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Monday 14 March 2011

Are You A Good Samaritan? Responsibility and Intervention in Libya

At the heart of the debate in Western countries over how to respond to the civil war in Libya there is something quite fundamental at stake: what is the rest of the worlds responsibility towards people in other countries?  Haunted by the spectre of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq many are understandably tentative about direct military involvement in Libya from any of the big players in the West 'going it alone.'  Some would go further and even view a UN sanctioned intervention as dangerous and wrong.  Yet when you see Gaddafi's forces pushing back rebels in the East, and using considerable force to do so, it is difficult not to hear a kind of 'call' that makes one think that 'we' should do something to help 'them.' But is there a call for us to intervene? And how should we respond to that call?

The typical Christian parable of this moral dilemma would be the story of the 'Good Samaritan.'  I'm sure many people were taught this biblical story, where the Samaritan crosses the road and helps the beaten and robbed Jewish traveller after a priest and a Levite have both avoided him.  In fact, it is perhaps the most fervently impressed story of morality I can remember from my early years at school (and my primary school was not overly religious.)  Whether one is a Christian or not, the way the story is constructed and the point it makes would seem to be pretty much universally relevant.  On the most basic level the Samaritan is 'right' to cross the road and help the beaten Jew.  The priest and the Levite are 'wrong' to leave him.  The story is made more powerful still by the fact that one would probably expect for the Levite and the priest to have helped the Jew because of who they are, yet it is the Samaritan, who would typically have been an enemy of the Jew, who does the 'right' thing and crosses the road.   



So what does this parable tell us about morality?  Does it work? Do we agree with the point it is making? I think there are certainly a couple of ways to unpick the Samaritan story in a way that might be useful for thinking about the crisis in Libya.  Firstly, I think it is interesting to think about the emphasis on 'the road' in the parable.  Depending on the version of the story you know, either the Samaritan crosses the road to help the Jew, or it is the priest and the Levite that cross the road to avoid helping him.  Either way there is an element of distance involved.  We distance ourselves to absolve responsibility.  Or we come closer to increase our responsibility.  So would the story read the same if none of the three travellers could see the victim, and were instead told by another person on the road that there was a Jewish man beaten some miles further on?  Would we still expect these men to go and help?  And what if they were told about a beaten Jew in another country or continent - do we expect any person to go and help a complete stranger in another country?  It would seem that distance, space, time and territory have an impact on responsibility and morality, and it is perhaps this that the Libyan crisis brings into sharp perspective.  Do we help those far away from us?  Do we have the same (or even more?) responsibility for them as we do for those close to us? Or should we be concerned with our fellow citizen over our fellow human? We would help a member of our family if they were in trouble in another part of the world but would we help a stranger? Is it contradictory to help 'us' in one circumstance and not help 'them' in another?  

There is also another role that I think 'the road' plays in the Good Samaritan tale.  It represents, or perhaps with the impact of Christianity it is better to say that it has come to represent,  something of a metaphor for the way people understand the moral journey we all go on in life.  Often people say things like 'we are all travelling the road of life,' or 'life is journey and there are many choices we must make along the way.'  The Good Samaritan parable has come to illustrate this idea.  It suggests that sometimes we may make the wrong choice, we might be the priest or the Levite in some cases, but that the right thing to do is to be the Samaritan, and to do the right thing is how we ultimately stay on 'the road.'  This metaphor of the road has left a legacy in modern times, most obviously explored in Cormac McCarthy's novel by the same name.  I definitely recommend reading his book, and also watch the film if you get the chance as it is a great adaptation with excellent performances from Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee.  The story is very depressing but at the same time also very uplifting.  While the title of 'The Road' is most obviously representative of the physical journey the man and his son take in the story, I think it also represents the moral road they both travel on.  For instance, at the beginning of the story the man teaches the boy that they are 'good guys' and that they 'carry the fire.'  The boy asks whether they would ever eat people to stay alive (as many other people in the story have done) and the father says 'no, because we are the good guys.'  So the boy has to learn morality from his father, much in the same way as we learn morality in our youth from stories such as the Good Samaritan.  However, as the man and the boy's journey continues, they switch roles, and the boy often has to guide his father and make sure he keeps doing the right thing, making sure the man does not stray from the very path he has taught to the boy.  There journey along the road is therefore one where they must each help each other to keep doing the right thing, despite all the challenges and despair they face along the way.  



