MUST READ! Imperial neurosis and the dangers of ‘humanitarian’ interventionism http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/73728

Yash Tandon critiques the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) resolutions within the UN system to show how the forces of Empire have used 'humanitarian intervention' to advance their own interests. He also explains how the militaristic solutions advanced under R2P are part of a neurotic response to the various crises faced by the Empire.

A nightmare scenario for the Empire in the Arab region involves three basic ingredients. One is the rise of Iran and what the Empire ‘perceives’ as the Islamic ‘fundamentalist’ threat (the inverted commas are explained below). The second is a change in the balance of power in the region that in the long run is most certainly going against the security and wellbeing of Israel, unless the Empire and Israel make fundamental changes in their dealings with the Palestinians. And the third is the deepening economic crisis within the capitalist system. The Empire’s understanding and responses to the above triple challenges is neurotic.

Neurosis is a condition of mind that is based on an irrational phobia and what is recognised in the medical world as an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This applies to nations as well as to individuals. With nations, the phobia is real; it has real-time effects, especially if it affects powerful countries, as is the case with the present day Empire.The triple causes of imperial OCD go back to 1979. That is the year when the Iranian revolution ushered in the era of the Ayatollahs. That was also the year of the beginning of deep recession in the global capitalist system.

Let us, first, take the economic crisis and the Empire’s neurotic response to it. The crisis forced the Empire to review its global economic strategy. Its ‘resolution’ around 1985-86 was the neo-liberal agenda ushered in under the leadership of Thatcher and Reagan, and then ‘globalised’. The question is: what is it about this response that classifies it as neurotic? What made the neo-liberal agenda a neurotic response to the economic challenge? The short answer is that the response is neurotic because it is based on a fierce defence of the capitalist system which has lost its historic justification.