International Interventions, and the Bitter Taste of Iraq

by Michelle

category: Darfur & Sudan

Published May 05, 2009 @ 07:48PM PT

Amanda put up a very thought-provoking post today over at Wronging Rights (my favorite of all the blogs in the sphere, as many of you know by now), which offers a series of questions regarding when, and if, international intervention in conflicts and crises can be effective. No intervention is appropriate, she writes, unless all of the following questions are adequately addressed:

1. Is it ever appropriate for foreign citizens, governments, or international institutions to intervene in crises overseas?
2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," then when is it appropriate?
3. Do we know to do it? That is, do we understand the technological means that will allow us to accomplish our stated goals?
4. If so, are those means available to us?
5. If they are, are we willing to expend the resources necessary to use those means?

For the time being, I will set questions #1 and #2 aside as topics for another post, and defer to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, the Genocide Convention, and other relevant documents as providing reasonable grounds for sidestepping national sovereignty when a government is hell-bent on abusing the bejeezus out of civilians.

As for the other three, I think it behooves us to consider:

1. What is the context in which the questions must be asked and answered?
2. What is our definition of "success," and our reasonable expectations of what a particular intervention can achieve in a specific situation?
3. What are the pros and cons of looking at international interventions through the lens of Iraq?

Context

By this, I mean: The world we live in, which is sloppy and imperfect. Questions #3-5 can never be fully answered, because any step into a conflict arena will be fraught with unforeseen roadblocks and unintended consequences that will challenge even the most careful of pre-planning. Alternatively, inaction might have roadblocks and unintended consequences of its own. (Think Pearl Harbor.)  Ultimately, we do not know the limits of possible interventions until we push against them, nor do will know the unintended consequences until they slap us in the face.

The answers will never be straightforward, so perhaps another question should be: "What level of sloppiness are we able to live with?"

Expectations

Amanda writes that she is unclear that "we have learned how to intervene in ongoing atrocities and resolve them in any meaningful way." In order to determine what is meaningful, however, we need to ask what we can reasonably expect from a particular intervention in a particular setting.

As Amanda notes, "interventions" run the gamut of possibilities, from humanitarian aid to military intervention, and the efficacy of one intervention will vary from situation to situation. No one intervention, nor any combination of interventions, will lead to clean conflict resolution, and so international policymakers must consider a very realistic cost-benefit calculation for each action --- even something as seemingly simple as food aid.

(Activists often get into a bit of trouble with the critics on this matter, as their t-shirts and rallying cries calling for an "end" to genocide and mass atrocity are viewed as unrealistic, naïve, and possibly even detrimental. But as I've argued in the past, there's a need to distinguish between the voices of grassroots activists and the work of the high-level advocates they support --- again, not a defense of sloppiness, or of stupidity, but a recognition of the clockwork of social movements.)

The United States certainly as the ability to intervene, the question is rather what effective interventions are at our disposal --- not a question of whether the US is strong or weak, but of what our strengths and weaknesses are in a particular case and how they can be brought to bear to make some semblance of progress towards something better than the status quo.

Again, we don't know what the limits are until we push against them, and there is clear recognition among advocates that unilateral action on the part of the US is not a viable option, at least for Sudan. (In fact, in their most recent policy memo, ENOUGH, Save Darfur, and GI-Net write, "But the United States can't do it alone.")

Iraq

I recently attended an event hosted by the Center for American Progress on the topic of Darfur activism. ENOUGH Executive Director John Norris noted that, in response to the mass atrocity triple play of the early 1990s with Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, the international community "started to get its act together," with improved though still imperfect responses to Bosnia (Round 2), East Timor, Sierra Leone, and others. Each situation was fraught with complications, as is always the case in a sloppy and imperfect world, but each also emerged from a process of international intervention better off than before.

The sea-change, however, came with Iraq. Beyond the fact that an offensive, unilateral war (and don't give me any of that coalition BS) is typically not a way to make friends on the diplomatic playground, the Bush administration's mishandling, gross miscalculations, and outright lies have cast a pall on international interventions ever since.

So my question is: How is Iraq a useful lesson for international interventions --- i.e., when and how not to do them --- and to what extent is the Iraq experience casting an unfair shadow on the prospect of more well-thought-out, effective interventions elsewhere in the word?