Thoughts on Libya and liberal interventionism 2011 March 25 The hypocrisy, double standards and selectivity displayed in the

western militar y action in Libya defy enumeration, but just for a start. In Yemen and Bahrain western-backed regimes are violently repressing the democra cy movement the west claims to back in Libya. In Iraq a US-sponsored regime prot ected by 47,000 US troops is trying to do the same shooting demonstrators, detai ning thousands and subjecting many to torture. The urgency of the response to Gadd affi is in marked contrast to the infinite patience extended to Israel. No one p roposed a No Fly Zone when Israeli aircraft were pummelling Gaza. Nor did they w hen the Sri Lankan government killed some 20,000 civilians in its final assault on the LTTE. In Burma condemnation has never been matched by the merest hint of military action, while millions have perished in a war in the Congo financed and armed by western corporations Had the Egyptian army jumped the other way and re pressed the uprising, would western powers have treated them as theyre treating t he Gaddafi regime? Not a chance. And then theres the flip-flop over Gaddafi himse lf, from pariah to partner and back again in record time. So what? some will respond. If the western powers are hypocritical and selective, that doesnt mean that in this instance theyre wrong. Our guilt elsewhere is not an excuse for failing to protect the innocent in Libya. We cannot cure our governm ents double standards with double standards of our own. But what are these double-standards of our own? We dont demand the invasion of Burm a or the bombing of Tel Aviv and no one called for NFZs over the townships durin g the apartheid years. We want an end to western support for repressive regimes everywhere, we stand in solidarity with democratic struggles, but our solidarity is not expressed at the tip of a Cruise missile. The critical point about the hypocrisy, double-standards and selectivity is that they unveil the real motive forces driving the intervention. And motives here a re anything but incidental factors; they guide and shape the intervention and th erefore tell us a great deal about its likely impact. What the double standards reveal, ironically, is a very clear and consistent policy standard, i.e. western elite interests (or lack of them). Where oil is at stake, behaviour is striking ly uniform whatever is necessary to control and/ or keep others from controlling its supply. This helps explain why the western powers are throwing caution to the wind, jump ing into a conflict for which they are even less well-prepared than they were fo r Iraq. The Libyan crisis is too good, too rare an opportunity to pass up. It of fers them the chance to insert a pro-western regime in an oil producing nation, to reassert their role in the region after a series of setbacks and to renew the ir prerogatives as world policemen in the wake of the catastrophic performance i n Iraq. There is also a pressing need to realign and channel the Arab popular mo vements, which have defied so many western assumptions. Crucially these movement s have combined demands for political rights with demands for economic and socia l justice the part of the movement that is a revolt against neo-liberal rule has to be diverted. In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland writes that liberal interventionism is fine i n theory but goes wrong in practise. Id suggest that it goes wrong in practise becau se its deeply flawed in theory. If liberal interventionists were consistent, they would advocate similar Western military action in relation to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Congo, Kashmir, Iran, I srael, Burma, etc. etc. etc. This would not only be wildly impracticable but dee ply undesirable. It would lead to chaos and escalating violence on a global scal

