Responsibility to Protect (R2P): Catch All

[Rex Brynen]

It would be interesting to hear what Louise Fréchette has to say.

I'm struck how much the entire language of R2P has been struck from the current (Harper) government's vocabulary because it is viewed as a Liberal invention--even though the concept could be quite usefully deployed in support of the current Canadian ISAF mission.

[Bill Moore]

Fascinating and worrisome article, the self-righteous would love to full control of the military.

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinion...-humanity.html

The human rights industry does a lot of noble work around the world. And yet many of the field’s most prominent figures and institutions have lately taken to vocally endorsing acts of war. Where does this impulse come from? On what grounds is it justified? And how’s the hawkish stance working out, given a decade of strategic and humanitarian debacles for Washington and its allies?

Liberal hawks respond to skepticism over their bellicosity with an invented pedigree of successful humanitarian wars, wheeling out India’s armed intervention in East Pakistan in 1971, which halted a genocide and created Bangladesh, or Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978, which ended the Khmer Rouge, or Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1979, which brought down Idi Amin. What they fail to mention is that these wars weren’t simple humanitarian interventions but attacks motivated almost entirely by national self-interest, conducted to stem massive, destabilizing influxes of foreign refugees from a bordering nation.

Author ends with this:

The itchy trigger finger of the human rights industry is symptomatic of the atrophy of diplomacy and dealmaking in favor of the militarization of statecraft.

[davidbfpo]

I have merged two main threads and five SWJ Blog threads into this R2P thread following the catalyst of an academic discussion yesterday.

As CAR and Syria show today R2P has not gone away as an issue, although I fear many within and outside government would prefer it did.

[davidbfpo]

In a very direct 'rejoinder' Patrick Porter, a UK-based Australian academic, responds to Ann-Marie Slaughter's recent NYT column. He starts with:

Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that America should enter the fighting in Syria and Iraq. In doing so, she argues that there is little distinction between strategic interests and humanitarian impulses. I’m personally, fearfully, sympathetic towards some assistance to the Iraq state in denying ISIS control of whole cities. But Slaughter’s cosmology is truly startling.
In an article that begins in self-pity, and ends in glib counter-factuals, she makes it all sound so simple.

Link:http://offshorebalancer.wordpress.co...rie-slaughter/