If Achar wants a debate from an anti-imperialist perspective, it would be good if his own position was more clearly anti-imperialist. But in much of this piece he writes as if he has no objection to imperialist interventions as such:
> if we could turn back the wheel of history and go back to the period
> immediately preceding the Rwandan genocide, would we oppose an
> UN-authorized Western-led military intervention deployed in order to
> prevent it? Of course, many would say that the intervention by
> imperialist/foreign forces risks making a lot of victims. But can
> anyone in their right mind believe that Western powers would have
> massacred between half a million and a million human beings in 100
> days?
So the grounds on which to judge interventions that Achar proposes here are purely those of immediate humanitarianism, and his reason to generally oppose imperialist interventions is that such interventions would generally produce more immediate harm than the actions they intend to prevent.
OK, fine, but that's not an anti-imperialist position. An anti-imperialist position is based on the belief that the continued existence of imperialism is at least as big a problem as any particular case of repression. So the question to ask about intervention is, first, does it further the continued existence of imperialism and, second, if it does, is the event being prevented so terrible that it outweighs the terribleness of imperialism.
You could make such an argument in the case of the Libyan intervention, particularly by arguing that a no-fly zone, as opposed to an occupation, and one supported by the UNSC and regional powers, rather than unilaterally imposed by imperialists, doesn't prop up the power of imperialism all that much, and indeed Achar does suggest this argument. I'd find his position much more persuasive if he foregrounded this argument, though, particularly if he addressed what seems to me to be one of the main ways in which this intervention supports imperialism, which he mentions without really discussing, the thought that, if they had not acted in Libya:
> Western governments would not only have incurred the wrath of their
> citizens, but they would have completely jeopardized their ability to
> invoke humanitarian pretexts for further imperialist wars like the
> ones in the Balkans or Iraq.
Now, I'm not sure that's quite right - humanitarian failures seem just as good a pretext for humanitarian intervention as successes (e.g., Rwanda). But the general point that imperialist ideology depends on humanitarian pretexts is correct, and to the extent that intervention in Libya supports these pretexts, it also supports imperialism. Unfortunately, Achar returns to this only briefly at the end of the piece, and when he does, he again argues in a way that doesn't clearly oppose imperialism:
> A final comment: for so many years, we have been denouncing the
> hypocrisy and double standard of imperialist powers, pointing to the
> fact that they didn't prevent the all-too-real genocide in Rwanda
> while they intervened in order to stop the fictitious "genocide" in
> Kosovo. This implied that we thought that international intervention
> should have been deployed in order to prevent or stop the genocide in
> Rwanda.... The left should learn how to expose imperialist hypocrisy
> by using against it the very same moral weapons that it cynically
> exploits, instead of rendering this hypocrisy more effective by
> appearing as not caring about moral considerations.
This is completely and utterly wrong. The problem with imperialist hypocrisy is the imperialism, not the hypocrisy. By attempting to "expose imperialist hypocrisy" by using against it its own moral weapons, leftists would _strengthen those moral weapons_, that is, they would strengthen imperialism.
--
"I had never understood why Socialism need imply the arraying
of oneself in a green curtain or a terra-cotta rug, or the
cultivation of flowing locks, blue shirts, and a peculiar cut
of clothes." -- Isabel Meredith, _A Girl Among the Anarchists_ Voyou Desoeuvre <http://blog.voyou.org/>