The 'Blair Doctrine' and After: Five Years of Humanitarian Intervention

8/14/2019 The 'Blair Doctrine' and After: Five Years of Humanitarian Intervention

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Published on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)

The 'Blair doctrine' and after: five years of humanitarianintervention

By Chris Abbott, John Sloboda,

Created 2004-04-21 23:00

The notion that nations should go to war, not for territorial interests, but in order to save the lives

of peoples threatened by humanitarian disaster, is potentially a noble and inspiring concept.

Five years ago in Chicago on 22 April 1999, in the midst of the Kosovo war British prime

minister Tony Blair offered the international community a set of criteria for deciding when and

how to intervene militarily in the affairs of another country where the immediate threat was not tothe outside world, but to a domestic population [1]. These proposals, originally formulated as the

doctrine of the international community, have become known simply as the Blair doctrine.

Humanitarian considerations have been invoked as a more or less direct justification for every

major United Kingdom military engagement since 1999. Three broad questions arise. First, is

the Blair doctrine coherent and defensible [2]? Has it stimulated new thinking in the

international community, and is consensus emerging? Second, to what extent can actual

interventions such as those in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq be understood as successful

applications of the Blair doctrine? Third, what lessons need to be learned for the future? Can

nations (individually or in coalitions) learn how to bring lasting benefits to the people on whose

behalf they claim to intervene?

How does the Bush doctrine compare to the Blair doctrine? Read and respond [3] to the

analysis on openDemocracy

By raising these questions on behalf of Oxford Research Group [4] (as part of a recently

launched one-year project), we hope to add impetus to a focused dialogue on these issues,

involving both civil society practitioners and key decision-makers. This article sets out some of

the background issues within which these questions must be framed.

What is the Blair doctrine?

In his celebrated April 1999 speech [5], to the Chicago Economic Club, Tony Blair outlined a

doctrine of the international community based on the idea of a just war: a war based not on

any territorial ambitions but on halting or preventing humanitarian disasters such as genocide or

ethnic cleansing. In helping to decide when and where to intervene, he proposed that five major

questions should be asked as illustrating the kind of issues that should be taken into account

in decision-making, rather than as absolute tests:

1. Are we sure of our case?

2. Have we exhausted all diplomatic options?3. Are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake?

4. Are we prepared for the long term?

5. Do we have national interests involved?

Where the answer to all five questions is yes then there is a strong case for intervention.

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Developing the doctrine: the responsibility to protect

United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan raised the dilemmas of humanitarian intervention

in his speeches to the UN General Assembly in 1999 and 2000. He asked the international

community to try to find a new consensus on how to approach these issues and to forge unity

around the basic principles and process involved.

In response to this challenge, the Canadian government established the InternationalCommission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in September 2000 [6]. The ICISS

published their findings in a December 2001 report entitled The Responsibility to Protect. This

report [7] develops the idea ofsovereignty as responsibilityand concludes that where a

population is suffering serious harm (e.g. mass murder or starvation), and the state in question

is unwilling or unable to avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international

responsibility to protect. This responsibility to protect comprises three specific responsibilities:

1. The responsibility to prevent (this being the most important)

2. The responsibility to react

3. The responsibility to rebuild

When considering military intervention for human protection purposes, four precautionary

measures are identified:

1. Right intention

2. Last resort

3. Proportional means

4. Reasonable prospects

The ICISS concludes that the most appropriate body to authorise such intervention is the United

Nations Security Council, and that the task is to make the Security Council work better than it

has in the past. It recommends that the General Assembly adopts a draft declaratory resolution

embodying the basic principles of the responsibility to protect, and that the Security Council

should seek to reach an agreement on a set of guidelines embracing the principles laid out inthe report.

The ICISS report goes considerably deeper than Blairs Chicago speech, and it demands far

more critical attention and analysis than it has received. Unfortunately, its publication was

almost completely overshadowed by the aftermath of 9/11. As a result its contents have been

barely reported in the establishment media, and it has not entered the public consciousness.

