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Humanitarian Imperialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Terry Nardin
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Extract

Fernando Tesón offers two “humanitarian rationales” for the war in Iraq. The first, which he calls the “narrow” rationale, is that the war was fought to overthrow a tyrant. The second, “grand,” rationale is that it was fought as part of a strategy for defending the United States by establishing democratic regimes in the Middle East and throughout the world–peacefully, if possible, but by force if necessary. Both rationales strain the traditional understanding of humanitarian intervention.

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Articles
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Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , September 2005, pp. 21 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2005

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References

1 Tesón, Fernando R., “Ending Tyranny in Iraq,” Ethics International Affairs 19, no. 2 (2005), pp. 1 – 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All in-text citation references are to this article.

2 Tesón suggests that humanitarian intervention is called for in cases of “severe” tyranny, which he defines as involving past or present atrocities as well as “pervasive and serious forms of oppression” (p. 15). This still puts the emphasis on the character of the regime, of which its crimes are evidence, not on rescuing the victims of those crimesGoogle Scholar.

3 The traditional understanding underlies the argument of Ken Roth's “War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention,” Human Rights Watch World Report 2004; available at hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm.

4 For an analysis of the president's national security strategy that makes these and other relevant points, see Hendrickson, David C., “Preserving the Imbalance of Power,” Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2003), pp. 157–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Jedediah Purdy considers these parallels in “Liberal Empire: Assessing the Arguments,” Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2003), pp. 35–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” (September 2002); available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf.