Michael Ignatieff gave a simplified picture of a successful military intervention at a discussion about the often-controversial Responsibility to Protect policy with Janice Stein at the Munk Center on Monday.
“We have to take sides in what is usually an ongoing civil conflict ” said Ignatieff. “Let us remember Bosnia, 1994-5. We put the Croats together with the Muslims, armed the Muslims, made them stronger, pushed back the Serbs, and at a decisive moment, rained air power on the Serbs, forcing them to the table.”
The next example was Kosovo. “We intervened to make one side prevail.” The West did not want Melosovic to continue his war in the Balkans because this would fracture Europe, so they intervened to make one side win.”
Ignatieff said it was painful to watch the Serbs flee. But in intervention, he said, the interplay of means and ends were as complex as the politics involved. “You may not like [the means], but nobody’s died in Bosnia since.”
He spoke not as a the Liberal deputy leader but as a former commissioner on the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, an ad hoc organization that promotes humanitarian intervention. Ignatieff’s talk began with the “very unpopular notion” of preemptive war that the commission’s R2P policy is about.
Ignatieff recalled a meeting of the ICISS in Brussels that determined R2P did not apply to the terrorist threat behind the Sept. 11 attacks, not only because the policy is preemptive, but also because it involves threats abroad rather that at home.
Armed intervention in Kosovo and Bosnia was justifiable, Ignatieff said, because there had been a “just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, reasonable prospects, proportional means and last resort.”
The conflict in post-Sept. 11 Af- ghanistan, though not considered a case for R2P, fits the “just war” principle, invented by Saint Augustine. He stressed that the principle, which requires that a war be fought justly, “with one hand behind their backs.” even when the enemy followed no rules or wore no uniforms, should be followed in whatever actions Coalition forces there take.
Ignatieff aimed to show that the intervention in Afghanistan meets all of the just war criteria. He said there was adherence to a just authority, namely UN approval. It was a last resort, he added, because the U.S. had already been attacked. He saw trouble, however, in the Coalition assertion that the armed reaction was proportional to the threat posed by Afghanistan. “Those are acute moral issues which all citizens ought to be concerned about,” he said.
Ignatieff invoked another of St. Augustine’s concepts, the “reasonable prospect” principle. This is a jus ad bellum criterion, meaning it is to be considered before the use of force. Under the principle, use of force cannot be condoned unless it has a reasonable chance of succeeding in its goal.
“Reasonable prospect is something we’re in fact debating now when we think about whether to extend this mission [in Afghanistan].”
On the subject of a global leadership, he was asked whether “we need a (hopefully) liberal hegemony who can define the order and then police it,” Ignatieff clarified, however, that a hegemony was not what he wanted to live under. That in fact he did not want a liberal hegemony at all. Ignatieff envisioned a multipolar world, with power distributed across many centres worldwide.
