Anti-Climacus

IOZ links approvingly to a blogger suspicious of the revival of humanitarian intervention talk for Libya, but not for Egpyt. Which, first: intervening seems unwarranted at the moment for reasons I elaborated yesterday. Second: Libya's government appears to be more serious about using violence to suppress dissent, and that violence is a reasonable cause for concern. Third, at the blog IOZ links to: I will never understand people who actively defend Milosevic. I can understand thinking intervention in Kosovo was unwarranted (though I believe that position to be wrong), and perhaps even the view that Milosevic was no worse, on balance, than a number of other political leaders who didn't receive his level of scrutiny. But affirmatively defending him is a kind of madness: unless one is determined to see the world through the lens of empire, I can't fathom an argument in which he's the victim.

Norm Geras identifies this as, in part, a hangover from Iraq, which I believe gets the politics about right. I also think he is perhaps too optimistic about humanitarian intervention's future prospects. I have a now-discarded frame for an article in which I connect liberal internationalism with 'responsibility to protect' theory and note that both of them are responses to, and conditioned by, foreign policy failures, rather than successes. However, even getting broad matters of moral concern onto the foreign policy radar counts as success, of a kind, in a world that is half defined by considerations of power and interest, and half by others who forcibly restrict the viable options because they believe only power and interest can triumph.