Children Are Dying
Aleppo, and Two Illusions About Humanitarian Intervention
I remember this moment. It gets worse, interestingly, each time it happens. Age and fatherhood have made me less able to ignore the meaning of images of small bodies draped over rubble. My three-year-old son lay down in the middle of the fountains at Kings Cross the other day, and he looked perfectly like a picture I’d just seen from Aleppo, except he was going to get up again and that kid wasn’t. But I ran, anyway, and picked him up and carried him, pursued by demons.
I didn’t have children then, of course, but I remember this feeling of rejection of events, of visceral refusal, from the early 90s. I was at university studying Global Security under Gwyn Prins. The Cold War had ended and we still did not properly appreciate what that would mean, or what a narrow time window we had (and missed) in which to establish a new posture of good action among states. The Bosnian War was happening on Western Europe’s doorstep, with all its echoes of the beginning of WWI, and the cry of horror that went up was clear: “man does not do this to man”. That was Wesley Clark, who led the NATO response in the former Yugoslavia, defining terms and seeking to narrow what is now called the Overton Window: the boundary of the acceptable. He was answering a chorus of academic and popular writing which said quite simply that this must not happen. The end of binary geopolitics could not be allowed to usher in ethnic conflicts and sorrows. We would not enter the new millennium fighting yesterday’s wars and yesterday’s hatreds. Enough.
There was one paper in particular — I’ve tried to find it and failed, no doubt because it was published before Google made everything fuzzily indexable, and I can’t remember the authors’ names. It said: we must do everything and anything we can. We should be firing aid — medicine, food, water — into civilian areas with cannons, dropping it from planes, throwing it over the walls of besieged towns with our bare hands if we have to. We must help. We must block the action of the aggressor and heal the sick. Children are dying.
Which they were, as they are today. And indeed as they usually are, because the world is a horror and not a rose garden, and we tend to be selective about which children to mourn, by whether they look like us and how close they are to where we live, and whether they live in that nebulous collection of countries (or regions, or neighbourhoods) we tacitly assert are unfixably awful: “Sorry about that — it’s a postcode lottery.”
The First Iraq War had created a sort of proof-of-concept: a straightforward enough annexation of one state by another had been undone, and if George Bush the Elder had stopped short of unseating Saddam (and thereby sacrificed the lives of thousands to Ba’athist retaliations) that was evidence that even when it didn’t suit us we (the muscular liberal democratic countries) showed the proper respect for international law. Mogadishu blunted the enthusiasm for intervention, but this was Europe, and a little too familiar to be comfortable, with whispers of genocide and the possibility of a small war becoming a big one.
It just about worked. That’s to say that we went in, stopped the war for the time being, and did not start a bigger one. We actually came quite close to starting a very, very big war indeed: in 1999 there was a standoff over Pristina Airport. Russian troops were already in place there when NATO arrived, and Clark — the same man who gave such a stirring speech about preventing appalling events — apparently ordered his troops into conflict with Russian ones over fears of a Russian power grab. In this he was blocked by the UK’s General Mike Jackson —
“I’m not going to start Third World War for you,” General Jackson told the US commander, according to Newsweek. In the hours that followed General Clark’s order, both men sought political backing for their position, but only General Jackson received it.
— and somewhat bizarrely also by one Captain James Blunt, which is reason enough to buy every album he ever releases.
The least complex aspect of Humanitarian Intervention is the legal one, and it’s complex. The UN is charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. It is designed around the idea of the nation state and specifically around imposing a discipline on the dealings between states. Cross-border aggression is very clearly at the heart of its mandate. Internal atrocities are not in the first instance what the Charter deals with; it comes to them as consequence. From a very basic UN perspective, if an internal activity is liable to create a breach of international peace and security, then the UN may be able to do something about it. “Regime change” is not part of the UN conceptual DNA at all — hence it was procedurally simple to go to war in Kuwait, but illegal as well as geopolitically difficult to remove Saddam from power in Iraq at that time. That was also the root of the whole WMD discussion in 2003: if Saddam’s Iraq was trying to develop or still possessed WMD and long range missiles, then it was arguably a threat to international peace and security. If it was just another country where saying the wrong thing or being from the wrong ethnic group could get you tortured and killed, that wasn’t enough to legitimise an invasion.
We have never had an international mechanism for preventing atrocities inside sovereign countries. Even after the Nazis, the world’s ruling powers would not accept such constraint — and of course, in the nuclear age, there’s a limit to how much force one faction can deploy before risking a greater disaster if another faction opposes the choice. Conventional and nuclear politics: the boundaries of the possible.
