{"id":19056,"date":"2016-03-21T12:34:32","date_gmt":"2016-03-21T17:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19056"},"modified":"2016-03-21T12:34:32","modified_gmt":"2016-03-21T17:34:32","slug":"the-fallacy-of-humanitarian-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19056","title":{"rendered":"The Fallacy of \u2018Humanitarian\u2019 War"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Fallacy of \u2018Humanitarian\u2019 War<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Rajan Menon\u2019s new book,\u00a0The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention<\/em>, launches a timely argument against a dominant argument lying behind so much of modern American foreign policy \u2014 \u201chumanitarian intervention\u201d or \u201cliberal interventionism.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are, of course, well familiar with Republican and neocon readiness to go to war, but the reality is that many Democrat Party leaders have been no less seduced into a series of optional foreign military interventions, with increasingly disastrous consequences. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is today one of the leading exponents of the idea, but so are many of the advisors around President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

\"President<\/a><\/p>\n

President Barack Obama talks with U.S.\u00a0Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, a major proponent of \u201chumanitarian\u201d wars, following a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Sept. 12, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Menon offers powerful argumentation skewering the concept of \u201chumanitarian intervention,\u201d demonstrating how it operates often as little more than a subtler form of an imperial agenda. Naked imperial ambitions tend to be recognizable for what they are. But when those global ambitions are cloaked in the liberal language of our \u201cright to protect\u201d oppressed peoples, prevent humanitarian outrages, stop genocide, and to topple noxious dictators, then the true motives behind such operations become harder to recognize.<\/p>\n

What humanitarian could object to such lofty goals? Yet the seductive character of these \u201cliberal interventionist\u201d policies end up serving \u2014 indeed camouflaging \u2014 a broad range of military objectives that rarely help and often harm the ostensible objects of our intervention.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Fallacy of \u2018Humanitarian\u2019 War The new excuse for U.S. imperial wars is \u201chumanitarian\u201d or \u201cliberal\u201d interventionism with Hillary Clinton and other proponents citing noble motives for destroying foreign societies, as ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller discusses. Rajan Menon\u2019s new book,\u00a0The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, launches a timely argument against a dominant argument lying behind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6963,9420,13054,13055,10449,827,862],"class_list":["post-19056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-consortium-news","tag-graham-fuller","tag-humanitarian-war","tag-imperial-wars","tag-intervention","tag-united-states","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19057,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19056\/revisions\/19057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}