Chomsky, Monbiot, Hitchens and the Hippocratic Principle... posted by Richard Seymour

Regarding Monbiot's proposals for a new UN Charter to restore justice to international law, Noam Chomsky says that Monbiot has "radically misinterpreted" the nature of the Hippocratic principle as somehow meaning "avoid doing any harm, even if it may lead to greater benefits" so that "a doctor violates the Hippocratic oath by giving someone an injection, because the puncture harms the skin." The Balkans example is especially pertinent:

"Turning to the case to which he refers, Kosovo in March 1999, the US and NATO command anticipated that the effect of military intervention would be to intensify sharply the level of atrocities in Kosovo, as clearly happened. These had been stable and relatively low for some time according to the State Department, OSCE, and other Western sources, and were attributed mostly to the KLA guerrillas by the British government (implicitly) and by the most serious pro-intervention scholarship (quite explicitly). Unless there is some powerful reason to the contrary, then, the Hippocratic truism implies that intervention should not be undertaken -- and there is always a heavy burden of proof to be borne by the call for resort to violence, another truism.



"There is of course more to the story, as there always is in the real world: thus there were diplomatic alternatives -- NATO and Serbian -- on the table at the time. After 78 days of bombing, a compromise was reached between them, lending further support to the surmise that the diplomatic track might have been pursued without the bombing and the atrocities against Kosovar Albanians it instigated, as anticipated by NATO, not to speak of the effects of the bombing on those targeted directly. It follows that the burden of proof to be borne by advocates of bombing is even heavier. Can it be met? Perhaps. The Hippocratic truism does not provide an answer, of course, nor did I (or anyone) suggest otherwise. But that, clearly, is the challenge that must be faced by advocates of bombing in Kosovo, intervention in Rwanda, and other such cases. We cannot evade the serious questions that always arise by gross misinterpretation of the Hippocratic truism."



I think this is eminently defensible, and since one Christopher Hitchens has proven so contemptuous of this logic, I thought I'd share a little secret with you. I just discovered some Hitchens quotes on the Balkans war which suggests a position rather different to the one he has latterly evinced:

ON ETHNIC CLEANSING -
"[T]he cleansing interval ... was both provoked and provided by the threat of air attacks on other parts of Yugoslavia."

ON US FOREKNOWLEDGE OF ETHNIC CLEANSING -
"[T]he 'line of the day' among administration spokesmen, confronted by the masses of destitute and terrified refugees and solid reports of the mass execution of civilians, [was] to say that "we expected this to happen" ... If they want to avoid being indicted for war crimes themselves, these 'spokesmen' had better promise us they were lying when they said that."