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Finally, Western countries, particularly the United States, have conducted themselves deplorably during the United Nations’ many decades. They too had little desire for the United Nations to act effectively against eliminationist politics, for the same egoistic reasons that democratic countries have barely lifted a finger to stop mass murders. Worse, in the context of the cold war, the United States and other democratic countries prized a regime’s political allegiance more than its domestic practices, so they ignored or supported rightist client regimes even when they slaughtered or eliminated their opponents—communists, democrats, members of ethnic groups challenging their rule, or virtually anyone the regimes declared to be allies of their (particularly leftist) opponents. During the 1970s and 1980s, the number of American client states practicing mass-murderous politics exceeded those of the Soviets.
The communist world’s implosion, the cold war’s end, and democratic countries’ numeric increase, since the 1990s, removed or greatly diminished several of the insuperable structural impediments to transforming the United Nations and the international community into effective agents against eliminationist politics. The continuing obstacles of a tamer China and Russia notwithstanding, the international context for combating eliminationist politics has progressed. The cold war’s binary logic so overwhelmed political leaders’ meager ethical impulses regarding international affairs that progress in combating (or even not encouraging) mass murder was all but impossible. Two of the rare actions, in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999, to stop eliminationist onslaughts, which under NATO’s auspices the United States, together with France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other alliance members, undertook, would have been unthinkable during the cold war, for fear of escalation into a shooting war with the Soviet Union. For the past ten years, the number of democratic countries has hovered around 120, about 63 percent of all countries, the most since the United Nations’ founding, and almost twice as many as just twenty years ago, on the eve of the communist bloc’s disintegration .7 The overwhelming obstacle tyrannical regimes pose to addressing eliminationist politics has substantially lessened.
Another set of factors related to but not reducible to the first has synergistically shaped the United Nations’ and the international community’s malign neglect of eliminationist politics. The United Nations was founded after two world wars left tens of millions dead, ravaging Europe and East Asia. With modern warfare’s unprecedented destructiveness and the development of nuclear weapons, the United Nations’ first and overwhelming priority understandably became preventing war. With many new countries and many new UN members emerging with the imperialist powers (United Kingdom, France, etc.) retreating from their colonies around the globe, anti-imperialism understandably and rightly became the developing world’s rallying cry, and consequently the rest of the world accepted it as a bedrock principle. Marked by similar deformities of membership and history, the world’s major regional organizations, including the African Union, the Association of Southeast Nations, and the Organization of American States, hold as a cardinal principle member states’ nonintervention in other member states. The African Union, which was created in 2002 as the Organization of African Unity’s successor, for example, explains: “The main objectives of the OAU [created in 1963] were, inter alia, to rid the continent of the remaining vestiges of colonization and apartheid; to promote unity and solidarity among African States; to coordinate and intensify cooperation for development; to safeguard the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Member States and to promote international cooperation within the framework of the United Nations.”8 Anti-imperialism, emphatically yes. Primacy of the member states’ sovereignty, emphatically yes. But nothing about intervening against those same states to safeguard people’s lives and rights, even when a state perpetrates genocide.
Together, the United Nations’ foundational mission to prevent aggressive war and its and most countries’ reflexive opposition to one country’s occupying another, for whatever reason, impede the world from addressing today’s acute problem, exceeding certainly imperialism and arguably also interstate war: eliminationist politics, in its most extreme version, mass murder. Why? Because dealing with eliminationist politics effectively, especially once a mass murder or elimination begins, usually requires an intervening country or alliance to initiate hostilities against a country that has not attacked it, and, to replace an eliminationist regime, an outside power or powers likely must occupy the country. The first looks like aggressive war and the second like imperialism. Furthermore, the countries most capable of intervening, including by violating in other ways the near-sacrosanct principle of state sovereignty, are past imperial powers, which the United States is seen (partly rightly) to include, which triggers the developing world’s (and their Western vocal sympathizers’) anti-imperialist reflexes even more intensively. Thus, for decades, the United Nations, the international community, and its individual members have been all but completely hamstrung in fashioning any real response to the world’s rampant eliminationist politics.
One might have thought that now, after the cold war, with war not a thinkable option between a good part of the world’s countries, and with imperialism, except in the margins, a dead letter, the United Nations would be able to seriously address eliminationist politics. New, hopeful initiatives reflect this changed international landscape, most notably around the concept of the responsibility to protect peoples their own governments kill or harm, a movement that gained steam with its December 2001 foundational report, The Responsibility to Protect, calling for states to intervene in a country—in other words, ignore sovereignty, when a government slaughters civilians.9 In a 2006 resolution the UN Security Council tepidly and in passing acknowledged the responsibility to protect.10 Yet, like the genocide convention itself, the responsibility to protect has little actual force, lacking a clear triggering mechanism or prescribed intervention. So far it has not changed the response of the international system, and especially that of the United Nations, to eliminationist politics. Intervention to forcibly stop the massive Political Islamist exterminationist and eliminationist onslaught in Darfur (or the one in Southern Sudan before it) did not happen before the United Nations recognized the doctrine, and it has not happened since.
