>In other words, neither of these extreme poles will do. Neither a
>sacrosanct sovereignty, inviolable whatever the circumstances, nor Martini
>interventionism, a free hand to meddle anytime, any place, anywhere.
>Neither position fits today's world, either as it is or as we would want
>it to be. Instead, we need a different guide.
>
>That will mean rules, and institutions to enforce them. Much work has been
>done on the former, none more serious than that of the International
>Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. That body of notables
>came up with a rulebook for when action is justified and when it is not.
>There needs, they said, to be a threat of large scale loss of life or
>ethnic cleansing; the prime motive of the interveners has to be averting
>suffering; action has to be multilateral; war must be a last resort and
>the means proportionate "to the magnitude of the original provocation";
>and the consequences of action must not be worse than the consequences of
>inaction. What strikes you reading that 2001 report today is that an
>attack on Iraq would meet almost none of those criteria.
And therein lies the problem. Clearly there are millions of people around the world that have no problem discarding the notion of inviolable sovereignty and Saddam Hussein's Iraq is certainly eligible for "regime change".
The problem is of course that almost no-one believes that the the proponents of war against Iraq are genuinely motivated by human rights concerns.
The main concern with this justification though is that it is completely arbitrary. If respect for human rights is to be a justification for outside intervention to effect regime change and I think this is a perfectly reasonable proposition, then enforcement of human rights standards be enforced universally. Not just when it is convenient for the superpower to do so, to justify some other agenda.
Even so, perhaps it might be possible for the end to justify the means. But many of us are very suspicious about what the desired end might be. Puppet governments installed by the US have a poor record. The people of Iran can attest that human rights is not usually the highest priority of the US government.
Perceptive article though.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas