The uses and abuses of intervention

Simon Tisdall

Burma's intensifying agony is confronting the "international community" with further uncomfortable evidence of its own impotence in the face of man-made humanitarian disaster. As if Rwanda, Darfur and Zimbabwe were not shaming enough, the lethal blocking by Burma's generals of most external aid for the victims of Cyclone Nargis is another chastening reminder of the limitations imposed by status-quo politics and national self-interest.
Burma's internal opposition, outside pressure groups and individuals, desperate to prevent a crisis becoming an epic catastrophe, are turning to revolutionary answers. Echoing Vladimir Lenin, they ask: "What is to be done?" And in the case of the All Burma Monks Alliance and the '88 Generation student movement, the reply is insurrectionary.
"To save thousands of lives before it's too late, we urge the UN and foreign governments to intervene in Burma immediately to provide humanitarian and relief assistance directly to the people of Burma without waiting for the permission of the military junta," the opposition alliance said in statement. Individual countries need not wait for a UN go-ahead, either, they said. Just come now.
Similar calls for unilateral action have been heard in France and the US but so far lack official backing. Asked about using US forces to help the aid effort, as after the Asian tsunami, defence secretary Robert Gates said he "could not imagine" doing so without prior Burmese government agreement.
David Cameron predicted at the weekend that if the generals continued to make difficulties, "the case for unilateral delivery of aid by the international community will only grow stronger". Britain's Conservative opposition leader may partly be responding to grassroots pressure. John Moger, writing in yesterday's Guardian letters page from the Tory heartlands of Eastbourne, said it was time to forget the UN. "Think big and send in the navy," he urged. Fortunately for Cameron, such a decision is not (yet) his to make.
Despite or perhaps because of his fierce verbal criticism of the junta, David Miliband also risks accusations of ineffective posturing. Burma's thwarted "saffron revolution" last autumn was his first big crisis as foreign secretary. It quickly became plain then that there was next to nothing Britain could do to prevent the ensuing military crackdown on the mass protests. But that did not stop Miliband, in a speech in Oxford in February, declaring that Britain and others have a duty to support pro-democracy "civilian surges" and oppose authoritarian regimes by all means at their disposal.
"There will be situations where the hard power of targeted sanctions, security guarantees and military intervention will be necessary," Miliband said. "In extreme cases the failure of states to exercise their responsibility to protect their own civilians from genocide or ethnic cleansing warrant military intervention on humanitarian grounds."
Former Labour minister Denis MacShane argues passionately that is exactly what is happening in Burma now. "By any definition there is a crime against humanity being committed by the Burmese junta against the Burmese people," he said in a letter to Miliband. "When in Rwanda or Darfur governments did nothing to prevent the deaths of scores of thousands of their own people, we rightly called such action genocide. Are the Burmese generals guilty of anything less?"
Pressure is growing on Britain, current chair of the UN security council, to seek authorisation for tougher, collective action. But to the Brown government's probable tacit relief, China and Russia, as in the crisis over Zimbabwe, can be counted on to block or veto any move towards direct intervention.
The democratically-challenged rulers of Moscow and Beijing fear a precedent. After all, if the UN moved to bypass and perhaps unseat Burma's bosses, what might be the effect of such action on restless Tibetans, Uighurs or Chechens? Ironically, China, Burma's biggest, most influential trade and business partner, is probably the only country that could force the generals to change tack without physically pushing them out of the way.
While direct western or other intervention in Burma currently appears unlikely, it is inaccurate to say that intervention never works - rather that as a tool of international statecraft, it is applied to the "wrong" sitautions at the "wrong" times. Tony Blair evolved a whole philosophy of uninvited humanitarian intervention - the Chicago doctrine - and saw it implemented to initially beneficial effect in Sierra Leone and East Timor. But the Blair approach, problematic in Kosovo and ineffective in Sudan, fell apart in the crucible of Iraq, leaving a legacy of nervousness about intervention in principle.
Despite Blair's post-facto justification for the Iraq war - that it was morally right to save Iraq's people from Saddam Hussein - Iraq and Afghanistan were, initially at least, primarily self-interested military-led operations that had little to do with saving lives, more with assuring an illusory "western security". If this were not so, Blair would in all logic have supported intervention to protect Palestinians against their Israeli occupiers or North Koreans against their murderous rulers.
Opponents of US "war on terror" policy fear that recent, limited unilateral interventions, such as Israel's bombing of a supposed nuclear reactor in Syria and US air strikes against Islamist militants deep inside Somalia, could yet presage another larger-scale convulsion - namely, a Bush administration attack on Iran. In such a situation, the White House would hardly worry about first gaining Tehran's permission.
In other words, interventionism is too often mistaken in its priorities and misdirected in its targets. And thus are those who scorn the international will, such as Rangoon's heartless generals, emboldened in their brutish defiance.

Source: The Guardian
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/simon_tisdall/2008/05/the_uses_and_abuses_of_intervention.html