When you going to go protest our Saudi allies too???

Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world's leading economic and military powers - above all, the United States - in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks.

The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq.

Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large parts of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention-discovering new “Hitlers” as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.

Jean Bricmont’s Humanitarian Imperialism is both a historical account of this development and a powerful political and moral critique.

It seeks to restore the critique of imperialism to its rightful place in the defense of human rights.

It describes the leading role of the United States in initiating military and other interventions, but also on the obvious support given to it by European powers and NATO.

It outlines an alternative approach to the question of human rights, based on the genuine recognition of the equal rights of people in poor and wealthy countries.

Timely, topical, and rigorously argued, Jean Bricmont’s book establishes a firm basis for resistance to global war with no end in sight.

When the "Good Fight" Is Anything But

As the U.S. invasion of Iraq got underway in 2003, anti-interventionists on both the left and right were blasted by the pro-war establishment as callous isolationists indifferent to the suffering of Iraqis under Saddam Hussein.

There seemed to be little space for anti-interventionism in the new foreign policy consensus that stretched from liberal humanitarians like Michael Ignatieff and Michael Walzer to neoconservative hawks like William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer.

Four years later, the course of the Iraq war has led to increased introspection by former "humanitarian hawks", and has opened new political space for members of both the anti-imperialist left and isolationist right.

It is with Iraq squarely in mind that Jean Bricmont, a French theoretical physicist who made his name as a critic of postmodern theory, takes aim at the doctrines of humanitarian intervention that rose to the fore during the 1990s debates over Rwanda and Kosovo.

His latest book, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War, is a provocative indictment of the ways in which human rights rhetoric feeds into a militarism that ends up damaging the cause of human rights worldwide.

Bricmont begins with the sensible observation that nearly every regime claims altruistic motives for its actions, however self-interested or malicious they may be, and therefore that using a regime's humanitarian rhetoric to judge its intentions is close to useless.

He goes on to provide a damning account of the anti-democratic violence that has been perpetrated by the United States under the rhetoric of "spreading freedom", ranging from the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s to the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras 30 years later.

These examples and others effectively make the point that the United States and other Western powers have always deployed human rights rhetoric in a selective and self-serving manner, ignoring their own abuses and those of allies while using the wrongdoing of unfriendly regimes as an excuse to justify intervention.

What is surprising is not that regimes have falsely claimed altruistic motives for their military actions, but that self-described humanitarians so often believe them.

Particularly, Bricmont shows, the fact that so many of the Iraq war's architects had previously supported gross violations of human rights in Latin America and elsewhere should have been a warning sign to liberal humanitarians.

One of the book's particular insights is its portrayal of a sort of interventionist "ratchet effect".

Often, Bricmont notes, the failure of one form of Western intervention creates a humanitarian crisis that the West takes as evidence that an even more extensive intervention is needed.

Rarely do foreign policy analysts step back and take the lesson from these crises that the wisest solution would have been to avoid interfering in the first place.

Foremost among the safeguards against interventionist militarism, Bricmont argues, is international law, and he sets out a defence of international law against the doctrine that human rights violations annul national sovereignty.

He demonstrates the almost unconscious sense of U.S. exceptionalism that underlies this doctrine with a few simple yet effective counterfactuals.

How would the U.S. respond, he asks, if Brazil were to unilaterally invade Iraq to install a democracy?

Or if India were to respond to terrorist attacks by taking it upon itself to "liberate" the populations that produced the terrorists?

Bricmont also gives a good account of some of the pathologies that have driven the interventionist urge, particularly the fixation on fascism and the Second World War to the exclusion of all other history.

The yearning to experience the internationalist heroism of the "good fight" against fascism, as he documents, has led leftists like Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen to back policies a long way removed from the anti-imperialism of their hero, George Orwell.

"Humanitarian Imperialism" thus demonstrates the hypocrisy behind the U.S.'s self-image as a champion of human rights, and offers a convincing argument that nations often deploy human rights as a smokescreen to conceal self-interest and militarism.

"Humanitarian Imperialism" thus demonstrates the hypocrisy behind the U.S.'s self-image as a champion of human rights, and offers a convincing argument that nations often deploy human rights as a smokescreen to conceal self-interest and militarism."

And on the flipside of the very same coin we have anti-americanism used to undermine the rights of the very same people that are most in need of human rights protection!

Why do anti-american voices continue to use the crimes perpetrated by the US to continue to defend regimes who's human rights abuses are every bit as repulsive.

Iran has been locking up trades unionists activists, and the support from socialists in the UK has been zero. Why do you persist with promoting one repulsive regime above another?

No humanitarian would ever do that!

There is a growing division between those who are acting to preserve & defend the human rights of those who ask, internationally for protection and those who are unable to look beyond their hatred of the US. What is going on in Iran has nothing to do with the US. It is about the Iranian people and their desire to rid themselves of religious fascism.

By posting this anti-US bile, you are propping up and supporting a regime that continues to commit serious human rights violations and continues to break international law. By doing this, you not only make your case against the US, but you comprehensively undermine it too.

"Why do anti-american voices continue to use the crimes perpetrated by the US to continue to defend regimes who's human rights abuses are every bit as repulsive."

I'm struggling to find where the defence of Iran actually is on this page. Perhaps its in your head?

The article on Humanitarian Interventionism is merely a call to beware of obvious propaganda drives. As long as the US/UK support Mubarak, Israel and Saudi one can only be suspicious of the reasons why other regimes who behave in a similar fashion are singled out for attack.

I know the authoritarian left like to divide countries into good and bad, and think "my enemy's enemy is my friend", but Indymedia is against hierarchy and should oppose all governments.

It's ludicrous to think Iran is "singled out for attack". Indymedia is full of reports of demonstrations against all sorts of regimes. I imagine the people who are active in campaigning against human rights abuses in Iran main have personal interests in it due to having family or background there.

Just because the US hates Iran is no reason to lick the arses of the Iranian government.

"I'm struggling to find where the defence of Iran actually is on this page. Perhaps its in your head?"

Of course its in my head, that's where I do all of my thinking!

The fact that the comment I'm quoting from appears in conjunction with a report on a protest against stoning executions in Iran and is exclusively 'about' the US and its 'habits' infers that balanced thinking inevitably should equate domestic policy in Iran with the foreign policy failings of the US. I find this spurious and feel the need to point this out.

And I'm not a troll. I'm a contributor.

from the archives:


The great divide: Iran and leftists

by Gary Sudborough, 27 June 2009


There seems to be a great divergence of opinion among liberals and leftists about what is really happening in Iran. There are those who think Iran is in somewhat of a vacuum and is only trying to have a democratic election against theocracy and a repressive attitude to women's rights. Other leftists think because the Bush administration in the past had contemplated military action and also covert actions by the CIA against Iran that these facts, among others, argue for an attempted coup taking place, especially given the enormous number of successful and unsuccessful CIA coups which have occurred in the past 60 years. I have an excellent book entitled Killing Hope-US military and CIA interventions since World War 2 by William Blum. I would say that the only countries or continents not to have at least CIA spies in them would be places like Greenland or Antarctica that have little interest for multinational corporations because they are covered with huge ice sheets. Of course, this could change with global warming. You might be served a burger and fries by an Eskimo at the grand opening of McDonalds in Greenland.

Noam Chomsky seems to want to take a middle ground and say that no elections in the US or Iran are really democratic because in the United States only the very wealthy get to choose those candidates who are to run and in Iran it is the clerics who decide the question. He is correct, of course, but that does not solve the problem of whether the CIA and US covert actions are being used in Iran.

Norman Solomon, a leftist writer for Common Dreams and other publications, had an article titled "Full Spectrum Idiocy- the GOP and Hugo Chavez." One of the points of his article is that anyone who thinks like Hugo Chavez and suspects a CIA-instigated attempt to overthrow the Iranian government is an idiot. This is somewhat belligerent. When I wrote my article about Iran entitled: " Iran- Amnesia, Ignorance or Stupidity," and gave my reasons why I suspected CIA involvement in Iran, I at least didn't call those with differing ideas idiots, but gave them three choices, all of which are better than idiot. Hugo Chavez has already suffered one CIA -backed coup in April 2002 in which a portion of the Venezuelan military arrested him, imprisoned him on a military base and installed a Chamber of Commerce man named Pedro Carmona as President of Venezuela. Pro-Chavez supporters in the thousands stormed the Presidential Palace, removed Pedro Carmona and in a while Hugo Chavez was released from military custody, during which he said two uniformed military men from the United States took part. Is Hugo Chavez an idiot or paranoid for suspecting that CIA coups have been perpetrated or are presently taking place in other countries, having experienced one himself? I think he is being perfectly rational, especially since Ahmadinejad is a man like himself in certain respects. Both Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez are spending the profits from the sale of oil to improve the lives of the poor in their respective countries.The ruling class of the United States hate this situation. They would rather have the rich in power in other countries so that American corporations can move in, privatize the oil and all other corporations, privatize health care and any benefits like Social Security for the poor and establish sweatshops with no recognition of worker's rights, unions, safety regulations in the workplace or product quality and safety. In other words, they want what Michael Parenti calls a client state government. I call it a puppet government. As Michael Parenti has said: "There is only one thing the rich have always wanted and that is everything."

I have discovered a very interesting thing about Venezuela. The CIA is still organizing coups against Hugo Chavez. The Cato Institute, a right wing think tank in the United States, recently paid an anti-Chavez student organizer a half a million dollars to stir up trouble against Chavez. It is called the Milton Friedman Award, but let's get real. This is nothing more than a bribe to help overthrow a democratically elected government. The student's name is Yon Goicoechea. I couldn't get a break in remembering this name by having him called Juan Gonzalez or some other easy name. If I had accepted money from a foreign government, let us say the Soviet Union when it was in existence, to overthrow the government of the United States, I would be classed as a traitor and either executed or would be spending a lot of time behind bars, probably in solitary confinement. However, Yon Goicoechea is now in Mexico from certain reports and probably spending his half an million dollars and enjoying himself immensely. Is Hugo Chavez an idiot for thinking that perhaps Iranian students, like Venezuelan students in Venezuela, are being paid money by US institutions to foment revolution in Iran? I think not and believe the real idiot to be Norman Solomon.

Another very prominent leftist in the United States is Michael Moore. He is a man who has done great work with movies like Roger and Me, Fahrenheit 9-11, and Sicko, with a new movie coming out in October on all the thefts and frauds committed by the banks and financial institutions of the United States that have contributed to the present world-wide depression. I give him enormous credit for at least keeping track of the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan and posting on his web site the news of the latest US drone strikes that have killed numerous civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. However, he is another who sees the situation in Iran in isolation and thinks it is all about democracy. Michael Moore has long been a union man and I believe it was his father or another relative who was involved in the famous sit down strike at General Motors in the 1930s. I, too, have long held a passionate affinity for unions. Some of the earliest books I read were about the IWW in the United States and their heroes like Joe Hill, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood. I am just speculating here, but I think one of the things which swayed Michael's opinion on Iran was that the bus drivers union came out in support of the protesters and threatened a strike. The real tragedy here is that unions in other countries have often been infiltrated by the CIA.
In Latin America there was an organization called The American Institute for Free Labor Development. It was ostensibly run by the AFL-CIO, but was funded almost exclusively by the Agency for International Development and was an instrument of the CIA. One of its missions was to teach the unions in Latin America to be virulently anti-communist and to help with strikes any coups that the CIA was organizing in Latin America. Consequently, it is a big mistake to think that unions are always on the moral, just and democratic side of an issue.

One of the greatest problems that I perceive confuses many Americans, including many leftists, is a separation in their brain between domestic and foreign events. Most Americans realize the effects of capitalism at home. After all, in just the last 30 years there have been the scandals of the sub prime mortgage swindle by the banks, the Enron debacle where some people in California actually lost their lives due to planned blackouts, the accounting crimes of Arthur Andersen and others, which caused stocks to be greatly overvalued and led to a stock market crash and finally to the great savings and loan theft, which cost every American family approximately 5,000 dollars to remedy. They, also, realize that a great deal of their tax money is going to the very rich people who robbed them in the first place. The amazing thing is that these same Americans often believe that their foreign policy is motivated by humanitarian and democratic concerns, instead of the greed and avarice they experience at home. They point to the humanitarian aid given to other countries. Incidentally, much of this so-called humanitarian aid is actually money to build the roads and ports so that American corporations can make even more profit by not having to pay for these expenses. What American aid there is in terms of food, medicine and other things which are truly humanitarian is very miserly, especially since the demise of the Soviet Union, when there was obviously a competition between the countries. Now, US humanitarian aid is near the bottom in terms of that aid given by the other industrialized countries. Americans, also, point to the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe. That was obviously meant to prevent all the countries of western Europe from going communist because most of the resistance movements against German fascism in those countries were lead by communists. Finally, there is the American fascination with the "good war." I am speaking of World War 2, when American forces actually did fight on the right side against German and Japanese fascism. They relate that to other wars and think the United States is always correct when it decides to intervene in other countries.

Finally, let us return to the question of why if domestic policy in the United States is determined by very wealthy capitalists, why that same greed and desire for profits and power should not also extend to foreign countries? Those who own a country also control the repressive apparatus of the state. In other words, the police, army and the national security apparatus are in the control of the capitalists. If one doubts this fact, look at the history of Europe. Weren't nearly all the wars caused by the territorial and monetary aspirations of the rich nobles and kings? Does one notice any massive demonstrations by the poor for a war which does not benefit them in the least? Consequently, if the ruling class of the United States control the armed forces would they not use that army to satisfy the same hunger for wealth and power which they exhibit at home? I believe the answer is an emphatic yes, and all those leftists who believe the United States is not involved in the least in Iran are dead wrong.

Going to very popular leftist web sites and finding myself seemingly all alone in this opinion, I was very despairing that people who understood capitalism could not understand its consequences, namely imperialism. Now, I see that Paul Craig Roberts, Phil Wilayto, James Petras and others have joined me in my opinion. Michael Parenti once called the CIA, "Capitalism's International Army," and I couldn't express the situation any better.