Thursday, June 03, 2004
(1:28 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Humanitarian Intervention
I do not believe in humanitarian military intervention. I know it sounds like a good, appealling idea -- bring in our army to force people to be peaceful -- but I cannot imagine a situation in which it would be effective.
Name me a counter-example. But first, let me cut off a couple of false options: Japan and Germany do not count. We did not invade either country for humanitarian reasons -- we invaded them because they were our enemies. No matter what the ideological bullshit about American righteousness would like to tell us, we did not enter WWII in order to stop the Holocaust. The way we treated Japan and Germany, after invading and utterly defeating them because they were our enemies, was admirable by the standards of war, but neither situation provides a valid model for contemporary humanitarian interventions -- especially since both were highly effective and disciplined totalitarian regimes without a lot of underlying resistance from their own people (unlike, say, Iraq).
If we conceptualize humanitarian intervention as "police action," I also object: police action almost always ends up producing more criminals. "Preemptive" police action, such as that in Iraq, leads inevitably to unnecessary death and destruction, just as if the police were to invade some separationist's home in Montana on the belief that he had weapons.
For the record, I believe that the military and the police are inherently immoral. Some good may occasionally come out of them, but they exist in order to destroy, and we should not feign surprise when they do in fact destroy -- whether the example is the "collateral damage" that we didn't mean to cause (unlike the evil terrorists, who mean to cause collateral damage directly!) or the criminals we didn't mean for our prisons to produce.
