UN officials always describe their nightmare scenario as “another Srebrenica”: peacekeepers standing by as civilians are massacred.  Their dream scenario is, of course, for the presence of blue helmets to ward off violence.  Last year’s fighting in the DRC came dangerously close to the nightmare: thinly-spread UN troops remained on their bases as thousands of civilians were forced to flight.  But there were no large-scale massacres (none that made the media anyway), so the UN survived to peacekeep another day.  Now there’s news of a courageous stand by the UN in Darfur:

Peacekeepers have refused to leave a rebel-held town in Darfur, despite warnings from the Sudanese government that an attack is imminent. About 5,000 civilians took shelter at the UN-African Union base after the government said the army was preparing to take Muhajiriya from rebels. A spokesperson for the peacekeeping force – called Unamid – said they would not leave civilians unprotected.

Mediators are talking to both sides to try to prevent more fighting.

The rebel Justice and Equality Movement (Jem) seized Muhajiriya two weeks ago, sparking fierce fighting, including air strikes.

“We are not going to leave while there are thousands of displaced people around our camp,” Unamid spokesman Noureddine Mezni told Reuters news agency. “The Sudanese government should be aware that their actions are endangering civilians and Unamid.”

On Sunday, Khartoum had warned peacekeepers to leave the town. “We are not ordering them around, we are asking them,” said Akuei Bona Malwal, Sudan’s ambassador to the African Union. “It’s sort of like informing them: ‘Something will be happening here,’” the AP news agency reports him as saying.

Meanwhile, Tahir al-Feki, of the Jem rebels, said they were expecting “a large attack.”

“They [government forces] are bringing tanks so they must be preparing to pound the town,” he told Reuters.

This may augur the organization’s redemption – or a catastrophe.

Former US Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman has a piece in the new edition of Foreign Affairs on the Great Crash of 2008, which takes the following as its opening premise:

The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe. Over the medium term, Washington and European governments will have neither the resources nor the economic credibility to play the role in global affairs that they otherwise would have played. These weaknesses will eventually be repaired, but in the interim, they will accelerate trends that are shifting the world’s center of gravity away from the United States.

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As everyone waits to see what Obama plans to do about reforming foreign assistance in the US, back here in Britain change is in the air too: the Conservatives are coming clean about what they really think about DFID, the Department for International Development.

For a while now, there have been whispers that the Tories don’t really buy into the idea of an independent DFID – and that perhaps (gasp!) they might be considering merging it back into the Foreign Office, where it resided until 1997. Well, following last week’s Independent interview with Conservative aid spokesman Andrew Mitchell, we can put that notion to rest: “We are very committed to DFID continuing as an independent department of state”, says he.

So, a ringing endorsement of DFID, then?  Er, not quite.  Here’s the full context:

The shadow International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, said DFID had begun to encroach on the work of other departments and to come “perilously close” to setting its own foreign policy, a role he said should be reserved for the Foreign Office. He said the Foreign Office will be given much greater influence over the use of overseas aid should the Tories win the next election …

“There are times when DFID comes perilously close to pursuing its own foreign policy and that is not right,” Mr Mitchell said. “Foreign policy is decided by the government and the Cabinet, led by the Foreign Office, and DFID should not be an alternative to this. We are very committed to DFID continuing as an independent department of state. But we would make it more of a specialised development department and a little less like an aid agency,” he said.

That left me wondering just which specific instances Mitchell was thinking of in arguing that DFID was coming close to having its own foreign policy.  Iraq? Afghanistan? Climate change? (Thinking that Paul Wolfowitz might not be such a great idea for President of the World Bank?) Sadly, we don’t know.  Earlier today I called his office to ask him to elaborate, but he declined to say more.

This is a shame, on two counts. First, because it’s a cop out.  For the Opposition front bench spokesman on international development to argue that the Department he shadows has come ‘close to pursuing its own foreign policy’ is a serious claim – and one which he ought to be prepared to substantiate.  To fail to do so leaves him open to accusations of offering soundbites rather than reasoned argument.

More fundamentally, though, it’s a shame that Andrew Mitchell wouldn’t elaborate because this debate needs to be had.   (more…)

The rumour that Barack Obama may appoint Hilary Clinton as his top diplomat has filled the Sunday papers. Personally, I think she would be a better Defense Secretary or a nominee to the Supreme Court, although she is bound to do well as Secretary of State too.

