Conceptually, humanitarian intervention is a rather beautiful thing. State sovereignty had been seen as absolute for 350 years, but then the universal human rights  regime emerged and the idea took hold that a state’s responsibility to defend its people trumped its right to territorial sovereignty. When a state massacres its people rather than protecting them, the human family, working through broadly legitimate international institutions, would intervene, militarily if need be, to spare the vulnerable. This has become known as the “responsibility to protect,” and you can read all about it here (PDF).

As one who believes in this principle, I can’t say that I “oppose” the no-fly zone established over Libya. The country offers a rather clear-cut example of a despotic government poised to massacre thousands of its own, and here is the international community responding forcefully to spare their lives. Perhaps it will be a text-book example of the “responsibility to protect” in action.

I imagine that most of those who “oppose” the action would like nothing more than to have their skepticism be proven to be unfounded.

At the same time, there is every reason to be deeply cynical about the prospects of success. Because while the principlesunderlying humanitarian intervention are well developed, the institutions charged with implementing them are certainly not.

For those of us who have long argued to develop those institutions more fully, this no-fly zone creates distinctly mixed feelings. Under the circumstances, doing nothing would not only be profoundly irresponsible, it would also violate our core belief in the imperative of respecting essential human rights. Yet, having studied our history, we also know that the potential for unintended consequences — for a bad situation to be turned into something worse — are real, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, or due to wishful thinking.

Books have been written about the challenges of humanitarian intervention, but here’s a very quick-and-dirty summary of three of the most daunting.

1) Mission creep

I wrote yesterday that limited interventions — with promises that the goals will be limited and, in the case of no-fly zones and naval embargoes, that no ground troops will be deployed — are like a “gateway drug” leading all-too-easily to expanded conflict. This is an institutional reality — the Security Council states are now invested in this conflict, but there is no reason to be confident Gaddhafi’s regime will fall quickly. As the saying goes: “in for a penny, in for a pound” — having entered the conflict, the temptation to escalate our involvement — to add “regime change” and “state-building” to the agenda — is going to be difficult for the Security Council to resist.

You can go through the history of multilateral interventions — from Korea through Somalia (but not really in Rwanda!) — and what you’ll find in virtually every case is not a single Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force, but a series of them authorizing ever-greater military involvement in the conflict. This reality cannot be ignored.

2) Insufficient resources

If the mission creeps — or, if it drags on — then history also suggests that we’re likely to end up with the worst of both worlds: a broad mandate coupled with insufficient resources to do the job right.

This is almost always the case in the UN system, which has no independent source of funding and must rely on the dues and pledges of its member states to undertake any action. It’s the same whether you want to talk about humanitarian intervention or relief from famine, drought or natural disaster. At the beginning, with shocking footage of rebel forces being massacred, children starving or tsunamis hitting the beach flashing across the world’s TV screens, it’s easy to commit all kinds of resources to help. But these actions are costly, and those resources have to be authorized by domestic legislatures. And it’s not just the money at stake — national governments also have to deal with all manner of domestic and international political calculations.

In the case of military interventions, under-funding can lead to disastrous results, with the most obvious example being the horrific failure of UNAMIR leading up to and during the Rwanda Genocide.

3) Politicization

Finally, the nature of the UN decision-making process itself is a huge challenge to these kinds of interventions being viewed as legitimate. Central to the “responsibility to protect” concept is that it is based on an imperative to uphold certain basic human rights, and not on international political (or economic) considerations. So the entire venture rests on the decision of when and where to intervene being made in some relatively apolitical fashion. In the real world, of course, given that the power of the Security Council, and thus the entire United Nations system, rests in the hands of the 5 permanent, veto-wielding members — the most powerful states, each with its own internal and external politics to manage — this is impossible to achieve.

That an intervention be widely perceived as legitimate is not just some abstract academic issue. Combatants are far less likely to engage in the political process that must always accompany such actions if they view them as prettied-up acts of neo-colonialism or cover for other, more powerful states’ agendas.