The likes of Ben Ferencz built the International Criminal Court partly in the hope that it would be adopted and become the germ of a safety belt. Instead, the global community has moved away from the ICC over the last two decades. In 2002, the United States — the world’s largest military power by a considerable margin — formally withdrew its intent to ratify the Rome Statute. Guantánamo and Bagram, and their deniable cousins around the world, blew away the moral authority of Britain and the US — and more than a few other countries — and here we are.
Indelibly seared into my memory are the scenes I witnessed while liberating these centers of death and destruction. Camps like Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau are vividly imprinted in my mind’s eye. Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget-the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned…. I had peered into Hell. (Ferencz, Planethood.)
Ferencz saw his visions of hell in person. We get ours, for the most part, through out screens — in this case, snapshots of a city five hours from London Heathrow. That’s less time than it takes to drive to my parents’ house from where I live. We could go there, together, from London: ten million of us. If we all went together, what would happen? Surely we could just put a stop to it.
The first illusion we have to let go of is that the moment when you stop Aleppo is now. That’s the movie ending, isn’t it? That at this late date, somehow, some consensus is reached and the paratroopers drop from the sky like a divine change of heart after the flood. We all want to believe in superheroes — in fact, this was the inception of Superman and Captain America: the need to believe someone will come and make hell stop. (Yes, I know: Superman was created in 1933 — but he didn’t actually fly until October 1943, when US troops began fighting a land war in the south of mainland Europe.)
But you don’t stop Aleppo now. Why would you stop it only now, when so many people are already dead? You stop it years ago. You stop it by not using Syria as a proxy; by not invading Iraq under cover of 9/11; by having a just and performable plan for after the invasion of Iraq and staying to execute it even if that is costly, unpopular and expensive. You don’t hope that your geopolitical adventuring will set off a firecracker chain of governmental collapses and then just trust that from the rubble will emerge little perfect tolerant secular democracies. Foreign policies have consequences, complex and sometimes ugly. It’s not enough to say you didn’t intend that, you were looking the other way. I tell my children that the point is not that one does not mean to break the cup or the plate; the point is that one constructs one’s choices to avoid breaking anything. Those same ten million who might get on a plane with me now to stop the slaughter: it’ll stop when they — when we — stop it before this point. Everything else is just making yourself feel better.
In short, the reason Humanitarian Intervention is such a nightmare of moral, ethical, political and military problems is that it’s the attempt to put the milk back in the bottle. It is the instinct of a compassionate person seeing a crisis that is too far gone to fix. It is also, as Robin Cook would have told us had he lived, the apology of a nation whose foreign policy has been part of the problem. We could have averted this, or at the very least not played the part in it that we did as nations — but when it wasn’t this horrible, it wasn’t important enough to give serious time to. Certainly not important enough to risk economic or international upset. So what use are tears now? None at all. Mine no more than yours.
Did you know that tears have different structures depending on what inspires them? I wonder what guilty geopolitical indifference looks like.
Which brings us to the second illusion we need to discard: that we’ll do better next time. We won’t. We are already not doing better. Right now, there is a crisis being constructed somewhere, and we are ignoring it. Many crises, actually. But we have too many other things to think of. Syria itself; Brexit; Trump.
Is it a global Climate Change crisis we’re ignoring? Well, that, for certain, and the likely refugee movements which will come with it, and the wars and horrors they will entail. Famine is political.
Is it another political mess? Yes, probably: where else are we hoping to achieve some favourable political outcome with little effort? Where else are we vying for influence over a nation state with Russia? Yemen, perhaps. Afghanistan always comes around. Trump reportedly wants to go back on the US deal with Iran. What about Myanmar or Sudan? I don’t know.
Humanitarian Intervention is a lot like revolution. It is something that happens when everything else has already gone wrong, and it is an attempt to act in a timeline that has no end and no beginning and claim a job is started and finished on a neat and politically expedient schedule. It’s the last worst way to ameliorate something that can’t be fixed anymore.
So yes. God, please, yes. I want to see the miracle. I want to hear that we Went In and justice rained from the skies and mercy and hope were everywhere. I want to hear that Putin, Xi and Obama have come together and said “no” in a voice the world will never forget. Close the damn Overton Window on this much, at least. And that we would move forward from there.
But in case all I’m going to see in my timeline is the burning end of a war I’ve never properly understood and the meltdown of humanity in the city of Aleppo, here’s what I’m telling myself tonight:
Don’t cry for Aleppo. You don’t have the right. If you want to cry, pay your way. Fix the next one before it happens, so that we never know its name.
But I’ll cry anyway, I’m sure.
