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.S.demands.As for engaging in large-scale combat in Pakistan, that presents anightmare of inconceivable proportions.No one would recommendit even if the government in Islamabad fell to the worst extremistsand gained control of Pakistani nuclear weapons.Washington cer-tainly would warn such a government of the terrible consequencesof harming us, but would not start a war.Deterrence would have tobe the order of the day.Pakistan, Iran, and such actual or potential nuclear-armedsmaller countries are the toughest cases for the use of Americanforce, whereas the next level down has invariably demonstrated con-sistent positive results.This level covers peacemaking and peace-keeping operations, usually involving several thousand troops, plusair support for the purposes of preventing genocide and ethniccleansing, or for broad humanitarian purposes.The enemy here is agovernment or dominant group within the country bent on riddingitself of people it regards as enemies for reasons of ethnicity, reli-172 Power Rulesgion, or general otherness. In Bosnia, the road to military successbegan after a long period of providing military aid to the victimizedgroups and backing up this aid with U.S.and NATO air strikes.Tokeep the peace that was the direct result of this limited but effectiveuse of force, plus the brilliant Dayton Accords, the United States hasdeployed upwards of 20,000 troops.To this day, they have taken nocasualties, and the peace has stood.To quiet the situation in nearby Kosovo, which was then a prov-ince of Serbia populated primarily by Muslim Albanians, requiredseventy-eight days of bombing of Serbia and Serb targets in Kosovo,plus providing aid to the Albanian insurgents.Again, U.S.andNATO forces achieved their main objectives of stopping the killingsand allowing the Kosovo Albanians to move toward independence.In sum, these two Balkan operations can be considered successesprimarily because military action cleared the way for peace andkeeping all parties to the terms of the peace or cease-fire accords.United Nations and U.S.troops began well enough in Soma-lia late in the George H.W.Bush administration and early in theClinton administration, when their mission was simply to help feedstarving Somalis.But later, when Clinton expanded the mission toquelling Somalia s internal tribal war and to a nation-building en-terprise, the troubles began.The peacekeepers simply didn t haveeither the military capability or the will to absorb the casualtiesor pay the costs of getting this job done.And at the first hint oftragedy when U.S.troops were ambushed and killed in the Soma-lian capital of Mogadishu in 1993 Washington quit the operationentirely.However, U.S.and Latin American peacemakers fared better inHaiti.The approximately 20,000 U.S.forces that were dispatched toHaiti in 1994 1995 achieved our stated goals: removing a dictator;restoring Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president; more or lessstifling gang warfare; quelling the general anarchy; and stemmingthe flow of Haitian refugees to Miami, which had burgeoned into aserious problem.In Rwanda, the failure and the tragedy were unspeakable.But theMilitary Power 173problem was not misuse of force, but rather the failure to use force.Washington wouldn t send its own troops to quell the raging tribalgenocide there and even stood in the way of others assuming thisresponsibility.Clinton apparently feared that if others got involvedand got into trouble, the United States would be compelled to goto their rescue.After Somalia, he didn t want to send in troops andhave them become embroiled in yet another civil war.These are instances of what has come to be known as humanitar-ian intervention, with the presumption being that such interventiondoesn t really involve vital or even important strategic U.S.inter-ests.The rationale is that U.S.intervention would be based solelyon the humanitarian concerns of Americans.I believe that in eachand every one of these cases the humanitarian reasons for our inter-vention were paramount but didn t tell the whole story of Americaninterests.Standing up to genocide is a critical American interest in and ofitself because failure to do so will inevitably lead to the spread ofviolence elsewhere and to the rise of refugee issues and economicproblems.Those spillovers do touch our economic and material in-terests.In addition, states being torn apart in this way become failedor failing states, which in turn become breeding grounds for terror-ists.And finally, and of great importance, American inaction in theface of such consummate evil would lead to the most profound cyni-cism within American society itself, and nothing would undermineour democracy the heart of our national security more thanthat.The failure of the United States and other nations to act inRwanda certainly made it much more difficult to deter the genocidein Darfur and elsewhere.To further undermine American credibil-ity and moral standing, the leaders of the Bush administration re-ferred to what was happening in Darfur as genocide, a term whichlegally obligated the United States to take action to stop it and stillwe did nothing of consequence.One of the main arguments against U.S.military interventionin these situations is that to stop the ethnic cleansing or genocide,we would have to insert American armed forces over an extended174 Power Rulesperiod of time in a civil war or in an extremely difficult, if not im-possible, nation-building process.But that clearly has not been, andneed not be, the case.Washington can take a variety of military ac-tions far short of sending troops into internal, open-ended combat
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