Humanitarian Intervention Does More Harm Than Good

agsr

While humanitarian intervention is a noble cause, from practical perspective it often causes more harm than good.

I was assigned this position at random as part of the Finals in the DebateIsland tournament. I ask the judges to please vote based on provided arguments in the debate and not your personal opinions on this contentious topic.

Definitions 

For this debate, I propose:

"Does more harm than good" - there are sufficient number of identified cases where net negative affect can be demonstrated based in intervention. [3]

"Humanitarian Intervention"  has been defined as a state's use of "military force (publicly stated that its use is for ending the violation of human rights) against another state [4]

• C1 - Rhetoric of humanitarian intervention has been abused historically. For example, Japan's attack on Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia were all proclaimed to be humanitarian intervention and were accompanied by high-minded rhetoric. [1]
• C2 - The concept of humanitarian intervention has often been used as a veil for self-interest I There have been 3 interventions that have qualified as humanitarian, but all of them were claimed to be purely self-interested. These were Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in 1978, India's invasion of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1978. It is possible that the UN could conduct a humanitarian intervention but to achieve this it would be necessary to abolish the security council, since it caters to the self-interest of the big powers. And that is hardly going to happen. Humanitarian intervention is a nice ideal but in the real world it is simply a cover for self-interest. [1]
• C3 - US humanitarian interventions have proven to be atrocities The United States proclaimed themselves to be the guardians of humanitarian intervention in the 90's even though they conducted no humanitarian interventions, but they did commit many awful atrocities. The first US intervention of the 90's was in Iraq. This was supposedly in response to the invasion of Kuwait but since there were still diplomatic routes open to ending the occupation this is a ridiculous assertion. Also, the US didn't care about territorial integrity when they invaded Panama in 1989, with very similar circumstances and death toll to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The intervention had numerous violations of human rights and international law, such as the use of depleted uranium shells and the bombing of civilian targets such as houses and water treatment facilities. The bombing was responsible for the deaths of about 200,000 people. But the US continued to intervene in Iraq and maintained sanctions under the pretense of forcing Saddam out of power. But these sanctions caused suffering on an enormous scale. Food and medicine was blocked and children starved to death and died from curable diseases and there was no clean up of depleted uranium which resulted in unparalleled cancer and leukemia epidemics. The sanctions were responsible for the deaths of about 1.5 million people by 1998, most of them children, according to US judge Ramsey Clark. They were also described as genocidal by Dennis Halliday, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq who resigned in protest of the sanctions. This was added to many other grievous abuses. These include the terrorist attack on the Al-Shifra pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, killing tens of thousands of people and destroying more than half the pharmaceuticals to the poor country with aids, tuberculosis and cholera epidemics; the double intervention in Somalia, killing 6 to 10 thousand people, mainly women and children; and support for Turkish atrocities against the Kurds, Colombian atrocities against it's own people and Indonesian genocide in East Timor, all quite arguably the worst crimes of the 1990's along with the genocide in Bosnia and the US led sanctions on Iraq. [1]
• C4 - The most urgent crisis in the world is starvation and we do not need humanitarian intervention to end that. According to the UN, "The Right To Food: Commission on Human Rights Resolution 2002/25”, 36 million people die of starvation every year. That's the equivalent deaths of the Nazi holocaust against jews every 2 months. This is despite the fact that the world currently produces enough food to adequately feed everybody and according to the Food And Agricultural Organization Of The United Nations' 2008 report the world could produce twice as much food. According to UNICEF, it would cost $40 billion a year to ensure universal access to basic education for all, basic health care, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food and clean water and safe sewers. This would surely end starvation. The world military budget is approximately $1.1 trillion. So with approximately 1/30th of the world military budget starvation could be ended. Other steps that move toward ending world hunger include stopping businesses and governments of rich countries exploiting poor countries for their resources and their labour and paying them grossly unfair amounts for it, thrusting them further into poverty. This, along with the environment and nuclear weapons, is the most urgent crisis on earth and none of them require a humanitarian intervention. Instead of focusing our resources on intervention we should focus them on stopping these crises. [1]
• C5 - US intervention in Iraq left behind unstable government and countries full of crime.  While US entered our war with Iraq under guidance of Iraq's nuclear weapons, we never found evidence of that being the case and instead lost many American lives and billions of tax payer dollars. [2]

Sources: 

[1] http://debatepedia.idebate.org/en/index.php/Debate:_Humanitarian_intervention

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/05/gordon-brown-admits-iraq-war-not-justified/

[3] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/do_more_harm_than_good

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_intervention

someone234

When we ask if Humanitarian Intervention(HI) does more harm than good we need to ask what it is to not intervene.

Because these round are only one-hour long, I WON'T HAVE TIME to fully rebut my opponent here, I will do so in Round 2 having had at least an hour more to prepare.

When it comes to the definition of 'more harm than good' the Proposition has implied that you can quantify the net good or net evil of an act by what happens most times. Not only can you not quantify it but you furthermore cannot say that if it severely helps in some cases but barely hurts in others that 'more often is more overall harm than good'.

So what the latter part is saying is, is that even if you had 10 people who had got a shallow wound on their leg after an act that ensured 5 people didn't get tortured slowly to death and catch gangrene along the way, that you can't say the 10 is inherently a greater evil than the 5 much more severe 'good' trade-offs. More often doesn't mean more overall in that direction.

To put this more obviously, you can be a winning Poker Tournament player by losing most games you play as long as you win much bigger than you lost overall when you do win.[3]

Humanitarian Intervention should be defined as:

The deliberate act of a nation or a group of nations to introduce its military forces into the course of an existing controversy in the name of concern for or helping to improve the welfare and happiness of people or pertaining to the saving of human lives or to the alleviation of suffering.
[1][2]

From the elimination of dictators to the assisting of people to even have a remote voice in nations throughout history we have seen that the only time when the Caesars and Genghis Khans run rampage is when everyone has a 'keep to myself' mentality. Think I'm making this up? You think you can speak of the aftermath of Iraq or talk about how ISIS began to get a tiny bit bigger after the Syria war to say that it does more harm than it's done good? Let's observe what these isolationist hyper-Liberal mentality:


On the left side we have the inability (yes US is in the range of 20 trillion in debt and can't just 'buy out' nations like Iraq or Egypt from the poverty that is most certainly a lesser evil than the inhumane dictatorship in which there was poverty anyway)[4][5] On the right side we have helping everything other than the overall GDP of a nation. In other words, you can keep using this idea of 'quantifying harm vs good' and then using money and poverty but what you fail to understand is that you can't just quantify the level of inhumanity and suffering that people like Saddam Hussein, 
Bashar al-Assad, Gaddafi and even cases where there was no significant HI like Kony and Mugabe. You cannot just quantify that and weigh it in some numerical sense against the quantifiable loss in cash for the nation overall.

I have news for you:
If you engage in a war with any nation, it's going to leave them economically worse off due to the need to invest in weapons and Intelligence to win the war (as well to 'bribe' their corrupt allies) so it's blatantly going to leave nations poorer, this is about more harm than good and you can't just quantify some things.

C=Contention
C1: The things you cannot quantify are where the 'most good' in HI occurs. Meaning you cannot even 'measure' to then conclude the harm has been more than the good.
C2: Having the means to intervene and turning a blind eye when your intervention is one of the only means to stop the inhuman tyranny is undeniably morally wrong.
C3: All moral pillars of any society represent the ethos of Humanitarian Intervention and whenever they do their job wrong it was due to half-intervening at best and completely failing to intervene at worst, never due to intervening wrong.
C4: The aftermath of HI is only ever negative due to the inability to intervene further, never due to the wrong of having intervened at all.


