NDAA Sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran: Watering the Grassroots of Regime Change

Iran fired long-range cruise missiles into the Strait of Hormuz - the waterway through which 20 percent of world’s traded petroleum must pass to get to market. The U.S. Navy deployed a carrier group through the Strait as a show of force. The mullahs responded, stating that the deployment of warships through the Strait might provoke full-out naval warfare. The U.S. retorted that the Strait will be kept open to shipping by all means necessary. The world economy, already suffering from a minor depression, anxiously fears a disruption in Persian Gulf petroleum supplies, a spike in oil prices, and the spiraling inflation which might kick the crutches out from under the fragile recovery.

This brinksmanship did not originate out of the mullahs’ sudden desire to hold the world hostage, but rather as a direct and foreseeable response to the latest round of economic sanctions enacted by the United States of America against the Islamic Republic of Iran. This policy is not a new one; the U.S. already maintains a practically absolute program of trade sanctions against the entire Iranian economy. Executive Order 12959 issued by President Clinton prohibited all trade with Iran; the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act imposed severe penalties on any U.S. corporation that invests in Iran’s petroleum sector; Iranian banks are completely barred from transacting with U.S. financial institutions. Now, through the Kirk Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011, the U.S. has levied third party sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). As of December 31st, this measure gave foreign companies a stark choice: one can either conduct business with the CBI or conduct business with the United States.

Foreign corporations have opted to do business with the United States and divest from the Central Bank of Iran. The effect of this mass pullout from the CBI has been a sharp drop in the strength of Iran’s currency. Since the Kirk Amendment went into effect, the rial has weakened by 20 percent compared to other currencies. Iranians are rushing to currency exchanges to trade their holdings in the rial for euros, dollars, any currency that might be more stable. Prices in Iranian bazaars are fluctuating so quickly that vendors of imported cell phones and computers are changing their prices by the hour. Commercial establishments dependent upon imports and exports are going out of business because no one wants to transact with a company with unpredictable prices. Iranian manufacturers have shuttered their factory doorsbecause they cannot afford to do business so long as the rial is subject to such erratic fluctuations.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently told the Majlis that the latest measures were “the most extensive . . . sanctions ever.” He continued, “this is the heaviest economic onslaught on a nation in history.”

The depreciation of the rial compared to foreign currencies has led to a painful spike of food prices in this nation highly dependent upon imported food. The price of food staples such as rice, bread, chicken, and lamb have risen by roughly 40 percent in Iranian bazaars. Iranian households have suddenly found themselves unable to put food on the table. Those who can have seen the quality of their food decline. Medications and pharmaceuticals are more expensive too. Though it is too early to tally much data, it appears likely that the Iranian people will likely suffer an acute rise in malnutrition, increased susceptability to disease, and an overall decline in health over the long run.

The NDAA sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran are as provocative as a full-on blockade. Congress has intentionally engineered a direct hit on the Iranian civilian economy. It’s no wonder why Ahmadinejad has resorted to saber-rattling in the Strait of Hormuz – the United States has all but declared economic war on Iran.

So why would the United States of America, send such a belligerent shot across the bow of a country that has not attacked us? Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), one of the GOP’s rising hawks on Middle Eastern affairs, explains the rationale for his eponymous Amendment:

"When we look at Iran today, we see an accelerating nuclear program, expanding ballistic missile program and a wholesale disregard for human rights . . . These are not the signs of successful U.S. sanctions against the regime. Iran continues to sponsor terror around the world, including most recently a failed attack on U.S. soil. In response, the Administration should move quickly to implement the most effective, non-military response - cutting off the Central Bank of Iran and collapsing the Iranian currency."

Let’s break that down. Senator Kirk’s stated rationale for the CBI third party sanctions is that Iran is:

1) pursuing nuclear capabilities;
2) sponsoring terrorism;
3) violating the human rights of its subjects.

Chew on that for a minute.

Let’s say that one of these days, say a year from now, the Iranian economy is so devastated and the people are conducting nation-wide strikes and mass demonstrations in the streets of Tehran ten times as massive as the unrest in 2009. The regime is on its knees. The Ayatollah Khameini completely disavows the Islamic Republic’s intention of pursuing nuclear technologies once and for all so that it can reallocate its resources towards food production. This fantasy is, in fact, the purported endgame of the CBI sanctions. In such a scenario, would the Obama (or Romney) administration declare the mission accomplished, that the Treasury Department is going to de-list the NDAA sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran?

