Just Causes
The Case for Humanitarian Intervention
Article Summary
Because borders are becoming ever more porous and contingent, everyone has an interest in humanitarian intervention.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of books on Cyprus, Iraq, the Kurds, the Palestinians, and Anglo-American relations.
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Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention
Knopf
2008
528 pp.
9780307266484
$35.00
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First of all, and not merely judging with the benefit of hindsight, one should consider how likely it was that the Greeks would have continued as subjects of the Ottoman Empire -- in other words, as a bastard form of Christian Turks. Not at all likely, really, which is to say that there was a prima facie case to be made that outsiders had a shrewd interest in supporting a cause that was probably going to be ultimately victorious. Second, if the Greeks did not win, then the Turks would, and this in turn would be a victory for the Turkophile Metternich-Castlereagh-Wellington forces in the rest of Europe. In other words, in this case, as in others, failing to help one side was the same thing, strategically as well as morally, as helping the other. (It is not as if famous American "realists" theoretically opposed to intervention have not also embroiled the United States in some grave foreign quarrels in their time, from Cambodia to Chile to, indeed, Cyprus.) Third, there were some "balance of power" questions that, even though they arose out of what the otherwise philhellenic Jefferson called "the broils of Europe," still had implications for the United States. Only the fear of entanglement in such "broils," Jefferson wrote to a Greek correspondent in 1823, "could restrain our generous youth from taking some part in this holy cause." James Madison was more affirmative, writing that year to President James Monroe and Jefferson that he favored an American declaration, in concert with other countries, such as the United Kingdom, in support of the Greeks. And the ethnologist, American diplomat, and former U.S. treasury secretary Albert Gallatin proposed what Bass writes "would have been the United States' first humanitarian intervention." He did so in distinctly ironic tones, suggesting that Greece be aided by the United States' "naval force in the Mediterranean -- one frigate, one corvette, and one schooner." This was even less of a navy than the Greek rebels could call on, but the point -- not dwelled on by Bass, alas -- is that only a few years previously, Jefferson had sent the navy, as well as the newly created U.S. Marine Corps, to shatter the Ottoman fleets that were both enslaving American crews and passengers and denying free trade through the Strait of Gibraltar. The move had led to a huge increase in American prestige as well as to vastly enhanced maritime commerce. Why should the two thoughts not occur again at the same time in the same minds?
In the end, then Secretary of State Adams carried the day (against that improbable champion of liberty: the slavery apologist John Calhoun, who was then secretary of war), and the United States did not go abroad in search of a chance to destroy the monster of Turkish imperialism. As if in compensation, however, the White House proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine, which denounced the "odious and criminal" slave trade, and freely issued warm expressions for the future of Greek statehood.
It is very often by these sorts of crabwise steps and political tradeoffs that the United States finds that it has -- perhaps in a fit of absence of mind -- avoided one humanitarian commitment by implicitly adopting other ones. These days, this happens every time someone who wants to leave, say, a Saddam Hussein alone is rash enough to wonder out loud what should be done about Darfur, Myanmar (also known as Burma), Tibet, or Zimbabwe. History has a way of adopting such taunts or at least of playing them back to their originators. And this, as Bass shows, is how the international community has gradually moved from double or multiple standards to something like a more intelligible and single one.
SOVEREIGN SOVEREIGNTIES
It is either unfortunate or significant -- and probably both -- that so many of Bass' early examples have to do with confrontations between a Christian (or liberal) West and a Muslim (or imperial) Turkey. In addition to the Greek case, there is the European powers' protracted intervention in Syria between 1841 and 1861 to underwrite and guarantee the lives and freedoms of the Christian minority there, which resulted in the country's partition -- or, if one prefers, the emergence of a quasi-independent Lebanon. This was followed in depressingly swift succession by British Prime Minister William Gladstone's campaign for the cause of the martyred Bulgarians in the 1870s and U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau's extraordinary dispatches in the early months of World War I about what Morgenthau called the "race murder" of the Armenians by the Ottomans. (Even though I do not really believe in the category of "race," I find this term more dramatic and urgent than the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin's "genocide.") At any rate, an amateur reader -- or perhaps a resentful Muslim one -- could be pardoned for taking away the idea that the West's views of human rights and humanitarian intervention were formed in opposition to the manifest cruelties and depredations of "the Turk," or, as he was sometimes called, "the Mussulman." In fact, the fight over Jerusalem and its status seems to have gone on for longer than most people know, the 1853-56 Crimean War that opposed the Russian empire to the British, French, and Ottoman empires being only one of many occasions when Christian states have fought one another for control over the holy sites of Palestine.