The things you cannot quantify are where the 'most good' in HI occurs. Meaning you cannot even 'measure' to then conclude the harm has been more than the good.
What you can do is look at the list of things that HI has helped prevent:
A culture of fear where anyone in power can hurt anyone who isn't for any reason at all:
Saddam Hussein's son, simply feeling like a power-trip bludgeoned to death his father's bodyguard Kamal Hana Jajo in front of horrified partygoers, and would be so obsessed about the Hussein-sponsored football team winning that he'd phone up the dressing room during half-time to threaten to cut off players' legs and throw them to ravenous dogs.[6] He is also reported to have operated an even more private torture chamber on the banks of the Tigris.[6] This is quite simply the tip of a colossal iceberg of humanitarian violations of the Hussein family and their regime (as I just pointed out even on their own bodyguards and staff at random). You can't quantify suffering and a culture of complete terror where for no reason at all, having done your job completely right and betraying no one as a loyal bodyguard, the son of the man you are guarding can bludgeon you to death for a show of power. In Round 2 I am willing to bring up far more examples of Hussein's atrocities, not just his son's or his own but his entire regime's.

Note: The Iraq war was out of fear of Iraq having nuclear weapons and was not claimed at all to be a HI mission to free the people from Hussein, it changed into a HI at some point during the war but most of the negative impact came from what was done when the military acted desperate thinking Iraq had nuclear weapons.[7]

I have many more examples that I'll bring in round 2, this is a one-hour-per-round debate and I must proceed to my other points fast.

Having the means to intervene and turning a blind eye when your intervention is one of the only means to stop the inhuman tyranny is undeniably morally wrong.

Let me explain something here, when it comes to 'harm vs good' you need to fully comprehend the harm of not intervening to then comprehend the good of having intervened.

Since we cannot create parallel universes at will and prove that more harm would occur to a nation had HI not occurred, the proposition can never ever claim as such without significant prediction factors to say so.

So, if the proposition cannot ever prove the lack of intervention would result in any good at all or less harm overall, then they already can' t prove the resolution true from that angle whatsoever.

What the opposition is able to do is to point out that being a bystander when having the means and knowledge to stop inhuman atrocities on the scale of an entire nation of somewhat enslaved people is undeniably morally wrong.

If the proposition denies this based on morals being subjective then they deny the resolution too because if there is no moral right, there's no moral wrong. Harm is not quantitative, it's qualitative and so is good. To deny 'good' being valid because it's not quantitative is to deny harm being valid as a measurable commodity to compare with 'good' in the first place.

The consequence of doing nothing resulting in more harm than good is, under any Utilitarian outlook, definitely morally wrong. In the classic trolley example, the harm being inevitable either way does not ever negate the amount of good of pulling the lever being considered in a morally good pulling of that lever.[8]

All moral pillars of any society represent the ethos of Humanitarian Intervention and whenever they do their job wrong it was due to half-intervening at best and completely failing to intervene at worst, never due to intervening wrong.

From the police to a counsellor who has a feeling that a student in their school is going to kill himself/herself or harm others, the moral pillars of society always do good by intervening and are considered so morally wrong to not intervene that they can be not only fired by arrested for doing so.[9][10]

The aftermath of HI is only ever negative due to the inability to intervene further, never due to the wrong of having intervened at all.

This point speaks for itself and it going to be a contention from which multiple rebuttals of mine evolve in Round 2. I will go much more into this in Round 2.

Enjoyed writing this, good luck ASGR in Round 2.

[1] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/humanitarian
[2] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/military+intervention
[3] https://www.pokernews.com/strategy/mtt-strategy-how-make-poker-tournaments-profitable-26363.htm?pn=7206
[4] http://www.usdebtclock.org/
[5] https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-3306124
[6] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/23/iraq.suzannegoldenberg
[7] https://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-weapons-inspections-fast-facts/index.html
[8] http://theconversation.com/the-trolley-dilemma-would-you-kill-one-person-to-save-five-57111
[9] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2222214/Police-rebuked-ignoring-complaints-thousands-accuse-rude-lazy.html
[10] http://www.stopitnow.org/ohc-content/when-must-a-therapist-file-a-report

agsr

Thank you @someone234.  

