“We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi—a city nearly the size of Charlotte—could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” Barack Obama’s rationale for intervening in Libya in 2011 is a succinct summary of the logic of humanitarian intervention: When mass atrocities occur, it suggests, the world community has a responsibility to intervene.
That intervention ended up exacerbating rather than ending the conflict, and Libya has since dissolved into chaos and grinding violence. Tens of thousands of people have died, and a second civil war launched in 2014 is still ongoing.
In The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, City College of New York political scientist Rajan Menon argues that such disastrous missteps are common. When nations set out to salve “the conscience of the world,” they often end up staining it more. “Humanitarian interventions,” Menon writes, “like war in general, produce many unforeseen and unintended consequences that their architects ignore or dismiss, whether from ignorance or arrogance.” Noah Berlatsky reviewed the book for the June issue of Reason magazine.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/20mAtOS
via IFTTT