Suffering

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by Alan J. Kuperman

The problem is exacerbated, Rieff argues, by the fact that states have begun to label nearly all their interventions as "humanitarian", when invariably they are motivated by interests such as national security, reducing immigrant flows and promoting abstract and often ill-defined human rights-none of which satisfies his definition of humanitarianism. "These interventions invariably reveal mixed motives and hidden agendas", Rieff writes; as long as Western states pay the NGO piper he implies, they will call a tune other than humanitarianism. Even when these military interventions support humanitarian objectives, Rieff insists that they still undermine the very soul of the enterprise: "A humanitarianism that supports the idea of war carried out in its name is unworthy of that name." The resort to force, he argues, is a "perversion of humanitarianism, which is neutral or it is nothing.... [I]magining that just wars can be joined with humanitarian imperatives is delusional and antihistorical."

There is some truth in this analysis, but there is nothing new about it. Scholars such as Richard K. Betts and the late Myron Weiner, and practitioners including Mary Anderson, John Prendergast and most eloquently Alexander de Waal, have long since laid out the dilemmas of humanitarian intervention. We have known for many years that humanitarian intervention is never politically neutral in the context of war, because food and medicine help not only civilians but also combatants. Thus, Rieff's holy grail--politically neutral humanitarianism--is a kind of intellectual unicorn: alluring and beautiful, but nonexistent.

PARTLY AS A result of its shaky logical foundation, A Bed for the Night suffers from numerous flaws of argumentation, and the reader must suffer along with them. Perhaps most important, despite implying throughout that something is very broken in the current state of humanitarianism, Rieff never offers a solution as to how to fix it, or even what the goal of remedial action should be. He criticizes humanitarian organizations both for engaging too much in politics and not enough. For example, after tarring American organizations as pawns of their government's anti-totalitarian efforts during the Cold War, and European organizations as distorted by their promotion of socialism and human rights, it seems that Rieff is about to argue for a return to pure humanitarianism. But instead, the organization that most rouses his ire is the ICRC, precisely because it practiced pure humanitarianism during World War II. When Red Cross workers discovered evidence of the Holocaust in progress, they deliberately hid it from t he outside world on the grounds that divulging it would be a political act that could endanger their humanitarian activities. For Rieff, this is a mark of shame that the ICRC can never live down. But what it really shows is the moral failing of the pure humanitarianism that Rieff spends the rest of the book advocating.

Rieff never resolves this contradiction. The best he can offer is simply an assertion that the ultimate solution lies in addressing the root causes of internal conflict, such as inequality and lack of economic development. Accordingly, he calls for the West to increase substantially its overseas development assistance. But, as he himself acknowledges, "development aid has largely been a failure." Thus does one fundamental tension between analysis and prescription beget another.