Mike Jackson: Military action alone will not save Libya
[General Sir Mike Jackson is a former chief of the general staff of the British Army.]
Intervention continues to be a prominent dimension of the post-cold war world. Since the early 1990s, Britain and other countries have made the choice to be involved in, among others, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya. For some, these represent latter-day military adventurism. For others, the operations are “all about oil”, or “a clash of civilisations”. But none of those views is borne out by the facts.
Of course, the degree of national consensus in support of each has been mixed: from general support for the Nato Kosovo operation (despite the lack of a UN Security Council resolution) and for the UK operation in Sierra Leone, to the controversy of Iraq and, today, Afghanistan. The interventions in the Balkans were undertaken mostly to safeguard Muslim minorities and there are certainly no great oil reserves in that part of Europe.
There are two fundamental and connected motives for intervention: the avoidance of humanitarian catastrophe and the desire for greater stability in the world order. They are connected because humanitarian catastrophe – as a result of ethnic hostility, tyranny or civil war – is a big source of instability. As events in Libya show, the concept of “responsibility to protect” has more or less been adopted by the UN as a duty to intervene where a state cannot (or will not) protect its own people – or, as in the case of Muammer Gaddafi, where it abuses its own population.
Crucially, this concept accepts that the weight of this duty can be even greater than the sanctity of sovereign borders enshrined in the UN charter. In the absence of a Security Council resolution, this doctrine – then nascent – was the justification for the Kosovo intervention. Interestingly, it is also the justification Russia used for its intervention in Georgia in 2008...
Read entire article at Financial Times (UK)
Intervention continues to be a prominent dimension of the post-cold war world. Since the early 1990s, Britain and other countries have made the choice to be involved in, among others, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya. For some, these represent latter-day military adventurism. For others, the operations are “all about oil”, or “a clash of civilisations”. But none of those views is borne out by the facts.
Of course, the degree of national consensus in support of each has been mixed: from general support for the Nato Kosovo operation (despite the lack of a UN Security Council resolution) and for the UK operation in Sierra Leone, to the controversy of Iraq and, today, Afghanistan. The interventions in the Balkans were undertaken mostly to safeguard Muslim minorities and there are certainly no great oil reserves in that part of Europe.
There are two fundamental and connected motives for intervention: the avoidance of humanitarian catastrophe and the desire for greater stability in the world order. They are connected because humanitarian catastrophe – as a result of ethnic hostility, tyranny or civil war – is a big source of instability. As events in Libya show, the concept of “responsibility to protect” has more or less been adopted by the UN as a duty to intervene where a state cannot (or will not) protect its own people – or, as in the case of Muammer Gaddafi, where it abuses its own population.
Crucially, this concept accepts that the weight of this duty can be even greater than the sanctity of sovereign borders enshrined in the UN charter. In the absence of a Security Council resolution, this doctrine – then nascent – was the justification for the Kosovo intervention. Interestingly, it is also the justification Russia used for its intervention in Georgia in 2008...