If she were given the State Department, she is more likely to follow Colin Powell’s management style -– which a place like Foggy Bottom sorely needs –- than emulate Condi Rice’s neglect of the department. At the same time, she is likely to play a key role in foreign policy, unlike General Powell, as President Obama is compelled to focus on the economy.

It is just that I think Senator Clinton would do better at the Pentagon. She supported the Iraq War, which will make her better at coaxing the military into a draw-down of forces and a shift of focus onto Afghanistan. Though the officers and soldiers will accept the democratic transition from Bush to Obama, a military that has gone to war twice, suffered both casualties and reputationally, and seen itself as the sharp end of U.S foreign policy for eight years will need to be helped to make the switch by someone they trust. With her hawkish views, time on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and work on Unified Action, a large U.S military exercise, the New York senator is well placed to take this role on.

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In early August, Daniel wrote a punchy post entitled “After state-building”.  Looking at American debate about what to do in Afghanistan and Iraq, he concluded “we may be about to witness a paradigmatic shift away from state-building. But what replaces it?”  I’d come to a parallel conclusion for the UN: “the idea of large-scale, multi-dimensional UN missions overseeing countries stumbling out of conflict may have run out of road.”  But I didn’t have an answer about what comes next.

And I still don’t.  But I’ve outlined some initial thoughts in a piece over on the Guardian website, timed to pre-empt the arrival of the UN’s new peacekeeping boss – Alain Le Roy - next Monday.  I run through the current list of short-term UN woes (where are the helicopters?), but then turn to “longer-term, strategic challenges”:

These aren’t about management. They involve adapting to a less American, more multipolar world. The current scale of UN peacekeeping is a product of the last, all-too-American decade. The Bush administration favoured hefty UN missions to stabilise places where it did not want to get bogged down itself: Haiti, Liberia, Darfur.

UN officials, shaken by their impotence over Iraq, have often felt obliged to look “relevant” elsewhere. The result has been a trend towards bigger peace operations with ever-more ambitious, perhaps unrealistic, mandates to rebuild these shattered states. In private, many of the organisation’s experts worry that they cannot fulfil these mandates – almost all would prefer less expansive alternatives with realistic targets.

But the greatest obstacle to effective peace operations is that tensions between the US and its rivals can reduce the UN to paralysis. China has ensured that the UN mission in Darfur cannot push back much (if at all) against pressure from the Sudanese government. Throughout 2008, Russia has stymied efforts to transfer UN peacekeeping responsibilities to the EU in Kosovo. UN observers in Georgia evacuated as Russian troops advanced this month.

If great power tensions increase further, the chances for more UN missions can only decrease. That would be tragic for the vulnerable who rely on the UN from, Port-au-Prince to Kinshasa. It might be dangerous for the great powers too. Without the UN to provide basic security, the odds of small flare-ups escalating into big crises will grow.

So as Alain Le Roy looks beyond his first round of crises, he may decide that his overarching strategic task is to build up a minimal consensus between the US, its allies and its rivals about what UN peacekeeping is for in an age of tensions between them.

Minimal consensus, eh? What might that look like? Stand by for answers sooner or, more probably, later. But I have started to spot quite a few symptoms of a “new minimalism” around the UN of late.  These include its first ever peacekeeping doctrine, which is sharp and thoughtful document but feels conservative relative to earlier UN statements on peacebuilding and statebuilding (there’s textual analysis in my recent International Peacekeeping article, if you like that sort of thing). 

It’s also worth checking out the state of debate on the Responsibility to Protect - Ban Ki-moon’s staff have been rather skillfully guiding discussions, emphasizing “soft” aspects of R2P like conflict prevention over “hard” military interventions.  It’s worth having a close read of this really good report on the subject from the International Peace Institute.  Now, a couple of policy documents do not equal a new ideology, but I think we’re seeing the first signs of a deeper minimalist trend…

In July, I argued that the African Union’s discomfort with the indictment of Sudan’s President Bashir might be a turning-point in the evolution of international law. “African leaders are setting limits on global governance,” said I, because they are sick/scared of being in a “laboratory for international institutions”. Since then, there’s been a pitched battle between the AU and the West over Bashir, with the US abstaining on the resolution extending the UN mandate in Darfur in anger, and the AU condemning the ICC for deciding “to put oil on the fire” yesterday.

But now there’s a new front opening up. Rwanda has just published a detailed report accusing France of complicity in the 1994 genocide, pointing fingers at Mitterand, de Villepin and other former Gallic high-ups. That comes less than a month after Rwanda threatened to pull its troops out of Darfur when a Spanish judge accused their general of involvement in revenge killings after the genocide. French prosecutors have also been going after members of the Rwandan government, up to and including President Paul Kagame, on similar charges – the AU has, unsurprisingly, come out in favor of the Rwandans against this.

