Can humanitarian intervention be justified?

With all that is going on today in Libya, I thought about issues regarding humanitarian intervention, state sovereignty, political reform, and so on. I used the W.I.S.E. approach to clear my ideas and think more about the issues. To begin with, in the "wonder" stage, I thought of numerous controversial questions. When the United States and several European countries attacked the Qaddafi government in the name of humanitarian intervention, it made me wonder if humanitarian intervention can be justified. Furthermore, I thought about to what extent the sovereignty of a nation should be respected by other nations. These questions and more were essentially rooted in the issue of humanitarian intervention.

Moving on, I thought about the conflicting arguments that exist regarding this issue of humanitarian intervention. In this section I did both steps two and three (investigate and speculate) because since so many ideas and arguments are interrelated it is difficult to separate one idea from another, issue from resolution and conclusion, and so on. Humanitarian intervention refers to the use of force across state borders aimed at ending infringements of fundamental human rights of individuals. At first thought, it seems that intervention of such nature is for a good cause, resulting from good intentions. However, on the other hand, it seems ironic that force and violence is used for the purpose of stopping force and violence that result in violation of human rights. Then the questions arises, whether the use of force can be justified if it is for a good cause and a desirable end result. The use of force is not the only controversial issue when it comes to humanitarian intervention. Another very important problem is state sovereignty. The idea of sovereignty allows a state to have supreme and independent authority over its state and state affairs. This would mean that a state has the supreme power over its state over any other nations. Then given this, is it just or fair for a nation to intervene in the matters of another nation, how ever good the intentions may be? Though there are many conflicting ideas regarding humanitarian intervention, it seems that without it a countless number of innocent people may never be protected as in the case of Libya.

Finally, for the last step (evaluate), I thought about which arguments I think are most agreeable. In my opinion, there are many flaws in this idea of humanitarian intervention such as the use of force, denying a nation its sovereignty, and etc. However, I still think that humanitarian intervention is necessary and inevitable. Sovereignty should not be an unlimited power. If a state abuses its power and denies its citizens their fundamental human rights, it is the responsibility of the capable nations in the international community to intervene and end such abuse of power by the government. However, the sole purpose of such intervention should be to end infringements of fundamental human rights of the individuals and not be to further the intervening nation's interest such as political reform or economic gain.

In conclusion, I think that humanitarian intervention was needed in Libya where the government was basically waging war against its own people. However, as the US and the European countries turn over their responsibility to NATO, more questions arise. With the US essentially being the leading nation of NATO, it seems that the US may be getting too involved with what is actually a civil war within Libya between the existing government and rebels who want reform.