Interventionalizing
Time Magazine, of all peace-mongering publications, has a huge article outlining the case for invading Burma in order to save as many as possible of the probably 1 million people at risk for death by starvation, disease, and exposure in the wake of last week’s typhoon. It is a tragedy that the evil, repressive junta which has governed Burma these past several decades is so scared of threats to its own continued power that it won’t allow other nations and/or NGOs with the experience, personnel, and equipment for dealing with major natural disasters to do the job.
The trouble is that the Burmese haven’t shown the ability or willingness to deploy the kind of assets needed to deal with a calamity of this scale — and the longer Burma resists offers of help, the more likely it is that the disaster will devolve beyond anyone’s control. “We’re in 2008, not 1908,” says Jan Egeland, the former U.N. emergency relief coordinator. “A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder we may set a very dangerous precedent.
That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the U.S. to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says. The Bush Administration has so far rejected the idea — “I can’t imagine us going in without the permission of the Myanmar government,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday — “but it’s not without precedent…”
I have opposed many of the macho military interventions conducted by the West over the past decade. Their justifications have been obscure, their motives mixed and their morality situational, especially those aimed at “regime change”. Those in Afghanistan and Iraq had the additional defect of built-in failure.
On the other hand the West did intervene to try to stop humanitarian catastrophes in Bosnia from 1992, Somalia in 1993, Kosovo in 1998 and Sierra Leone in 2000. The failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 and more recently in Sudan’s Darfur province was attributed not to timidity but to the logistical difficulty of deploying power in the African interior.
These interventions were not ideological, whether “liberal” or “neocon”. They were to save lives from being lost by the thousand. They were covered by international law (possibly not Kosovo) because the UN charter’s respect for territorial integrity also stipulates it “shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures” to avert a humanitarian crisis.
On Friday the British and French foreign ministers, David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner, announced that “we look to the regime” to lift restrictions on aid distribution. Nobody “looked to” Slobodan Milosevic to stop slaughtering Kosovans or the rebels to stop the killing in Sierra Leone. We intervened.
The Foreign Office remarked last week that there was “no excuse” for delay and then thought of one. The British chairman of the UN security council, John Sawers, claimed that the 2006 resolution referred only to “acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity . . . rather than government responses to natural disasters”. But in 2001 there was no evidence that the Taliban were committing such acts, yet Britain intervened. And what is happening in Burma if not an “intentional denial of humanitarian assistance”?…
Either way some enforced intervention must surely be planned. The British aid minister, Douglas Alexander, said last week it would be “incendiary”. He did not explain why a “dump-and-run” of emergency supplies in the delta would be incendiary - compared, for instance, with his antics in Afghanistan.
He cannot hold to the thesis that Burma is not ripe for “liberal intervention” because the loss of life is the result of a natural disaster rather than political or military oppression. What is this fine distinction between a massacre and what the military are now inflicting on the Burmese people? A corpse is a corpse.
Lisa, I’m all for the option of invading just about anyone, at least in the sense that I believe in a doctrine of conditional sovereignty. That’s to say, there’s no reason why a dictatorship should expect its sovereignty to be as respected as, say, New Zealand’s. If it’s a good idea to help Burma, it’s not suddenly a bad idea because they refuse to issue the requisite visas.
However, I’d be reluctant to send the boys into Rangoon on the say so of Time magazine. If we’ve learned anything from the past five years, it’s that the media, the Democratic Senators, the think-tank experts and large numbers of other fast-molting hawks are on board only until the first setback, or the first “atrocity”. As the Belmont Club observes:
If the “good old U.S. military” actually does invade Burma it will incinerate every vestige of armed opposition in its path. Burmese Army units will stand about as much chance as ants before a kid’s homemade flamethrower. And then all of a sudden the assumptions will collapse in reverse order. People are going to say, ‘we didn’t realize invasions meant killing people’; ‘we didn’t realize we wouldn’t have allies’; and finally ‘we did not think it would be so expensive’. And then we will hear that classic line: “I was for it before I was against it.”
There has been, right from the first day of this crisis, a wing of the anti-interventionist movement that has sought to shift blame for the aid debacle from the Burmese generals to the West in general and America in particular. I first heard it from some professor interviewed on the Today programme, and have read it several times since. The junta (this apologia suggests) is just paranoid, this paranoia is justified because of the West’s hostility, and therefore it makes sense from the Burmese point of view not to admit foreign aid workers, who might be CIA spooks.
In a way I prefer this adamantine daftness to the slippery arguments of those who have used the Burmese disaster to attack liberal interventionism, while suggesting that in this particular instance there are grounds for some kind of uninvited action. Their reasoning runs like this: Burma’s crisis is different and more urgent than was the case in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, because of the immediacy of the humanitarian disaster. So the stakes are clear, and whereas it would be illegal to remove the Burmese junta, it is somehow legal to invade Burmese air space and docks to deliver and defend supplies. Presumably (though the anti-interventionist interventionists don’t spell it out) we would protect our aid convoys from attack, so the possibility of military action is implicit.
But they must secretly know, as we all do, that it’s too late. It’s too late again. A country may, of course, be hit by a natural disaster, no matter what the ideological nature of its government. But the way it reacts to a catastrophe will be entirely consistent with its form of administration. For several decades Burma has had a Government whose authoritarianism and isolationism has made it almost inevitable that the consequences of any natural disaster would be magnified by its craziness.
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