e, overwhelmingly detrimental to the poor and vulnerable and fatal to the cause of democratic advance. A policy that if applied consistently and universally wou ld result in disaster is best not applied at all. Liberal interventionists treat great powers as neutral agents, disinterested ent ities that can be inserted into a situation for a limited purpose and time, like a surgeons knife. In reality, however, these powers have clear and compelling in terests in Libya as elsewhere and their deployment of military force will be gui ded by those interests. In action, western troops are accountable not to the peo ple theyre supposed to be protecting but to a chain of command that ends in Washi ngton, London and Paris. The unleashing of the great military powers undermines the universalism the libe ral interventionists claim to honour: outcomes are determined by concentrations of wealth and power remote from the scene of suffering. If were to build any kind of just, sustainable world order, then we must (at the least) restrain and rest rict great powers, not license them to act where and when its convenient for them . The incompatibility between democratic development and great power intervention may seem obvious but it seems to escape the liberal interventionists. Their appr oach is ahistorical, as if somehow the entire record of western imperialism coul d be suddenly overturned, self-interest magically transformed into humanitarian interest. In the name of pluralism they endorse a uni-polar world, governed perp etually by a few great powers. In the name of universalism, they support an exer cise of power that has always been and must continue to be selective in the extr eme when it comes to human rights. Characteristically, the liberal interventionists omit from their equations the r ealities of unequal power. Their approach to crisis is managerialist. Problems w ill be solved by the implementation from above of sound policies. They see the m asses as passive recipients of democracy, not the creators of it. Those who beli eve democracy can be imposed by military assault have surely missed some of the basic stuff of democracy itself, not to mention the powerful lessons of Tahrir S quare. For them military intervention is an act of noblesse oblige but like all such acts, it re-enforces the subordinate status of the alleged beneficiary; it reminds them whos boss. Its argued that badly motivated actions can still have unintended positive conseq uences and that Libya may be a case in point. But its much more likely that such actions will have unintended negative consequences. This argument from serendipi ty that good will accidentally flow from bad was advanced in the run-up to the I raq invasion. It seems a flimsy basis for a geo-political philosophy. Most impor tantly, it ignores that intentions, however contradictory or confused, shape out comes. Liberal interventionism is underpinned by a lack of sensitivity to the inevitabl e costs of warfare and in particular warfare waged by one country on the soil (o r airspace) of another. It ignores the vast range of unpredictable ramifications . It treats military intervention as if it were the same as raising or lowering taxes, a mechanical incentive to a desired form of behaviour. Liberal interventionism is entirely dependent on the great powers. Theres no othe r way the policy can be implemented. It relies on a coincidence of western and h umanitarian interests, one that has been a historical rarity at best. In the end , the liberal interventionists have no agenda or standard of their own. The current intervention ensures that if Gaddafi falls, his replacement will be chosen by the west. The new regime will be born dependent on the western powers, which will direct its economic and foreign policies accordingly. The liberal in

terventionists will say thats not what they want, but their policy makes it inevi table. The problem is not the ambiguities of the UN mandate. Mission creep is inherent in the process. The mission will become what the major powers want it to be, accor ding to their own agendas, not least their interest in Libyan oil. What about Bosnia? What about Rwanda? One significant difference is that in Libya were faced with an attempt by an authoritarian state to crush a popular uprising and the ensuing civil war not an ethnic assault. The lessons of Bosnia and Rwand a are indeed powerful but they do not include the one that the question usually supposes, i.e. that western military intervention should have taken place. In Bosnia a western-imposed NFZ and Dutch troops on the ground failed to stop th e Srebrenica massacre. When the full scale intervention that the liberals had be en calling for finally took place in 1999, it precipitated a massive escalation of the ethnic cleansing it was supposed to stop and stymied the anti-Milosevic m ovement in Serbia (which succeeded without western help a year later). Eleven ye ars on none of the underlying issues have been resolved, the victors have engage d in their own ethnic cleansing and the Kosovo statelet is a corruption-riddled western dependency. In Rwanda, there were French troops on the ground, defending their national inte rests and nothing else. In the end, the genocide was stopped by an African inter vention. Western powers are unlikely to have been any more effective and their p resence on the ground as a military force would have profoundly skewed subsequen t developments, in all likelihood hampering the progress that Rwanda has been ab le to make in their absence. So do we do nothing? The question is undermined by the selectivity of those who as k it. Their indignation may be sincere but it is intellectually contrived. Not w anting to do the one particular thing (using military force) that they fix on is not the same as doing nothing. We do what we can do, what contributes most and de stroys least. There is ready to hand an alternative model of global intervention in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign aimed at Israel, which is opp osed by most liberal interventionists. Western presence in the region is not the solution but a major part of the probl em. This is not a presence that can be restricted to policing the rights of civi lians (and I cant think of a single instance in modern times where it has actuall y performed that task). Its a presence that shapes the regions economy, society an d political institutions according to its own priorities. Getting rid of that in terfering hand is a necessary step towards democracy and development. Finally, this debate has reminded me of the gulf that separates my politics (and most of us on the left) from this type of liberalism. For me this gulf first op ened when as a youngster I watched liberals launch the Vietnam War on a sea of go od intentions. The gulf widened when, despite the ensuing nightmare, liberals con tinued to believe in the benign nature of US (or British or French) world intent ions. In Libya, once again, they have been seduced by a vicarious potency. And t hey have always failed to recognise that vast disparities in wealth and concomit ant concentrations of power are themselves the greatest threats to democracy and human rights. Liberal interventionists may not like the disparities, the inequa lities, but they regard them as inevitable and tolerable. Mass economic immisera tion, it seems, is never grounds for urgent intervention.