The point I think we can take from this for thinking about intervention in Libya is that it is important, even with all the challenges and problems in the world today, to still try and do the right thing, whatever that may be.  The decision of whether to intervene is therefore crucially important because it has to be the right thing to do and it has to be done for the right reasons.  I always think it interesting that former PM Tony Blair makes a similar argument to the Good Samaritan parable for intervention in Iraq.  He constantly repeated at the Iraq Inquiry that he believed intervention was the right thing to do because Saddam was an evil dictator and was oppressing his own people.  We in the West had to 'cross the road' and help the people from Saddam's tyrannical rule.  Now to a certain extent I can actually buy this as an argument for intervention; I think it is probably quite a good one.  The problem is that Blair (and Bush), whether they believe this argument themselves or not, are both full of shit because that is categorically NOT the reasons that were cited for intervention in Iraq.  At the time it was all about the threat of WMD's (that subsequently did not exist,) the perceived threat from terrorist factions in the country, and, quite obviously for most people, about the threat to Western oil supplies.  At no point was the primary reason for intervention anything other than in the name of our own Western security.  It was never primarily to help others or to stop acts we deemed to be abhorrent.  I have no doubt that Saddam was a bastard, but there are many regimes all across the world that are no better, and some are even worse.  How can we pick and choose between which ones we should stop?   

I guess I think then that Western intervention is justifiable in certain circumstances despite what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that the reasons for intervention have to be thoroughly thought-out internationally, legally and publicly.                                                         

However, a final point that strikes me in relation to Libya is that the Jew in the Good Samaritan parable does not ask for help.  We assume he is in need of help because he has been hurt and robbed.  Yet we do not know why that has happened, it is just assumed that these are bad things and someone should help the Jew.  But what about the politics of the attack on the Jew?  What if he had done something really bad and deserved to be beaten?  What if he had attacked someone who had simply overpowered him and returned the favour?  Or what if he does not want the help of the Samaritan (which may well be true because the Jews hated Samaritans)? Does this change the scenario and how we think it is right to respond to the situation?  Therefore I think we must ultimately ask the question: do the Libyan revolutionaries want Western help?  And if they do not, and they end up getting defeated by Gaddafi's forces, then would it still have been right to not help them? The picture below may seem to answer the question, but then I wonder: can they really manage it alone? And do all Libyans feel this way or is it a minority?  How could you even find that out?



Of course in this respect the real surprise of the Samaritan story is in some ways the fact that ANY of the three men go and help the Jew.  You cannot deny that many people, sometimes even good ones, often choose to ignore some of the bad things happening around them because they are so difficult to deal with.  So maybe we should just leave the Libyan's to their fate? Is this what the good person would do? I am not entirely sure, but I suppose what the international community and the Western world needs to consider is what really are the reasons for intervening, whether they can be consistent in that reasoning and apply it to other situations, and what the impact of intervention would be.  My own opinion would be to say that, if the situation continues to deteriorate in Libya and Gaddafi continues to attack and kill his own people, then some intervention is necessary and justified, even if some Libyans do not want it, because as long as their are some Libyans who do want help to remove Gaddafi then there is a strong case for doing so.  The best way to then ensure the correct reasons for intervention were being applied would then be to have full UN backing via a resolution and then an introduction of gradual measures to restrict the Libyan military i.e. a no fly zone, that would then only be ramped up to more fundamental military involvement if it was really necessary.   But I will put up a poll to see what you think...