Where on earth is this all going? Check out an interview Kagame gave to the FT in early July, when the latest report was in the works. Edited highlights:

Q: So it will name names?

PK: Yes. And hopefully our judges will enjoy indicting some of those people. There is no justice for Europe and justice for Africa that are different. And if they are to be different it cannot just be Europe extending its jurisdiction into other countries Africa if it is to be universal.

Q: So you will launch some indictments on the basis of the report?

PK: I don’t rule that out unless there is progress on these issues.

Q: To an outsider it seems like the political tensions between Rwanda and France are being exercised through the legal system?

PK: Legal systems are systems of government. No one will believe the French when they say it is the judge we are not concerned. Judges don’t make laws they only carry out their duties based on the laws of the country. There are problems relating to that between us and France and Spain. And probably there would be problems between us and any other country that would want to come up with this. First of all there is no basis in terms of fact and no basis in terms of process. It is hugely questionable what is meant by universal jurisdiction when it comes to basing things on their own law and extending it to other territories. One would have expected there to be an international regulatory mechanism, otherwise you will not avoid chaos. Everyone will be indicting everyone else.

That certainly seems to be an option. Of course, there are multitudinous differences between an ICC indictment (as on Darfur) and national courts claiming universal jurisdiction (as on Rwanda). Nonetheless, the convergence of these tensions – specifically the way they all seem to get tangled up in the Darfur peace operation and AU-Western relations – rather disrupts the legal niceties. Does this mean that promoting the rule of law is about to join democratization as an unacceptable foreign policy goal for Western governments? Not quite: the once and (I rather suspect) future Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power argues in the current NYRB that Barack should effectively launch a “Presidency of the Law”:

In his National Security Strategy for 2002, Bush used the words “liberty” eleven times, “freedom” forty-six times, and “dignity” nine times; yet people who live under oppression around the world have seen few benefits from President Bush’s freedom doctrine. Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state under Bush, put it best when he said, “Since 9/11 our principal export to the world has been our fear.” The gulf between America’s rights rhetoric and the abuses carried out against detainees in American custody has been fatal to American credibility. Obama needs to restore that credibility by ending those excesses, and by following through on his pledge to launch a foreign aid initiative rooted in Franklin Roosevelt’s core democratic value: freedom from fear. The United States should invest in a long-term “rule of law” initiative that takes up the burden of helping other countries and international organizations to build workable legal systems in the developing world.

Be careful what you wish for. The task may not be building legal systems, but reconciling them. Or reconciling the various leaders indicted by them…

So, farewell then the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), born after the two countries ended a massive war in 2000 and gently put down by a sorrowful Security Council on Wednesday.  It won’t really be missed, as it wasn’t one of the coolest missions out there.  It was one of the last old school, peacekeeping-equals-troops-stuck-between-two-states-that-had-a-big-war operations left in Africa, an anomaly in the age of peacebuilding-as-changing-the-DNA-of-the-country.

And closing it down was the only option, as the Eritreans had cut off its fuel supplies through their territory last December, forcing a troop withdrawal this February.  The remarkable thing about UNMEE is that it stayed in place so long, as the Eritreans began to bugger about with it in December 2005 and never really let up.  Their excuse was that Ethiopia has refused to comply with international rulings on the delineation of the border with the UN was meant to monitor, so why bother?

Eritrea had a point.  But its behavior towards UNMEE has been an important part of the trend towards greater resistance to UN missions that I blogged about earlier in July.  One UN staffer responded to my post, which argued that Darfur is now a textbook for anti-UN spoilers, by pointing out that “the Eritreans provided the Sudanese with a wonderful case study in how to ‘red team’ a UN mission through de facto withdrawal of consent by removing critical mission enablers [that'd be the helicopters, etc.] and not honoring Status of Forces Agreements”. 

So Eritrea has earned its place in the roster of UN failures (a sign that the UN will probably be back there sooner or later, as in the DR Congo, Central African Republic and maybe Somalia).  The Eritreans are trying to be reassuring that this doesn’t mean war with Ethiopia straight away, but given that they managed to pick a fight with tiny Djibouti recently, I wouldn’t get too relaxed.  Last month, I suggested in an op-ed for ECFR that the way out of this impasse is to enlarge the context by several orders of magnitude, addressing East Africa’ problems en bloc:

There is a need for an international drive for a regional security conference that could hammer out a credible framework for resolving border disputes, guaranteeing peace agreements and rehabilitating rebel groups. The African Union and UN should take a political lead. The U.S. (which sees East Africa as a front against terror) and China (which buys its raw materials) must join in. The EU could play a role in coordinating conditional financial support to back up the deal-making.

