Comments Elsewhere

But I would like you to consider the Rwanda scenario or some other humanitarian scenario. … I think what you would like to say here is that we are fighting a defensive war on behalf of the citizens of Rwanda. Which sounds kind of right, but it also seems very odd to call such a war a “defensive” war.

Well, would it sound any less odd to call it an “aggressive” war? “A war in defense of the Tutsis,” on the other hand, doesn’t sound odd at all.

As a side note, I do agree with you that there are cases — and the genocide in Rwanda is one of them — where massive violations of human rights could, in principle, justify war by third parties in defense of the victims. But it is important to remember that there are lots of different ways of conducting wars, and that signing on, in principle, to a war by third parties doesn’t mean signing on to any kind of war by any kind of third party. (For example, liberal interventionists usually use cases like Bosnia-Hercegovina or Rwanda as exhibit A in the argument for justifying large-scale wars by alliances of governments, especially the global powers, with aerial bombing and typically a period of foreign occupation. But all of these terms are debatable. Wars don’t need to be sponsored or conducted by governments, let alone alliances of them, and don’t need to be conducted by means of the usual full-scale military assault that the Great Powers typically engage in. Maybe the genocide in Rwanda would justify a military intervention by NATO or a UN-sponsored coalition, but I think that’s very much less obvious than many people seem to think, because it is much stronger than the claim that some kind of war or another would be justified than many people realize.)