Is a new UN “principle” now guiding US foreign policy and intervention?

Hotair ^ | March 20,2011 | Bruce McQuain

[Hojczyk]

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon also said on Thursday that the justification for the use of force was based on humanitarian grounds, and referred to the principle known as Responsibility to Protect (R2P), “a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community’s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

“Resolution 1973 affirms, clearly and unequivocally, the international community’s determination to fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians from violence perpetrated upon them by their own government,” he said.

Inside the NSC, Power, Smith, and McFaul have been trying to figure out how the administration could implement R2P and what doing so would require of the White House going forward. Donilon and McDonough are charged with keeping America’s core national interests more in mind. Obama ultimately sided with Clinton and those pushing R2P — over the objections of Donilon and Gates.

Read that last paragraph very carefully. Well, read the whole thing carefully, but you have to ask, what does agreeing with this “principle” mean in the future?

Do we intervene in Sudan or the Congo? Ivory Coast? And if not, why not? None of them, like Libya, put our core national interests at stake. But all certainly fit the new R2P principle. How about Bahrain and Yemen? Nepal?

Instead, what we see here is precisely what the left has decried for years – the US along with others who can afford it and are willing to do it –agreeing to police the world. However, in this case, it would be at the behest of the UN. We are agreeing that the UN can determine when and where we commit our military forces simply by invoking this principle. Invoke R2P and, by our precedent in Libya, we agree to respond.

[bill1952]

fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians from violence perpetrated upon them by their own government,”

Really? Just really?

So when do the bombs start falling on Iran, North Korea, and china?

[Pearls Before Swine]

So when do the bombs start falling on Iran, North Korea, and china?

R2P has to be interpreted in the context of TBTF (too big to fail--or perhaps too big to F$$$ with).

[blueplum]

and all the more reason to question now how it applies to every nation. Not just the ones ‘we’ don’t like right now, but, how can this enable other nations in a Security Council, say anti-Western ones for instance, to act without ‘us’, against us, under exactly the same premise.

[A Strict Constructionist]

In the present case it should be know as the Mullah enablement protection act.

[chuckee]

I detest that term “human rights” which seems to have found its entre into the public lexicon by none other than Jimmuh Carter.Prior to Jimmuh, wars have always been about a nation’s perception of its vital national interests.Now the globe and the UN seems to insist on the fiction that all aggressive wars and interventions must be defined in terms of “human rights”. Yet I cannot think of one aggressive intervention in the past century that has truly been initiated for the protection of “human rights”.Barring a large scale atrocity like the holocaust or Rwanda, the US should not be policing the world with our military for human rights violations unless we also have a vital national interest in the intervention.