Recently, President Obama’s drone campaign in Libya has demonstrated open defiance, if not disregard, for moral and legal frameworks in international relations. Much has already been made of the United States’ War Powers Resolution, which asserts that this campaign should have ended on May 20, 2011 (1). It did not. Obama maintains that these actions did not fall under the War Powers Resolution, because drones are not “war”; “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors (2).” At first read this sounds a bit like the definition of “is.” Libyan ground forces cannot target the drones at the altitude they fly, nor could they kill the absent pilot. The administration’s defense made drones sound as harmless as gassing infants while they sleep.
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At first appearances the proclaimed motivation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention to protect civilians in Libya is admirable. However, a closer inspection suggests that the justification for the bombing campaign reflects a broader misappropriation of the humanitarian ethic in the 21st century. Violent conflicts are singularly the most bitter of political contests; for a intervening third party to expect to rise above the fray as a matter of virtue is at best naïve and at worst dangerous. Using fighter jets to destroy the ground forces of an international pariah is a political action. Distributing food aid in an area under the control of a warlord is a political action. Building a water sanitation system for a contested government is a political action. Although not an invested ‘party’ to a conflict in the traditional sense, through their interventions third parties become a part of the political landscape that defines the conflict. Without considering the possible impacts of intervention in a wider context, third party expectations of the perceived impartiality of their actions and the neutrality of their identity are a self-created fantasy. The politics of violent conflict are an inescapable, omnipresent reality third parties ignore at their peril and to the detriment of others.
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