The Humanitarian Temptation: Calling for War to Bring Peace to Darfur

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Portion below; from FAIR at http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3259

A “humanitarian intervention,” as benevolent as it may try to sound, at its core means non-consensual military action against a foreign country—war under the banner of humanitarianism. The remarkable thing about nearly all of these media calls for intervention is that, beyond the appeals to urgency and morality, virtually no effort is made to explain exactly why or how one should believe that aggressive military action is what will bring peace to Darfur; readers, apparently, are to take that as self-evident. “If the United Nations is not willing to intervene,” the St. Petersburg Times asked (7/27/04), “how can it be taken seriously as a force for peace and humanitarianism?”

The equation of intervention with peace and humanitarianism is particularly remarkable in the wake of Iraq. Despite the Bee’s declaration that “nothing” is more globally urgent than rescuing the people of Darfur, Iraq is unquestionably a much larger humanitarian crisis. Best estimates put the death toll in Iraq at over a million. (See page 22.) According the UNCHR, 4.4 million Iraqis are currently refugees or internally displaced, despite widespread media attention on a relative handful of Iraqis returning home.

The “liberation” of the Kurds and Shiites from a genocidal dictator was from the beginning presented as a key justification for the Iraq War, increasingly so as the WMD argument lost all credibility with the public. Even now, calls for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq are based primarily on claims that a pullout will “result” in a humanitarian crisis—as if one were not already well underway.

The Bee’s amnesia is just one more example of the media’s refusal to acknowledge the humanitarian disaster that is Iraq, let alone take lessons from it. Iraq must be forgotten rather than learned from if we are to successfully deal with Darfur. The Washington Post (7/22/04) argued forcefully that, “if the nation is to avoid succumbing to an Iraq syndrome to match the Vietnam syndrome of the past, it must prove its continuing readiness to lead in the world”—and go it alone in Darfur if necessary.

“Has the grim shadow of Iraq, and fallout from the crisis in Lebanon, paralyzed the Western democracies in responding to a terrible ‘genocide by attrition’ among the African tribal populations of Darfur?” inquired Eric Reeves in a Post op-ed (9/3/06).

Iraq is cast as the exception, the “bad” war that has made it more difficult for us to advance “good” wars like Darfur. “Unfortunately for the victims of Darfur, too many of their advocates have come to view [American] power as tainted, marred by self-interest and by its misapplication in Iraq,” wrote New Republic editor Lawrence F. Kaplan in the L.A. Times (4/23/06).