Intervention In Iraq

The Iraq war has and continues to be a contentious issue amongst the international community and has been thoroughly addressed in Fernando Teson’s 2005 Ending Tyranny in Iraq. Acknowledging the primary claims as to why the events that unfolded in Iraq in 2003 cannot be considered humanitarian, Teson provides a thorough analysis of the intervention arguing that the war was morally justified as an act of humanitarian intervention. Teson’s argument is accompanied with a detailed analysis of humanitarian intervention and the Doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention. However, Teson’s 2005 stance appears weak in retrospect to the continuation of war and unrest in the Middle East. In all, Teson’s analysis provides a dialogue of justification for the

The United States entered Iraq with the intent to suppress a security threat to the West. If the intent was to suppress a threat towards the United States, in theory the act cannot be labeled as an act of humanitarian intervention as the liberty of the Iraqi people was not the forefront issue. Teson poses that although the initial intention was to suppress a security threat to the West, the consequential liberty brought upon the Iraqi people established a genuine humanitarian element. Thus, if the outcome of the intervention has a humanitarian element, as Teson argues the intervention can be morally justified as humanitarian despite disapproval from the international

Thus, in order to rationalize the intervention Teson applies two humanitarian rationales for the intervention in Iraq: narrow and grand. Within the narrow rationale the immediate intention of the intervention was to overthrow Hussein, focusing on the rule of the government and not the atrocities committed by it. However, the grand rationale moves focus from those being rescued from tyranny and towards the security concern of the intervening state. Both of these claims drift far away from the normative understanding of humanitarian intervention, instead describe a reform