I will use this round to refute my opponent's contentions.  I look forward to see rebuttals to my arguments I provided in round 1.

I agree with the definition of HI.

The deliberate act of a nation or a group of nations to introduce its military forces into the course of an existing controversy in the name of concern for or helping to improve the welfare and happiness of people or pertaining to the saving of human lives or to the alleviation of suffering.

My opponent argued that I implied that net impact can be quantified.  I disagree. Net impact can't be quantified in absolute units, but can be weighted objectively on balanced basis.

I also disagree with assertion that I propose isolationist policy.  There are many merits of Humanitarian Intervention if done appropriately and selectively.  It's just in many examples it wasn't the case and it actually causes more harm.  It's not about "never" or "always".

Lets look at each contention stated by someone234:

C1: The things you cannot quantify are where the 'most good' in HI occurs. Meaning you cannot even 'measure' to then conclude the harm has been more than the good.

Going back to my definition that wasn't specifically rejected by my opponent in round 1:

Does more harm than good" - there are sufficient number of identified cases where net negative affect can be demonstrated based in intervention."

In example provided by my opponent for Iraq, clearly there were bad things happening in Iraq and Hussein and his son were abusing their power.  That by itself doesn't justify us going to a full blown war and losing American and Iraqis lives.

The justification for that war was a Nuclear threat that would have potentially cost tens of millions of American lives.  That threat never materialized.

In fact, we lost about 4500 American lives in Iraq and has about American 37,000 casualties.

That to me far overweights specific examples provided by my opponent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war

C2: Having the means to intervene and turning a blind eye when your intervention is one of the only means to stop the inhuman tyranny is undeniably morally wrong.

Is US intervention the only means of helping in most of the conflicts and does intervention always mean a military conflict resulting in loss of American lives, local lives, distraction of local economy, and cost to hard working American tax payers?  In some cases - sure.  But consistent with the definition there are many instances I  where that wasn't the case, and I mentioned multiple cases in my Round 1 Contentions.

C3: All moral pillars of any society represent the ethos of Humanitarian Intervention and whenever they do their job wrong it was due to half-intervening at best and completely failing to intervene at worst, never due to intervening wrong.

I don't think that relying on morale justification of counseling is a relevant example, as most humanitarian interventions has to do with military conflict.

C4: The aftermath of HI is only ever negative due to the inability to intervene further, never due to the wrong of having intervened at all.

That is a very bold statement to say "only ever" and "always". My opponent makes an argument that basically implies we should stay forever and wage wars in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, with continuous loss of American lives. That's not practical and isn't what happened in prior examples in World History.

someone234

In the entire Round 2 we see no expansion whatsoever on AGSR's Round 1 (sorry for spelling it as ASGR was genuine mistake and shouldn't count to the S&G vote as it wasn't part of my arguments). The problem with this is that it's usually considered bad conduct for someone to raise a new point  in the last round of debate but since I go after him it will seem less bad but really it isn't. He should have fully expanded all the contentions of Round 1 in Round 2 so if he brings new sources and new justifications for Round 1 in Round 3 I highly urge the judges/audience to bear in mind that this is not at all how a debate is supposed to go.

I shall first be rebutting the Round 1 contentions of the Proposition before defending my Round 1 contentions against the attacks they put forth. The reason I am going in this order is because it is easier for the reader to follow, not because I wouldn't like to defend first at all.

What appears first as 5 contentions all requiring one attack minimum each is actually 3 contentions because C1, C2 and C3 of the Proposition are genuinely 3 different wordings and angles on the very same contention.

