On 2 September 1898 a British expeditionary force in Sudan defeated the armies of the Caliph Abdullah al-Tashi, the successor to the ‘Mahdi’ Muhammad Ahmad, who had overwhelmed the British garrison at Khartoum thirteen years before.  

Armed with artillery, Maxim machine guns and Lee-Metford magazine rifles fitted with dum dum bullets, British troops killed more than 9,000 of the Caliph’s soldiers in a single day.

It was, wrote the young Winston Churchill, who was present at the battle, ‘ the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians.’ Two days later the British flag was hoist in Khartoum for the first time since the Mahdist siege in which General ‘Chinese’ Gordon was killed in 1885. Captain Sir Henry Rawlinson, a participant in Kitchener’s expedition, later wrote how

The battle of Omdurman was one of many similarly unequal confrontations that took place in the colonial era between technologically superior western armies and their ‘native’ opponents.

Whatever its more prosaic commercial, economic or geostrategic objectives, nineteenth century colonialism was often steeped in philantrophic rhetoric, which presented even the bloodiest manifestations of imperial violence as part of the onward march of civilisation and progress.

It was this philosophy that enabled the corrupt and rapacious King Leopold of Belgium to declare, at an international conference in London in 1876 in which he obtained approval for Belgium’s ‘philantrophic’ stewardship over the Congo Free State that

Leopold was a liar and a fraud and one of the great monsters of history, whose ‘tutelage’ over the Congo was pretext for the pursuit of personal enrichment, and who presided over one the most genocidal regimes in history. But many of those who took part in the ‘scramble for Africa’ sincerely believed in this civilising mission and the moral imperative of the ‘ white man’s burden’.

As in Sudan, colonial militarism was often presented as an act of liberation intended to overthrow tyrants and promote good governance, and justified on the basis of European cultural (and racial) superiority.

Today, in the early 21st century, Western democracies are engaged in a ruthless global ‘scramble’ over energy resources, pipelines, oil supply routes in the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond, which has often been dependent on wars and military interventions of various kinds. As in the nineteenth century, these efforts have often been presented as an altruistic enterprise intended to promote democracy and liberal governance, and overthrow rulers who, like the Sudanese Caliph, are responsible for ‘brutality and tyranny’ .

But the new neo-imperialist interventions of our era also draw on humanitarian rhetoric that was largely absent in the nineteenth century. Today’s ‘liberal interventionists’ do not celebrate mass slaughter as an act of ‘ vivid and majestic splendour’, as Churchill described Omdurman.

On the contrary, today’s wars are often presented as humanitarian endeavours intended to prevent massacres, ‘genocide’, or stop dictators from ‘killing their own people.’  Such rhetoric may well be a facade and a pretext to conceal more ignoble motives, especially when it is invoked so selectively, or when it comes from a cold-blooded apologist for state terror like Elliot Abrams. But there are also those who argue passionately on humanitarian grounds that ‘we’ must do something, or that ‘we’ cannot stand idly in the face of tyranny or atrocity.

Take Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former advisor to Barack Obama and a leading proponent of humanitarian interventionism, who penned an op-ed column in the New York Times last week on ‘how to stop the butchery in Syria’ .  Slaughter argued that ‘foreign intervention offers the best hope for curtailing a long, bloody and destabilising civil war’, and advised against arming Syrian rebels on the grounds that such actions would facilitate such an outcome.

Instead she proposed that foreign special forces from the ‘Friends of Syria’ group of countries should collaborate in the formation of ‘no kill zones’ that would ‘protect all Syrians regardless of creed, ethnicity or political allegiance’. Well not quite all, since

That sounds a lot like a kill zone. As Paul Staniland pointed out last week on The Monkey Cage blog, these recommendations are completely impractical and unrealisable, and would in fact intensify the civil war that Slaughter says she wants to prevent, and which has in fact already begun.

There is no doubt that Slaughter is sincere; her MSNBC debate with Jeremy Scahill makes it clear that she is. But her extraordinarily convoluted arguments suggest that she is oblivious or indifferent to the discrepancy between the humanitarian motives that she espouses and the consequences of such interventions in the past – and also in the future.

Such indifference is not unique to her. On the contrary, it is an intrinsic component of the new humanitarian militarism. Today’s interventionists no longer talk of spreading civilisation to the darker regions of the earth, as King Leopold did, at least not in so many words.

But they often assume that western governments have a unique and unquestioned right to wage war or undertake military adventures in any part of the world, and that such wars as ultimately benign and altruistic. These interventionists may well be entirely sincere, but Slaughter’s tortured prescriptions for Syria suggest that sincerity is not always accompanied by clarity or judgement.

Because there is really very little that is benign or altruistic about the West’s interest in Syria or any other country in the region, whatever the pith-helmeted bombardiers might think.  And their humanitarian rhetoric – whether they intend it to be or not – is essentially a justification for new forms of neo-imperialist violence, and a new ‘civilising mission’ in a world that still has more in common with the nineteenth century than you might think.

Matt Carr blogs regularly at Infernal Machine. He is the author of The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism