administration are as obvious as the differences. Both are pre-emptive and both ask the public to trust policymakers – in the case of R2P to trust their knowledge of what is happening on the ground. It would be reassuring if one thought that policymakers in Washington and London knew anything about places like Libya; the fact is there are probably less than a dozen people across the entire university system of both countries who do. Political scientists are trying to help cover the information gap. They are busy designing "early warning" mechanisms to help tell the difference, but anyone familiar with the state of contemporary political science and "genocide studies" must wonder whether these have any real value. There is also the troubling selectivity of the thing. The underlying principles are compelling, but in practice who decides when R2P applies? Warding off genocide is only one of its supposed aims, and ethnic cleansing and war crimes, two others, routinely go unremarked. Why Gaddafi and not Tibet? When I asked a senior Obama administration official whether R2P might be invoked over Gaza, the human rights crusader suddenly morphed into an old-style diplomat and there was lots of noisy throat-clearing. If R2P is ever to gain serious support across the globe, history will have to be taken more into account by its supporters than they do right now. Human rights do not form an eternal language; they are enmeshed, whether we like it or not, in past European imperial forays. Defenders of empire a century ago commonly drew a distinction between imperialism, a selfish matter they abhorred, and the white man's burden they assumed on behalf of humanity at large. After 1918, for instance, high-minded British diplomats like Lord Balfour and Robert Cecil quite openly justified Britain's acquisition of former German colonies on the grounds that too many of the lesser European powers – countries like Belgium – tended to behave, as they put it, "imperialistically". In other words, absolutely central to the British and American case for colonialism before and after the first world war was their adamantine self-belief in their own moral rectitude – a distinction that was less obvious to the colonised. The world has changed, of course, and Europe's empires have vanished. With R2P, the moral argument is now being made not by imperial nations but by the supposed voice of the international community speaking through its world organisation. Supporters say that is an improvement and believe that an "international community" really exists. Others remember the German jurist Carl Schmitt's point that the ultimate sign of power is not weaponry but the ability to create new norms. When deployed by the Obama administration or the UN secretary general, the new norm of R2P presents itself as self-evident moral truth. But in the realm of international politics, that is not enough. Unless the defenders of R2P can come up with a much more nuanced and less militarised set of options, one that takes explicit account of historical memory and political interest, they risk devaluing the currency of their principles.

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A good, balanced article. I note, though:

"It would be reassuring if one thought that policymakers in Washington and London knew anything about places like Libya; the fact is there are probably less than a dozen people across the entire university system of both countries who do."

If that's true, I'd like to know why the hell I am paying taxes for Intelligence agencies, Armed Forces' own intelligence services and a Foreign Affairs department.

We should have a breakdown of Libyan headcounts per tribes, their likely alignment with Gaddafi and therefore the % of the pop. he can rely on.

That tells us whether we ought to try something or not. Without that, how can we reach an effective decision?

"Why Gaddafi and not Tibet? When I asked a senior Obama administration official whether R2P might be invoked over Gaza, the human rights crusader suddenly morphed into an old-style diplomat and there was lots of noisy throat-clearing."

A very good point. But, one, you take the wins you can. If Gaddaffi has 35% support in Libya then he ideally ought to lose his seat but, in practice, it'd take a civil war for him to do so so, fuck it, we pass and we advise the rebels to lay down arms and come to terms with him. If he's got 20% only, you know you can win decisively without too much bloodshed so you go for it. Two, this is a very good criteria to reign in imperial tendencies or self-aggrandising bullshit. Your willingness to support Gaza or Tibet and upset Israel or China will show your seriousness wrt R2P. Or it will show you to be a hypocritical little cunt. Either way, it's information for the electorate to decide on whom to elect next time.

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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

A good, balanced article. I note, though: "It would be reassuring if one thought that policymakers in Washington and London knew anything about places like Libya; the fact is there are probably less than a dozen people across the entire university system of both countries who do." If that's true, I'd like to know why the hell I am paying taxes for Intelligence agencies, Armed Forces' own intelligence services and a Foreign Affairs department. We should have a breakdown of Libyan headcounts per tribes, their likely alignment with Gaddafi and therefore the % of the pop. he can rely on.

Well, yeah, we do have some people who are just as incompetent on their zone as the very best university professors. The journalist's exagerating.

No one has reliable statistics on anything because anyone senior enough to get the numbers correct thinks it beneath them to handle actual figures and they delegate it to someone who doesn't have the tools and is too far down the organisational chain to give a fuck whether the numbers they're feeding upwards bear any relationship to reality, aka myself.

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If you have no reliable data, you cannot have informed decision-making.

Close all these departments and save the cash. It's the least bad outcome as opposed to spending a fortune on make-believe numbers.

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Fair point. Puts me out of a job, but nevertheless...

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Perfect information is impossible. Any numbers, no matter how perfect, would be out of date as soon as you got them anyway. We just have to struggle on doing the best we can with what we can get.

I don't ask for perfect data. If Gaddafi turns out to be supported by 30% instead of 35% (or 40%), it's okay - it doesn't influence the decision making per se.

But there's a difference between, say, 20% and 35% and my information system ought to be able to catch it, else it's worthless. And I appreciate they evolve over time and there are tons of restrictions due to data collection methods, statistics limitations, etc etc etc.

All of these are known or can be pointed out as potential limitations. But I still ought to have a decent picture when the question is War/No War.

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Outsource it then. 95% of my information comes from l'Année stratégique, The Military Balance,the CIA World Factbook or Wikipedia.

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I just don't think the kind of data you want is ever going to be available and that's just a fact of life.

What is difficult with breaking down Libya into: Which tribes, where are they traditionally located and who's heading them?

The trickier bit is: Which way would they lean? But Gaddafi seems to have had an idea as I've heard that he massively privileged a few with oil revenues, investments and the like. Surely, such things are trackable, even if taking a snapshot poll per tribe was somehow entirely beyond the means of intelligence agencies/foreign offices.

And, again, if the data cannot possibly be obtained, why am I paying so much for what then become more or less useless departments? And then, more to the point, why our leaders making any decisions like "Let's intervene (but mezzo vocco) in a friggin civil war when 1- we don't know who is likely to end up on top and 2- we're never going to involve ourselves so much as to give clear, uncontested victory to one side and thus make the guy on top our guy".

What kind of rational decision-making is that?

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