All rather grandiose, and observant readers may wonder how this proposal squares with my recent warning against “piling international institution on international institution in Africa”.  My answer would be that such a conference, involving horizontal negotiations between African governments, may be the best Plan B when trying to impose security frameworks from New York stops working.

After Jean-Marie Guéhenno’s comments last week on the perils of Darfur, here’s more plain speaking from a senior peacekeeper – in this case the Darfur mission’s commander, responding to a report criticizing his force…

General Martin Luther Agwai greeted the report’s recognition that the force was short of critical resources, saying that people had had unrealistic expectations. “If really you have an organisation that lacks critical resources and you expect that force to do magic then I think you are not being fair to the force,” he told the BBC.

He said many people had overlooked logistical constraints including delays at Sudan’s single sea port, and the large distance from the port to the area of operation in Darfur across land routes that are unusable during the rainy season. “People thought that things would work faster and better but the reality from the ground does not translate that way.”

But he also rejected concerns that the mission was doomed to fail, saying that it had the backing of the UN and the AU. “I’m not sure the United Nations and the African Union would want to fail because if they do, the whole world would fail. So based on that, I am optimistic.”

I find that optimism genuinely inspiring – analysts like me punch out our prophesies of doom while veteran peacekeepers get on with the actual job.  But I fear that the whole world may be keen to avoid a perception of failure in Darfur, while having no idea of how to achieve (or even define) “success”.  It’s Agwai’s task to provide as much security as he can with the resources he has.  But for how long?

Just when you thought it couldn’t look much bleaker for peacekeeping, a reminder that it can:

Sudan has again warned it cannot guarantee the safety of UN and African Union peacekeepers in Darfur if its president is indicted for war crimes. A presidential adviser said that if the International Criminal Court indicted Omar al-Bashir, Sudan could not be held responsible for the troops’ well-being.

Earlier this month, the ICC prosecutor asked judges in The Hague to issue an arrest warrant for President Bashir. The judges are expected to announce their decision in a few weeks’ time.

The adviser, Bona Malual, told the BBC the government was not expelling the joint UN/AU force, or even threatening the troops.

It was, he said, simply saying how Sudan would view the situation.

The fact that I think UN (and quite a lot of non-UN) peacekeeping is in crisis will not come as news to regular readers.  Indeed, a rapid search of my contributions to this blog over the last seven or eight months reveals that I’m not just the Boy who Cried Wolf about the future of UN ops, but the Boy who cried “Wolf!  W-w-wolf!! Really Big Wolf!!  Actually, it might be a Bear…”.  And so on ad nauseam. 

Earlier this year, I tried to step back and define what this time of troubles consists of, beyond the flow of bad news from Chad, Congo, Darfur, Kosovo, etc., etc.  The results of my musings were published today in that multi-million-selling glossy International Peacekeeping, under the subtle title “Peacekeeping in Crisis: 2006-08″.   For those who don’t want to spend their summer beach-time ploughing through 7,000 words of this stuff, here’s my argument in three parts:

• Yes, this is a real crisis.  There is a school that argues that the UN is just being whiny.  It has managed to field 100,000 peacekeepers worldwide, far beyond its own predictions – and half its problems result from its own bureaucratic inflexibility, not real threats on the ground.  This is wrong.  The UN does have many internal flaws, but it is being asked to go to too many places at once, including places where peacekeeping stands no chance…
• …like Darfur.  I argue, contrary to some optimists (including myself in an earlier, happier incarnation), that Darfur presents the UN with a systemic crisis.  Sudan’s success in blocking the deployment of a serious UN force for two years (and counting) has shown that its pretty easy to bring the UN to a halt, if you have sufficient political will and few morals.  I pick up on David and Alex’s concept of “intentional systems disruption”, which involves bringing down a complex system by exploiting its most vulnerable points – in the case of Darfur, those vulnerabilities have been (i) the UN’s political reliance on winning  consent for its operations, which Sudan has denied and (ii) its shortage of specialized assets like helicopters.  My hunch (shared by a lot of UN officials) is that Darfur is a textbook for how to block a UN operation that will be used elsewhere, weakening the whole system’s credibility…
• …and yep, we see the UN’s vulnerabilities being exploited from the Congo to Afghanistan.  Getting all theoretical, I talk about a paradigmatic crisis for the UN: the idea of large-scale, multi-dimensional UN missions overseeing countries stumbling out of conflict may have run out of road.  That’s not only because nasty governments know how disrupt UN ops, but because the UN model for building liberal, democratic and Western-oriented regimes doesn’t make so much sense in a world defined by a fit of Western self-doubt.

