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A Duty to Intervene, Not to Stay A Response to the Recent Book What Happened? by former Bush White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan By C.G. Bateman, Editor As we are all painfully aware
- mostly because news agencies are talking about it ad infinitum
- former United States press secretary Scott McClellan recently unveiled
the new memoir of his years in Washington on the staff of President
Bush, excruciatingly titled, What Happened: Inside the Bush White
House and Washington's Culture of Deception. In it, suffice it
to say, he relates that George W. and Dick Cheney et al were purposely
misleading the American public about why they were going into Iraq.
But wait a minute here, with all the oil being pumped out of Iraq since
the US military went in to Iraq, and all the money being paid out to
Halliburton, Cheney's company, along the way and on the ground in
Iraq, is anyone really shocked at McClellan's admissions? The world
has already learned that there were no weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, and yet the feeble justification was that there was a faulty intelligence
report which led to the bad decision to go to war in the first place.
A faulty intelligence report from the richest country in the world,
a country which works in concert with the intelligence agencies of many
other countries, fully capable in their own right? As sensational as
the McClellan story comes across, the fact that we are being told Bush
and Cheney wanted to sell the war cannot really surprise anyone who
has critically appraised all the facts which have come to light since
the beginning. To be fair, the leader that
the US toppled in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was no angel himself. Ghandi
once said, "We prefer the terrible government of our own people rather
than the rule of a foreigner," but what if such a ruler is engaging
in genocide, should the world stand idly by and watch? But what if the
West had gone into Iraq on grounds of human rights abuse, say, of which
there is plenty of proof in the brutal Anfal Campaign alone,
in which somewhere between one and two hundred thousand people were
massacred? Perhaps on these grounds the move should have been received
with more aggregate international consensus and approval. At that point in time 1987-88,
the Iran/Iraq war was just closing out, but a few years later in 1990,
the US and other countries went in to the aid of Kuwait who fell victim
to the unprovoked attack of Iraq. The sad irony is that the human rights
abuses against the Kurdish people did not provoke a similar response a few years earlier. If the international community
did not stand up to Saddam Hussein who killed almost two-hundred thousand
people living within the borders he was supposed to protect, perhaps
some one can tell me just what the United Nations and their army of
international lawyers are for anyway? Do they do more than merely drink
champagne and orange juice for breakfast on the tab of the UN, is it
simply a "talking shop?" If the international community is not
allowed to militarily intervene in the face of gross human rights abuses,
but are permitted to prevent an oil rich country such as Kuwait from
being invaded, then our international community's moral compass looks
pathetically offline. The EU and the West were justified in preventing
Hussein from taking Kuwait for the simple reason that Kuwait has an
unqualified right not to be invaded, there is no question on that count
from almost anyone. But should not human rights abuses on a grand scale
invoke a similar response from our international community? |
In This Issue Now skip to the present situation
in Burma, and does not this situation call for a similar kind of incursion,
at least in terms of aid, for the sake of the people suffering under
the junta supremo Than Shwe? Although it must be pointed out that neither
the General nor his government are responsible for the natural disaster,
they are responsible for the reaction of the country, or lack thereof,
to its civilians being put in harms way. My suggestion here raises a
very difficult question of whether the international community has a
duty to intervene not only when genocide is being perpetrated, but when
large numbers of people are at risk of dying due to the lack of response
from their own government? Regardless of Ghandi's adage preferring
the rule of your own despot, I would have to say that when the infringement
of the human right to live is threatened by either a tyrannical or indifferent
governing body, the international community has a duty to intervene
until such time as a status quo previous to the disaster has been established. Should Saddam Hussein have
been toppled to save lives by the intervention of other countries wanting
to protect the innocents? Yes, certainly. Should this intervention have
been carried out when and as it was, and to the extent it has been and
continues to be by the US? I think this is a question with two answers.
Yes, the intervention should have gone ahead because the international
community proved itself inept at protecting those almost two hundred
thousand people who perished and it was high time Saddam was made to
answer for his atrocities. But no, there is no need to carry the ousting
of the leader to such painful lengths of time as is the case here. If
anything, an international body of peace-keepers should be stationed
there to show that while the international community desires prosperity
and peace for Iraq, they have no wish to imbue the vision of the West
a la the United States into the bargain. Scott McClellan made strong
allegations against a White House which he was recently fired from.
I think critical thinkers are best served by seeing these comments in
the larger context of world events that they are part of, rather than
some new "truth" about "what happened." |