The United Nations suffers from its first several decades’ profound deformities, and the continuing membership, including veto-wielding membership, of countries wanting to preserve their international impunity to slaughter and eliminate unwanted groups. Even today the United Nations, far from being a force against eliminationist politics and assaults, de facto protects if not legitimizes them, by vociferously defending countries’ sovereignty (really the sovereignty of states, or their leaders) and the pseudo-principle of noninterference in other countries’ internal affairs, even when states slaughter their own people. The American ambassador to Burundi during the 1972 mass butchery could declare shortly thereafter, “The United States simply should not interfere in any way with the internal affairs of another country.” Although both a cynical statement (the American government merely followed its self-conceived interests in doing nothing), and a hypocritical one (the United States intervened routinely to weaken or overthrow regimes), the statement also comported with the overwhelmingly defended international consensus the United Nations grounds and most robustly maintains. According to the American ambassador, “Direct unilateral intervention was out of the question.” Why? “It would have been contrary to our policy of nonintervention in the affairs of African states.” In his view, the United States rightly left it to the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations “to carry out their responsibilities,” which everyone knew they would not do.11 Whatever the United Nations’ small symbolic steps against eliminationist politics and assaults may be in general, and whatever occasional good it does to help victim peoples, the United Nations has effectively legitimized, codified, encouraged, and pursued a hands-off politics providing cover to mass-murdering and eliminationist
regimes. The United Nations has consistently done this, not just in Burundi but also in China, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and elsewhere. Whatever claims and appearances to the contrary, the United Nations and the international legal system are organized to allow states to pursue eliminationist politics, including mass murder.
The debate about the United States’ and Britain’s prospective invasion of Iraq in 2003, for all its confusion and false pretenses, highlighted this central problem. To be sure, politics—to put it crudely, those against and for American power’s exercise—informed people’s positions from the run-up to war to the subsequent occupation. Much argumentation on both sides was insincere rhetoric. Nevertheless, one central issue was almost entirely absent from the discussion: Saddam was one of our time’s worst mass murderers, which in principle should be cause enough to forcibly remove him and his regime from power. What’s more, in principle, it should be other states’ and the international community’s duty to do so. Whether it is a wise or prudent undertaking (taking into account other important principles and the costs, damage, and death the practical measures to remove him might produce) is also a critical issue, which becomes relevant, however, and must be assessed case by case only after the primary principle is recognized: Mass murderers have no right to rule and thereby to slaughter people.
Saddam had already started two murderous, aggressive imperial wars: against Iran in 1980, and Kuwait in 1990. His regime had already conducted three systematic exterminationist campaigns against Iraq’s people: the Marsh people, Shia, and earlier, including with chemical weapons, Kurds. To maintain his tyranny, he regularly murdered and brutalized and tortured political opponents and others. Saddam, his regime, and the people serving it murdered perhaps half a million Iraqis—in addition to the million deaths he caused in trying to conquer parts of Iran. There was absolutely no reason to believe that absent an invasion (1) Saddam would be deposed anytime soon, that (2) he would not continue mass murdering tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands more Iraqis, and (3) that his eventual successor would not be another Baathist tyrant, probably a son, probably the similarly brutal and murderous Uday. This is all aside from the untold nonexplicitly murderous misery Saddam was causing Iraqis, including children’s and others’ deaths from his continuing ruining and plundering of Iraq’s economy to maintain his rule and pursue his megalomaniacal schemes of grandeur. When ten, twenty, thirty years down the road the Baathist regime would end, Iraq would have likely faced all the disintegrating tendencies and conflicts that appeared after the American and British military victory, but without the powerful military presence that greatly dampened such disorder and that has at least (for now) provided some possibility that a democratic and peaceful dispensation might follow.
Victims of Saddam’s chemical weapons, Halabja, Iraq, March 1988
Those who favored war to topple Saddam and his regime not only acknowledged but hammered home that Saddam was a killer, a brute, a butcher, an “evildoer” of epochal proportions. But, significantly, the arguments put forward to justify the invasion—that he had or would soon acquire weapons of mass destruction, that he sponsored terror, including that of Al Qaeda, and the sometime and related argument that fighting terror in Arab or Islamic countries depended on democratization—did not include the right, need, or duty to depose mass murderers. Bush administration officials did not advance this argument, but not because it had nothing to do with the intervention. Instead, the Bush administration sought to maintain that attacking Iraq did not violate international law. And international law prohibiting nondefensive warmaking left no room, short of the United Nations’ invoking the genocide convention and authorizing intervention, for forcibly removing a mass murderer, even one killing hundreds of thousands. Whatever the argument’s moral force that the international community should have the duty, or at least the right, to depose such colossally lethal murderers, the Bush administration did not advance the obvious and incontrovertible case that Saddam and his regime had to go, because it would have hurt its case legally and politically, and probably even in the court of public morality shaped by the laws and norms of the international arena.