Does that mean it’s all over for the UN?  No.  But, as the article concludes in a slightly bathetic fashion, we have to adjust to an environment in which UN operations can only deliver limited goods: some stability, perhaps, and a limited amount of time to do political deals and maybe get to work on early economic recovery (for guidance on that part, check out the excellent new study by my colleagues at CIC).  But not shiny and sustainable social democratic states.

As Richard’s reported, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, accused of being responsible for the massacre of more than 100.000 Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian War in the late 1990s, has finally been captured by Serb forces after 13 years on the run. 

This is nothing short of a momentous day for international justice and therefore deserves a double blog-entry. ICTY Prosecutor Serge Brammertz, who will prosecute Dr. K – as he was known – summed it up:

This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade. It is also an important day for international justice because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law and that sooner or later all fugitives will be brought to justice.

The date of Radovan Karadžić’s transfer into the Tribunal’s custody will be determined in due course, but the capture comes at a key moment, with ICTY’s sister court, the International Criminal Court, coming under fire for having indicted the Sudanese President Umar al-Bashir for war crimes in Darfur.

As readers of the blog will know, only a few weeks ago I voiced concerns about ICTY, pointing out that two key fugitives – Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic – were on the loose. Now I feel a lot better.

For the Serbian goverment too, this is crucial moment allowing President Boris Tadic to begin his country’s road towards European integration that was cruelly stopped when Prime Minister Zoran Dindic was killed.

It’s ten days since seven UN troops were killed in Darfur – today, one more has been killed.  In between, there have been a series of events that raise big questions about the UN’s future in Africa.  First, there was the defeat of the US-UK effort to slap arms sanctions on Zimbabwe in the Security Council – notable less for China and Russia’s vetoes than the African Council members’ (pace Burkina Faso) rejection of the resolution.  Then there was the ICC decision to charge Sudan’s President Bashir with genocide in Darfur - again, the most striking part of the international response has been the level of African opposition, with the AU’s “Panel of the Wise” announcing the charges could “lead to a lot of danger”.

The convergence of these events may mark a turning-point in how Africa fits into the international system.  African leaders are setting limits on global governance. 

For most of the last decade, the continent has been a laboratory for international institutions: it has hosted the bulk of UN peacekeepers; been the testing-ground of the Millennium Development Goals (and so the G8′s efforts to hang with Bono); and was the ICC’s focus even before the Bashir indictment.  The AU has emerged as everyone’s favorite new regional institution, not least for taking on Darfur.

For quite a few commentators, myself included, it has been almost axiomatic over the last few years that better international institutions mean a better Africa.  But we mostly missed the politics of institution-building: the interests and ideologies of African governments, and the limits on their desire to be subsumed into supranational organizations (hey there, EU specialists, does this ring a bell with you?).  There’s been lots of talk of “African ownership” over all this institution-building, but it’s all too often hollow.  In May, I was at a seminar in Berlin at which the African participants gave the phrase a kicking (check out the event report).

It was never going to be possible to keep on piling international institution on international institution in Africa.  I wrote a short piece in October 2006 arguing that the UN might find itself “Out of Africa” sooner than expected -  that looked silly as the Security Council went on to mandate blue helmets for Darfur, and mused about sending them to Somalia.  But I may not have been so wrong.  It’s too early to know whether July 2008 is a turning-point or a blip in international engagement (or interference, depending on your perspective) in Africa.  But it should be the moment we start thinking what “African ownership” really means.

The sense of chaos surrounding the EU Force in Chad grows by the day. After rebel groups praised an Irish contingent’s refusal to get involved in fighting and the government condemned their passivity, Javier Solana intervened yesterday to say that the peacekeepers are doing a “fantastic job” and can’t be blamed for anything. Right on cue, the spokesperson for the UN Refugees agency (UNHCR) in Chad blamed the EU Force (Eufor) for failing to protect its staff – which coincides with the government version of events. Here’s the UNHCR account of what happened:

Irish troops were fired at on Saturday while observing clashes between the Chadian army and 800 heavily-armed rebels just outside the eastern Chad town of Goz Beida, about three miles from where 430 Irish troops are based. The Irish fired warning shots. They then took up a defensive position around the refugee camps and internally displaced persons (IDPs) camps they are responsible for protecting.

