The Humanitarian arguments for this War are Spurious by Scott Burchill The Age 3:40pm 22nd Mar, 2003   March 21 2003. Melbourne, Australia.    Why, asks Scott Burchill, does the liberation of Iraq take precedence over concerns in West Papua and Palestine?    The onus is always on those who argue for war. They need to demonstrate a casus belli or just cause. There is no need to mount an argument against the use of violence, unless peace and order are regarded as undesirable conditions.    So how should we assess the argument of supporters of this intervention in Iraq, that war can be justified on humanitarian grounds? There are four major problems with it.    1. While there is no disputing the brutal nature of Saddam Hussein's regime, the case for intervention made by those in Canberra, London and Washington is weakened by the fact that at the peak of Saddam's crimes in the late 1980s, they were either directly supporting him with weapons, technology and intelligence or were entirely indifferent to his behaviour. Even if they have belatedly recognised the error of their ways, how seriously can we take their concerns about weapons of mass destruction now, given they were his suppliers then?    2. In some quarters the humanitarian commitment to the people of Iraq appears only skin deep. Despite adumbrating Saddam's awful treatment of his citizens, both John Howard and Tony Blair said last week that he could stay in power - presumably to continue his brutality - provided he gave up his weapons of mass destruction. So much for their ethical concern.    3. The argument for humanitarian intervention in Iraq implies that sovereignty is no longer a protection against attack from outsiders who object to the nature of another government's rule. This principle, if widely adopted, would overturn the UN charter and international law more generally, and revolutionise international relations.    The idea of humanitarian intervention is widely contested and debated by academics, non-government organisations and governments around the world. No clear, consensually recognised criteria for it exist, even in recent cases such as Somalia and Kosovo where the principle was invoked. When Vietnam brought an end to Pol Pot's genocidal regime in Cambodia in 1979 it was treated as a pariah by the West, despite the improved humanitarian conditions the intervention produced.    To simply claim non-intervention will produce a worse humanitarian result than war ignores the significant reality that, for all its faults, the international system is still based on the independence of sovereign states, which enjoy an administrative monopoly over a bounded territory. To raise the principle of humanitarian intervention to the same legal and moral status of national sovereignty would have immediate and chaotic consequences for people across the world.    4. Howard's claim that "doing nothing about Iraq, potentially, is much more costly than using force, if necessary, to ensure Iraq's disarmament" is both wildly hypothetical and morally suspect. No one can accurately predict the number of innocent civilians who will be internally displaced, forced to become refugees, or be killed by this war. To imply there is a moral balance sheet that can be reconciled if the humanitarian effects of the war can are minimised is grotesque. As British philosopher Ted Honderich has said: "There is no parity between our doing something with the dead certainty of killing and maiming thousands, and not doing it with only the probability that some people will suffer."    We are directly responsible for the effects of our intervention in Iraq. We are not responsible for the consequences of our inaction, unless - at the very least - the West suddenly owns up to the vital support it gave Saddam when he was gassing Kurdish villagers and Iranian soldiers in the 1980s. This has not happened.    However, by this logic we are equally accountable for much of the immiseration of Africa, Asia and Latin America. So why does the liberation of Iraq take precedence over longer-standing concerns in West Papua and Palestine, to cite only two peoples betrayed for more than 30 years by the UN and the West?    The sudden discovery of a humanitarian crisis in Iraq by people who were silent when it peaked in the 1980s is an unconvincing acknowledgement that all other arguments for this war against Iraq have collapsed.    It's a grab for the moral high ground which is, at best, tendentious, and at worse an action with unforeseen and possibly catastrophic consequences for Iraqis and others.    Scott Burchill lectures in international relations at Deakin University. Visit the related web page
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