Of course not – Senator Kirk’s original intent of the CBI sanctions was also to protest Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism and human rights abuses. At that point, the Iran hawks would surely justify the crippling sanctions on the Islamic Republic’s financial sponsorship of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Surely, Senator Kirk and his colleagues would argue, we must maintain the economic sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran until it forsakes these militant anti-Israel organizations. The Iran hawks would also point out Tehran’s purported direct organizing of terrorist acts – including the botched attempt to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States.

Let’s suppose the sanctions are really working, the Ayatollah Khameini has consulted with his finance ministers, and the mullahs decide that it is economically imperative to abandon their deadweight terrorist clients; Tehran de-friends Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Khameini declares in a globally-televised address that the Islamic Republic has disavowed its terrorist conduct once and for all. Would the State Department ever let Iran come in from the cold – like it did with Libya, Sudan and North Korea – and drop their designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism?

It appear unlikely that this could ever happen, because in 2007, at AIPAC’s request, the State Department labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps itself as a terrorist organization. Likewise, for Iran to ever shake its State Sponsor of Terrorism status, either the Revolutionary Guards would have to cease to be a terrorist organization, or the Iranian government would have to cease its financial and logistical support for its very own intelligence/paramilitary agency. This is as likely to happen, of course, as the U.S. is likely to cease our support for the CIA and the U.S. Army. The designation of the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization was patently made to ensure that the Islamic Republic of Iran – so long as the regime exists in its present form - is never stripped of its designation as a terrorist state.

But let’s be optimistic, and suppose the economic conditions in Iran become so insufferable that the Islamic Republic not only abandons its nuclear ambitions, but throws Hamas & Co. under the bus, and disbands the Revolutionary Guards Corps. The only criterion to the Kirk Amendment left standing is the continuing criticism of its human rights violations. Suppose Tehran ends the random beatings, arrests and disappearances of peaceful demonstrators and dissidents. The Majlis vote to prohibit torture, abolish capital punishment, and end government censorship of the media. The Ayatollah even consents to a wholesale overhaul of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran so that it ensures equal rights for women, religious minorities, and homosexuals. Under such a pie-in-the sky fantasy scenario, wouldn’t the Obama (or Romney) administration be tempted to repeal the sanctions on the Central Bank?

Though it would be eminently reasonable to repeal the CBI sanctions if Iran substantially performs on each and every demand of the Kirk Amendment, it is difficult to imagine that any U.S. administration might ever back down on the sanctions program so long as Iran remains an Islamic Republic. Depending on how one construes the term human rights, an administration could justify continuing the CBI sanctions so long as Iran limits the participation of non-Islamic parties in its presidential and parliamentary elections. Even if the Guardian Council were to allow for truly democratic, multiparty elections, Iran hawks could always object to the fact that all real political power resides in the Supreme Leader who is the commander of the armed forces, who exercises great sway over all branches of government – and who is not elected by popular vote. One could argue that the Iranian people’s freedom of religion is violated unless the theocratic institutions of the Supreme Leader, the Assembly of Experts, and the Guardian Council are completely abolished.

An elected government composed of the Majlis and the Presidency might not suffice either. It appears that the 1979-81 hostage crisis left such a pall of humiliation on the American psyche that no administration, no Congress will ever be satisfied until the entire Iranian regime is eviscerated to a pulp and a completely new regime is erected from scratch. When U.S. officials talk about human rights in Iran, they often imply the right to be free of the Islamic Republic.

It appears that the real end goal of the CBI sanctions is an aim which most Iran hawks are reluctant to flat-out mention: to inflict hardship onto the Iranian civilian population so as to stir up discontent with the Iranian government. A January 10th article in The Washington Post by Karen DeYoung and Scott Wilson quoted a senior U.S. intelligence official laying out the strategy:

The Obama administration sees economic sanctions against Iran as building public discontent that will help compel the government to abandon an alleged nuclear weapons program, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official.

In addition to influencing Iranian leaders directly, the official said, “another option here is that [sanctions] will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways.”

The intelligence official’s remarks pointed to what has long been an unstated reality of sanctions: Although designed to pressure a government to change its policies, they often impose broad hardships on a population. . . .

A senior administration official, speaking separately, acknowledged that public discontent was a likely result of more punitive sanctions against Iran’s already faltering economy, but said that is not the direct intent. . . .

