Thoughts on Syria: at the moment, it looks more like Clinton bombing the Sudan in 1998 than Iraq III.

If the question is strictly one of justice, then some kind of intervention is demanded, if we have some capability to prevent the worst abuses of the Syrian government (and the rebels). That part's not a complicated question. What the 'some kind of intervention' is will be.

I have gradually come to oppose these types of actions, in spite of the moral clarity of the case. The problem is that most of the western world, and the United States in particular, is unprepared or unwilling to stomach the realities of intervention. Successful interventions take a lot of time--decades, not months or years; they require serious and sustained involvement--the good of the people you seek to help has to become, in some way, your good. As Tocqueville noted, though, the characteristic of America is an inability to focus on a problem for long enough to actually solve it. If it will be an issue of concern for, at best, a few months, then it's better to avoid acting.

But this is a particular type of objection, not at all different from refusing to permit a civil rights march because it might incite violence. That is to say: it is entirely up to the general public to decide what is important to it. While it may, pragmatically and in the moment, make sense to concede to the reality of the political situation, we should be aware that the entire system functions only because of a fundamental decision to be unjust. American interventions don't work because the American people don't care about the rest of the world (this is not a problem unique to America, though we are its apotheosis); it is their own intransigence that sabotages the action, not the wrongness or impracticality of the action itself.

Norm talks a bit about humanitarian intervention and whether recent experiences in Libya and Syria are causing anyone to rethink their positions. I tend to agree with Norm that the decision to intervene is always going to be idiosyncratic to the case at hand, and trying to make general rules out of the collection of experiences is both descriptively and normatively bad: people are going to respond or fail to respond for reasons that have little to do with past experience.

But having paid close attention to this issue for ten years now, and having paid some attention to it since Bosnia/Somalia dominated the news cycle, I do believe there's an underlying dynamic behind these shifting responses: a theory that puts forward an obligation to help in trying circumstances is widely disseminated and accepted; a case arises that would test this obligation; states act or do not in response to the problem; if they act, they encounter unforeseen but knowable complications and eventually lose the desire to follow through; that lost desire means subsequent cases are neglected, and the theory of obligation is judged a failure; if they don't act, the theory is judged a failure. Consequently, theorists get together and create a new theory of obligation, but this theory just repeats the same process over and over. Post-Cold War humanitarianism fails in Rwanda (and Bosnia and Somalia, but never mind that), therefore the doctrine of liberal internationalism is proposed, which is rejected as illegal and fails in Afghanistan or Iraq, therefore the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect is proposed, which fails in Darfur and elsewhere. It's a strange conclusion, but I think it's the correct one: when it comes to intervention, we have cases but can have no theory.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, bless her heart, is doing her best to keep my dissertation topic relevant. For the record, I do not think much of Responsibility to Protect doctrine (see the usual valid criticisms here). I will eschew the possibility of saying more because the argument in which I say more constitutes the hook for my book project. Suffice it to say I agree with Julian Ku that Slaughter gives "a pretty fair description of the trend in thinking among international law scholars in Western liberal democracies," though, unlike Ku's point, I think the vital word is scholars not Western. (Well, the vital word is also Western, but that's a different kind of objection).

I've been sitting on this Slate/n+1 article on humanitarian intervention for awhile because I'm not exactly sure what to say about it. The essay hits a number of points with which I am in substantive agreement--e.g. the UN Charter and the UDHR work at cross-purposes--but then proceeds to say nonsensical things, like that the moral clarity of some human rights is a problem:

The function of these words—as well as the word genocide, to whose propagation the book is partly devoted—is to place the evil people beyond the pale of politics, of negotiation, of human intercourse. Would you shake hands with a mass murderer? With the invocation of the word genocide, we move into some other sphere of human relations. Thought, strategy, negotiation shut down; there is only right and wrong, only fight or flight. Which is precisely, in fact, the point.

A politics this morally coercive may explain why a president who is a former law professor, and who came to power with the mandate to restore the rule of law, would so brazenly ignore the Constitution. But a politics this morally coercive is not a politics at all.

What has happened to human rights in the last 20 years is a hijacking, of the sort Napoleon managed with the Declaration of the Rights of Man when he turned Europe into a bloodbath, as Power would put it, under its banner. The search around the globe for genocides to eradicate is the ultimate rights perversion, for it reduces human rights to the right not to be brutally murdered in a particular way that fits the definition of genocide given in the Genocide Convention. This cannot be anyone's idea of a robust human rights. If human rights are to be reclaimed they need first of all to be restored to the realm of politics. Not the realm of morality, which is always and ever a discussion of good versus evil, but politics, a discussion and argument over competing legitimate aims—e.g., the aim of honoring sovereignty and not waging war, versus the aim of protecting the defenseless and ensuring their rights.

Of all the places to make a stand on the importance of flexibility in the scope and weight of human rights, genocide is an odd choice. Isn't the fact everyone thinks genocide is bad a good thing? Further, it's well-understood in the literature that the wrongness of genocide does not translate in any straightforward way to political facts: who should intervene, when intervention is appropriate, etc.* I was talking with a colleague about recent developments in Somalia and argued against intervention in those circumstances even though intentional forced famine is #2 on the list of rights violations everyone can agree are bad and might merit forcible response.


*To be clear: well understood in the literature, not well understood by political decision-makers. This fact is sometimes lost on those in the literature. My favorite expression of this is a sentiment expressed at least twice with slight variations in Theodor Meron's The Humanization of International Law (a great book, present criticism notwithstanding): "In this area, political reality regretfully lags behind legal principle." Those silly politicians, if only they knew the answer's already been figured out!