Title: At the point of a gun : democratic dreams and armed intervention /
Authors: Rieff, David
Publisher: Simon & Schuster,
Year: 2005
Subjects: United Nations; Iraq War, 2003-2011.; War; Humanitarian intervention.; United States Foreign relations; United States Military policy.
Abstract: Writing from the front lines of the hot wars of the post-Cold War world -- the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East, and most recently Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times Magazine -- Rieff witnessed firsthand most of the armed interventions waged in the name of human rights and democratization. His report is anything but reassuring. In this collection of articles, Rieff, one of our leading experts on the subject, reassesses some of his own judgments about the use of military might to solve the world's most pressing humanitarian problems and curb the world's cruelest human rights abusers. Rieff's essays draw a searing portrait of what happens when the grandiose schemes of policymakers and the grandiose ethical ambitions of human rights activists go horribly wrong in the field. Again and again, they ask the question: Do these moral ambitions of ours to protect people from massacre and want match either our means or our wisdom?
Contents: pt. 1: The UN and international relations leading p to Iraq. Hope is not enough -- A new age of liberal imperialism? --An age of genocide -- In defense of Afro-pessimism -- Lost Kosovo -- Goodbye, the new world order. -- pt. 2: The Iraq War and its aftermath. The lives they lived : collateral damage -- The specter of imperialism : the marriage of the human-rights Left and the new imperialist Right -- End of empire -- The way we live now : a notion of war -- Were sanctions right? -- Blueprint for a mess -- The Shiite surge.