Compassionate Killing: Can war be fought for humanitarian reasons?

[struggle4progress]

By Kevin Kelley, Utne Reader

... The "humanitarian" military campaign has become a distinctive feature of U.S. foreign policy in recent years. But is it really humanitarian?

Not at all, writes Noam Chomsky in his new book, The New Military Humanism (Common Courage Press). Indeed, the scholar-activist finds scant evidence in human history of wars fought out of a sense of compassion. "The category of genuine humanitarian intervention might turn out to be literally null, if investigation is unencumbered by intentional ignorance," Chomsky writes. That assessment is in keeping with his suggestion elsewhere in the book that the term "moral state" is oxymoronic ...

The 1994 occupation of Haiti did restore the elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Chomsky acknowledges, but only after Washington had facilitated his overthrow by "a murderous military regime." What's more, the United States forced Aristide to accept "an extremely harsh version" of its Third World economic regimen as the price for his return to power ...

"Defiance of international law and solemn obligations has become entirely open, even widely lauded in the West," he writes. Rampant lawlessness on the part of the world's leading nuclear power is perversely depicted, Chomsky adds, as a " 'new internationalism' that heralds a wonderful new age, unique in human history.

http://www.utne.com/2000-01-01/Compassionate-Killing.aspx

[napi21]

1. I think it can be if we, as the superpower stop ethnic cleansing

in an area. Certainly not because of some political disagreement!

[Chulanowa]

3. I wouldn't necessarily use warfare there, either

Warfare is, in a loose definition, ethnic cleansing. "The people of Nation X are my enemy, we must destroy them"

WOuld I use combat to halt ethnic cleansing? Absolutely. Using armed force as a line in the sand to protect the people being targeted, not forwarding an army into the perp's cities and destroying their side of the country.

[eridani]

4. Any ethnic cleansing that has been stopped by imperial bullying--

--is strictly a side benefit. The major goal is domination.

So we stopped ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. If our policy was dominated by that concern, why was the identical and successful ethnic cleansing of the Krajina by Croatia not only not stopped, but aided and abetted by US mercenaries?

[EFerrari]

2. "The New Humanitarianism"!

LOL!