BOOKS: HELP IS ON THE WAY
By Joshua Muravchik
Wall Street Journal
Aug 21 2008
Most international-law experts have long agreed that war
is permissible against a government that commits or tolerates
atrocities against its own subjects. This rule does not apply to
instances of run-of-the-mill repression, but it does apply to abuses
of extraordinary severity. The government at fault is deemed to have
forfeited its claim to sovereignty, and other states may send troops to
stanch the bloodshed. Nobody has defined where the threshold lies, but
it was obviously crossed — to take two notorious examples — in the
case of Hitler’s Holocaust and Pol Pot’s maniacal regime in Cambodia.
The problem is that no one lifted a finger in response to either
horror. While international law rests in part on intuitive justice,
it also rests on custom. What have states actually done by way of
humanitarian intervention? Not much. Decades back, the case often
cited in legal literature was the landing of Western forces in the
Congo in the 1960s to protect Europeans caught in the middle of
a multi-sided civil war. But rescuing whites stranded in African
chaos made an uninspiring example. A more promising precedent was
Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1978 to oust Idi Amin. Tanzania,
however, insisted that its action was taken in response to territorial
violations by Ugandan forces, not to Amin’s murderous domestic record.
In short, the case book on "humanitarian intervention" seemed
hopelessly thin until the 1990s. In the decade between the Cold
War and the war on terror, global diplomacy focused on a series of
crises ripe for humanitarian intervention: Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia,
Kosovo. In these cases, however, the performance of outsiders was
decidedly mixed. The firmest, timeliest response came in Kosovo,
where the atrocities were fewest; the least effort was made in Rwanda,
where they were greatest. In Bosnia, intervention began too late;
in Somalia, it ended too soon.
Still, acceptance of the idea grew, and in 2005 and 2006 the
United Nations enshrined in various resolutions what it called the
"responsibility to protect." With "Freedom’s Battle," Princeton
historian Gary J. Bass buttresses the legitimacy of humanitarian
intervention by reacquainting us with three 19th-century episodes
in which military invasions were undertaken to rescue populations
subjected to terrible abuses. He describes the naval efforts of
Britain, France and Russia in support of the Greeks fighting for
independence from Turkey in the 1820s; the suppression by France of
communal warfare between Druse and Maronites in Lebanon and Syria
in the 1860s; and Russia’s defense of Bulgarians against Ottoman
"horrors" in the 1870s.
Mr. Bass relates these episodes masterfully, providing a wealth of
detail in fluid prose. Although he aims to make a point — about the
legitimacy of humanitarian intervention — his accounts are full and
fair-minded. "Freedom’s Battle" is a pleasure for the learning one
can take away from it and for the opportunity it provides to reflect
on how much things have changed since the 19th century, and how much,
in certain ways, they have not.
The battles between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon — eventually
resolved not only by outside force but also by a power-sharing
arrangement representing each sect — seem painfully familiar. So
does the assiduity with which Russia played every humanitarian crisis
solely for its own aggrandizement. The poet Byron was the apotheosis of
philhellenism, journeying to Greece to join its fight for independence,
and his disappointment in the real-live Greeks he met sounds like so
many contemporary encounters of Westerners with the Third World.
Preludes to current debates can be heard in Thomas Jefferson’s forecast
of universal democracy as well as in John Quincy Adams’s rejection
of a donation for Greek relief on the ground that he would rather see
the money spent "at home." One feels a frisson of a contrary kind in
reading the scale of the massacres that galvanized the conscience of
the 19th century — death merely by the thousands. So innocent seem
those days before slaughters by the millions.
I am not sure, however, that Mr. Bass’s story leads to the conclusion
he aims for. He claims that "the tradition of humanitarian intervention
once ran deep in world politics." But his accounts offer ambiguous
evidence. In every case the victims were Christians mistreated by
Muslims, and in each case those urging rescue appealed directly to
Christian solidarity. Napoleon III, preparing to send soldiers to Syria
to protect the Maronites, invoked the glory of the Crusades. How far
is all this from rescuing white people in Africa?
Worse, even the religious solidarity was sometimes feigned. Russia
long arrogated the right to intervene as protector of Christians
under Ottoman rule, but Mr. Bass quotes Disraeli’s plausible report
"that the Russian ambassador had told him that ‘Russia did not care
a pin for Bulgaria, or Bosnia . . . what it really wanted was the
Straits.’ " Mr. Bass provides a wrenching chapter on the World War I
massacre of Armenians by the Turks, focusing on U.S. ambassador Henry
Morgenthau’s vain appeals for intervention. This massacre eclipsed
the killings in Greece, Syria, Lebanon or Bulgaria — and yet went
unimpeded. So much for the "tradition" of humanitarian action running
"deep" in world politics.
Finally, Mr. Bass tackles some of the difficulties — then and
now — of humanitarian intervention. On one end of the spectrum,
few states are willing to risk the lives of their own citizens
to rescue others. On the other, humanitarian concern may be put
forward as a pretext for what are really imperial designs. Today
the first difficulty is much more likely than the second — think
only of the unrelieved sufferings of Darfur. I’m with Mr. Bass in
wishing for a greater willingness to intervene, but I suspect that
interventionists are on stronger ground appealing to natural justice
than to "tradition."
Mr. Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,
has just completed a book about democrats in the Middle East.