First Do No Harm: Do Air Raids Protect Civilians?

The 3,000th air raid against Islamist forces in Iraq and Syria was carried out just before Easter 2015.¹ By the end of the year, the figure is likely to rise close to 5,000. Meanwhile, experts have lost count of the number of people Syria's autocratic rulers have murdered and Islamic State (IS) militants have beheaded. At the time of this writing (September 2015), over 11 million people had escaped the war as either internally displaced people or refugees, according to the UN High Commission on Refugees.² A recent revelation by one of world's legendary peace brokers, Finnish President (1992-2000) and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Martti Ahtisaari, suggests that perhaps all this could have been avoided by diplomacy!³

Before IS had started its offensive and the West was still only fighting the tyrannical rule of President Bashar al-Assad, President Ahtisaari approached the Russian UN ambassador. At the time, Russian policies in support of Syria's dictator were considered inimical to prospects for democracy in the country. According to Ahtisaari in an interview with The Guardian, Ambassador Vitaly Churkin informed him that Russia would not object to a solution that persuaded Assad to resign. Ahtisaari informed the other permanent members of the Security Council of this new opening, but to his surprise and dismay, he could not make his voice heard.⁴ According to Foreign Policy, however, it was Russia itself that derailed a fragile consensus by attaching further conditions to the purge of Assad.⁵

According to Ahtisaari, Churkin's demands were worth studying. Russia agreed to persuade Assad to step down, provided that everything took place in a dignified manner and the West did not arm its favorite rebels to ensure their succession.⁶ However, the voices of the militant opposition to Assad drowned out the voice of diplomacy. As in Libya, where the Western coalition refused to react to Muammar Qadhafi's promise to step down provided that he was allowed to remain a symbolic figurehead — "like the Queen of England"⁷ — in Syria, too, it was decided that a dictator with a brutal human-rights record did not deserve a dignified exit. More than a quarter of a million conflict fatalities later, after the collapse of the Syrian state and the rise of brutal fanaticism, it is possible to ask whether it might have been wiser to try the diplomatic solution that seemed within reach in early 2012.

DID ASSAD DESERVE FACE-SAVING?

There is a "cosmopolitan" argument against allowing Assad the dignified exit that the Russians have suggested. Mary Kaldor, in her seminal book New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, suggests that horrific atrocities such as the ones IS and Assad have committed in Syria must be dealt with by the enforcement of global humanitarian norms of civility rather than negotiation.⁸ One does not negotiate with burglars or murderers; they are captured, tried, convicted and punished. It should have been clear to Assad that it is not acceptable for a president to use chemical weapons against his subjects. According to Kaldor, cosmopolitan law enforcement — soldiering and policing — is the solution to such senseless violence: "The analysis of new wars suggests that what is needed is not peacekeeping but enforcement of cosmopolitan norms, i.e., enforcement of international humanitarian and human rights law."⁹ The practice of enforcement of prevailing cosmopolitan norms constitutes the existence of a global order where these norms prevail. The practice of negotiating disputes that are ruled by these norms constitutes a reality where common norms do not regulate global interaction. This is why, according to this reasoning, Assad did not deserve face-saving.

Political-realist critics, however, suggest that such a normative global order is a fantasy, and living in such a fantasy could be dangerous. Whether it is realistic to act as if there were a global humanitarian order depends on four premises:

1. There are common values that can be enforced.

2. There is an agreement on how to implement them.

3. There are legitimate actors to enforce such values and principles, which could be applied to each situation in a commonly accepted manner.

4. There is a need for a full normative foundation before we can enforce basic norms.

GLOBAL NORMS AND CONSENSUS

Do rogue states resist consensus simply to prevent the regulation of shady interactions that benefit opportunistic leaders? In March 2014, when Russia rocked the prospects for a UN Security Council authorization of anti-Assad military intervention in Syria, it was speculated that Russian leaders wanted to be able to sell weapons to Assad and avoid becoming the next autocrats pushed out by the democratic international powers.¹⁰ China, perhaps, opposed sanctions against Assad because its sense of responsibility for global governance had not yet awakened, as former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick has suggested.¹¹

All this may be partly true. Yet, the people we try to protect by enforcing global humanitarian norms also tend to resist our protection. This, at least, should be seen as an indication that we have real problems with the acceptance of the norms we consider global. In Iraq, Western protection was always unpopular. In 2008, a U.S. Defense Department poll suggested that only 22 percent of Iraqis felt the United States was contributing to security in their country, while only 3 percent felt the U.S. security role in their neighborhood was legitimate.¹² A British Ministry of Defence poll pointed in the same direction. Up to 82 percent of Iraqis were strongly opposed to the presence of coalition forces in their country, while less than 1 percent believed that coalition forces were good for their security. Problems in Afghanistan testify to the same problem.¹³ Even the main domestic beneficiaries of the Western presence — soldiers that Western forces had selected to train to take control over the country — tended to turn against their trainers. The unpopularity of the U.S. drone program to protect civilians against terror speaks loud and clear: the people we protect by enforcing humanitarian law against tyrants and terrorists do not share the normative foundations of our protection.

