by Zack Beauchamp
Steve Hynd distills one of the strongest anti-intervention arguments to its core:
[Responsibility] to Protect interventionism is essentially a utilitarian argument – that by using violence in reply to violence the greater good of the greater number can be achieved – specifically, that fewer people will die if there is an armed intervention than if the state or non-state actor is allowed to continue killing unopposed by external forces. But it largely ignores a wider utilitarian argument to do so – that the resources required to intervene could be put to better use saving more lives elsewhere…I doubt the dead care whether they are killed by a bullet or starvation – they're still just as dead. Utillitarian ethics, such as those used to justify R2P interventionism, dictate that resources should first go to missions which would help the greatest number – yet the budget for Somalian aid is a measly $105 million.
Previous discussion of this line of argument here. I can think of fourth responses at the moment. First, one could make non-consequentialist arguments justifying intervention based on the particular moral heinousness of mass slaughter as compared to other lethal ills. I'm not compelled by the underlying moral reasoning here, but I could see how one might be. Second, one could say it's an argument for more aid AND intervention. That'd be fair enough, except for the fact that states do lots of things to save lives other than aid and intervention that draw from the same finite resource/tax base. So that argument might work depending on the resource constraints at play, but it also might not. Third, an intervention might be politically possible whereas aid increases might not. Again, that might be true in a given case, but it doesn't answer Hynd's more fundamental moral challenge.
There's a fourth, though, that's more compelling: humanitarian intervention is often necessary to create the conditions under which aid can be effective in saving lives.
Consider Steve's example, Somalia. Two of the causes of the famine, and two reasons why aid can only have limited success in causing it, are Somalia's civil war and the al-Shabaab terrorist organization. The Ken Menkhaus article I looked at earlier this week made this point clearly:
The conditions that led to Somalia's famine were already apparent late last year. The country had been beset by corruption, political instability, and an insurgency pitting 9,000 African Union peacekeepers, protecting a weak transitional government, against al Shabab, an Islamist group with ties to al Qaeda that controls southern Somalia. The armed violence, which has raged for four and a half years, has crippled the economy and, according to the United Nations, displaced an estimated 1.4 million people. Then, in 2010, Somalia began to suffer its worst drought in 60 years, just as food and fuel prices spiked worldwide. The crisis fully erupted in July, when the worsening humanitarian crisis reached a tipping point and the UN announced famine conditions across parts of southern Somalia. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis in famine-stricken areas fled to the capital, Mogadishu, and Kenya in search of aid.
At first, the international community could do little to aid the victims of the famine. Most relief agencies had suspended operations in Somalia two years earlier, due to attacks on their aid workers by a variety of armed groups, including al Shabab. When the famine was announced in July, those agencies no longer possessed the networks and infrastructure necessary to operate in the country and distribute aid effectively.
Now, neither Menkhaus nor I support an intervention in Somalia right now for a host of reasons, in part because it's not clear how, given the specific contours of the Somali conflict, one could hope to succeed in making the situation better. But Somalia illustrates the point I'm getting at well enough: humanitarian crises are often caused and prolonged by wars and bad governance. Food and medicine can't very well get passed out in war zones, and evil or corrupt governments will limit the ability of aid organizations to operate. Either way, aid doesn't get to the people who desperately need it.
That's why it's so critical to either end the fighting or, as the case may be, topple the government slaughtering its population. Civil wars and awful governments have tremendous long term consequences beyond the already-awful casualties caused by the fighting itself. They are, in some cases, the root causes of the spread of disease, famine, poverty, and other horrors. Further, both civil wars and bad governance prevent the international community from taking effective action to ameliorate the humanitarian crises they create. Somalia is one example. North Korea is another.
Steve's talking about Libya, a comparatively better off country. However, Qaddafi was directly responsible for dire poverty despite the country's wealth, and one can only imagine that conditions would have gotten worse as a result of a) the government diverting resources from economic development/basic subsistance aid to power consolidation after the likely slaughter in Benghazi and b) growing international isolation. The intervention in Libya likely headed off long-term humanitarian problems as well as a short-term catastrophe.
As I've been examining in the past few days, we aren't certain that the consequences of intervention will be comparatively better yet, though there are reasons for optimism. That's an important constraint on intervention: that the outcome be better than the consequences of doing nothing. Indeed, humanitarian intervention, like any other war, is subject to just war constraints. Intervention isn't always a possible option morally or practically.
But aid isn't a panacea either. Sometimes, our best reading of the evidence suggests that a humanitarian intervention is one of the best available options to help the world's worst off. I desperately hope, and very cautiously believe, that Libya will turn out to be one of those cases.
The Dish 