So, again, many who oppose — or are at least skeptical of humanitarian intervention — support it in theory, and have long argued for reforms that might address these issues.

Security Council reform — gradually phasing out the veto power enjoyed by “permanent 5,” or providing a mechanism to override a veto — has been a long-time goal of human rights activists. But, as you might imagine, the P-5 have fought it tooth-and-nail.

There have also long been calls for a dedicated and independent UN intervention force, which wouldn’t rest on the ad-hoc pledges of UN member states. Similarly, reformers have long argued that an independent funding mechanism for UN actions — both military and humanitarian — must be created through some variation of the “Lula Fund” or “Tobin tax.”

A final but important note: anyone who holds an idealized view of “clean” and “precise” modern warfare is simply deluded. As of this writing, there are reports of US cruise missiles being fired at targets in densely packed Tripoli, and French fighters engaging “regime tanks” on the ground. Despite being widely portrayed by the media as a UN air patrol designed to deny the regime’s forces the capacity to wipe out their enemies from above, Western powers are dropping munitions on Libya. Make no mistake: innocents will die. There will be “collateral damage” — it’s the nature of the game, and that can’t be ignored.

Rather than “opposing the no-fly zone,” I find myself deeply conflicted. Hopefully, it will work exactly as promised — lives will be spared, opposition forces will be emboldened and the Libyan regime will crumble under the pressure of international isolation. Hopefully, the skeptics among us will be proven wrong.

But it’s important to understand that the history of these adventures, no matter how well intentioned, doesn’t provide much cause for optimism. And one doesn’t have to be an “isolationist” to see that.

Setting the Record Straight on “Jack-Booted Thugs”
I’m still not really up to writing much, or well, but an item over at Media Matters caught my eye tonight, and I felt compelled to offer some thoughts on it.

Adam Shah of Media Matters For America offers this as his set-up:

National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre is the last person a responsible media outlet should have on its airwaves to comment on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). That’s because LaPierre once referred to ATF agents as “jack-booted government thugs” and reportedly called for “lifting the assault weapons ban to even the odds in the struggle between ordinary citizens and ‘jack-booted government thugs.’”

Shah’s framing can be read in such a way as to suggest that anyone who would call government agents “jack-booted government thugs” is inherently nuts. The gripe I have with this is that government agents frequently are jack-booted thugs. That LaPierre said so isn’t why his comments were problematic.

LaPierre is a reactionary who deals in the nuttiest sort of black-helicopter conspiracism. His rhetoric, offered in the 1990s, is indistinguishable from that of the militia movement that grew like a cancer in that same period, and it’s this context that elevated his “jack-booted government thugs” comment from a truism to an eye-raiser.

But it takes some space to explain why….

The full discussion is worth reading, but skipping down a bit, we get to the part where he gets to the LaPierre writing a letter where he refernces the Koresh cult, which the rightwing militas portrayed as a bunch of innocents attacked by the government for no reason:

LaPierre was opportunistically playing to this sentiment when he made his “jack-booted government thugs” comment. In the same letter in which he wrote those words, he even made explicit reference to the action against the Koresh cult, and, further, added

“Not too long ago, it was unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens. Not today.”

Of course, such a thing hadn’t been “unthinkable” to left-wing political parties, the civil rights movement, radical groups, labor unions, anti-war groups, and more other non-conservative and anti-conservative groups than can be named–they’d been on the receiving end of government violence for over a century, by that point. It was only “unthinkable” to white Christian conservative good ol’ boys who had never been subjected to it. LaPierre was part of a cadre of reactionaries who, for purposes of political expediency, was trying to make it thinkable to them. The world learned how thinkable some of them found it when a fertilizer bomb went off in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing hundreds.

I couldn’t agree more. After all, it wasn’t the ATF necessarily, but when gov’t agents came for Fred Hampton and scores of other Black Panthers, they were indeed jack-booted thugs.

