It's the goody-goodies who frighten me most

National Post ^ | 2008-09-13 | George Jonas

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'In the grim present, humanitarian intervention feels like an idea whose time has come and gone," laments Michael Ignatieff in a review-essay in the current issue of The New Republic. Mr. Ignatieff may be right. I regret that being right alarms him. It reassures me.

The birth of organizations such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) at a UN-sponsored conference in Rome alarmed me much more 10 years ago. This was around the days when, in Mr Ignatieff's words, "the idea that all states have a 'responsibility to protect' civilians at risk of ethnic cleansing or massacre in other states appeared to carry all before it --it became something approaching a principle of international law."

Indeed. I found it chilling. Not because I've a soft spot for massacres and ethnic cleansing, but because the spectre of a new world order of supra-national bureaucracy replacing the Treaty of Westphalia and national sovereignty terrified me.

...

Today, as we're about to abandon Georgia to the tender mercies of Russia--it's obvious that we are, and I'm not arguing that we should or that we shouldn't-- Mr. Ignatieff's conclusion is that humanitarian intervention has hit the shoals of reality. "In the case of Georgia, the humanitarian impulse has collided with raw, vast, and unyielding power," he writes. "For the moment at least, world-weary realism rules."

But was there ever a time it didn't? If anything, brave-new-world doctrines like a "responsibility to protect" handed an entire garbage dump full of justification to ursine Russia for grabbing South Ossetia from Georgia. Humanitarianism became a free gift of a casus belli from idealistic Mr. Ignatieff and his ilk to pragmatic Russian leader Vladimir Putin & Co. Prince Metternich, the grandfather of all realists, must be smiling.

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