It takes a great deal of courage and lucidity to admit that one's deepest-held convictions just don't work. Former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour was one of the main architects of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine that has shaped Western policies in recent years. She was chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Now, in a series of speeches and a recent interview with The Globe's Doug Saunders, she looks back at the result of these experiences and realizes that what appeared to be laudable humanitarian impulses have actually led to "confusion or chaos."
One could go further and conclude that initiatives like the International Criminal Court and the R2P theory have actually been tragically counterproductive. The international court almost exclusively pits a tribunal based on Western legal values against Third World war criminals. But "the initiation and unfolding of criminal prosecution," Ms. Arbour now concedes, "can complicate if not impede peace processes." One wonders whether the slower, reconciliatory approach used in countries such as Rwanda and South Africa isn't preferable.
What is certain is that the West has failed in its efforts to force its notion of human rights on countries that have yet to develop them internally, Ms. Arbour told Mr. Saunders. As for the R2P doctrine, a theory that Ms. Arbour once promoted and that was later adopted by the UN Security Council, she concludes that it is a failure.
The 2011 North Atlantic Treaty Organization military intervention in Libya is the most obvious case in point. The bombing – a response to a verbal threat uttered by dictator Moammar Gadhafi against rebels based in Benghazi – resulted in the collapse of the country, which has become a failed state and a launching ground for terrorist organizations.
R2P was based on ideas espoused by the likes of Samantha Power, an academic who became U.S. ambassador to the UN, who was among those outraged by how the free world looked the other way during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Thus was born the idea that the duty to prevent crimes against humanity should take precedence over state sovereignty. The humanitarian left embraced it, conveniently overlooking that George W. Bush's infamous invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on exactly the same idea.
The Bushites were primarily motivated by the fiction that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but another argument was the necessity of protecting the Kurds from further massacres. The exact same justification was used by French president Nicolas Sarkozy when he quixotically decided to "save" the Benghazi rebels from Moammar Gadhafi's wrath, convincing other members of NATO, including the United States and Canada, to overthrow a regime that had posed no threat for a decade.
The invasion, coupled with U.S. insistence on "democratic" Iraqi elections, paved the road for the rise of the Islamic State – born partly from the frustrations of a Sunni minority excluded from the resulting Shia-led government, in a culture traditionally divided by religious clans unaccustomed to majority rule and political compromise.
Ms. Arbour isn't questioning the universality of values, such as women's equality and other human rights, but she now argues in favour of more "political empathy" – the need "to understand what an issue looks like from an opponent's point of view." Wise advice indeed.
Lysiane Gagnon