Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society

Rating:
Summary: Useful study of the dangers of intervention
Review: Wheeler's book investigates "how far states have recognised humanitarian intervention as a legitimate exception to the rules of sovereignty, non-intervention, and non-use of force." He studies seven cases: East Pakistan in 1971, Cambodia in 1978, Uganda in 1979, Iraq in 1991, Somalia in 1992, Rwanda in 1994 and Kosovo in 1999.

India attacked and dismembered Pakistan, claiming self-defence. Vietnam genuinely defended itself against Pol Pot's attacks, which had killed 30,000 Vietnamese. Tanzania replied, claiming self-defence, to Uganda's 1978 invasion.

Resolution 688 of 1991, used by NATO states to justify their postwar intervention in Iraq, did not authorise the use of force to protect human rights. If it had, the Soviet Union and China would have vetoed it. Wheeler writes, "the longer-term benefits of the intervention remain fundamentally ambiguous."

In Somalia, the Security Council authorised armed intervention not on humanitarian grounds, but by claiming, falsely, that 'international peace and security' were threatened. In Rwanda, the French government got the UN to authorise its intervention, but its troops only rescued its clients, who had killed a million Rwandans.

The UN did not authorise NATO's intervention in Kosovo: Russia and China would have vetoed any such resolution. Wheeler notes, "there were important US security interests at stake in the Balkans" and judges that this was 'not a good model of humanitarian intervention'.

In sum, Wheeler rightly asserts that claims for humanitarian intervention were not accepted in the 1970s. He argues that a new norm of UN-authorised humanitarian intervention developed in the 1990s, but, as we have seen, the UN only authorised intervention on humanitarian grounds once, in Rwanda, which discredits, not supports, the policy. As the Foreign Office admitted in 1998, "There is no general doctrine of humanitarian necessity in international law." A fortiori, there is no new norm of unilateral humanitarian intervention: NATO's unilateral intervention in Kosovo threatened the whole international security system founded on the UN Charter.

Sovereignty, non-intervention and non-use of force are barriers against international, imperialist wars, so hugely destructive of human life. A new NATO norm of humanitarian intervention would increase the dangers of such wars.