Unity is right: the manifesto doesn’t say; it hand waves a bit.

On the second point, I suggest that an increase in governments that left people to “their fate” would be a marked improvement. As Sen has shown, people (read: governments) cause famines, not bad weather or anything else. A state that lets people get on with their lives, even if that means neglect, is a world apart from one that kills people. We might not like it too much, but that’s hardly a case for armed intervention.

Furthermore I’m not particularly sure that a state that lets its people die through simply not caring about their fate is morally superior to one that kills people.

Not true. A state’s right to sovereignty is only forfeited if the state itself violates this common life in appalling ways, which quite obviously wouldn’t apply in the scenarios you cite.

Actually, I’m a little more sanguine about the bits of the “Manifesto” that sanction political violence (where the counterfactual isn’t “no violence” but “different violence”). What troubles me far more is the (conditional) carte blanche it writes for unilateral political violence. That’s Very Very Bad Indeed. Not that it should never happen (I sort-of-supported the Iraq War, on balance), but that it certainly ought never to be pre-approved, if you like, outside international law.

Sunny’s right in highlighting the massive practical difficulties with military interventionism – whether Blair, Geras or anyone else wants to accept it or not, foreign policy = realpolitik. It doesn’t matter how foul the regime is in NK, sending the troops in to liberate the North Koreans is not an option, not simply because of NK’s nukes but because the country sits within what China regards as its sphere of influence and only if China is prepared to back direct intervention or look the other way, would there ever be scope for action.

The tipping point issue is another big problem – what EM says is

“If in some minimal sense a state protects the common life of its people (if it does not torture, murder and slaughter its own civilians, and meets their most basic needs of life), then its sovereignty is to be respected. But if the state itself violates this common life in appalling ways, its claim to sovereignty is forfeited and there is a duty upon the international community of intervention and rescue. Once a threshold of inhumanity has been crossed, there is a ‘responsibility to protect’.”

The key phrase is ‘meets their basic needs of life’ which could be interpreted in a very open ended way – would, for instance, the failure of the Ethiopian government to tackle a famine constitute grounds for military intervention under this interpretation of EM? Pehaps we should have sent the troops in to expel Musharraf from office in Pakistan for no responding more effectively to the earthquake? Why not have a military coup in Washington on this basis – after all Bush presided over a complete mess after Hurricane Katrina.

In all these cases there was a period of time where the respective governments failed to meet their citizen’s ‘most basic needs of life’ albeit temporarily, so where do these events fall in terms of the tipping point for intervention?

The EM crowd don’t say.

And what sort of force can other countries use? What about local conditions? For example invading North Korea is out of the question because they have nukes. Invading Iran thus is not out of the question but it would certainly polarise any liberal opinion within the country and bolster the nutcase President.

Yet Iran has not committed large-scale genocide against its own citizens, though has threatened others.

The problem with the Manifesto, as you say Garry, is that it leaves things up in the air and allows people to use it to justify regime change without many checks and balances. I too find that uncomfortable.

as far as they’re concerned they can freely chuck around trite aphorisms and blatant straw-men all they like but try to put up a counter-argument that consists of anything less than a 10,000 word dissertation and you’ve got no arguments at all

Heh. I couldn’t possibly comment.