Michael Ignatieff, professor of practice at the
Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, published this piece on
"the duty to protect" in The New York Times last Friday.
Ignatieff, who was one of the many liberals who supported the Iraq War, argues that an important aspect of preserving human rights is the obligation to intervene, even militarily, when human rights are threatened, which he believes is the case with the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Samantha Power, currently
the ambassador of the United States to the United Nations, is another strong proponent of United States military action to defend human rights. As a journalist, she witnessed the horrors of the civil war in the Balkans as Yugoslavia disintegrated, and believes that military action helped end the human rights abuses there. She was also a major supporter of the recent United States intervention in Libya.
I read Ignatieff’s book Blood and Belonging, and it was all about self-determination and the question of who governs. I wonder is he supports military intervention in Syria because he believes that it is the Syrian’s right to overthrow a government which is brutal to its people.
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