Intervention is unpopular in practice

The argument

The argument turns on a gap between what publics say they value and what they will authorise. In 2013, shortly after President Bashar al-Assad of Syria used chemical weapons against his own people, pollsters asked US citizens whether they wanted military intervention in the deadly civil war. A meager 9 percent favored humanitarian intervention (HI) in the middle-Eastern country. That case is close to the strongest one available: an atrocity that was public, documented and widely condemned. If support does not appear there, the argument holds, it is unlikely to appear anywhere. While nearly every American would condemn human rights abuses and suffering in theory, they rarely support the practice of stopping it. The second element is memory. Due to the failures of past interventions, such as Iraq, it is difficult to find support for future interventions. Voters weighing a proposed intervention do not assess it in isolation; they price in what the last one cost and what it achieved, so each disappointing campaign raises the bar for the next. From there the argument draws a constraint rather than a moral objection. Considering most of the nations that consider HI are democracies, it does not appear just to pursue a policy that is so unpopular among voters. A government that commits its citizens' lives and money to a war they have declined to endorse acts without the authority that makes such decisions legitimate, and it will struggle to sustain the effort when support falls further — which it tends to do once the fighting begins. Military intervention should not be completely precluded from occurring, but the recent examples of foreign conflict have had very low popularity, especially after the conflict begins, and a policy that cannot hold democratic support cannot be relied upon to run its course. Nations can still help foreign citizens in crisis by other means; what is clear, on this argument, is that military intervention is not a popular choice to aid those abroad.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Public support may not be the best litmus test for whether to intervene in a humanitarian crisis. If we take Rwanda as an example, there is a degree of political guilt for the lack of decisive action taken in 1994. Some scholars and policymakers have indicated that more action would have stopped or lessened the eventual mass genocide that took place in the small African nation. At the time, there was not overwhelming support for military action, other than a small UN peacekeeping presence. With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that more could have been done to prevent the degree of death and suffering that occurred. If we only acted according to public support, then little humanitarian action will be taken to protect human rights.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Unpopularity may be due to a lack of information on the atrocities being committed. [Rejecting P2] Recent conflicts may have become unpopular, but inaction on past genocide is now regretted, such as Rwanda and Cambodia.