“The question is whether people in the government feel pressure from the fact that there’s public discontent,” the official said, “versus whether the sanctions themselves are intended to collapse the regime.”

The original version of this January 10th Post article quoted the anonymous administration official as stating that the ultimate end goal of the sanctions was, in fact, to foment “regime collapse.” A later version of the same article was amended, sheepishly backpedaling that that statement was “incorrectly reported.” Either way, this off-the-record story was a veritable bombshell as it explicitly named the hardship and discontentment of the Iranian population as an express goal of the CBI sanctions.

But the question remains; was the first reporting of this article retracted because the invocation of “regime collapse” was a misquote? Or did this anonymous senior administration official simply say too much? Are we sabotaging the Iranian civilian economy because we want the people to write to their Representatives in the Majlis to vote “Nay” on a nuclear program bill? Would Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon be content with an Islamic Republic sans nuclear capabilities? Or are we going to maintain these draconian sanctions until the Islamic Republic lies in the same ash heap of history as the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahariya?

We have conducted regime change in Iran before, and Iran has enjoyed the blessings of democratic self-government – though not in that order. The brief reign of Iranian democracy lasted during the brief window from 1951 to 1953 under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh was as revered a nationalist leader in the Age of Decolonization could be. But after Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the Truman administration enacted an embargo on nationalized Iranian oil. President Eisenhower followed up by authorizing Kermit Roosevelt to lead the joint CIA/MI5 mission Operation Ajax. Roosevelt and his cohorts fomented political instability in Iran with bombings and demonstrations, destabilized the Mossadegh government and re-installed the Shah Reza Pahlavi by coup d’état. Embargo proved to be but a prelude to direct CIA subversion.

Neoconservatives like Senator Kirk are gaga over the Central Bank of Iran sanctions because they hope that these restrictions might achieve the same end of Operation Ajax by purely economic means. But this strategy inadvertently showcases the extent to which Neoconservativism borrows generously from more radical (and European!) ideologies. According to the Marxist-Leninist "immiseration thesis", the worse the economy, the more “immiserated” the proletariat, the more radicalized the proletariat becomes, and the greater chance of political revolution. Trotsky’s corollary to the Marxist-Leninist “immiseration thesis” was essentially that farsighted vanguards of humanity could speed up the process of political revolution by deliberately sabotaging the economy. Similarly, with the CBI sanctions the Neocons expressly aim to foment so much havoc in the Iranian economy that the Iranian people are thoroughly “immiserated" that they become radicalized, and bring about regime change on their own accord.

What happens if the sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran don’t succeed in dislodging the Islamic Republic? 13 years of comprehensive sanctions maintained by all of the United Nations against Iraq did nothing to remove Saddam Hussein. After 6 years of Israeli-American-European strangulation, Hamas still maintains its fiefdom in the Gaza Strip. After 52 years of unilateral U.S. embargo, the Castro brothers are still in power in Cuba. With the exception of perhaps South Africa and Chile, trade sanctions have rarely succeeded in fomenting regime change.

In the aforementioned cases, economic sanctions have certainly achieved the intending goal of “immiseration”; embargoes plunged the Cuban, Iraqi, and Palestinian populations into even more devastating poverty. But the undesired regimes did not budge. Though the incumbent regimes have been able to blame the people’s economic misery on America and the Western powers, and they have benefited from the “rally-around-the-flag” effect which often results from acts popularly characterized as foreign aggression. The manifestations of this effect can be transnational and quite sinister; in his seminal fatwa, Osama bin Laden justified his waging jihad against the American people partly upon the misery suffered by the Iraqi people under UN sanctions.

The NDAA’s latest salvo against the Iranian economy might not even disincentivize the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. According to the Post’s anonymous administration official, “[the CBI sanctions program] could have the opposite effect from what’s intended,” he said, “and impel the Iranian leader to decide, ‘We’re going to build that nuclear weapon.’ We’ve thought of that.”

Don’t get me wrong; the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the most despicable regimes in the world today. President Ahmadinejad, the Ayatollah Khameini, and all agents and bureaucrats complicit in the murder of peaceful demonstrators in 2009 ought to be indicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity. Any fair observer must look forward to the day when the Iranian people inevitably rise up and overthrow the Ayatollah and the mullahs in favor of a new, more democratic form of government. However, it appears that “immiseration”-based trade sanctions might be neither suitable nor necessary to achieve this end.

