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Anthony Arnove's
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QuestionAt a time when the concepts of 'self-defense' and 'humanitarian intervention' are being redefined, how are we to tell the difference between 'holy war' and 'just war'? Sandra SchaedeAnswer
Anthony Arnove: I think all of these terms have been used in ways that are problematic. The term humanitarian intervention is really perhaps the most questionable of the terms. The previous question raised questions about self-defense and made a very important point about how self-defense and terrorism are used in such hypocritical ways in contemporary discussions of politics. But the question of humanitarian intervention is one that really also needs to be a question, because humanitarian intervention has become the way increasingly that war is justified, that war is defended. But, it has historical roots. The reality is that wars are rarely fought for their stated reasons or almost never fought for the stated reasons, and the politicians have always dressed up their justifications for war in terms of liberation, in terms of humanitarian names, in terms of freeing people from tyranny and oppression and advancing human rights. But, there is a new discourse of human rights, which is justifying imperialism today. And in the context of the past two decades, we’ve seen an expansion of a discourse that seeks to justify war on the basis of human rights. And the highest examples of that really came under the administration of Bill Clinton, a liberal, who saw a means of re-legitimizing the role of the United States as a global superpower in the context of the collapse of the cold war framework. George Bush laid the groundwork for the expansion of US power, the role of the United States as an imperial power, with the collapse of the justification of combating Soviet imperialism, which was the justification used for the interventions in the Cold War era for the most part, although even those of course were described in humanitarian terms. But then, ultimately, it was Clinton who used the doctrine of humanitarian intervention and gave a legacy, which then Bush could exploit.
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