I am going to put into words what the Opposition thinks the Proposition's C1, C2 and C3 are actually as one united contention meant to be worded as:

PAC = Proposition's Actual Contention
PSC = Proposition's Stated Contention
PAC = [PSC (1+2+3)]: When Humanitarian Intervention, which is itself good, is used as a disguise for Non-Humanitarian Intervention, then it often does more Harm than Good.

I want to note that in Round 2 of Prop's arguments he says:

"I agree with the definition of HI.

The deliberate act of a nation or a group of nations to introduce its military forces into the course of an existing controversy in the name of concern for or helping to improve the welfare and happiness of people or pertaining to the saving of human lives or to the alleviation of suffering."
- The Proposition (AKA Prop) [agsr]

In no way whatsoever does Prop state that this definition need to be altered to 'claimed to be'. In other words, they conceded there and then that if you have a non-humanitarian intervention in the name of HI, you are not doing HI as the definition applies only to the honest HI scenario.

If, in round 3, Prop decides to fight the definition that they agreed to then this is very fallacious given that they would be defeating their own agreed-to definition in the final round which equates to a new point in final round and also is debating against their own side there and then.

PSC4 = PAC2: The most urgent crisis in the world is starvation and we do not need humanitarian intervention to end that.

To make this simple and easy, let's agree to the most urgent crisis being starvation. The reason I want to concede that is this is a one hour debate and it's not important to the debate if the most urgent crisis is starvation.

Multiple cases of HI (majority actually) were to stop a dictator who, as part of a multitude of Human Rights violations, was starving their people. On top of that, when Stalin did this to his people, he kept doing it again and again as no HI to Russia occured (the Allies were fighting an equally inhumane leader and needed to ally Stalin due to limitations of resources).[1][2]

Famine is almost 100% correlated with anti-humanitarian leadership even if it occurs outside of it. What I mean is that all cases where HI was needed, famine was there even though famine does occur in more Human-Rights-friendly nations.

Gaddafi was such a severe sociopath that he even called his people who migrated out 'starving and ignorant' and he actually was probably correct about both insults since they were most likely starving and ignorant due to his regime.[3]

On top of this, how does HI stop our fight against poverty? Prop has yet to explain how the two ideas collide.

Poverty can be the gold medal winner in priorities but that doesn't mean silver isn't Human Rights violations. Just because there's a bigger issue in no way whatsoever proves that the intervening on behalf of solving the lesser issue is doing more harm than good.

PS5 = US intervention in Iraq left behind unstable government and countries full of crime.

Counterpoint 1: In Round 1 I provided a very reputable source that explained that the war in Iraq had the war crimes occur while it was a war in fear of nuclear weapons being held in Iraq. The HI of Iraq came much later on as a result of them seeing how inhumane Hussein's regime was to his people. So, the Iraq war was not a HI when the war crimes occurred, it became a HI later on and if anything Hussein's war crimes far outweigh USA and this is about what outweighs what.[4]

Counterpoint 2: The left behind unstable government requires Humanitarian Intervention to handle the widespread issues, it in no way whatsoever is doing well due to the lack of intervention.

I will now defend my C1 through to C4 in a very quick rant as I'm running out of time.

The stats about the lost lives in Iraq are already unreliable for this particular debate as the Iraq war was a Nuclear scare-war much longer before it became a HI war. On top of that, the loss of lives can be considered a required part of the intervention but this is not in any way weighed against the net benefit by Prop at all. Until they remotely measure X against Y they are simply stating the price paid for the reward but not comparing the overall reward against the price paid. The lives lost to stop inhumane tyranny are lost to stop what could be a 20 generation long dynasty of unimaginably large-scale human rights violations. If no one stops the bad guys, the bad guys are blatantly going to stay in power unless the nation gets lucky and the rebels somehow win on their own (which is extremely rare and in the case of USSR was so ironic as by overthrowing the Tsar, an even more inhumane regime took its place).

