re: #375 iossarian

Please explain to me how we can “blame the bleeding-heart human rights crusaders” for Obama’s drone war. If it’s in the article and it makes sense, I’d love to hear it.

If not, the author and/or sub editor are trolling, which is sad, and not really worth the time to pay attention to.

simplistically summarizing:

The force projection justification used for drones parallels the language of the Responsibility to Protect and neuters the understanding of “other states’ sovereignty”. That language was created in the UN and used for interventions, which included use of force interventions, in numerous cases. It allows for (and arguably encourages) intervention in nations unwilling or unable to act.

A critical passage snipped from the article goes:

By the late 1990s, the principle of non-intervention had come under sustained assault by the human rights community. The Balkan wars and the Rwandan genocide had demonstrated that non-intervention could carry a heavy moral price tag, and in 1998, when reports of Serbian “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo began to emerge, human rights advocates urged the international community to take action to prevent a possible new genocide.

The United States and other NATO members responded with an aerial bombing campaign against Serbian targets within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (as it was still then called). This military action was not authorized by the Security Council, and NATO could make no plausible claim relating to state consent or self-defense. As a result, many international law experts viewed the Kosovo intervention as illegal — or, at best, “extra-legal.” Nevertheless, it was generally viewed as morally legitimate, and it received what amounted to retrospective endorsement in later Security Council resolutions.