R2P and Bernie Sanders' Progressives

[ProgressiveCentrist]

Last edited Thu Feb 4, 2016, 03:23 AM - Edit history (1)

I have a problem.
I keep reading that Libya has become a litmus test for Bernie progressives.

I see all over that Clinton supported the "forced regime change"in Libya as if that makes her a war monger and/or not to be trust with the power of the military.

This is terribly confusing.

Responsibility to protect gained ground after ghastly mass killings in the late 20th century, including massacres by the Khmers Rouges in Cambodia in the 1970s; the use of chemical weapons in Iraq in 1988; and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. In 1999 NATO unleashed an air war, without a UN blessing, to stop a Serbian campaign in the province of Kosovo. It argued that the need to protect civilians was an overwhelming moral imperative. The UN gave a sort of retrospective blessing by endorsing an international tutelage for the territory, led by Bernard Kouchner, a French pioneer of humanitarian intervention.

R2P is a worldwide progressive initiative.

The RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT ("RtoP" or "R2P&quot is a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community’s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

The INTERNATIONAL COALITION FOR THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT (ICRtoP) brings together NGOs from all regions of the world to strengthen normative consensus for RtoP, further the understanding of the norm, push for strengthened capacities to prevent and halt genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and mobilize NGOs to push for action to save lives in RtoP country-specific situations.

Libya

So much for the theory. What about the practice? Colonel Qaddafi provided an all-but-unique test. Regional leaders loathed him and readily dumped him. The Arab League's support for the intervention stopped Russia and China wielding their vetoes. And the concentration of the rebels in the east, combined with flat desert terrain, at first made the regime's forces easy bombing targets. “The stars were well and truly aligned in the Libya case,” says Mr Evans. “All the criteria were satisfied.”

I get why RT and those paid by Moscow would like to diminish the efforts of progressive groups around the world, I also get that good plans fail at first contact with the enemy, but I don't understand Sanders' progressives dismissal of global progressive efforts so blithely.

Bernie claimed he was an objector during Vietnam. He later claimed he was not honest in his efforts to avoid the war when he claimed he was opposed to all war. Without prejudice it was an immoral war.

Here's the confusing part. As a progressive who supports war, how does he denigrate the efforts of progressive organizations when he claims no real progressive supported the Libya intervention?

I see a few option that would allow for such casual dismissal of progressive policy.

1. Sympathizes with the Russian and Chinese position
2. Pacifists are trying to redefine progressivism
3. Invested in seeing progressive policy is never implemented or improved.

I'm open to 4,5,or 6

[TubbersUK]

1. And how are things in Libya now ? n/t

[newthinking]

2. In theory: But in practice abuse occurs due to "fog of war", propaganda, interests

NeoCons and other less then savory groups have attached themselves and infiltrated this "movement" and it is being abused.

Medicine Sans Frontiers (Doctors without borders) explains this problem on their web site. They do not support "The responsibility to protect" .

Not In Our Name: Why MSF Does Not Support the "Responsibility to Protect"

But apart from operational constraints, there is a more philosophical reason for refusing the call to arms: if the purpose of humanitarian action is to limit the devastation of war, it cannot be used as a justification for new wars. This is what the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) felt necessary to state in 1994, after the Security Council had adopted two resolutions authorizing the use of force in Somalia to “secure conditions for humanitarian relief operations.”19 The ICRC emphasized that it was under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter and not under IHL that the Security Council had authorized the use of force. Even though the Council was acting with the intention of combating violations of IHL (in this instance, obstacles to delivering humanitarian aid), it could not claim to act in the name of humanitarian law: “Because international humanitarian law starts from the premise that any armed conflict entails human suffering, and undertakes to develop a set of rules designed precisely to alleviate this suffering. It would be logically and legally indefensible to conclude that this same law authorized the use of armed force, including in extreme cases.”20 In other words, “shoot to feed” or “shoot to heal” is incompatible with humanitarian action. MSF does not want to become a new party to a conflict where its own military strategy would be set by public health imperatives. Even if we are not pacifists, we are non-violent.

[font size = 3]In our view, the aim of humanitarian action is to “civilize wars” [/font]through the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. It is not to conduct “wars of civilization” that split the world into civilized people and barbarians, thus paving the way to unbridled violence. It must be said that the founding fathers of the ICRC and other modern originators of humanitarian practices took a different view of this. Many of them believed that the “primitive peoples” should be civilized (including by force) before they could take advantage of the protection of IHL. At the end of the nineteenth century, Gustave Moynier, the co-founder of the Red Cross and the instigator of the first Geneva Conventions, judged the progress in IHL to be inaccessible to “savage tribes that practise cannibalism, engage excessively in war and give in to their brutal instincts without a second thought, while the civilized nations, which seek to humanize it, confess even in so doing that not everything that happens is lawful.”21 These perceptions would continue until well after the Second World War, as illustrated by the ICRC’s position in the face of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya (1952-59).22 For a long time, the committee refused to concern itself with the fate of the 80,000 people interned by the British authorities on the grounds that the Mau Mau detainees were too “primitive” to understand “the notions of charity and solidarity on which the Red Cross is based.” “Humanitarian notions…are for the moment inaccessible to the naturally cruel black masses,” explained the ICRC delegate for Equatorial Africa in 1962.23

By attempting to subject the world to its own standard of humanity, armed universalism is as much a process of inclusion as exclusion, driving whatever resists it beyond the boundaries of what is human. It conceals a tyrannical principle of integration: the inevitable eradication of anything that obeys other standards and resists inclusion. Alexis de Tocqueville’s remarks on the fate of Native Americans in the American Revolution reveal this quite clearly, as philosopher Alain Brossat remarks.27 Described by the Declaration of Independence as “the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions,” Native Americans were seen as foreign to democratic expansion. Failing to wage war humanely and to be willing to be absorbed into the democratic system, they were annihilated using the methods they themselves were criticized for. “It all seems as though the inclusive movement [of democratic universalism] at the same time set a limit, a frontier, a line at which the drive for inclusiveness turned back in on itself: beyond that boundary, we do not include any more; we exclude,” remarks Brossat.28 While in the West, the universalism of human rights is associated with the struggle for democracy and political freedoms, it also harks back, in the former colonies, to the experience of domination and exploitation. This is something that does not seem to be of concern to the co-president of the ICISS, Gareth Evans. In his seminal work on R2P, Evans, an indefatigable advocate of the R2P, seems to find it flattering to be compared to Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, coming with the “Bible and the sword.”29

Dividing humanity into those who are included and those who are excluded is certainly not the prerogative of liberal imperialism — although it may provide an opportunity for it to assert itself radically. Peacekeeping policies and the development of any kind of political order inevitably produce their own share of victims and people who are excluded: the “residue” that will suffer a slow or violent death. The people of Sierra Leone and Liberia who were sacrificed for the reestablishment of peace in Sierra Leone, as well as the “collateral victims” of operations committed “to protect the Afghan population” are clear examples of the old adage, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” But in our view, humanitarian assistance is precisely about “the revolt of the eggs.”30 Our relief efforts are targeted at those who form the “silent residue of politics,”31 the men and women whose very existence is called into question by the decisions of the political and military powers.

[UglyGreed]

4. US Weapons Have a Nasty Habit of Going AWOL

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/pentagon-arms-lost-missing-yemen

[MisterP]

8. she hired proto-IS against Qaddafi; what ever did happen to those Viagra Brigades?