Abstract
An armed humanitarian intervention (AHI) must have a reasonable prospect of success to be justified. It must also be a proportional last resort. These are necessary conditions for legitimate AHI. It has been suggested that, in addition to these necessary conditions, there are also ideal conditions of AHI, namely disinterest and multilateralism. These conditions are said to enhance the moral credentials of an armed intervention without being strictly required. The paper concerns itself with the relationship between these two ideals and the requirement of a reasonable prospect of success. Specifically, I explore the suggestion that the former are in some way instrumental to the latter. On this view, we should aspire towards disinterest and multilateralism because these things contribute to a positive humanitarian outcome. If this is correct then the ideal conditions can be partly grounded in, or justified in reference to, the prospect of success principle.
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Notes
Responsibility to Protect, Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001, at http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/ICISS%20Report.pdf, last accessed 29/09/2014. Some of the material in this paper is taken from work previously published. See especially Ned Dobos 2008, 2010a; Dobos 2012.
Some commentators are at pains to stress that they are not advancing this consequence-based argument. Uwe-Jens Heuer and Gregor Schirmer (1998) write: “We do not want to deny that military interventions like those of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, or Vietnam in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or of the United States in Somalia may well have saved human lives, and may well have worked to the benefit of those threatened by hunger and terror. But in all these cases, and in others as well, the altruism of the intervening parties was a mere secondary phenomenon to crude self-interested efforts towards the expansion of political and military power, spheres of economic influence, and the like.
See also Luttwak 1995.
Hence it was not until Vietnam that the “body-bag effect” really kicked it. During the two World Wars and the Korean War, conscription ensured that the costs were shared by all sectors of American society, whereas in Vietnam many of the privileged managed to escape the draft by living abroad or extending university studies. Moreover blacks remained over-represented on the casualties list. Since fewer of them had formal education, they were assigned disproportionately to the combat-intensive infantry (See Moskos 2002).
Richard Falk (1993: p. 760) writes that “the higher value attached to the lives of the intervening side… led to a callous disregard for the lives of the indigenous people, especially civilians”, who were killed indiscriminately by American forces. The battle that killed 18 US Rangers claimed the lives of several hundred Somalis; a statistic that history forgot.
I have addressed this issue elsewhere (See Dobos 2010b).
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Dobos, N. Idealism, Realism, and Success in Armed Humanitarian Intervention. Philosophia 44, 497–507 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9704-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9704-0