To intervene or not to intervene

“Very few people, in fact, are against intervention in principle, otherwise they would criticise the interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone just as much as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.”

Interventions in foreign nations have been roundly criticised by almost everyone almost everywhere. Even liberal champions of human rights shy away from foreign intervention in brutal dictatorships, deathly afraid of the legacy of Blair, Bush and their Iraqi adventure.

The failure to stabilise Iraq and Afghanistan after their invasions in the 2000s has left a black mark on the name of foreign intervention, giving rise to revisionist accusations of ‘neo-colonialism’ and other such rhetoric by those who supported these interventions at the time and then disowned them as soon as public opinion turned against them.

Very few people, in fact, are against intervention in principle, otherwise they would criticise the interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone just as much as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Intervention in the former Yugoslavia is ignored because it was successful; so successful in fact that the most popular male name in Kosovo is ‘Tony Blair’.

Very few people, additionally, would disagree with the removal of al Qaeda from Afghanistan after it was found to be harbouring the perpetrators of 9-11 and supporting terrorist organisations the world over. The truth is that western nations simply do not have the stomach for war. We can talk up human rights and international order all we like but if we are not willing to enforce it then it is not worth the paper that it is written on. If you support law, you must also support its enforcement; and it is only western powers that are both willing and capable to do that.

That is the fundamental dilemma of foreign intervention; it is often justified, and it is often the morally right thing to do. After all, who could truly argue against the successful prevention of an ethnic cleansing? In this we find our hearts fighting our heads. Rationally an intervention is fraught with the risk, the risk of creating a power vacuum and destabilising a nation and even an entire region due to the unintended side effects of armed conflict.

It is true that we should stay out of the internal affairs of other states and that meddling usually causes only trouble. However, to set in stone principally that we should never intervene even in the face of moral obligation goes too far. There is a case, in some instances, for foreign intervention and fear has in the past allowed hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths to occur, most notably in Rwanda. Intervention, as with most things, is a vastly complex issue that has no one definitive answer. There is a question that needs to be addressed and readdressed regularly on the international stage; would we prefer to intervene and not be needed than to have not intervened and potentially allowed a genocide?