I tend not to listen to Any Questions, unlike my partner, as it annoys me too much. You have this ritualised debate between government and opposition politicians through yet another venue, enlivened by a healty dose of mainstream media commentators all carefully mixed to present a “balance of opinion”, chasing the issues of the day through a thoroughly mainstream Westminster filter. A perfect example popped up on this week’s episode, which for once I did catch.
It came through an audience question about Harry Patch, the last survivor of the war of the trenches, who sadly died earlier this week. Patch had been adamant that he considered all war to be a waste of human live and the question was whether the panel agreed. Said panel, consisting of “Charles Moore, British Medical Association chairman Hamish Meldrum, commentator and chief executive of the Index on Censorship John Kampfner and chair of the Health and Safety Executive, Judith Hackitt CBE” was quick to agree with this but even quicker to backpedal. It just wasn’t possibe, Britain needs an army as deterrent, there are evil countries that need to be defeated, yadda yadda.
The highlight was a short side discussion between Charles Moore, Britain’s slightly more polite answer to Bill Kristol and the “leftist” John Kampfner about Ruanda and humanitarian intervention. Moore started by lamenting the failure of the UN to act in Ruanda, which Kampfner followed up to by agreeing and giving more examples of countries that should’ve been humanitarian intervented: Darfur, Birma, Zimbabwe, the usual litany of soft liberal foreign causes. He then went on to mourn the war on Iraq, as it was this that had shied away western countries from other interventions.
Both either don’t know, or don’t care to think about the realities of all interventions (and Kampfner really has no excuse here, as he wrote a book on Blair’s interventions). None of these interventions is ever done out of charity, few if any make any real difference to the people themselves and they all take place in a context of western supremacy and compliance in whatever situation we are supposed to resolve some years later. As Lenny shows, the Ruanda is actually the perfect example of how western intervention really works:
the story of the Rwandan genocide was one of non-intervention. The ‘West’, or the Euro-American powers so designated, demonstrated ‘indifference’. They considered it just another example of ancient tribal hatreds finding an outlet in a new blood-letting, failing to accept that what was taking place was a genocide that demanded urgent intervention to protect the innocent. (These racist spiels about ancient tribal hatreds are certainly culpable, but I wonder if the reactionary discourse of ‘good-vs-evil’ that imperialists are fond of is really any better?) The lesson drawn from this by those advocating ‘humanitarian intervention’ is that new norms of intervention, mandating the use of military force in emergency cases, have to be elaborated and embedded in international law. Now, even if it were true that the ‘West’ had not intervened, it would by no means follow that it should: you have to make another series of assumptions to justify that conclusion. But it isn’t true, and the widespread acceptance of this idea cultivates the claim of US innocence, the obverse of ‘indifference.
Sending in the US army or the UN blue helmets is just the most visible part of western intervention in the rest of the world. As Lenny argues, it’s the context in which these interventions take place that is important. You just cannot naively wonder why nobody cares enough about Birma or Darfur or Zimbabwe to “do something” about them, without taking into account the interests of the nations that are supposed to act. There are no neutral actors. What’s more, to keep insisting in the face of the evidence, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the former Yugoslavia, that interventions actually solve anything is downright irresponsible if not criminal. It also smacks of a certain arrogance to argue for intervention in Zimbabwe, when the opposition there has always made it clear they don’t want it, they want to solve their problems themselves.