Any Excuse to Start a War: Human Rights

Just Another Invasion

What's that over there? It's a bird! It's a plane? Oh, nevermind, it's just another goat farmer who makes his wife wear a head covering. Everyone, gather up your troops and pitchforks, a 3rd world hunting we will go.

♫ Hi, ho, the drones will go, a hunting they will go. ♫

There may be a slight ringing in your ears, as TV talk show pundits pretend to care that a fat middle-aged Arab somewhere is practicing poor leadership skills. This is normal, and will soon pass with the next election.

Daily dose of reality, incoming -

Since the end of the Cold War in the late 20th century, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention was a hallmark of liberal and left opinion on international affairs.
The enemies of human rights were rogue states and left-leaning, democratically elected “autocracies”. In the Balkan war the Kosovo intervention became the model for humanitarian intervention.
Jean Bricmont wrote a powerful polemic against humanitarian intervention, renamed humanitarian imperialism.
Western powers used human rights as a justification for intervention in countries that were vulnerable to their attacks. The criteria for such intervention had become more arbitrary and self-serving,
After the fall of the Soviet Union, human rights, especially the rights associated with liberal democracy, moved into the vacuum left by the absence of a Left alternative.

There was no challenge to capitalism. As a result, the free market and representative democracy were embraced not only by mainstream liberals as they always had been but by large segments of the Western Left.
In the process, the defense of human rights became an occasion for the display of First World arrogance. This defense supplied the rationale for military intervention.
All wars need a legitimating ideology.
Very few on the political left at that time saw the need to be wary of human rights arguments as a defense for humanitarian intervention. They failed to understand that it was doublespeak for western neo-imperialism.
Politicians routinely attached the word “humanitarian” to political or military causes that needed a wider moral justification.
It is a truism today that war propaganda means uses journalists to repeat ‘acceptable’ terminology.
Part of the indoctrination process that primes the population to support a war persuades them of the ‘just cause’.

Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War