There’s a vitally import point here, wrapped up in who LaPierre and his audience are, that usually seems incredibly abstract & philosophical to many. To wit: all discourse is embedded, embodied, contextual. It is NEVER trascendent and disembodied no matter what it might pretend. It is NEVER simply about objects devoid of context in philosophical Cartesian space. There is always a subject who speaks and a subject spoken to. American rightwing “anti-government” rhetoric ALWAYS comes out of a discourse where the speaking subject and the audience subject are white (even if it gets picked up by minorities and repurposed because of its white-supremacist cultural credibility).

There is nothing whatsoever abstract & philophical about this, of course, and feminism in particular has done a good deal to make awareness of this commonly available to everyone. But this doesn’t just apply to white supremacists. Far from it. It applies to classic liberalism as well, as Mike Konczal pointed out this week at Rortybomb in a piece titled “International Woman’s Day, Wendy Brown, and What Feminist Theory Can Do For You.” In it, he refers to an article by Brown:

Brown also has a critique of liberalism in an article that is sadly not online, Liberalism’s Family Values (collected in States of Injury). Like Okin, she deals with the liberal tradition being predicated on a liberal subject that is the antithesis on the conceptual and practical role women play in society. The eight values of a liberalism positioned next to the values they exclude from the political realm is a particularly sharp explanation of what is going on under the hood of liberalism. From the article:

I want to make a quick argument that this critique is important for those who want to rebuild an economy where prosperity is broadly shared and concentrations of power are held in check….

Why? Academic feminism has thought deeply about two arguments that need to be addressed. The first is that that the project is larger than stagnating wages, something that can’t be addressed by the differential inflationary impacts of the consumption of cheap electronic goods and really cheap food. The issue is about freedom and autonomy. The subject that can lead a life of equality, liberty, autonomy in the public is not a given or a prerequisite to society but instead a political creation, something created only through struggle.

The second is that a contract, like a marriage contract or like a labor contract, can be “freely” entered into but still contain elements of coercion to it. Coercion can still be the central characteristic of it. That the market is a series of voluntary transactions, and any outcome of it just, is an illusion. How to pull away that veil is the project, and feminist thought gives us a start on it.

What Brown is doing here is, in a sense, critiquing the formal structure of liberal political theory, if we think of the formal structure as that which contextualizes and shapes that which is the content of the theory. As soon as I began reading this, I immediately thought of Robert Kegan’s levels of cognitive complexity, particularly the fifth level, about which I’ve written relatively little online. Here, for the sake of completeness, is my crib sheet on the subject:

Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has developed a theoretical framework for integrating the developmental theories of Jean Piaget and later developmental psychologists, such as Lawrence Kohlberg and Erik Erikson. Kegan argues that at each developmental stage, what was the background/context/subject of consciousness in the previous stage now becomes foreground/content/object. The result is the table below:

Feminist theory of the sort that Brown practices belongs to Level 5. It takes liberal political theory (a Level 4 theory concerned with autonomy/self-authorship) as its subject. Level 5 is particularly concerned with opposites, and transforming their seemingly absolutist nature into more tractable forms. In short, it takes them out of the realm of absolutes that define us and turns them into objects that we may manipulate and define for ourselves. This is why, at the deepest and most fundamental level, feminism is a theory of liberation for men as much as it is for women.

Conservatives, for the most part, are either stuck at Level 3, the level of traditional social order, where the self is defined by the social roles and relations of society, or at Level 2, an even more primative level associated with late childhood and early adolesence. (Libertarian “you’re not the boss of me!” temper-tantrums, anyone?) Liberals, OTOH, tend to be fixated at Level 4, based on a mascunilist model of autonomy, which Brown’s article excerpt above provides an embrionic critique of.

Marxism also provided this sort of a crtique, but there were relatvely few people around in the 19th century who capable of grasping the Marxist critique at the level it was offered. That’s because day-to-day consciousness levels tend to be determined by the complexity of the world that people live in, and the sorts of experiential supports they encounter which enable them to comprehend and deal with the complexity around them. Because today’s world is considerably more complex than the 19th century was, Level 5 consciousness is far more common today than it was back then. And so we have a much better chance of making sense of a critique of Level 4 ideology, thus enabling us to overcome the limitations it carries with it.