In making the case for deposing Saddam, the Bush administration and its supporters at least did state clearly that Saddam was a mass murderer, placing him alongside Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and our time’s other most brutal killers. Those opposing the prospective American invasion barely addressed this, except for the few saying in passing, yes, of course Saddam is a bad guy, or I’m not defending Saddam, who is a murderer, before moving on to their many reasons for opposing a war to depose him. The all but complete failure of the war’s opponents to acknowledge let alone openly consider the desirability, the necessity, and in principle the duty of deposing mass murderers, and also to see this duty as integral to assessing the rightness and wisdom of getting rid of Saddam, is shocking. This failure was even more glaring in the human rights community, which, with exceptions, stood almost united in opposition to the war and in silence about the principle that removing mass murderers from power ought to be a priority in international politics and law.
The long-standing and ongoing international legal and political systems’ perverse failure to consider states’ and international institutions’ rights and duties to stop eliminationist politics and depose its practitioners inhibited a discussion of the principle from entering the public discourse in the run-up to the Iraq war. (In my many discussions with scholars and nonscholars before and during the war, and then during the occupation and continuing fighting, including the sectarian slaughter of many Iraqi civilians, my enunciation of this principle was the first time most had heard it.) In other, less heated instances, such a discussion had taken place, including among those earlier calling for or lauding American or NATO intervention to stop Milošević in Bosnia and then in Kosovo, and those in the human rights community already working on developing a political and legal norm of the responsibility to protect. 12 Yet when confronting Saddam, acknowledging, even uttering this principle was, for political reasons, anathema to the war’s opponents.
There were reasons, including principled ones, to oppose the American and British attack on Iraq. The Bush administration’s wholesale misleading of the U.S. Congress, the American people, and the world about Saddam’s weapons capabilities and existing programs, and about his ties to Al Qaeda, in retrospect substantially strengthens the prewar arguments against the invasion. Now that the war against Saddam’s Iraq itself is over—though the occupation and its aftermath, with its various sectarian insurgencies, are still being played out, at this moment uncertainly, for a democratic, peaceful, and economically prosperous outcome—a retrospective cost-benefit analysis (including the massive death, destruction, and displacement) can seriously begin. But none of this speaks to the principle discussed here, that the international community ought to depose mass murderers.
Before the war, in the United Nations’ and in the broader international legal, political, and journalistic discussions about how to proceed, the international community’s sacrosanct principle against nondefensive wars trumped almost every other consideration. (The Bush administration’s doctrine of preventive (defensive) war was meant to stretch the concept of what constitutes “defensive,” thereby grafting it onto the generally accepted, legitimated reason for making war.) The principle against nondefensive wars trumped any positive and systematic consideration of the principles and pragmatic arguments for forcibly removing Saddam. Whatever conclusions people would have drawn after assessing the competing principles and the prospective cost-benefit calculus, such an open and honest assessment did not take place, certainly not in the major public forums, not in the United Nations, not by political leaders, and not in major media in different countries of which I am aware.
The Iraq war shows how little the international community and the United Nations are willing to consider the most acutely needed military interventions—to free peop
le not from foreign occupiers but from homegrown tyrannical rulers and regimes. The fraternal principles of sovereignty and proscription of nondefensive wars govern an international system that, its self-professions notwithstanding, effectively and as a practical matter sanctions mass murder by providing tyrannical regimes insurance policies for repressing, terrorizing, and murdering their peoples with impunity.
The responsibility to protect movement to sanction intervention against a state’s slaughtering its own country’s people, and the UN Security Council’s recognition of it, makes the international system’s recent stance toward eliminationist politics a little more complicated than this. A discussion, and in some quarters a vigorous one, is now taking place about prevention and intervention. Task forces and groups seek to reform the United Nations. Kofi Annan, with the guilt he bears for the Hutu’s extermination of the Tutsi, not to mention his inaction as UN secretary-general toward other mass eliminations during his tenure, in 2004 promulgated an action plan (hollow as it was, witness the United Nations’ abject failure in Darfur and Democratic Republic of the Congo). The United States established a seemingly serious high-level commission, led by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who has also made an about-face since her infamous statement that intervening in Rwanda would be “folly”), working to produce a comprehensive and effective approach to preventing mass murder. Proposals urge establishing a UN rapid deployment force, which could be a critical aid should an effective one ever exist. We have an International Criminal Court, which, whatever its founders’ good intentions, was also a low-cost way for world leaders to seem to be combating mass murder. But unfortunately the discussions that do occur are riddled domestically in the United States (and to a lesser extent elsewhere) by left-right politics, and internationally with the often paralyzing politics resulting from power’s and symbolism’s calculations. Bad faith and hypocrisy govern discussion about stopping mass murder and other eliminationist onslaughts. Myriad other political considerations unjustifiably take precedence over any serious confrontation of the problem.