The foremost idea that is being promoted throughout the course of Michael Walzer’s article The Case against Our Attack on Libya, is that, contrary to the assumption that it is specifically the protection of human rights and freedoms that represented the involved Western countries’ main agenda in Libya, this having not been the actual case.
According to the author, it was not only that the Western support of these rebels did not help to prevent the humanitarian catastrophe in the region, but it in fact created objective preconditions for this catastrophe to assume dramatic proportions.
Hence, Walzer’s suggestion that there is absolutely no rationale to believe that anything positive may ever come out of the military attack against Qaddafi forces.
Kenneth Roth’s article Was the Iraq War a Humanitarian Intervention? does resonate with the one, mentioned earlier. In it, the author went about justifying his suggestion that, even though American governmental officials used to justify the America’s invasion of Iraq, as such that was concerned with achieving purely humanitarian objectives, it did not result in lessening the extent of the ordinary Iraqi citizens’ vulnerability to the violations of their human rights.
In its turn, this provided Roth with the justification to conclude his article by suggesting that the U.S. invasion of Iraq could be referred to as anything, but the ‘humanitarian operation’.
Mahmood Mamdani’s article Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish? can be well defined as another analytical piece, meant to expose the fallaciousness of the assumption that the pretext of ‘human rights protection’ justifies the violation of the independent countries’ national sovereignty.
After all, as it was pointed out by the author, the idea that the protection of ‘human rights’ should account for the international law’s cornerstone, contradicts this law’s classical provisions, which are absolutely clear about the fact that there can be no good enough excuse for any third-parties to meddle in the internal affairs of independent countries.
The Part 1 of the Gareth Evans’s book The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All is concerned with the discussion of how the concept of R2P (Responsibility to Protect) came into being.
Throughout this particular part of his book, the author also provides readers with an insight, as to what he considers the major challenges, faced by the members of the international community, on the way of eliminating the possibility for the state-sponsored genocidal atrocities to take place in the future.
As it appears from the book’s Part 1, it is specifically the fact that R2P is being inconsistent with the provisions of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia (which even today remains the foundation of an international law) that undermines the effectiveness of internationally enacted atrocity-prevention policies.
There can be only a few doubts, as to the fact that the earlier mentioned articles (book excerpt) do contain a number of discursively valid ideas, as to what should be considered the de facto implications of the R2P’s practical deployment.
At the same time, however, there are also a number of weaknesses to these articles (book excerpt).
The foremost of them is the fact that; whereas the authors discuss the concept of human rights, in general, and R2P, in particular, from the Constructivist perspective, it would make much more sense doing it from the Realist one.
The reason for this is apparent – as of today, it became clear to just about everybody that the true purpose that the ideologeme of ‘protection of human rights’ actually serves, is ensuring Western countries’ undisputed geopolitical dominance in the world, and allowing them to exercise a unilateral control over the world’s natural resources.
Works Cited
Evans, Gareth. The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2009. Print.
Mamdani, Mahmood. “Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 4.1 (2010): 53-67. Print.
Roth, Kenneth. “Was the Iraq War a Humanitarian Intervention?” Journal of Military Ethics 5.2 (2006): 84-92. Print.
Walzer, Michael. The Case against Our Attack on Libya. Web.