August 19
2004
You'll never have it so good as reading this blog
» Posted on August 19, 2004 08:08 AM » Category: General

Forgive the sef-referential posts, but I can't resist this. Someone called Harry thinks that

My view is that everyone, regardless of nationality, should read at least one Stephen Pollard column once.

How kind.

The comment reminds me of a story which my old boss, Peter Shore, told me. As a young man he stood in a by-election whilst Macmillan was PM. In one speech, Peter spoke mockingly about the people never having it so good. The following day, his Tory opponent printed leaflets quoting Peter's exact words - without, of course, the mocking tone - and wrote that even his Labour opponent believed Macmillan's claim.


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Comments

What's interesting, when reading the full post, is the link to a Human Rights group's report (wow!) as authoritative, perhaps under the assumption that few will bother to read it. But those who do will see how consistent it actually is with your article. Paragraphs like this really do give the game away:

A humanitarian rationale was occasionally offered for the war, but it was so plainly subsidiary to other reasons that we felt no need to address it. Indeed, if Saddam Hussein had been overthrown and the issue of weapons of mass destruction reliably dealt with, there clearly would have been no war, even if the successor government were just as repressive. Some argued that Human Rights Watch should support a war launched on other grounds if it would arguably lead to significant human rights improvements. But the substantial risk that wars guided by non-humanitarian goals will endanger human rights keeps us from adopting that position.

In other words, they will only support interventions guided by no other goals than humanitarian ones. The fact that the greatest humanitarian crises will often occur in the context of a threat to national security, and the idea that one can achieve perfectly good humanitarian ends for self-interested reasons - World War II being an obvious case of both - carry no weight. The report denies a demand for purity of motivation, but by asserting that in a humanitarian intervention humanitarian concerns must be dominant and the sole guide to action comes so close for it not really to matter.

It's a doctrine of saying that wars that will liberate and save an oppressed people can only be right if the national interest is not also a real factor - that the human rights of the oppressed come second to the demand that Britain and America not advance their interests and security by acting to help them. Which, of course, was exactly your accusation.

Stated by: Peter Cuthbertson on August 20, 2004 12:48 PM

Human Rights Watch don't say "they will only support interventions guided by no other goals than humanitarian ones". They're just making the rather obvious point that if you attack another country for non-humanitarian reasons, your attack cannot be recast as humanitarian intervention simply on the grounds that the leader of that country was evil anyhow. The argument that the ends justify the means doesn't work because the ends are not humanitarian, and don't become so in retrospect, if and when you feel like it.

"It's a doctrine of saying that wars that will liberate and save an oppressed people can only be right if the national interest is not also a real factor "
No it's not. It would have been right to launch an attack on Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons, but no one did. Sure, people were bothered about destitute, uneducated women in burqas, but not all that bothered. However, you will note that the evil liberal left did not all unite against the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in the same way that it did against the invasion of Iraq. On the contrary, many even hoped that some good would come of it indirectly for the people of Afghanistan (although more good would undoubtedly have come if said good had been a genuine stated aim of the invasion). Many leftists accept the US's legitimate right to self-defence (hence no huge anti-Afghanistan war march), but not illegitimate attacks. The national interest was not a real factor with Iraq, and neither were humanitarian interests.

Pretending for a moment that the Iraq war was a national necessity, it is true that national self-interest and moral responsibility can coincide, but there is no reason why they naturally should. Constantly switching between the two in order to justify the war will not bring them any closer together. Does the US have any special long-term obligation towards Iraqis, or should Iraqis take what they can for now and accept that the US can leave whenever because the war was never really about them? If no one responds to humanitarian crises as humanitarian crises, and everyone saves up human rights abuses as tokens to use whenever they want to attack a country for personal reasons, then human rights have no intrinsic value any more. The surviving Jews, Romanies and gays of 1930s-40s Germany were lucky that Hitler was mad enough to keep invading other countries, but what if he hadn't? We shouldn't be waiting for that elusive coincidence of reasons to attack - it never comes early enough, and or worse still, it just becomes something we invent later.

Stated by: R on August 21, 2004 4:29 AM

Didn't Bernard Kouchner, Nobel Prize-winning founder of Doctors Without Borders support regime change in Iraq based on humanitarian grounds? I'm a liberal and that's why I supported it, why I still think we did the right thing. I don't care what the rationale of the Bush admin. was. Also, the results cannot be judged for years to come. P.S. Most of those people over at CT are assholes.

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