Trade sanctions with the express purpose of inflicting economic pain upon a civilian population should not be blithely enacted without due regard for their moral price and their real human costs. Terrorism is generally defined as the deliberate use of violence aimed against civilians in order to achieve political ends. The Geneva Centre for Security Policy defines economic terrorism as “varied, coordinated and sophisticated, or massive destabilizing actions [undertaken by transnational or non-state actors] to disrupt the economic stability of a state, groups of states, or society.” Maybe the CBI sanctions program is not economic terrorism because it is conducted by state actors. Maybe it is isn't economic terrorism when we do it. Maybe the CBI sanctions program is economic terrorism - but if it leads to the downfall of the Islamic Republic, the ends justify the means. Maybe it depends on what the definition of is is.

One can be a steadfast critic of the Iranian government and also a critic of one's own country's attempts to thwart the Iranian government. There is a sizeable camp of critics who loathe the Iranian regime and who also believe that the less foreigners do to meddle in that country's internal politics, the better for the legitimacy of the Iranian reform movement. Some of us despise the Islamic Republic and cannot wait to see the day when the Iranian people are free from its tyranny, but we also believe that the Iranian people’s struggle for political freedom is theirs and theirs alone.

Do We Have a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Civilians in Côte d’Ivoire?

(WARNING: This blog post contains graphic images of war crimes. If you are upset by images of dead bodies then do not continue.)

A dictator stands in defiance of the will of his people. His security forces are shooting nonviolent demonstrators, and a full-fledged civil war has erupted between popular militias and regiments loyal to the incumbent regime. The civilian population is caught in the crosshairs, and the dictator’s paramilitary death squads and mercenaries have resorted to the indiscriminate slaughter of neighborhoods, cities and clans suspected of subversion. An entire nation sits precariously on the brink of genocide. Millions of civilian men, women and children have fled from the violence to become a long term caste of internally-displaced persons and war refugees, destabilizing every country in the region. The people can only pray for the international community to take a stand to protect them from annihilation.

I’m not talking about Libya, however, but another country whose fate might have even greater implications for the fate of African democracy: the Ivory Coast.


Any proponent of this democratic tide which has swept away dictatorships in North Africa should be equally if not more enthusiastic for the ouster of Laurent Gbagbo - the president/dictator of Côte d’Ivoire since 2000. When his term ended in 2005, Gbagbo simply declined to hold new elections and ensconced in the presidential palace for another five years as an unelected warlord. In Gbagbo we have not a long-standing monarch or military leader who is merely facing a sudden popular revolt, but a strongman who had stolen a position of authority by subverting his country’s inchoate democratic institutions.


Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo agreed to hold a presidential election in November 2010. According to all objective observers, former Prime Minister and IMF economist Alassane Ouattara won with an unambiguous plurality of 54 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, the Gbagbo-appointed Constitutional Council declared “widespread fraud” in the pro-Ouattara northern provinces and rejected all of those districts’ ballots - disenfranchising enough voters to certify Gbagbo the winner with an alleged 51 percent of the vote. Gbagbo’s nullification of the Ivorian presidential election was the world’s greatest bastardization of the franchise in recent memory; fittingly, the incumbent nonsensically claiming victory in defiance of all objectively verifiable truth had campaigned on the slogan “We win or we win”.

Moreover, as President of Côte d’Ivoire Gbagbo provoked the Ivorian population into civil war, pitted his Christian-majority South against the Muslims of the North, incited xenophobic violence against French expatriates and immigrant workers from Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali. Since the November election, ex-president Gbagbo widened the category of enemies of his quasi spiritual-nationalist-chauvinist regime and effectively declared war on the Ivorian civilian population which rejected him at the polls - a clear majority of the electorate. Ivorian soldiers and pro-Gbagbo youth gangs have terrorized tribes, clans, villages and neighborhoods as collective punishment for marking their ballots for Ouattara.



The moral cravenness of the Gbagbo regime was best exhibited this past March when the market women of the Abobo neighborhood in Abidjan demonstrated for an end to the fighting, carrying tree branches and chanting "We want peace".


Gbagbo’s forces mowed them down with machine guns, killing eight.

Despite the fact that they have declared allegiance to the rightful President Ouattara, lovers of liberty should hold little sympathy for Les Forces Nouvelles who are swiftly descending from their northern territories to conquer Gbagbo’s strongholds in the South. Les Forces Nouvelles are for the most part jackbooted thugs who likewise govern their territory through extortion, intimidation and outright theft.


