Global Research News Hour - Justifying War: From Yugoslavia to Syria - 09/30/13

Most human beings by nature are anti-war.All military conflicts involve death and destruction, to say nothing of unintended consequences.This is why for generations, military planners have made use of war pretext incidents to galvanize war-averse populations behind aggressive military actions against other countries.These rationales are at core psychological operations utilizing justifications for military action generally not reflecting the government’s REAL reasons for going to war.As researcher and anti-war campaigner Richard Sanders chronicles in his magazine Press For Conversion, war pretext incidents were involved in the Mexican-American War (1846), the Spanish-American War (1898), both World Wars, the Vietnam War (1964), the Wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and NATO’s War Against Yugoslavia in 1999, among others.Richard Sanders appears on this week’s Global Research News Hour to discuss this routine propaganda practice, and whether the August chemical attacks in a suburb of Damascus fit the pattern of standard war pre-text incidents.In the final half hour of this week’s program, we hear two perspectives on one war pre-text in particular, that being the ‘Humanitarian Intervention.’Lloyd Axworthy was the former Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister who authorized Canada’s military intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999 for humanitarian reasons. He recently co-authored a commentary in the Globe and Mail promoting a humanitarian intervention in Syria along the lines of the ‘Kosovo Model.’ The Global Research News Hour allowed Dr. Axworthy, now the President of the University of Winnipeg, room to make his case.Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, however, strenuously disagrees with Dr. Axworthy’s viewpoint, arguing that the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine frequently results in worsening a situation from a humanitarian perspective. Nazemroaya is a geo-political analyst specializing in Middle East and Central Asia politics. He is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization, and the award-winning author of The Globalization of NATO and The War on Libya and the Re-Colonization of Africa. Nazemroaya was in Libya in 2011, and witnessed NATO’s Humanitarian intervention there first hand.