R2PTOO: NOT SOMETHING OUR OF STAR WARS: EDITORIAL OF THE CONNECTICUT JEWISH LEDGER
Not something out of Star Wars.
Star Wars, in fact, makes greater sense compared to this emerging international policy. This is the policy that rationalizes our involvement in Libya via a doctrine called R2P by most, but Rick Moran of FrontPageMagazine more aptly calls the “Soros Policy”.
R2P literally means Responsibility-to-Protect. It is the justification used to violate the sovereignty of a country and to intercede, with force, on behalf of its civilian populations. This is not a new idea. Most recently we used it in Bosnia in the 90’s when we chose sides based on our interpretation of which side perpetrated the worst atrocities on a civilian population. As always, when policy is based on an interpretive process, then it is the loudest and best presented narrative that wins in the end leaving little room for what is right and what is wrong. The outcome then is termed a humanitarian application of force, but those who know better see it as choosing sides. Whatever our good intentions in Bosnia, we ultimately ended up bombing the people of Serbia to enforce them. It reminds us that the use of force in someone’s behalf is also a license to use force against another.
It takes little imagination to see this principle moved east from Libya to Israel. Israel after all is the country that already absorbs most of the animus of the United Nations and the UN is where this policy is getting its putative legitimacy. One only has to look at where the UN targets its time and effort in the world and Israel becomes an obvious next focus. Turkey is already calling for R2P’s application against Israel in Gaza and Bosnia now sits as member in the UN’s Security Council. If Israel’s efforts to defend herself are characterized by the UN as terrorism, then R2P, as it devolves, empowers the United Nation’s to use force as a next step in its ceaseless pressure against the Jewish State. History may well look back at Libya as a test case for the application of this doctrine and Israel could very likely be one of the first places where it is fully enforced.
This is not a doctrine that is being challenged in the White House. It is already here. In fact, it has been waiting in the wings since before the election. Samantha Power, one of President’s closest foreign policy advisors, wrote about it prior to her meeting up with the then Senator of Illinois. She now champions it in the White House while Susan Rice our Ambassador at the UN lays the ground work for making it that bodies preferred policy. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton is its proponent at State. And George Soros, a long time advocate of selective humanitarian intervention, is the shadow that is not very far from all of the participants in this push for the application of US armed force in the service of his humanitarian objectives.
Omri Ceren of Commentary describes the status of R2P as follows :
“…Ambassador Rice and President Obama have succeeded in linking the use of national force with a particularly flexible interpretation of international humanitarianism. Contemporary international humanitarianism, in turn, is a pretext seething activists and government officials use to obsess over Israel.”
If Bosnia and Serbia are not clear historical examples of this policy, there is a starker one from a few generations ago. The subsuming of Czechoslovakia prior to WW2, where free world diplomats waved the paper promising peace, was all about Hitler’s humanitarian motives to aid the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia. In the doing the small but vibrant Czech democracy was dismembered and the map of Europe altered to give Hitler the ability to move his own military and political agendas forward. History is now repeating itself as farce and it is the United States who is the prime actor in this comic-tragedy and Israel as its likely next victim.
As with all flawed policies, it is not the policy itself that does most harm, it is the misapplied attention to it that clears the path for major damage. Our constant attention on Israel as the focal point of all things amiss in the Middle East deters us from treating the real problems of the region and the Middle East is a more dangerous place because of it. The vulnerability of the vital oil producing nations threatens the world’s future and our viability as an industrial power.
The story line in the Middle East is not as clear as the good and evil conflict of Star Wars. But watching this Administration move from disaster to disaster there and not knowing where our true interests are makes Star Wars a preferred script that would serve us better in the end.
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