The key element in shaping the Libyan intervention’s impact will be whether the operation can overcome the recurrent problems humanitarian interventions have been facing in the past two decades. The West’s reluctance toward renewed humanitarian interventions will only be revised if the operation attains its mission objective without becoming entangled in a protracted internal conflict.
The ongoing people’s uprisings in the Arab countries against autocratic rulers have provided Iran with both challenges and opportunities in the Middle East and beyond. Will these momentous events enhance Iran’s foreign policy opportunities, or will they ultimately lead to further isolation and strategic loneliness for Iran?
Although all wars may represent a failure of diplomacy, war is often the last resort of diplomacy. This paradox results from two competing ideas of what the supreme objective of diplomacy should be: peace at any cost, or peace by any means. This is the paradox of Libya. The international military intervention resulted from a mixture of an arguably successful strategy of coercive diplomacy at the UN, and a failure of third-party mediations.
The Libyan Crisis is in some respects a turning point in the ‘history’ of the responsibility to protect doctrine (RtoP). The case suggests that the international community is beginning to mobilize against rulers who conquer or purchase statehood to gain impunity.
Many international relations commentators are heralding the Western bombing of Libya as marking a return to the 1990s era of humanitarian intervention. The debate is largely over whether this return is to be welcomed or regretted. But a return of the moral or ethical understandings of the humanitarian interventionist 1990s is not a possibility.
Gaddafi has long had form as a murderer. Neither Britain nor America have forgotten his role in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. With intervention, the West sends a clear message to all Arabs and those who rule over them whether despots or occupying states. To stand with those who want democracy can only ever be the right thing to do. As Tony Blair has said, the case for western intervention is as strong now as it has ever been.
Whilst Libya is no doubt important, it is but the tip of the iceberg. In the long run, timely and decisive action such as the international action in Libya will continue to be a recurrent but painful necessity. Yet, we will make most progress towards a world without mass atrocities by reducing the number of cases that become so acute and preventing crises from escalating to the point of imminent catastrophe.
History has placed two peoples, both with legitimate claims, in competition for the same land. The brutality of the Murders at Itamar is a reminder that the conflict on the West Bank, indeed the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians in all of its aspects, should be understood as a secular, rather than a religious, event.
Given how the Security Council has acted with regard to Libya via Resolution 1973, many have queried its failure to act in other situations, such as Bahrain, Yemen and Syria. The lethal responses by the governments of those countries to pro-democracy protests are appalling, but it cannot be said that the crisis in those States has reached the proportions of Libya. After all, humanitarian intervention is war.
Western countries need to redefine their security agenda so as to return to basic core values which were seen in the 1990s. If we forsake such basic tenets, then we risk losing our sense of self; a fact which could have far worse ramifications than any specific terrorist threat or oil shortage.
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