The issue isn't whether we have the right to intervene - because the consequences of vicious dictatorships usually catch up with us in time - but whether or not, practically, we can.All one can really say about this is "tell us more about this 'considering the practical consequences' idea of yours Dave, we on the anti-war left find it strangely fascinating". It comes at the conclusion of probably the worst Aaro piece in at least a year - it isn't even noticeably better written than the equivalent Nick Cohen one.
By the way, is it me or has the entire pundosphere just completely bracketed out Hurricane Katrina? I suspect that the Chinese Ambassador to the UN threw them a curve ball by comparing the Burmese government's failure to deliver the goods in terms of flood relief to the French government in the 2003 heatwave, but there is surely to hell a more relevant comparison, and it measures pretty badly for Dave's blithe assertion (based, I suspect, on a bit of half-remembered Sen, and delivered
before) that horrible regimes have problems with natural disasters because they're not democracies. Terrible responses to natural disasters can happen anywhere; on the other hand so can competent ones.
But anyway, reading up the piece, if this is meant to be "Burma - The Case For Intervention", it doesn't really make a case, does it? I suspect Aaro has been poorly served by subs here and idly wonder what title he chose himself. He's done enough research to be aware that most of the actually existing calls for "intervention" are gum-flapping calls for logistic impossibilities (dropping aid out of the back of a Hercules is a dangerous and wasteful business when done over flat plains in Africa; to suggest something of the sort in Burma is just not paying attention). But nonetheless, he "admires the sentiment" of that nice young Mr Cameron. We've discussed on a few occasions whether Aaro's a Decent but I maintain that he is for this reason; for him as for Paul Berman, as for Michael Walzer, as for the lot of them, the real world is an optional extra.
See also his excursion into "blame America first"ism, in the course of a particularly savage kicking about at straw men (including someone sharing a platform with Aaro in Great St Mary's Church who was too postmodern to assume that the Burmese necessarily ate food - I mean really man, chinny reckon, are we idiots here?).
There has been, right from the first day of this crisis, a wing of the anti-interventionist movement that has sought to shift blame for the aid debacle from the Burmese generals to the West in general and America in particular. I first heard it from some professor interviewed on the Today programme, and have read it several times since. The junta (this apologia suggests) is just paranoid, this paranoia is justified because of the West's hostility, and therefore it makes sense from the Burmese point of view not to admit foreign aid workers, who might be CIA spooks
Notice the slip back and forth between "the Burmese junta are paranoid", "the Burmese junta's paranoia has a basis in fact", "the Burmese junta are right to be paranoid" and finally "the Burmese junta are justified in refusing visas for aid workers". Partly in the service of smearing people who attempt practical explanations of difficult problems and partly in the service of pretending that the most important thing is the moral stance which one takes toward something rather than what one does. It is like Michael Walzer's opposition to the Iraq War; Aaro actually pretty much agrees with this professor on the question of what can you do, but does so with such a loftier
tone.
Meanwhile, check
this out (in the sidebar), from the morally serious government of Canada, with the full support of possibly the most morally serious man in the world, Michael Ignatieff
HALIFAX–Prime Minister Stephen Harper cautioned yesterday that he'll only send Canadian humanitarian aid to Burma if he's sure the supplies aren't being used to support the military regime.
"Canada is ready to help, we want to make that clear. We want to do whatever we can do to pressure the Burmese government to accept that aid," Harper said.
However, the Prime Minister said the aid won't be flown into the country if the military junta is using the food and supplies to win political support.
Good God. As far as I can see, what the generals are doing is pretty bad. Aar is wrong to imply that they are actually refusing aid shipments (which
are in fact arriving, but they are control freaks and suspicious of foreigners, and so they are demanding to organise the distribution of aid themselves[1]. As a result of this, the distribution is clearly much less efficient than it should be and a real concerted international effort as was made post the 2004 tsnuami is impossible. That is, indeed, pretty bad.
But what the hell can you say about what Stephen Harper is threatening? The policy of the government of Canada is that it is going to refuse to provide humanitarian aid to people who desperately need it, based on a political condition. Is that not disgusting? The point of view here appears to be that the humanitarian crisis in Burma is bad enough to warrant threats of military intervention, but not bad enough to prioritise the delivery of aid over Decent grandstanding. Talk about "the situation is desperate, but not serious". And I don't even think that this is much of a strawman; I suspect that you could get a lot of the Decent Left to simultaneously agree to it.
But anyway, Aaro's stepped back from the War Room this time. To what end? To, apparently, widen his sights and look for bigger game. The impossibility of an intervention in Burma right now is to be the foundation of a general case for the threat of intervention anywhere at any time, whenever a government is judged[3] to be lacking in Decency. Because unless we roll forward democracy throughout the world (via solidarity with bus drivers if possible, but with white phosphorous if necessary), there will be disasters which resemble Nargis everywhere at some time. This is the argument from hypothetical humanitarian crisis and about all that you can say in favour of it is that it's not noticeably worse than the argument from counterfactual humanitarian crisis (the Hitchens/Uday/Qusay one).
Parenthesis: Aaro is basically wrong about the history of the planned economies too - one can see this most clearly in the case of the Koreas, where there are plenty of old South Koreans who remember being sent food parcels from their relatives in the richer North back in the 1960s and early 1970s. Something (something not very well understood, but probably having to do with the birth rate) went very wrong with the Communist economies in the mid 1970s, and it is true that a lot of their subsequent economic statistics were faked, but the post-war growth of the planned economies was not illusory and you can't, for example, brush off the early Soviet lead in the space race as something that never really happened.
[1] I have a couple of links to stories about the US doing something similar during Hurricane Katrina, but of course to draw any such comparison would be unserious and disgusting. The argument I suppose is that the USA is a first world country which can handle a 1 million refugee problem without people actually starving to death, and so it can do what it likes when a natural disaster hits, while Burma is a poor country and so is morally obliged to take whatever it can get on whatever terms offered. I can see a reasonable utilitarian case for this being a criterion, but "one law for the rich and one law for the poor" is precisely what it is and as such it is unlikely to command widespread support.[2]
[2] Decent explanatory footnote: "It is unlikely to command widespread support" is a factual assertion about whether poor countries are likely to vote
en bloc for any interpretation of the "responsibility to protect" which holds that their national sovereignty is non-existent in times of natural disaster, while that of rich countries is not, with the decision to be made by the rich countries. It is not a statement about what policies poor countries should adopt in natural disasters, still less an endorsement of any non-democratic third world government anywhere.
[3] By who? I have nominated Norman Geras for the role of judging which regimes "violate human rights in an appalling way" but I still suspect that the actual decisions will be made by the Pentagon and State Department.