How Empire is using humanitarian intervention to advance its own interests

TANDON SPEAKS

In this article, Yash Tandon critiques the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) resolutions within the UN system to show how the forces of Empire have used ‘humanitarian intervention’ to advance their own interests. He also explains how the militaristic solutions advanced under R2P are part of a neurotic response to the various crises faced by the Empire.

With the help of Western coiuntries, Libyans fight each other for the control of their country

In the last two columns on Libya I made a distinction between colony and neo-colony, going beyond Nkrumah’s initial analysis of neo-colonialism to show that in our times, the contradictions between the neo-colonies and the Empire are increasing in intensity. I argued that the ‘Arab Spring’ is, in essence, not just a challenge to the Arab dictators, but it is, above all, a challenge to the Empire itself. When the streets revolted against the neo-colonial regimes of North Africa and the Arab world, they were revolting, in effect, against the imperial order that is suffocating their democratic aspirations. In other words, in a larger and indeed more fundamental sense, the Arab Spring is part of a widening and deepening imperial crisis, which includes other aspects of its global economic crisis and the crisis of its legitimacy and moral authority. The Empire’s understanding and responses to the above triple challenges is neurotic. Neurosis is a condition of mind that is based on an irrational phobia and what is recognised in the medical world as an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This applies to nations as well as to individuals. With nations, the phobia is real; it has real-time effects, especially if it affects powerful countries, as is the case with the present day Empire.

A nightmare scenario for the Empire in the Arab region involves three basic ingredients. One is the rise of Iran and what the Empire ‘perceives’ as the Islamic ‘fundamentalist’ threat (the inverted commas are explained below). The second is a change in the balance of power in the region that in the long run is most certainly going against the security and wellbeing of Israel, unless the Empire and Israel make fundamental changes in their dealings with the Palestinians. And the third is the deepening economic crisis within the capitalist system.

The triple causes of imperial OCD go back to 1979. That is the year when the Iranian revolution ushered in the era of the Ayatollahs. That was also the year of the beginning of deep recession in the global capitalist system. Let us, first, take the economic crisis and the Empire’s neurotic response to it. The crisis forced the Empire to review its global economic strategy. Its ‘resolution’ around 1985-86 was the neo-liberal agenda ushered in under the leadership of Thatcher and Reagan, and then ‘globalized’. The question is: what is it about this response that classifies it as neurotic? What made the neo-liberal agenda a neurotic response to the economic challenge? The short answer is that the response is neurotic because it is based on a fierce defence of the capitalist system which has lost its historic justification.I shall leave a detailed analysis of this complex evolution of the capitalist system for another occasion. Suffice to say here that this particular neurosis has several consequences, two of which are crucial to our analysis here. One is the tightening of control over the political economies of the neo-colonies in the third world. And the second is the emerging disintegration of the Euro-American system. On the second we shall not dwell here, except to say that the 2007/08 crisis was inherent within the very dynamics of the capitalist system. In other words, it was inevitable; given the system’s internal dynamics, the crisis was unavoidable. It is wrongly identified as a ‘financial’ crisis, because in fact it is much deeper. The crisis that the Eurozone faces today, for example, is one of its latest manifestations. It requires no genius to understand that what is taking place in Europe is an increasing control of the German, French and British finance capital over the peripheral nations of Europe such as Greece, Iceland, Portugal and Spain, leading, inevitably, to their own ‘Arab Springs’, i.e. popular revolts against the Empire of finance capital.

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