In a prepared statement from the Security Council, Brazilian Ambassador to the UN,
Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti reminded the Gaddafi regime of its duty to the people, saying;
"The Security Council and top United Nations officials today urge the Libyan Government to immediately end its violent crackdown on protesters and to meet its responsibility to protect its population."
R2P is a principle that is the product of years of behind the
scenes diplomatic manoeuvring. Simply stated, R2P asserts; with
sovereignty comes responsibility, the responsibility to protect the
well-being of the populace over which a given body claims authority.
Where that responsibility is abrogated, as is clearly the case in Libya
at this hour, the responsibility must be taken up by an outside party.
In practical terms,
given the situation in Libya, (a text book case
of the need for such a doctrine if ever one was presented) it is the
duty of the international community to step in to protect Libyans from
what can only be described as a homicidal maniac.
The problem with the notion of war as an expression of humanitarian necessity is its long history of misuse. The "good" war is a central tenet of all imperial narratives; from Hannibal to Hitler, the powerful have assumed high-mindedness and used the language of universalism to mask their ambitions for extraterritorial plunder.
From Teddy Roosevelt's modifying of the British Raj's "white man's burden" to justify America's looting of fading Spain's colonial assets, to George W. Bush's short-lived Operation Iraqi Liberation, (the title lasting less long than the effort it attempted to describe) "noble" intent is commonly intoned before the launch of foreign adventures, and so, many are rightly skeptical of well-meaning military intervention.
R2P was designed to curb that skepticism, providing a codified set of circumstances where foreign nations can supercede sovereign rights, and is an attempt to rebrand "humanitarian intervention," so discredited by NATO's not so humane destruction of life, limb, and much of the civilian infrastructure of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1990's.
Canadian journalist, author, and researcher,
Anthony Fenton provides some background on the UN adoption of R2P, writing;
"September 2000; at the behest of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced the creation of the ICISS (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty). With primarily liberal philanthropic foundation funding, the esteemed commission embarks on a one-year process entailing massive research, discussion, global consulting, and, above all a consensus-building campaign to once and for all re-orient the debate about humanitarian intervention. The goal was to move, as in Kosovo, from an intervention that is illegal but (as decreed by the intervenors) legitimate, to a future of interventions that are both legal and legitimate. In order to reach the goal of legal enshrinement of R2P, a series of benchmarks needed to be (and, to an extent, have been) achieved. This part of the process falls under the heading 'norm-building.'"
Fenton records some of the participant pedigree for the now decade-long effort to bring R2P into the centre of international diplomacy both before and after its adoption at the
UN's World Summit in 2005, where foundations, governments, and NGO's around the world laboured long and hard to bring the principle into practice, writing;
"2006 - Chicago-based R2P Coalition is born. The convenor of the coalition is Richard Cooper, a CCGA board member and the Int'l Advisory Committee of the ICG. A conservative republican, he has donated generously to Rahm Emanuel's Our Common Values PAC. An offshoot of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (formerly named Chicago Council on Foreign Relations), on whose board First Lady Michelle Obama and President Obama's key donor Lewis Manilow among others sits, the R2P Coalition's Steering Committee includes Gareth Evans, Susan Mayer, Dean U of Chicago, William Pace, WFM, HRW's Ken Roth, Paul Rutgers, Exec. Director Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago, Adele Simmons. Advisory Board includes Cherif Bassiouni, CCGA's Marshall Bouton, David Scheffer, Northwestern, Ruth Messinger, President of American Jewish World Service, MacArthur's Mary Page, and Glria White-Hammond, One Million Voices for Darfur, and Obama's eventual cabinet member, Anne-Marie Slaughter."
If the great interest in R2P by the Uber caste isn't enough to set wondering heads to worry,
Fenton cites American scholar, Noam Chomsky, who says of the "new" R2P concept;
"A third principle is that virtually every use of force in international affairs has been justified in terms of R2P, including the worst monsters. Just to illustrate, in his scholarly study of "humanitarian intervention," Sean Murphy cites only three examples between the Kellogg-Briand pact and the UN Charter: Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia, all accompanied by lofty rhetoric about the solemn responsibility to protect the suffering populations, and factual justifications. The basic pattern continues to the present. The historical record is worth recalling when we hear R2P or its cousin described as an "emerging norm" in international affairs. They have been considered a norm as far back as we want to go."
Chomsky is right; the R2P is at best a disingenuous, rehashed, preemptive apologia for western exceptionalism. At its worst, it's a marauder's license to loot the world's weak. But who can argue against the need for immediate intervention in Libya, where reports of wholesale slaughter of unarmed civilians in the streets are leaking through Gaddafi's media cordon, and where the great man himself promises to "cleanse" the nation, even if it means going "house to house" to do it?
The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine is working its way back into the news. The doomed Gaddafi's determination to punish the citizens of Libya "to the last bullet" has afforded this hibernating notion of humanitarian intervention an early Spring, and promises joint international military action will soon be brought in to bring down the tyrant. 
