Anne Applebaum is a writer that I usually like a lot, and I usually try to maintain a more or less neutral stance on things, but this article in Slate is just wrong-headed. She attempts to make a case for a humanitarian military intervention in Burma, an argument I’ve heard others make. It is a bad idea.
Applebaum doesn't specifically mention it, but her argument is clearly coming from a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) point of view. For those who are new to the term, R2P is a newish, burgeoning international norm that asserts that governments have a responsibility to protect (hence the phrase) their own citizens. When they can't or won't, it is the international community's responsibility to do so. It has wide support, a lot of enemies, and the Security Council has cited it (among a host of other reasons) to support military interventions. Personally I think it is a pretty good idea.
R2P emerged in a 2001 report (follow the link above) that lays out in pretty vague terms the justifiable reasons for an R2P-intervention:
“Military intervention for human protection purposes is an exceptional and extraord-
inary measure. To be warranted, there must be serious and irreparable harm occurring
to human beings, or imminently likely to occur, of the following kind:
A. large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which
is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or
a failed state situation.
B. large scale ‘ethnic cleansing’, actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing,
forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.” (emphasis added)
I admit that you can make a fair case that the current situation in Burma qualifies under letter A. It involves a large scale loss of life and state neglect.
But R2P doesn't just gives a threshold for the type of humanitarian catastrophe that we need before an intervention can be launched. It also offers a set of utterly reasonable “precautionary principles”. These are so logical that even if Applebaum isn't thinking of R2P, they should/would be part of any military planning nonetheless. They suggest that any military action should have “reasonable prospects” of success. You should have a pretty good idea that you’ll be doing more good than harm when you send in the guns. Military actions should also be the “last resort”. We don't have either of those here.
Just to be clear. Your military intervention can do two things: kill people and blow things up. You don't protect someone, you threaten to kill their attacker. The R2P argument is strongest when there is a group of people who are being attacked, because then you can use your military to kill the bad guys – like in the Magnificent Seven. It still makes sense when you have two or more groups fighting each other and a bunch of civilians stuck in the middle – like uh, real life. In either of those cases people are facing flying bullets anyway.
But in this case what would the military do? Use fighter wings to defend air drops of food? That seems harmless enough, but what happens when that food hits the ground and is taken into the junta's system? Who defends the humanitarian workers then? Troops and artillery I guess, but now we’re fighting a ground war with the junta, and we’ve created a conflict where there wasn't one before. That isn't what the people of Burma need right now.
I’m absolutely not saying that the junta is good. They’re not. They are very bad leaders who deserve to be removed. But the norm of humanitarian intervention is best reserved for civil conflicts or other cases of violence and kept out of natural disaster response.