Credible reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented an FN modus operandi of arbitrary detentions, torture, extrajudicial killings and sexual violence directed towards those tribes, clans and villages accused of loyalty towards the Gbagbo junta. Aid groups descending upon the western town of Duékué recently “liberated” by the FN have discovered mass graves and piles of bodies which may turn out to evince more than 1,000 individual war crimes.

The Ivorian civilian population needs protection from both factions in this gruesome war. The apathy of the international community in respect to the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire is disgraceful, especially considering the fact that the United Nations already has a peacekeeping force of 9,000 mostly French and Bangladeshi personnel in this country. UN peacekeepers have been stationed in Côte d’Ivoire since 2004, in fact. However, the UNOCI peacekeeping forces effectively only serve to stabilize the expatriate neighborhoods of Abidjan and the environs immediately surrounding Le Golf Hôtel where Ouattara’s government-in-internal-exile has stood under siege since November. Like the UN peacekeeping forces which could only stand their ground and watch as genocide unfolded in Rwanda and Sudan, the powers that be have apparently destined UNOCI to serve as a mere witness to the human slaughter in Côte d’Ivoire.

The United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) is authorized by Resolution 1528, which was passed unanimously in the Security Council back in 2004 and reauthorized and augmented in a series of subsequent resolutions. UNSCR 1528 which begat UNOCI is actually remarkably similar to UNSCR 1973 which brought us the present Operation Odyssey Dawn; each was ostensibly crafted on the liberal humanitarian and politically neutral rationale of maintaining a cease-fire and protecting civilians.

One major difference is that UNSCR 1973 authorized member states to enforce a no-fly zone to protect the Libyan rebels and civilians from assault by the Libyan Air Force; though the Gbagbo has used the Ivorian Air Force to pummel FN positions and civilian targets, and in 2004 even attacked the French air base in Bouaké (killing nine French soldiers and an American aid worker), the mandate for UNOCI has never included the enforcement a no-fly zone. Understandably so; most of the war crimes conducted by both sides in the Ivorian Civil War have been implemented by foot soldiers.

Another major difference – arguably more subtle but a more consequential difference nonetheless – is that UNSCR 1973 authorized member states to enforce the transport of arms in and out of Libya, and a significant portion of participants in Operation Odyssey Dawn have actively deployed their respective navies to hold up the blockade and starve Qaddafi of arms. UNSCR 1528 and its follow-up resolutions similarly exhorted member states to enforce an arms embargo on Côte d’Ivoire as well, but no one has seemed to notice. Even since the post-electoral revival of hostilities, UN investigators have been pursuing reports that guns, ammunition, perhaps even attack helicopters and aircraft may have been imported from Zimbabwe, Angola, even landlocked Belarus. Though some of the individual accusations may turn out to have be groundless – apparently the Belarussian helicopter sale had indeed been planned but never actually executed – the fact that Ivorian seaports and airports have been open to commercial traffic at all is testament to the fact that no relevant powers of the international community are earnestly committed to enforcing the arms embargo which is crucial to minimizing the extent of the Ivorian bloodbath.

Conversely, the UN-authorized operations in Libya are extremely dissimilar from UNOCI in that whereas Obama, Sarkozy, Cameron and every other power player has repeatedly insisted that Odyssey Dawn will not entail the deployment of ground troops, the multilateral campaign is being conducted exclusively by air and sea, the peacekeeping mission in Côte d’Ivoire consists almost exclusively of ground troops. UNOCI now consists of 9,024 uniformed personnel on the ground, including 7,578 troops, 176 military observers and 1,270 police – disproportionately Bangladeshi infantry and French gendarmes. Boots on the ground do not necessarily make the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire any more effective; they have been by and large limited in their conduct to securing President Ouattara and his coterie at Le Golf Hôtel and only the most modest of civilian protection operations in Abidjan.

The crippling reserve exercised by UNOCI is likewise based on the exponentially greater risk of protecting civilians via ground troops; to date, 54 UN personnel have been killed in the line of duty in Côte d’Ivoire – more than the total death toll of US personnel in Bosnia, Kosovo, Colombia and Haiti combined. As the Obama administration is preoccupied with extricating our land forces from the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are reasonably squeamish about committing to any sort of civilian protection operations that cannot be executed by B-2 stealth bombers or guided-missile destroyers.