In Syria, Assad's regime is obviously unpopular. There is also little doubt about the need for the Syrian people to be protected from both their tyrant and from IS. However, the radicalization of the anti-Assad resistance, the appeal of the brutal Islamic State, and the weakness of the pro-Western resistance seem to suggest that the enforcement of our Western interpretation of globally accepted humanitarian norms is problematic. According to interviews conducted by a Guardian journalist, the appeal of IS lies not so much in what this violent organization stands for as in its resistance to the West.¹⁴ Even if Russia and China have ulterior motives in their opposition to the Western enforcement of common humanitarian norms, surely the people we protect with these norms should share them with us. Yet, this is clearly not the case in the Middle East, not least in Syria. It seems clear that Amitai Etzioni is right: the world still needs dialogue instead of simple enforcement of global norms.¹⁵

In addition to the lack of common norms, there is the problem of implementation — mainly the question of where democracy should be implemented. When imposing a specific concept of democracy in Syria, the international community has emphasized democracy on the level of nations. At the same time, the exercise of military power on the international level has not been democratic. Syrians did not vote for the United States to bomb them. As Etzioni has complained in his book From Empire to a Community, we are imposing democracy and freedom on national institutions but not on the United Nations or the World Health Organization.¹⁶ If China and Russia impose the norm of respect for sovereignty in situations where the United States is imposing democratic governance, it is unlikely that either will get positive results. Yet both are enforcing globally accepted norms. The fact that norms and interpretations of world politics vary globally does not mean that we do not need norms and their interpretations. However, it seems that we are not yet ready for their simple enforcement.¹⁷

LEGITIMATE AGENCY FOR ENFORCEMENT?

The peculiarity of the post-September 11, 2001, enforcement of humanitarian protection of civilians from terror and tyranny has been the asymmetry between the willingness to promote global principles and the refusal to build global agency for it. As Etzioni has complained, we have been eager to promote global governance while at the same time unwilling to promote the development of global government.¹⁸

This is especially problematic as we subscribe to democratic norms. The reason democracy is a better method of governance is not that autocrats are always less capable or morally corrupt, but that democracy as a power structure makes it impossible for incompetent and immoral rulers to make unpopular decisions and stay in power. Democratic rulers must comply with the interests and moral conventions of their constituencies. Even if a Western leader wanted to be unselfish and humane in his policies towards Syria, he would not survive politically unless he promoted the interests and moral framing of his own constituencies. The interests of Syrians are irrelevant.

The debate over the extent to which global norms dictate U.S. policies and are dictated by selfish interests is focused on specific events and cases; the big picture is often hidden behind demagogy. Only correlational analysis of U.S. foreign policy in general, on the one hand, and the democratic credentials of the targets of U.S. support, on the other, can reveal the big picture. However, the results of such an exercise are surprising. Even if one uses the most respected and conservative (individualistic) American dataset on democracy, the Polity IV data, it is inevitable that, in the Muslim Middle East, an average U.S. ally is more autocratic than an average enemy of the United States. While the average autocracy score of a U.S. political ally was 6.94 (on a scale from 0 to 10), the average autocracy score of a "tyranny" that the United States had to resist was 6.41. The autocratic nature of U.S. military collaborators in the Middle East was even more prominent. This has been the pattern throughout the post-World War II period; and the rise of the humanitarian agenda during the presidency of George W. Bush only worsened the situation.¹⁹

Moreover, if one looks at changes in the polities of Muslim countries of the Middle East, transitions to democracy are more often punished by the United States than rewarded. Syria, for example, has moved towards democracy twice — in 1950 and 1954 — and both times this meant closer cooperation with the Soviet Union. Therefore, American punishment was forthcoming. There is only one exception to this in the Middle East: in Bahrain, where U.S. support increased in 1973 after some significant but short-lived democratic reforms.

