Quote Originally Posted by LawVol View Post
he Darfur situation comes to mind. It is striking to me that some of those that oppose action in Iraq argue for action in Darfur. I'm not saying we should or should not go into Darfur, but we must remember that Darfur falls within the sovereign jurisdiction of the Sudan. While jumping in there may be a good idea, where do you draw the line at violating state sovereignty?
Those supporting intervention in Darfur generally do on R2P (responsibility to protect) grounds. The emergence and evolution of R2P since Rwanda and Kosovo is an interesting case of change in international norms, even if the concept is still vague and elastic enough (and constrained enough by national interests) to be a poor predictor of actual international behaviour.

The classic statement of this, of course, is the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (December 2001) on Responsibility to Protect.

R2P, however, is all about protecting third-country populations from massive human rights abuse, on the grounds that state sovereignty is contingent on states providing a certain degree of protection to their own citizens. If they are unable or unwilling to perform that fundamental obligation of statehood, sovereignty fades as a consideration.

This is a rather different thing from intervention in failed or failing states for counterinsurgent or counter-terrorism reasons. Of course, responding to attacks emanating in third country sanctuaries is hardly anything new, and one can easily root it in centuries of international law and practice of jus ad bellum. No one in the international system, for example, had particular problems with intervention in Afghanistan against AQ and their Taliban allies after 9/11.

The larger complication lies, I think, when such actions:

1) Are preemptive, or

2) Are perceived as unnecessarily unilateral (for example, striking at UBL in Pakistan rather than asking the Pakistanis to do so).

3) Risk establishing precedents that others use or misuse ("well, if the Americans can do it, why not us?")

Finally, at the level of practice rather than doctrine, there is the fundamental "big picture" question of whether such actions cause more problems than they resolve, complicated by the law of unintended consequences. Israeli intervention in Lebanon against the PLO in 1982 resulted in the subsequent emergence of Hizbullah; an American strike against UBL could well destabilize a nuclear-armed Pakistani government; and so forth.