If the police, the therapists and basically every moral pillar of all societies do good by intervening and when they fail to intervene are seen as morally bankrupt, then it extends to governments and their attitude to human rights violations of other nations. Being a capable bystander who had every knowledge and means to stop the evil makes you evil on any Utilitarian moral compass and almost any other form of Consequentialist moral compass.

Footnote: Nowhere so far has a means to compare the value of Harm against value of Good been provided by Prop, if there's no way to measure objectively in any more vs less sense then they lose the debate on that alone.

Sources:
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/145953/stalin-starved-ukraine
[2] http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/stalin.htm
[3] http://nehandaradio.com/2010/09/01/gaddafi-calls-african-migrants-‘starving-and-ignorant’/
[4] http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/IraqCoverage/story?id=2761722&page=1

agsr

Someone234 and Judges, thank you for your attention and please find my final round below.

C1 - C3: I am disappointed that my opponent elected to not only not reply to my specific contentions in round 2, but to also skim through the details of my 3 key contentions by dismissing it as  one bundle with some convoluted legal-sounding terms that essentially ignore all the clear points I provided in the initial round.  

In my 3 contentions I detailed multiple Humanitarian Interventions that backfired and caused more harm than good.

My opponent attempted to argue with form vs substance, and found it easier at first delay counterpoints and then just not face the facts at all.

C4:

My opponent again opted to ignore my round 1 contention details regarding alternative means to HI.  In fact, I detailed multiple points in my round 1 including

"According to UNICEF, it would cost $40 billion a year to ensure universal access to basic education for all, basic health care, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food and clean water and safe sewers. This would surely end starvation. The world military budget is approximately $1.1 trillion. So with approximately 1/30th of the world military budget starvation could be ended. Other steps that move toward ending world hunger include stopping businesses and governments of rich countries exploiting poor countries for their resources and their labour and paying them grossly unfair amounts for it, thrusting them further into poverty. This, along with the environment and nuclear weapons, is the most urgent crisis on earth and none of them require a humanitarian intervention. Instead of focusing our resources on intervention we should focus them on stopping these crises. "

Dear judges, please take it into consideration that I clearly provided information in Round 1 that wasn't refuted by my opponent.

Someone234: "On top of this, how does HI stop our fight against poverty? Prop has yet to explain how the two ideas collide.": the point is that HI shouldn't be the default option, and other channels can be much more effective in many cases as I stated above. That would avoid loss of American lives and adverse Economic impact on both countries.

C5:

My opponent chooses to dismiss Iraq as an example of HI, saying that it initially started due to a nuclear scare and therefore shouldn't qualify as HI.  He does admit that it did turn into HI later.

I hoped that my opponent was actually going to counter my specific points regarding American casualties and all other stated facts.

Regardless how the war in Iraq started, it was atleast partially caused by Humanitarian concerns and certainly turned into Humanitarian Intervention throughout the conflict. 

Even due to definitional technicalities if one was to argue that this specific War is disqualified as HI (I don't agree that it is disqualified) then it still serves an illustrative story in history of how HI can potentially go wrong and cause more harm than good.

Conduct:

I would also like to mention that not addressing my contentions until final round isn't the best conduct on behalf of my opponent. He had an opportunity to address these in Round 2, but opted to wait until the final round limiting my chances for rebuttals.

Dear judges, in summary:

If you would like to vote for form vs substance or for convoluted verbose technical definitions vs clearly articulated sourced facts then please vote for Against.  Otherwise I hope to get your vote.  

Someone234, thank you for debating with me and best of luck.

someone234

The cases where Prop even tried to make a case of 'harm' (not comparing it to the good at all, only mentioning supposed harm in an immeasurable manner), the intervention was proven to not be Humanitarian in nature thus defiling its validity as HI and meaning that the only times when those contentions apply is when the "Humanitarian" Intervention is not Humanitarian Intervention.

