Somalia and Operation Restore Hope

Somalia and Operation Restore Hope
Author: John L. Hirsch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN:

"Somalia" has become a symbol for the unacceptable costs of humanitarian intervention, for the type of foreign involvement that should be avoided. But the authors of this timely book, themselves key participants in the U.S.-led operation there, argue that substantial good was done--the tide of famine was stayed, hundreds of thousands of lives saved, and steps toward political reconciliation begun. Despite the recent renewal of political violence, the humanitarian situation remains stable. In launching Operation Restore Hope, the multinational coalition faced a complex, tense, and rapidly unfolding situation. The authors detail how the carefully limited mission achieved its goals, including mutual understanding with the Somalis, by combining political, military, and humanitarian actions. But the authors also describe how different U.S. and UN concepts of the mission and subsequent changes in the mission's scope led almost inevitably to confrontation. Hirsch and Oakley raise fundamental questions about how to conduct such operations, and in particular about the limitations of peacekeepers in nation building. Drawing lessons from Vietnam and Lebanon as well as more recent operations, the authors provide an analysis that will help policymakers and scholars as they debate the future of peacekeeping.

Humanitarian Military Intervention

Humanitarian Military Intervention
Author: Taylor B. Seybolt
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2007
Genre: Altruism
ISBN: 0199252432

Military intervention in a conflict without a reasonable prospect of success is unjustifiable, especially when it is done in the name of humanity. Couched in the debate on the responsibility to protect civilians from violence and drawing on traditional 'just war' principles, the centralpremise of this book is that humanitarian military intervention can be justified as a policy option only if decision makers can be reasonably sure that intervention will do more good than harm. This book asks, 'Have past humanitarian military interventions been successful?' It defines success as saving lives and sets out a methodology for estimating the number of lives saved by a particular military intervention. Analysis of 17 military operations in six conflict areas that were thedefining cases of the 1990s-northern Iraq after the Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor-shows that the majority were successful by this measure. In every conflict studied, however, some military interventions succeeded while others failed, raising the question, 'Why have some past interventions been more successful than others?' This book argues that the central factors determining whether a humanitarian intervention succeeds are theobjectives of the intervention and the military strategy employed by the intervening states. Four types of humanitarian military intervention are offered: helping to deliver emergency aid, protecting aid operations, saving the victims of violence and defeating the perpetrators of violence. Thefocus on strategy within these four types allows an exploration of the political and military dimensions of humanitarian intervention and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each of the four types.Humanitarian military intervention is controversial. Scepticism is always in order about the need to use military force because the consequences can be so dire. Yet it has become equally controversial not to intervene when a government subjects its citizens to massive violation of their basic humanrights. This book recognizes the limits of humanitarian intervention but does not shy away from suggesting how military force can save lives in extreme circumstances.

Humanitarianism Under Fire

Humanitarianism Under Fire
Author: Ken Rutherford
Publisher: Kumarian Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1565492609

The international humanitarian intervention in Somalia was one of the most challenging operations ever conducted by US and UN military forces. Until Somalia, the UN had never run a Chapter VII exercise with large numbers of troops operating under a fighting mandate. It became a deadly test of the UN’s ability carry out a peace operation using force against an adversary determined to sabotage the intervention. Humanitarianism Under Fire is a candid, detailed historical and political narrative of this remarkably complicated intervention that was one of the first cases of multilateral action in the post-Cold War era. Rutherford presents new information gleaned from interviews and intensive research in five countries. His evidence shows how Somalia became a turning point in the relationship between the UN and US and how policy and strategy decisions in military operations continue to refer back to this singular event, even today.

Reassuring the Reluctant Warriors

Reassuring the Reluctant Warriors
Author: Stefano Recchia
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2015-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 150170155X

Why did American leaders work hard to secure multilateral approval from the United Nations or NATO for military interventions in Haiti, the Balkans, and Libya, while making only limited efforts to gain such approval for the 2003 Iraq War? In Reassuring the Reluctant Warriors, Stefano Recchia addresses this important question by drawing on declassified documents and about one hundred interviews with civilian and military leaders.The most assertive, hawkish, and influential civilian leaders, he argues, tend to downplay the costs of intervention, and when confronted with hesitant international partners they often want to bypass multilateral bodies. America's top-level generals, by contrast, are usually "reluctant warriors" who worry that intervention will result in open-ended stabilization missions; consequently, the military craves international burden sharing and values the potential exit ramp for U.S. forces that a handoff to the UN or NATO can provide.Recchia demonstrates that when the military speaks up and clearly expresses its concerns, even strongly pro-intervention civilian leaders can be expected to work hard to secure UN or NATO approval—if only to reassure the military about the likelihood of sustained burden sharing. Conversely, when the military stays silent, as it did in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, bellicose civilian leaders are empowered; the United States is then more likely to bypass multilateral bodies, and it may end up carrying a heavy stabilization burden largely by itself. Recchia's argument that the military has the ability to contribute not only to a more prudent but also to a more multilateralist U.S. intervention policy may be counterintuitive, but the evidence is compelling.