In addition, transitions to autocratic rule have been met with more rewards than punishments since World War II. The U.S.-backed coup that toppled Syria's Husni al-Zaim in 1949 constituted dramatic democracy backsliding — rewarded by the United States for strategic reasons; the new autocrat was seen as sufficiently tough on communism. Bowing to the strategic security interests of U.S. constituencies meant compromising the humanitarian interests of Syrians.²⁰

If one looks at the kinds of democratic processes the United States has opposed, it becomes clear that U.S. energy needs have played an important role. Popular pressures that could lead to the diminution of U.S. energy supplies in the Middle East have been actively resisted. U.S. strategic interests, the war on terror and the protection of Israel have been more important rationales for U.S. policies in the Middle East than the promotion of democracy.²¹ More generally, domestic pressures on the U.S. foreign-policy leadership, especially concerning questions of peace and war, tend to be driven by nationalism. According to John Mueller, "The public applies a fairly reasonable cost-benefit analysis when evaluating foreign affairs, but it vastly overvalues the lives of Americans and undervalues the lives of foreigners."²² Here is Mueller again: "When Americans asked themselves how many American lives it was worth to save hundreds of thousands of (foreign) … lives, the answer came out to rather close to zero."²³ Thus, U.S. constituencies for democracy push decision makers to favor it only inside the United States; outside the country, they also think primarily about American interests. The fact that the constituencies of the decision makers in U.S. global governance in the Middle East live in America has made it impossible for U.S. decision makers to prioritize the interests of the people whose protection U.S. enforcement of humanitarian principles has aimed at.

There is also a lack of local ownership and agency in the protection of civilians and the observance of humanitarian norms. This is not related to the policies of the West but to the immaturity of most developing states. Enforcement of global norms and the external insistence on democracy has often further weakened developing states. This was the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and, indeed, Syria. The idea of enforcing democracy and human rights in countries where state-building has not been accomplished is complicated. Most experts agree that successful state formation has often been messy and has involved measures that fly in the face of human-rights principles that we apply to mature states.²⁴ Yet most scholars recognize that the formation of states has pacified interactions and has enabled both democracy and respect for human rights.²⁵ Without functioning states, the developing world might lie even further from global humanitarian norms. Thus, the question of agency in the protection of civilians should not be ignored in the debate on global governance. Cosmopolitan progress needs inter-civilizational dialogue before it can gain the consensus and shared ownership of global values that could be the foundation, not just of global governance, but of globally owned government.

WHAT IF THERE IS NO CONSENSUS?

If the global normative order is not entirely ready, does that mean humanitarian principles cannot be enforced? Mary Kaldor suggests that the creation of a cosmopolitan order and the stopping of Assads and Saddams cannot wait for a total global consensus on norms.²⁶ Global governance has to come first, global government only later. However, many political realists suggest that without the commonality of a normative foundation of order, and without the legitimacy and common ownership of the protection of the global humanitarian order, there is no legitimacy of order, and it has to be built solely on coercion. As Henry Kissinger has suggested in his latest book, World Order, sustainable global governance has to rely on order and legitimacy, not just on one of the two. Building an order without commonly shared legitimacy is not sustainable, according to Kissinger. Dreaming of normative crusades before such missions are realistic is not just naive; it is dangerous.²⁷

Yet, Saddam was stopped, as were the Taliban, Aideed and Qadhafi. Even Putin and Assad feel the pressure of Western enforcement of global norms. Can we then say that enforcement by means of economic coercion or military intervention has been efficient despite the lack of global consensus? Could a principled approach to Assad have worked? It seems uncontroversial that sanctions can prevent the West from becoming complicit in genocides and violations of humanitarian norms. Sanctions that limit the capacity of elites to steal from their people, such as freezing their assets, tend to have a relatively high success rate. Using the sanctions data of Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, Kimberly Elliott and Barbara Oegg,²⁸ I have calculated that up to 80 percent of cases after World War I in which financial sanctions have been used strictly against elites have been somewhat successful — if these elites were already weakened by domestic pressures against them. In these cases, due to popular pressure and the limited target of the sanctions, it has been possible to create local consensus on the norms that can be applied and enforced.

More generally, however, sanctions that punish entire states tend to have less success. Sanctions, in general, manage to significantly affect their targets in only one in three cases, according to studies by Hufbauer, Schott and Elliott.²⁹ Using the more up-to-date dataset mentioned earlier, I have calculated that sanctions imposed by hostile nations have an even worse record of success. In the cases of sanctions to promote human rights or democracy, sanctioners perceived as hostile by the target of the sanctions failed totally in 80 percent of the cases.³⁰ Sanctions tend to fail if they are imposed by states that are acting according to their own normative code and are thus perceived as unfair by the target of the sanctions. Thus, if sanctions are imposed in the absence of a common consensus, they tend to fail; imposed against whole countries, they are detrimental to humanitarian values. Karl and John E. Mueller call measures to punish and regulate tyrants by economic coercion "sanctions of mass destruction."³¹ Furthermore, when sanctions or military force are used against entire countries and manage to push dictators or terrorists out of power or out of a certain territory, the result has often been the emergence of even worse rulers. The Western support of anti-Assad forces should suffice as an example.