Despite the fact that the report is regularly commended to the UN General Assembly (most

recently in September 2003 by the outgoing Canadian prime minister, Jean Chrtien), the UN

has not formally adopted its recommendations.

Recent humanitarian interventions: the record

Kosovo

The Nato intervention in Kosovo [8] in March 1999 was justified explicitly on humanitarian

grounds, as designed to prevent ethnic cleansing and to protect the Kosovar Albanians who

formed the large majority of the population of the Serb-ruled province. It is perhaps the purest

example of the Blair doctrine at work. The intervention was successful in forcing the Serbian

military out of Kosovo, and ending the repression and killing of Kosovar Albanians by Serbs [9].

However, the most recent communal violence in Kosovo [10] in which nineteen people werekilled and 3,000 Serb civilians forcibly removed from their remaining centres of settlement

underline how far from stability the territory [11] still is. Many opponents of the intervention

foresaw the multiple dangers that might result from supporting one side in what had many of the

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characteristics of a civil war. In backing the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Nato gave legitimacy

and power to an organisation that has continued to promote anti-Serb violence in the region.

After 9/11, Kosovo almost totally disappeared from public view in the west. The coordinated

attacks by Albanians on Kosovar Serbs in March 2004 were needed to refocus western

attention on the territorys enormous unresolved post-conflict problems. What is clear from

Kosovo is that a very considerable presence of both military and civilian personnel under the

aegis of the UN was not able to address key issues that could have moved Kosovo and theKosovars decisively forward. Britain, which was the driving force for this intervention, bears a

heavier responsibility than any other nation for insisting that the international community

concentrate on devising and promoting truly workable solutions for the region.

Afghanistan

The Afghanistan intervention was not a humanitarian intervention, but a traditionally justified

defensive war to destroy [12] those who caused 9/11. On this basis the war received UN

Security Council approval. However, a secondary reason cited in favour of the war was to bring

humanitarian benefits to the people of a failed state. As it turned out, although the Taliban was

routed, al-Qaida was not dealt a decisive blow. Moreover, superficial social changes were

largely confined to the capital, Kabul; elsewhere, the iron grip of competing warlords has meant

that the life of the average Afghan remains as insecure as it was under the Taliban [13].

The west has largely walked away. Few countries have honoured their financial commitments to

the rebuilding of Afghanistan. Solutions that are in the true interests of the Afghan people are

even further away than they are in Kosovo. Yet the international community, headed by the

United States, has a grave responsibility that must be fulfilled [14].

Iraq

The Iraq war had no precedent in international law [15]. It was not a defensive war in response

to attack, nor was it fought to avert imminent genocide or ethnic cleansing. Yet almost all post-

hoc justifications of the war emanating from Washington and London have implicitly or explicitly

cited the humanitarian benefits that were said to derive from the removal of a tyrannical dictator

and the promise of restoration of democracy [16].

ForopenDemocracys extensive coverage of Iraq from Iraqis of two generations in dialogue

to Jo Wildings vivid report from inside Fallujah under siege see our section Iraq the war

and after [17]

In a speech [18] made in his Sedgefield constituency in the north-east of England on 5 March

2004, Tony Blair intimately linked the responsibility of humanitarian intervention to the war on

terror. Of global terrorism and its interaction with the proliferation of weapons of mass

destruction, he said:

Containment will not work The terrorists have no intention of being contained.

Emphatically I am not saying that every situation leads to military action. But we surely

have a right to prevent the threat materialising; and we surely have a responsibility to

act when a nations people are subjected to a regime such as Saddams.

It is crucial to recognise how different this is from the 1999 speech [19]. It is hard to see howanything in the 1999 speech (or in the ICISS recommendations) would sanction the removal by

force of a dictator such as Saddam Hussein. Similarly, a war fought to forestall potential future

terrorist attacks has only the remotest conceptual link to the humanitarian principle, given that

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there is no way of guaranteeing that civilian lives lost in such a war would be fewer than those

resulting from terrorist attacks [20]. Indeed, contemporary evidence points in the other direction.