The rebels advanced into Goz Beida and looted a UNHCR compound and house. Items were stolen including satellite telephones and fuel. Some of the staff were threatened at gunpoint and shots were discharged, destroying computers. UNHCR spokesperson Annette Rehrl said the UNHCR staff were left traumatised.

“The Irish troops in Goz Beida were not able to protect [UN staff] or prevent the looting because they simply were not there. They are here to protect us but they didn’t protect anything. There was shooting going on and they did not appear. Their mandate is to protect refugees, displaced persons and humanitarian staff, including the UN.” The UNHCR has now suspended its activities in eastern Chad due to the deteriorating security situation.

Well, that was yesterday. But here’s news just in from Irish broadcaster RTE:

Speaking on RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland, Irish Defence Minister Willie O’Dea said the Defence Forces had acted when they were informed of the incident and moved more than 200 humanitarian staff to their base, Camp Ciara. He said he had received thanks from UN staff on the ground and, this morning, also received an apology for the criticism that had been levelled at the Defence Forces from the UNHCR spokeswoman.

So that’s all good, although Mr. O’Dea has had to cancel a tour of the refugee camps due to the security situation. Whatever the truth of this episode, it demonstrates the gaps that still exist between peacekeepers and humanitarians in crisis-spots – gaps that the UN has tried to address through its “integrated missions” concept, but are bound to be exacerbated when you add other organizations like the EU to the mix. But as trenchant Africa expert Alex de Waal points out to the BBC, this isn’t a situation that can be resolved through better doctrine. With Chad accusing Sudan of assisting the rebels, he’s calling this an “international war”:

“The European Union force in Chad has been caught in a bit of a trap – most of the troop contributing countries do not want to get involved in a shooting war; they don’t want to be partisan. Trying to keep the peace when there’s no peace to keep is actually an impossible mandate, so the European Union troops have essentially decided to keep their heads down and stay out of the war as it begins to unfold.”

The troops may be keeping their heads down, but many European politicians – caught up with the “crisis” of the Lisbon Treaty – will want to bury their heads in the sand on this one. The EU is in a war and it doesn’t even know it yet.

Last week, I gave a talk at the Defence Academy on the new public diplomacy, focusing in particular on its implications for Afghanistan.

The full text is after the jump or read it as a pdf.

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Simon Jenkins has a good piece in the Sunday Times about the decreasing willingness to contemplate humanitarian intervention.  The humanitarian creed, he says:

can no longer override considerations of state sovereignty and the natural caution of diplomats and generals.

While opposing every intervention known to man, Jenkins goes on to lament:

This noble cause has vanished in the wind. Almost before it is put to the test it is gone. The failure to intervene in Darfur and the deference shown to the dictators of Burma and Zimbabwe indicate a pendulum swinging fast in the other direction.

It is not hard to see why the negativity. The West has failed to intervene in Burma and ships are now being forced to return after waiting in vain. The EU military mission in Chad was originally conceived by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner as a repeat of the U.S safe zone created in the Kurdish areas in Iraq. But instead of a mandate to go into Sudan, it has had to sit on the Chadian side of the border. Problems, of course, plague missions in Iraq and Afghanistan while Kosovo refuses to solve itself.

But Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan argued against this pessimism in the Washington Post last year.

America has frequently used force on behalf of principles and tangible interests, and that is not likely to change.

The duo behind the League of Democracies, remind readers that the U.S has intervened between 1989 and 2001 with significant military force on eight occasions — once every 18 months. This interventionism, they go on, has been bipartisan — four interventions were launched by Republican administrations, four by Democratic administrations. The implication: interventionism is here to stay. It is as much a part of international politics as state sovereignty.

I have to say I agree with Daalder and Kagan. The West is only temporarily numbed by recent failures, as well as being logistically constrained because of troop overstretch. True, in Europe few governments seem willing to spend the necessary funds on the required military and civilian capability. True, the U.S electorate is in a particularly sour mood, to the extent that more Europeans now support democracy-promotion than Americans.

But this will pass. And once a new U.S president begins a draw-down in Iraq – a policy I expect from both Senators McCain and Obama – and surge in Afghanistan – again something to expect form both – the balance of sentiment will be re-calibrated in favour of intervention. 

However, we need a re-definition of interventionism, a Chicago speech for the new post-Iraq millennium. And David Milliband is the man to give it, in my view.