A longer view on military interventionism
I have made no secret of my opposition to a unilateral military intervention in Syria. My opposition would stand even if it turns out that Assad used chemical weapons against the rebels and against civilian populations.
No, I most certainly don’t endorse attacking civilian groups with any sort of deadly weapons. My problem has much more to do with the unilateralism of the action. Even a NATO intervention would in effect be unilateral in my eyes because of the degree to which the US, Britain and to some degree France dominateand dictate the policies of that body.
Under what circumstances might I concede the right r duty of outside agencies to use deadly force to punish, deter or incapacitate a malevolent government bent on killing people within its boundaries? Well. If some such body as the World Court found unmistakable evidence that banned weapons had been used and then if the UN voted to take action, I think I could go along with that. The intervention would have to be multilateral, of course.
The obvious problem is that the UN is generally incapable of deciding on an actual military action, largely because of the Security Council veto rule. Russia or China could stop whatever intervention they chose to block, regardless of its merits. To me, the best solution would be to re-write the rules so that a “supermajority” of some sort (80% of nations? 90%?) would be sufficient.
Of course, this would be very hard to accomplish. Most of the major powers, including the US, wouldn’t have signed on to the formation of the UN without the veto provision.
This of course leaves us with a serious problem: There is no supranational body with the power to actually enforce international law. Whatever the outcome of the current Middle Eastern situation, the problem remains. The only way for the law to be enforced is by international vigilantism.
For this and many other reasons, the world needs a stronger supranational body. I think that we really ought to view the formation of such an entity to be a primary goal for Progressives. The body must be sufficiently strong to enforce its own laws, but not so strong as to morph into a worldwide dictatorship. There must, for example, be ways for it to fight off domination by the super-rich, the corporations, the international banks.
I have no particularly good idea of how to go about that—almost any system humans can create, humans can also pervert in catastrophic ways. But in a world already in bondage to the transnational corporations and their unholy trade treaties, how much do we have to lose by trying?
= new reply since forum marked as read
