https://lobelog.com/on-humanitarian-intervention/

I am old enough to remember when a “humanitarian intervention” meant organizing collections of food and blankets to send to distant communities in distress. Heck, in my elementary school in England we knitted little 6-inch squares to make up such blankets: they were taken away, sewn together, and delivered to the Red Cross by the teachers.

Nowadays, though, the term “humanitarian intervention” is nearly always understood to mean military action—or, in short, war. How did this happen?

The first move in this weasel-ish double rebranding was to re-describe war as merely “intervention.” That started happening in Western discourse right after the end of the Cold War, in discussions of what policies Western governments should adopt toward crises in Bosnia, Somalia, or Rwanda. At that time, Western governments and publics were still prepared to consider deploying numerous more pacific tools from the traditional diplomats’ tool-box, so “intervention” could still mean engaging in a broad range of diplomatic activities. But after the horrors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, the posture the United States and its allies adopted toward political crises in places of geostrategic interest shifted strongly toward a greater reliance on the use or threat of force, and the term “intervention” became increasingly synonymous with acts of war.

That shift became solidified in the over-militarized years after 9/11. Today, politicians, journalists, think tankers, and academics often unthinkingly conduct entire, lengthy discussions of whether Washington should “intervene” in crises in Syria, Venezuela, or wherever, when what they are actually discussing is whether Washington should use military action against that country. As they do that, they are de-facto setting aside any consideration of the numerous other tools of diplomacy.

The addition of the descriptor “humanitarian” to any such war/intervention is possibly an even more dangerous rhetorical move since, as explained below, it degrades the very concept of humanitarianism.

It is easy to see why warmongers have often wanted to describe their plans as “humanitarian”: it clothes their military campaigns in all the fuzzy feelings of the do-gooder. In one way or another, imperial and colonial powers have been doing just that for nearly 200 years. In the early days of the European empires, perhaps it was okay for the architects of their wars of expansion to describe their campaigns in purely selfish terms. “We’ll grab those crown jewels from the rulers of India!” “We’ll seize control of those lucrative trade routes!” “We’ll find great new acreage for our farmers to settle on and use!” But with the growth of literacy and the spread of newspapers, it became necessary to temper such displays of avarice and ascribe more noble goals to the continuing wars of expansion. Saving the “natives” of the targeted lands from some form of civilizational blight became a greater part of the empire-building rhetoric. And if the representations of that blight had to be exaggerated to some extent by the imperialists’ spokesmen and their allies in the national media, in order to strengthen the case for a “salvationist” imperial war—as happened very frequently—then so be it. (The counterpoint to that was always to downplay, or hide altogether wherever possible, any accounts of the much greater violence employed by the imperial armies and the much greater human suffering that they inflicted…)

The specific use of the term “humanitarian” in Western discourse, when applied to an act of war, seems to have started with NATO’s 1999 war for Kosovo…

All these fundamental principles of humanitarian action in time of war put clear constraints on how warfare can be waged—precisely because their authors recognized that in and of itself warfare is profoundly inimical to human life and wellbeing. Hence the deep contradiction of the idea of any “humanitarian war.”

It is time, therefore, to lay aside all the weasel-words and euphemisms that members of Western political elites have used in recent year to mask the realities of the nature of war. Military action is not just an “intervention.” In many circumstances, it is an act of war, and it should be recognized as such. And military action can never, in itself, be described as “humanitarian.” As General Sherman recognized, war is indeed hell.

Be seeing you

Government’s favorite sport-War