“My Clan Against the World”: U.S. and Coalition Forces in Somalia 1992-1994

“My Clan Against the World”: U.S. and Coalition Forces in Somalia 1992-1994
Author:
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2004
Genre:
ISBN: 1437923089

This study examines the American military's experience with urban operations in Somalia, particularly in the capital city of Mogadishu. That original focus can be found in the following pages, but the authors address other, broader issues as well, to include planning for a multinational intervention; workable and unworkable command and control arrangements; the advantages and problems inherent in coalition operations; the need for cultural awareness in a clan-based society whose status as a nation-state is problematic; the continuous adjustments required by a dynamic, often unpredictable situation; the political dimension of military activities at the operational and tactical levels; and the ability to match military power and capabilities to the mission at hand.

Debating Humanitarian Intervention

Debating Humanitarian Intervention
Author: Fernando R. Tesón
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2017-10-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190202920

When foreign powers attack civilians, other countries face an impossible dilemma. Two courses of action emerge: either to retaliate against an abusive government on behalf of its victims, or to remain spectators. Either course offers its own perils: the former, lost lives and resources without certainty of restoring peace or preventing worse problems from proliferating; the latter, cold spectatorship that leaves a country at the mercy of corrupt rulers or to revolution. Philosophers Fernando Tesón and Bas van der Vossen offer contrasting views of humanitarian intervention, defining it as either war aimed at ending tyranny, or as violence. The authors employ the tools of impartial modern analytic philosophy, particularly just war theory, to substantiate their claims. According to Tesón, a humanitarian intervention has the same just cause as a justified revolution: ending tyranny. He analyzes the different kinds of just cause and whether or not an intervener may pursue other justified causes. For Tesón, the permissibility of humanitarian intervention is almost exclusively determined by the rules of proportionality. Bas van der Vossen, by contrast, holds that military intervention is morally impermissible in almost all cases. Justified interventions, Van der Vossen argues, must have high ex ante chance of success. Analyzing the history and prospects of intervention shows that they almost never do. Tesón and van der Vossen refer to concrete cases, and weigh the consequences of continued or future intervention in Syria, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Lybia and Egypt. By placing two philosophers in dialogue, Debating Humanitarian Intervention is not constrained by a single, unifying solution to the exclusion of all others. Rather, it considers many conceivable actions as judged by analytic philosophy, leaving the reader equipped to make her own, informed judgments.

American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump

American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump
Author: Hal Brands
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2018-01-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815732791

Looking beyond the headlines to address the enduring grand strategic questions facing the United States today. American foreign policy is in a state of upheaval. The rise of Donald Trump and his "America First" platform have created more uncertainty about America's role in the world than at any time in recent decades. From the South China Sea, to the Middle East, to the Baltics and Eastern Europe, the geopolitical challenges to U.S. power and influence seem increasingly severe—and America's responses to those challenges seem increasingly unsure. Questions that once had widely accepted answers are now up for debate. What role should the United States play in the world? Can, and should, America continue to pursue an engaged an assertive strategy in global affairs? In this book, a leading scholar of grand strategy helps to make sense of the headlines and the upheaval by providing sharp yet nuanced assessments of the most critical issues in American grand strategy today. Hal Brands asks, and answers, such questions as: Has America really blundered aimlessly in the world since the end of the Cold War, or has its grand strategy actually been mostly sensible and effective? Is America in terminal decline, or can it maintain its edge in a harsher and more competitive environment? Did the Obama administration pursue a policy of disastrous retrenchment, or did it execute a shrewd grand strategy focused on maximizing U.S. power for the long term? Does Donald Trump's presidency mean that American internationalism is dead? What type of grand strategy might America pursue in the age of Trump and after? What would happen if the United States radically pulled back from the world, as many leading academics—and, at certain moments, the current president—have advocated? How much military power does America need in the current international environment? Grappling with these kinds of issues is essential to understanding the state of America's foreign relations today and what path the country might take in the years ahead. At a time when American grand strategy often seems consumed by crisis, this collection of essays provides an invaluable guide to thinking about both the recent past and the future of America's role in the world.

All Necessary Measures

All Necessary Measures
Author: Carrie Walling
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812208471

What prompts the United Nations Security Council to engage forcefully in some crises at high risk for genocide and ethnic cleansing but not others? In All Necessary Measures, Carrie Booth Walling identifies several systematic patterns in the stories that council members tell about conflicts and the policy solutions that result from them. Drawing on qualitative comparative case studies spanning two decades, including situations where the council has intervened to stop mass killing (Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Sierra Leone) as well as situations where it has not (Rwanda, Kosovo, and Sudan), Walling posits that the arguments council members make about the cause and character of conflict as well as the source of sovereign authority in target states have the potential to enable or constrain the use of military force in defense of human rights. At a moment when constructivist scholars in international relations are pushing beyond empirical claims for the value of norms and toward critical analysis of such norms, All Necessary Measures establishes discourse's real-world explanatory power. From her comparative chronology, Walling demonstrates that humanitarian intervention becomes possible when the majority of Security Council members come to a shared understanding of the conflict, perpetrators, and victims—and probable when the Council understands state sovereignty as complementary to human rights norms. By illuminating the relationship between national interests and the core values of Security Council members and how it influences decision-making, All Necessary Measures suggests when and where the Security Council is likely to intervene in the future.

The Ethics of Armed Humanitarian Intervention

The Ethics of Armed Humanitarian Intervention
Author: Don E. Scheid
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014-04-24
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1107036364

New essays on philosophical, legal, and moral aspects of armed humanitarian intervention, including discussion of the 2011 bombing in Libya.