Seriously, I am not raising new points here at all I am just going to repeat what he said and leave it at that:

• The Japanese colonial invasion and occupation of Manchuria...[1] Is this a Humanitarian Intervention? How is this HI?
• The very outwardly stated Imperial conquering and annexing of Ethiopia by Mussolini...[2] This is HI?! I don't think so. The definition agreed to does not apply to this at all.
• Hitler... Hitler... Wait, let me repeat that for you: Hitler, invading in the name of his Fascist Nazi regime the relatively defenceless Czechoslovakia... This is HI? What is this even meant to be pointing out?

The agreed definition of HI is:
The deliberate act of a nation or a group of nations to introduce its military forces into the course of an existing controversy in the name of concern for or helping to improve the welfare and happiness of people or pertaining to the saving of human lives or to the alleviation of suffering.

So... These examples are not HI even by fallaciously doing it 'in the name of', they are straight up 0% HI from any angle.

This is not a new point, this is why I said his C1, C2 and C3 all are refuted by this definition of HI.

Vietnam and Cambodia had a war that was because Cambodia kept trying to semi-invade Vietnam so Vietnam had enough and decided to end the conflict through extreme aggression.[3] The definition of HI states 'introduce its military forces into the course of an existing controversy' which in this case is not at all what happened. It's true that coincidentally the very inhumane of Pol Pot was the one in Cambodia at the time but that war was never ever in the name of helping the Cambodians, it was completely in the name of stamping out the conflict between Cambodia and Vietnam by Vietnam finishing them off once and for all. I said in Round 2 clearly that C1, C2 and C3 all use examples of wars that don't apply to the definition of Hi agreed upon, this is not a new point simply a reassertion and expansion.

In C3 of Prop's Round 1, he opens with this sentence (word for word):
"The United States proclaimed themselves to be the guardians of humanitarian intervention in the 90's even though they conducted no humanitarian interventions, but they did commit many awful atrocities."
- Prop Round 1
Let me just requote that focusing on the part where Prop renders the entire C3 irrelevant to the debate:

"... even though they conducted no humanitarian interventions, but they did commit many awful atrocities."
- Prop Round 1

So, as I said in Round 2, this entire point is about when interventions that are not HI occur resulting in supposed atrocities. Thus, the entire C3 is not applicable to the defined HI of this debate.

I addressed C1, C2 and C3 all in my Round 2 by stating that all did not apply to the agreed definition of HI. In response, Prop says that I didn't address their points but I honestly did and to defend against this Prop in no way whatsoever explains how their C1, C2 or C3 is applicable to the definition of HI agreed up on by Prop and Opp in this debate.

In Round 2, I state:

"Multiple cases of HI (majority actually) were to stop a dictator who, as part of a multitude of Human Rights violations, was starving their people. On top of that, when Stalin did this to his people, he kept doing it again and again as no HI to Russia occured (the Allies were fighting an equally inhumane leader and needed to ally Stalin due to limitations of resources).[1][2]

Famine is almost 100% correlated with anti-humanitarian leadership even if it occurs outside of it. What I mean is that all cases where HI was needed, famine was there even though famine does occur in more Human-Rights-friendly nations.

Gaddafi was such a severe sociopath that he even called his people who migrated out 'starving and ignorant' and he actually was probably correct about both insults since they were most likely starving and ignorant due to his regime.[3]

On top of this, how does HI stop our fight against poverty? Prop has yet to explain how the two ideas collide."
- Opp Round 2

The fact that 1/30th of the world military budget is calculated by one source to be the amount needed to "ensure universal access to basic education for all, basic health care, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food and clean water and safe sewers." [Prop Round 1] does not have anything to do with the debate at all. 1/30th of a budget being the amount for something to happen doesn't mean that out of the 29/30 of the budget, HI should not be invested into. On top of that, I pointed out how HI always does combat poverty since the regimes HI fights always have poverty in them. To this there was 0 rebuttal by Prop in Round 3.

