Failed Humanitarian Interventions and the “Good Intentions” Dodge

Ted Galen CarpenterIn a newNational Interest Online article,I discuss how advocates of “humanitarian” military interventions resort to a variety of excuses to evade responsibility once their crusades go awry.One especially maddening deflection of responsibility is when proponents insist that their intentions were good, and that the missions should be judged according to that standard.Even Barack Obama seemed to recognize the insufficiency of that defense when he first met Samantha Power, an advocate of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine and U.S. involvement in multilateral military interventions for humanitarian goals.Obama reportedlyobserved to her that it “seemed like malpractice to judge one’s prospects by one’s intentions, rather than making a stren ­uous effort to anticipate and weigh potential consequences.”Obama was right, but he didn ’t heed his own advice.Not only did he select Power for a series of high ‐​level policy posts when he became president, culminating in her appointment as ambassador to the United Nations, but he launched several catastrophic interventions, most notably in Libya and Syria.The unintended negative results of those crusades continue to reverberate nearly a decade after the initial U.S. actions.The situations in both Libya and Syria are substantially worse than they were before the United States and its NATO allies began to meddle.Overthrowing Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi prod...

Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 25, 2020 Category: American Health Authors: Ted Galen Carpenter Source Type: blogs