The realities of “humanitarian intervention”
Are explained by Helena over at Today in Iraq:
… Anyway, this piece I plan to write will take on a lot of that 1990s-era fuzzy thinking by comfortable, salon-based western liberals… the kind of people who by the end of the 1990s came to talk quite glibly about the need, here or there around the world, for a “humanitarian war”; or even more glibly, for a “humanitarian intervention” (meaning, war). I think that what those of us who have experienced warfare “at ground zero” need to do is to address all those fuzzy-headed liberals and say: Iraq, Kosovo– that is the nature of war! Get real! It is time for us all to find ways to deal with our political differences using ways other than war.
I mean, look at where the biggest improvements in the human-rights situation took place over the past 25 years: East Asia, East and central Europe, South America, South Africa– add Spain and Portigal to those… In none of those places did that improvement come about as the result of external military intervention…