Prop concedes that the HI part of the Iraq War came after the human rights violations and the severe brutal section of the war. He also concedes that the majority of the aftermath is due to the part of the war that was rushed and brutal to fight the threat of Iraq harbouring nuclear weapons and not due to the HI section of the war. He admits that the part of the war that made it partially HI is therefore not where the 'more harm than good' point he was raising can be applied and thus has conceded that his Iraq War angle should be negated due to irrelevance to the debate's resolution.

In Round 2 I combat the attacks on my C1 through to C4 by the following rant:

"The stats about the lost lives in Iraq are already unreliable for this particular debate as the Iraq war was a Nuclear scare-war much longer before it became a HI war. On top of that, the loss of lives can be considered a required part of the intervention but this is not in any way weighed against the net benefit by Prop at all. Until they remotely measure X against Y they are simply stating the price paid for the reward but not comparing the overall reward against the price paid. The lives lost to stop inhumane tyranny are lost to stop what could be a 20 generation long dynasty of unimaginably large-scale human rights violations. If no one stops the bad guys, the bad guys are blatantly going to stay in power unless the nation gets lucky and the rebels somehow win on their own (which is extremely rare and in the case of USSR was so ironic as by overthrowing the Tsar, an even more inhumane regime took its place).

If the police, the therapists and basically every moral pillar of all societies do good by intervening and when they fail to intervene are seen as morally bankrupt, then it extends to governments and their attitude to human rights violations of other nations. Being a capable bystander who had every knowledge and means to stop the evil makes you evil on any Utilitarian moral compass and almost any other form of Consequentialist moral compass.

Footnote: Nowhere so far has a means to compare the value of Harm against value of Good been provided by Prop, if there's no way to measure objectively in any more vs less sense then they lose the debate on that alone."
- Opp Round 2

What was the response to this by Prop? There was none whatsoever.

Since Prop has in no way whatsoever addressed my defence, therefore they have conceded my defence and have enabled me to irrefutably assert C1 to C4 since I addressed their rebuttals and they didn't say a single word of addressing my defence of them.
C1: The things you cannot quantify are where the 'most good' in HI occurs. Meaning you cannot even 'measure' to then conclude the harm has been more than the good.
C2: Having the means to intervene and turning a blind eye when your intervention is one of the only means to stop the inhuman tyranny is undeniably morally wrong.
C3: All moral pillars of any society represent the ethos of Humanitarian Intervention and whenever they do their job wrong it was due to half-intervening at best and completely failing to intervene at worst, never due to intervening wrong.
C4: The aftermath of HI is only ever negative due to the inability to intervene further, never due to the wrong of having intervened at all.

By the way, I did defend C4 in my Round 2 by saying:

"Counterpoint 2: The left behind unstable government requires Humanitarian Intervention to handle the widespread issues, it in no way whatsoever is doing well due to the lack of intervention."
- Opp Round 2

So, in the rant I didn't feel the need to further elaborate on how blatantly true C4 was.

All my contentions have been successfully defended, reasserted and since Prop didn't attack them at all post-Round-2, they are irrefutably standing strong.

All of Prop's contentions were fully rebutted in Round 2 and I have expanded on all of the rebuttals in Round 3 to the fullest, clearest extent possible to shine light on either the irrelevance or fallacious nature of the contentions Prop raised.

In conclusion, the harm vs good of Human Intervention has been rendered either totally inconclusive or absolutely favouring the side of good in this debate. The reason it's unclear which of the two is the case is because nowhere did Prop supply a means to quantify and then compare the value of harm vs good and if you can't do that, you can't support the resolution as even a viable resolution in the first place. The Resolution is what Prop supports, it can be opposed both by proving it impossible to argue at all or to argue the opposite side. I did both of these and thank you for this debate.

[1] https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/causes-of-ww2/manchuria-1931/
[2] https://www.britannica.com/event/Italo-Ethiopian-War-1935-1936
[3] https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/cambodia3-3.htm