Some 3,500 civilian deaths have been caused since 9/11 by paramilitary forces hostile to the

US. In the same period, the US and its allies have been responsible for over 14,000 civilian

deaths in Iraq [21] and Afghanistan.

Where next?

Kosovo is a flawed application of the Blair doctrine; Afghanistan and Iraq [22] are clear

violations of it. But in any case, the new vision outlined by Tony Blair in his 2004 Sedgefield

speech has little connection to the idealistic vision of 1999.

openDemocracy writers have brilliantly dissected the political character of Britains prime

minister. See David Marquand, Tony Blair and Iraq: a public tragedy [22] (February 2004);

Anthony Barnett, Tony Blair and Katharine Gun: the hollow centre [22] (February 2004); and

Godfrey Hodgson, A comedy of errors: Tony Blair and America [22] (April 2004)

Both speeches represent an inadequate answer to a question that nevertheless remains urgent

and relevant: can a universally acceptable humanitarian doctrine still be articulated and

defended by the international community? We believe that for the sake of humanity, the answer

has to be yes. But this will require civil society doing more to hold governments to account, and

building transparency and trust into the processes that lead to a decision to go to war. It will

require a return to and further development of the concepts of the ICISS report on The

Responsibility to Protect.

For instance, there is a need to develop transparent and universally agreed methods of

assessing the costs and benefits of interventions. Civilian deaths are one key cost that

interventionist governments have systematically refused to assess.

We need methods of gaining the confidence of civil society in the assessment of alternatives to

war. The understanding of intervention should be widened to include methods of conflict

prevention and resolution other than the use of military force. It is too easy for heads of state to

assert that all diplomatic avenues have been explored. History shows that this is rarely the

case. In both the Kosovo and the Iraq wars, it later emerged that the proponents of war rejected

potentially hopeful back-channel diplomatic approaches.

Finally, we need methods of ensuring that full post-intervention reconstruction plans are agreed

and properly costed prior to any intervention, and that robust and punitive measures are

prepared to deal with parties to the intervention that renege on their promises after the event. AsKofi Annan wrote in the Economist(18 September 1999 [23]): When fighting stops the

international commitment to peace must be as strong as was the commitment to war.

If a progressive international consensus on humanitarian intervention is to be achieved,

governments must elaborate a rigorous, consistent and legitimate doctrine of the international

community.

Source URL:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/article_1857.jsp

Links:[1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international/jan-june99/blair_doctrine4-23.html

target=_blank

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,937550,00.html target=_blank

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[3] http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/debate-3-98.jsp target=_blank

[4] http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/ target=_blank

[5] http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1297.asp target=_blank

[6] http://web.idrc.ca/en/ev-41175-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html target=_blank

[7] http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/iciss-ciise/report-en.asp target=_blank

[8] http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/europe/kosovo_pol98.jpg target=_blank

[9] http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/097255.htm target=_blank

[10] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3588217.stm target=_blank[11] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,1174515,00.html target=_blank

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._invasion_of_Afghanistan target=_blank

[13] http://www.nybooks.com/authors/8939 target=_blank

[14] http://www.cic.nyu.edu/pdf/Building.pdf target=_blank

[15] http://www.robincmiller.com/ir-legal.htm target=_blank

[16] http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefings/iraqyearone.htm

target=_blank

[17] http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/debate-2-95.jsp target=_blank

[18] http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page5470.asp target=_blank

[19] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3539125.stm target=_blank[20] http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm target=_blank

[21] http://www.iraqbodycount.net/editorial_feb0704.htm target=_blank

[22] http://hrw.org/wr2k4/_Toc58744952 target=_blank

[23] http://www.un.org/News/ossg/sg/stories/kaecon.html target=_blank

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The 'Blair Doctrine' and After: Five Years of Humanitarian Intervention

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