Peoples have a moral right to political self-determination; (nation-) States have a juridical right to sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The political mistake of consistently violating this main idea continues now, after the surge of international military interventions into sovereign nations' internal affairs in the 1990s, with Libya. Apart from the unwise decision to commit to intervening in Libya, the decision to intervene by establishing a no-fly zone came too late; the objective is unclear; the conduct of the operation is flawed. The Western coalition is neglecting a fundamental principle of the philosophy of just war – war should be waged only be waged if there is proportionality between objectives and cost. In other words, the damage and suffering the war causes should not be more significant than the hurt and suffering it aims to avert.
To prevent interventions by the international community into sovereign nations' domestic affairs, the United Nations Charter introduced and acknowledged the sovereign equality of all nations. The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2131 of December 21, 1965, reemphasizes this principle once again: "No state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatsoever, in the internal or external affairs of another State. Consequently, armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, or cultural elements are condemned."
This stipulation is a morally valid norm in a global society. As is currently the case in Libya, a government quelling violent political uprisings or revolutionary attempts that aim at its overthrow does not constitute a justifiable cause for intervention. A State can only lose the fundamental State right of sovereignty if a government commits crimes against humanity in the sense of religious or ethnic cleansing or pogroms on certain parts of its population. Cracking down on insurgents and revolutionaries does not fall under this category.
Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Western powers have begun to violate this principle profoundly. National uprisings received support by outright forceful intervention in some countries, but not in others. Apart from military feasibility considerations, ideological bias was the primary incentive for interventions.
Western powers began to breach the principle of national sovereignty during Yugoslavia's disintegration in the early 1990s. After they prematurely acknowledged the former Yugoslav provinces as independent nation-states, the subsequently fledgling states that had just seceded from the former Yugoslav Republic needed help. Thus was the NATO 1995 bombing in Bosnia and Herzegovina vindicated in the wake of the Srebrenica Massacre's apparent horrors. In the two years prior, despite an imposed no-flight zone by NATO, the war had raged on unrestrictedly on the ground before American and NATO airstrikes of Operation Deliberate Force finally paved the way for the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord.
A few years later, Liberal Interventionism continued, as always for allegedly humanitarian reasons, in Kosovo. After Serbian police and military forces cracked down on Albanian freedom fighters (the Kosovo Liberation Army/KLA), the Euro-Atlantic alliance suddenly felt compelled to embark upon an air-campaign to prevent a humanitarian disaster and take out Serbian forces. Nobody mentioned that the KLA had advanced their case in Kosovo with violent means. Their acts of cruelties underlined the KLA's unjustifiable use of violent means. The reversal of cause and effect, in both ethical as well as political terms, was palpable. There is a good reason and evidence to believe that intervention caused increased bloodshed and intensified ethnic cleansing in both instances, at least in the short term, thus aggravating the humanitarian crisis it intended to prevent in the first place.
The same appears to be happening in Libya now. Encouraged by events in Egypt, a dubious group of insurgents, yet to be defined in their ethnic, religious, and political composition, seek to oust Muammar Qaddafi's regime. The callous Qaddafi did not kill his people before the uprising broke out. And he did not attack another country or neglect UN-resolutions over years and years. He crushed an uprising which every political leader – authoritarian or otherwise – would have done. There are no national interests at stake for the US and the EU. There is no humanitarian necessity for intervention, and there is no need to establish a no-fly zone.
The reason for this ignorance in security matters owes to an unbearable unawareness about political theory, international affairs, and the nature of the armed conflict. Neither liberal left nor libertarian right, on both sides of the Atlantic, has ever understood the business of war. When dealing with political violence and armed struggle, they either do too much or too little. In the case of the current political administration in the US, this ignorance manifests itself in a lack of a consistent foreign policy strategy, exacerbated by an astonishing lack of leadership capability on the part of the president.
If it consoles Mr. Obama or anybody, I shall mention that he is not alone. Some heads of government in the European Union contend for the number one ranking in committing foreign policy blunder.
