Disclosure: I support Dean.
I'm in the midst of an International Relations essay on humanitarian intervention, and consequently I've been reading A LOT about Wesley Clark in the last few days. The focus of the essay is, conveniently, Kosovo.
I'm convinced that the world basically agrees in the abstract that humanitarian distress is a justification for aggressive war, when all the other options are exhausted and all the usual caveats blah blah blah. But my thesis is that there remains disagreement on a central point: do gross humanitarian violations by one regime legitimate the actual replacement of that regime? Lots of the theorists argue from social contracts: states are justified because citizens alienate their rights to the state in return for something. But when the state actively abuses its citizens, it breaks the contract. Thus, overthrowing the regime is just sort of acting out what already has happened in theory, except that the populace doesn't have B-2 bombers or whatever.
But does the mere dissolution of one social contract imply the necessary foundation of another--one between the abused people and the overthrower of their former regime? I don't think there's agreement on that. Clark wanted ground troops during the war in Kosovo. Had that happened, Kosovo would have become essentially a protectorate of NATO, and NATO's mission would have included far more political reconstruction than it did. Did Clark believe what he did for military reasons, or did he think there was some theoretical justification for taking control of a people just because their regime has oppressed them?
What do you think? Obviously this is relevant to today's Iraq situation. Assuming that the war was primarily humanitarian (which is untrue), that means that the Bush administration believes that we gained the social contract by virtue of overthrowing Saddam. We have sovereignty in Iraq by UN rules, so there.
Anyway, I'd love to hear some debate, considering I'm writing this all by my lonely self. Is there the two-step consensus about humanitarian intervention?