Test Case

This article is a very clear and well-written description, not of why we should or should not have intervened in Libya, but rather what the ramifications of success or failure of our efforts in Libya will mean for the R2P doctrine. It comes from North by Northwest, an online independent publication of Northwestern University.

And I'd like to share this final paragraph of a paper, of which you can find the full text here, because it captures what gives me the most trouble as a supporter of the idea of R2P.

“Overall, what does Libya tell us about R2P? Essentially, it tells us that operationalising the doctrine is harder than merely stating it. Critics might well label R2P a hypocritical fantasy. Since Rwanda in 1994 the international community has sat idle while massacres and crimes against humanity have occurred in many other countries: millions starving under the brutality of the North Korean communist dictatorship; tens of thousands dead in Darfur by murder, starvation or disease and millions more internally displaced; and millions dead in the Democratic Republic of Congo since the late 1990s. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe didn’t attract an intervention. Clearly, R2P was always going to be a doctrine selectively applied. And the test for intervention is high: even in relation to the Middle East in 2011, it doesn’t seem to apply to Syria, Yemen or Bahrain, cases that Secretary of State Clinton has described as policing actions rather than the deliberate waging of war against a population. But selectivity makes R2P look more like a norm of convenience than a genuine doctrine of international responsibility. At the moment, it is hard to tell whether R2P will emerge from Libya with more or fewer credentials than when the international community intervened.”

Selectivity is my problem.

Why not Ivory Coast?

Why not the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

Why not Yemen or Bahrain?

Why not any and all of the other countries dealing with monstrous atrocities? 

Practical and political reasons, I know, but I’ve had a number of interesting email conversations about this issue and what I always come back to is that while I don’t have “the” answer, I don’t even have “an” answer, I will always decide to err on the side of protecting people.  This is a quote by Argentinean playwright Griselda Gambaro that has stuck with me since I was in college. She said, in response to the wheat surpluses in the late 1980s and early 90s,

“Yes, but in a sense art has nothing to do with politics, it occupies a different space, answers to different laws. I don’t have to—in fact I must not—think like a politician or an economist. The responsibility of the artist or intellectual is to refuse to enter into that perverse system of thought in which people become abstractions. My solution to the wheat surplus? Give it all to the hungry. Any other solution is hypocritical and immoral. Let it wreak havoc in the world market, so what. Art’s connection to politics lies in its negation of the coarse and brutal pragmatism that is imposed as “reality.”

Someone must always call for intervention, and why not the artists?