The responsibility to protect from 30,000 feet

According to the Star, the leader of Canada’s liberal party, Michael Ignatieff, recently lit into Stephen Harper for blowing Canada’s campaign to win a Security Council seat last year: “We could be leading the diplomatic and political efforts to get rid of Col. (Moammar) Gadhafi,” Ignatieff said during a news conference. “But we’re not there ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

According to the Star, the leader of Canada's liberal party, Michael Ignatieff, recently lit into Stephen Harper for blowing Canada's campaign to win a Security Council seat last year:

According to the Star, the leader of Canada’s liberal party, Michael Ignatieff, recently lit into Stephen Harper for blowing Canada’s campaign to win a Security Council seat last year:

“We could be leading the diplomatic and political efforts to get rid of Col. (Moammar) Gadhafi,” Ignatieff said during a news conference.

“But we’re not there and everybody knows why—because he (Harper) is the first prime minister in Canadian history to have a chance to get Canada on the security council of the United Nations (who) blew it. And now we’re paying the price.”

Ignatieff then went on to speak about the importance of the Responsibility to Protect:

"We’ve got to be very clear about what the endgame is,” he continued. “Our party supported the use of Canadian air power for one purpose—to keep Col. Gaddafi from massacring his people.”

But the Responsibility to Protect doctrine does not mean Canada should send troops into Libya, he said.

The international community must remember that above all that it’s up to the Libyan people to determine the future of their country, he said.

I find baffling the willingness of R2P advocates like Ignatieff to simultaneously proclaim the importance of the doctrine and state that ground troops should not be deployed. If you take R2P seriously, how can you say in advance that ground troops will not be necessary? Surely that depends on whether air power is adequate to protect the population.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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