The track record of military enforcement of global humanitarian norms is even bleaker. The fact that Western humanitarian interventions tend to escalate conflicts and intensify killing — even in Syria — seems to testify to the intensity of the resistance to imposed Western values. Syria's experience is not exceptional. When looking at northeast and southeast Asia after World War II, we can calculate from the battle-death data of Oslo's Peace Research Institute³² that two-thirds of the region's conflict fatalities were produced in originally internal disputes where outsiders imposed their solutions. In such conflicts, 98 percent of fatalities were produced only after outsiders had entered the domestic dispute with their military might.³³ In Syria, the number of direct conflict fatalities more than tripled after the West initiated air strikes against IS and the CIA started its indirect military interference in the war.³⁴

Recent global trends testify to this result. Based on Uppsala University's battle-death dataset, the willingness to protect has turned global conflict trends upside down. After a steady decline in conflict fatalities following the Cold War, one could begin to see some increase. During the Cold War, both the Soviet and U.S. camps were eager to intervene in Third World wars. However, this eagerness disappeared until the turn of the millennium. Only then did the impulse to protect people from the malign influence of state power and terrorist violence arise. One can see that this eagerness to protect people who generally do not want to be protected has given rise to a new kind of warfare: protection wars, or New International Wars, as these wars were motivated by the international condemnation of violence in new wars. The war in Syria is a good example. Others include those undertaken in Somalia, Iraq, northern Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen to enforce humanitarian rules and protect civilians from terror and tyranny. These wars caused, according to the Uppsala University data, 45 percent of the world's conflict fatalities in 2013 and 74 percent in 2010. In other years of the Obama presidency, deaths from enforcement/protection wars fell somewhere between these two percentages.³⁵ At the time of writing, statistics for 2014 were not available in their entirety, but the fact that Syria had become the greatest source of conflict fatalities in the world suggests that the share of deaths in protection wars had remained substantial.

 

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Figure 1.

Fatalities of Enforcement of Global Protective Humanitarian Norms as a Percentage of All Conflict Fatalities

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Not all fatalities in countries where Westerners have intervened recently have been caused by the enforcement of global principles. There could be conflicts that have little or nothing to do with Western intervention. But, in these cases, one could say that the power of the state to contain such conflicts has been degraded by the penetration of norm-enforcing Western countries. However, it would be possible to consider only those cases as protection wars where the explicit contradiction has been related to protection. One would then also have to take into account conflicts where protection takes place in countries that are not fully penetrated by outsiders. Such cases include the following:

1. The protection by the UN multinational Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), which fought in Mali against a home-grown Tuareg jihadist organization, "Movement of Defenders of the Faith" (Harakat Ansar al-Dine), and several al-Qaeda-inspired or -affiliated organizations, such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), its splinter group the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), and the "Signed in Blood Battalion"

2. France's military involvement to protect civilians in Mauritania against AQIM

3. France's operation in the Central African Republic against the Union of Democratic Forces for Unity (UFDR), allegedly supported by the terror-supporting Sudanese government

4. The United Kingdom's operation in Sierra Leone against the New War terror group the West Side Boys (WSB)

Adding these fatalities to those in Somalia, Iraq, northern Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria (since Syrian fatalities of war between international protectors and internal terrorists and tyrants did not start until 2014, the latest Uppsala statistics do not yet reveal them), one can see that, even with the very conservative coding rules (ruling out many internal conflicts in countries that coalitions of the willing had already penetrated with their military forces), these protection wars have become the main source of violence in the world, occasionally contributing over 50 percent of total conflict fatalities.

Clearly, the enforcement of humanitarian principles in the absence of a global consensus has become a major problem. Thus, it was never realistic to assume success in the military operation in Syria.

CONCLUSIONS

In general, the enforcement of humanitarian norms is resisted by the people such enforcement is intended to protect when the effort shifts — by rule rather than by exception — from the original aim to protecting the self-interest of the protecting nations. When global humanitarian governance fails to develop global agency, "protection" can end up killing the civilians it was supposed to protect. This is clearly the case in Syria. Thus, one could infer that the enforcement of humanitarian norms, before consensus behind them has been achieved and before the emergence of global agency for humanitarian protection, has been a failure. Without a genuine interest in the development of a global humanitarian regime, effective global governance will be impossible.

Clearly, norms are disputed, their interpretation is not agreed upon and the enforcement agency is missing. As a result, the simple enforcement of norms we think are commonly accepted is not an adequate substitute for dialogue and negotiation. Global policing is not feasible if there is no legal system to enforce. The emergence of "cosmopolitan protection wars" or "new international wars" shows that the diagnosis was wrong. New wars were not apolitical and criminal; they could not be tackled by means of neutral policing. Efforts at that have led us to the kind of enforcement of norms of protection that kill the people we intend to protect. Therefore, instead of enforcement, we should continue to focus on dialogue and the creation of a normative consensus on global humanitarian protection. Western ambassadors should have listened to President Ahtisaari and tried to negotiate the solution that was on offer with the softening of the Russian position on Assad.