It seems that the logistics of peacekeeping in Côte d’Ivoire might be daunting, even more so than our “kinetic military action” in Libya. Yet it seems that the moral logic of intervention is in both countries is indistinguishable. President Obama intones that action was necessitated by the specter of full-out massacre in Benghazi – an action which “would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world”. Indeed it would have. But are our consciences not stained by the massacres in Abobo and Duékué?

Obama argues that the United States has a strategic interest in preventing a massacre which “would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya’s borders, putting enormous trains on the peaceful – yet fragile – transitions in Egypt and Tunisia.” At last count, the UN High Commissioner of Refugees stated that at least 116,000 Ivorian refugees had already fled to neighboring Liberia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea – with more than 100,000 in Liberia alone. All of these countries are already suffering from some degree of political instability, anemic economies and intolerably high levels of unemployment; hence the situation we have now with multiple millions of internally displaced Ivorians who might very well pour over the borders bodes terribly ill for West Africa’s fragile democracies.

Obama contends that if the U.S. did not intervene in Libya, “The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship, as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power.” Though as Laurent Gbagbo defied the will of his people and nullified the election in which he lost, we demonstrated to the young democracies of Africa that we would respond to their power grabs with sharply-worded proclamations and economic sanctions that we would not bother to enforce. This year alone presidential elections are scheduled to be held in Liberia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, and seven other countries on the continent; is the lesson of Ggbagbo to be learned by African incumbents that they should do well to stay in power by not holding elections at all?

Moreover, Obama maintained that intervention in Libya was necessary to uphold the credibility of the UN itself, that had we not acted “The writ of the United Nations Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling that institution’s future credibility to uphold global peace and security.” How does United Nations make itself credible when the Security Council calls for a cease-fire and does not enforce it? Or when the Security Council enacts an arms embargo on a war criminal regime – but not a single member state is willing to interdict cargo ships and planes bound for it? How can any institution be trusted to keep the peace in the African heartland when its peacekeeping mission cowers on the beaches of Abidjan?

In all fairness, the newly-christened Obama Doctrine is more nuanced than a mere postulate of normative ethics; the rubric for intervention laid out in the President’s “Responsibility to Act” speech is a complex calculus of moral imperatives and cold cost-benefit analysis. And he did state quite clearly: “It’s true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs”; i.e. sometimes despots will crush their people and the United States will do nothing because – however righteous intervention might be – we cannot afford to intervene, or we can but the fate of the country in question is not in our core national interests.

And likewise, it looks quite manifest that the international community is not going to take any substantive action to protect the Ivorian civilian population, that this civil war is probably going to end within a matter of hours as the Les Forces Nouvelles seize hold of the last military bases and police stations in Abidjan, the television station and the presidential palace, the last Gbagbo loyalists either defect, surrender or are summarily executed by the victors. Laurent Gbagbo himself will most likely come to an end with a bullet to the temple. And one can only imagine what sort of “revolutionary justice” the FN Jacobins might mete out to the neighborhoods, villages, and clans which voted for Gbagbo. This sort of African solution to an African problem will not put the lives of any U.S. troops on the line and it won’t cost taxpayers a dime; from our narrow self-interest, it might even be an efficient policy of isolationism. Though for the Ivorian people, on the other hand, it might mean tens of thousands of civilian deaths which could have been completely prevented had the international community made a serious stab at intervention.

As we bask in the self-righteousness of pre-empting humanitarian calamity in Libya, how do we sit content with the knowledge that civilians are being massacred at this very moment, that the United States could very well lead a multilateral coalition to protect the Ivorian civilian population – but we politely declined? How might our academies’ mightiest metaphysicists and international human rights lawyers conclude a moral “responsibility to protect” civilians in Libya – but not civilians in Côte d’Ivoire? What makes a real, actual massacre in Duékué any less atrocious than a hypothetical massacre in Benghazi? Is it the fact that Libyans are Caucasoid enough that they almost resemble Europeans – but Ivorians are much darker-skinned Others? Or is it that the Western economies cannot handle even a mild oil shortage – but we can cope with civil war in countries whose greatest export is the cocoa bean?

This author for one sympathizes greatly with the doctrine of a “responsibility to protect” which is evolving out of the legal framework of Odyssey Dawn, but a legal doctrine which aims to uphold the values of universal human rights either necessitates intervention to protect both peoples or neither. If the power elite espouse a “responsibility to protect” the people of Libya, but find no such obligation to intervene on behalf of the Ivorians, their reasoning must be predicated on some combination of apathy, hypocrisy, or the kind of cold-blooded economics in which human costs merit no consideration.