U.S. Intervention in Ethnic Conflict

CONTENTS

1. Introduction by Fred Wehling
2. Remarks by John Steinbruner
3. Remarks by George Kenney
4. Remarks by Michael Klare
5. Remarks by Michael J. Mazarr

   FIGURE 1: PEACE SUPPORT OPERATIONS: A TYPOLOGY

6. Summary of Discussion by Kathleen Hancock
7. About the Contributors
8. List of Participants

Introduction

Transnational ethnic conflict is a major source of violence and instability in the contemporary international system. It is too early to tell whether this threat will prove to be a transitory consequence of the collapse of multinational states, such as the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, or will become a defining characteristic of post-Cold War world politics. In either case, recent instances of ethnic strife in Bosnia, Chechnya, Rwanda, and the Kurdish area of northern Iraq remind us that ethnic conflicts will pose continuing problems for U.S. foreign policy.

The most controversial aspects of U.S. policy toward overseas ethnic conflicts center on the issue of military intervention. Should American forces intervene to stop ethnic and nationalist violence, or to prevent ethnic conflicts from escalating into open warfare? If so, how can these objectives best be achieved? These questions were raised in a panel discussion held at UC San Diego in January 1995 as part of IGCC's ongoing project, "The International Spread and Management of Ethnic Conflict, funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. John Steinbruner, George Kenney, Michael Klare, and Michael Mazarr presented their views on the efficacy, conduct, and morality of U.S. intervention to a working group of researchers from all campuses of the University of California and other academic institutions. Their presentations, and Kathleen Hancock's summary of the subsequent discussion, are collected in this paper.

While each of the authors has a unique analytic focus, all of them examine how intervention into ethnic conflict involves five dilemmas for U.S. policy makers:

Identifying interests. When does ethnic conflict directly affect U.S. interests and foreign policy objectives? As John Steinbruner and Michael Klare point out, unless U.S. goals are clearly formulated and articulated, the answer to this question can be dangerously ambiguous. Does the U.S. have an interest in upholding international law and maintaining legal order in collapsing states, as Steinbruner argues, or should the moral duty to respect states' sovereign rights prevail, as Klare contends it should? And as George Kenny reminds us, regardless of how these issues are resolved in principle, U.S. interests are frequently defined in practice by bureaucratic actors with specific institutional agendas.

Formulating options. Woodrow Wilson's unsuccessful efforts to safeguard the self-determination of peoples by redrawing the map of Europe after World War I demonstrate how a principle alone does not constitute a policy. Michael Mazarr examines how guidelines for using military forces for making, keeping, and enforcing peace are being established. But as every incident of ethnic strife has unique features and origins, it will rarely be easy to translate general guidelines into specific policies. Kenney, using the former Yugoslav case as example, points out how the question of timing can be critical, as intervention undertaken too early or too late can be worse than useless.

Making decisions. All decisions involve estimates of risk and reward, but the decision to commit U.S. forces and resources to resolving a conflict cannot be made through a simple comparison of costs and benefits. As ethnic conflicts are complex phenomena, the risks of intervention will often be easy to identify, but very difficult to calculate to the degree of precision decisionmakers may demand. Even if such calculations are possible, decisions to intervene will still require tradeoffs between values and the exercise of judgment. While Klare and Steinbruner agree that the international community should act to redress the underlying injustices that fuel ethnic clashes, they differ strongly on the relative weight which should be given to U.S. interests, international norms, concerns of neighboring states, and casualties in deciding to take military action.

Implementing solutions. After the dilemma of decision are resolved, the dilemmas of action begin. Mazarr and Steinbruner discuss the lessons learned from recent U.S. experience in Somalia, Haiti, and other areas of conflict. Both emphasize that successful intervention requires clear objectives, reliable intelligence, adequate human and material resources, and efficient logistics. Along with Klare, they also note that "mission creep," the incremental expansion of objectives once forces are in place, is a constant danger. Klare, less sanguine than Steinbruner and Mazarr about the possibility of preventing mission creep, contends that its inevitability is one reason why military rarely succeed.

Mobilizing support. Nothing is inevitable in military operations save death and taxes. The threat of escalating casualties and the costs associated with any attempt at peacekeeping or nation-building will often make U.S. intervention difficult to justify, especially at a time when America's interests and role in the new international system remain topics of sharp debate. All the panelists stress the necessity of building coalitions in favor of intervention, and of maintaining political support while interventions are in progress. (They disagree, however, on the extent to which these goals will be attainable.) In one sense, this dilemma brings the discussion back to its starting point of identifying the U.S. interests at stake in ethnic conflict. In a world where America faces no main enemy or overarching strategic threat, poll results and opinion "inside the beltway" may be too quick to dismiss even an attempted genocide as, in Neville Chamberlain's unfortunate phrase, "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."

These dilemmas frame the discussion of U.S. intervention to halt international ethnic conflict. Each of the contributors brings a unique perspective on the issues involved, and all offer valuable insights into the decision making process and innovative suggestions for future U.S. policy making. Together, the contributions to this paper summarize the key issues and leading currents of opinion on a persistent form of conflict which threatens to bedevil international politics with depressing regularity in the foreseeable future.

Remarks by John Steinbruner

Intervention in ethnic conflict is a conceptually difficult and emotionally intense topic - one that promises to be very serious trouble no matter what any of us might think or do. At the moment the international community as a whole does not have the conceptualization of purpose, the political coalition, or the operational capability that would be required to control any of the various instances of communal conflict. There is, however, a very large interest in doing so that will eventually have to be recognized and addressed. As a practical matter, the international community cannot respond on the scale required without an appropriate initiative from the United States, but the United States is currently attempting to minimize its engagement. As has been true several times in the past, we are slow to see the situation and reluctant to undertake unwelcome but ultimately unavoidable responsibilities. The moment is reminiscent of 1935, even though the looming problem is fundamentally different than it was then. We need a wake-up call; if anything I say today contributes even a little bit toward one, it will be worth the bother.

The Nature of the Problem: Eroding Legal Order

The fundamental problem is not the ubiquitous collision of ethnic identities that can be found throughout the world but rather a set of underlying circumstances that is evidently eroding basic legal order within many sovereign jurisdictions. In radical instances of this process, normal legal order effectively collapses and armed intimidation becomes the residual form of social organization. Gangs or militia form to seize assets and control territory using some obvious, readily ascribed basis for defining their identity. Ethnic distinctions are frequently evoked for that purpose and become the organizing basis for conflict. That does not mean that these distinctions are the initiating cause.

The root causes of radical disintegration are admittedly difficult to establish, but it is reasonably evident that sustained economic austerity has a great deal to do with it. When people in large numbers cannot get access to basic assets by legal means, they will attempt to do so by stealth or force. When this becomes the dominant pattern in a given area - and presumably there is some critical threshold - then normal society ceases to function and the residual form of organization emerges. Unfortunately, there are good reasons to fear that the massive transformation that is clearly underway in the international economy might well produce increasingly numerous instances of that situation, enough to threaten legal order generally. To the extent that this is true, then it is vital for the international community to learn how to contain and to reverse the phenomenon, just as it is literally vital to contain a lethal infection before it becomes too widely propagated.

The process of radical legal disintegration appears to be one of the more pathological effects of two very powerful phenomena that are simultaneously occuring: a global extension of the most advanced economic activity, driven by a revolution in information technology, and a rapid surge of the world population. Spontaneous economic integration is producing major shifts in the structure and location of basic economic functions, and is stripping away the capacity of even the most capable national governments to buffer their populations against these structural shifts. Population growth is occurring overwhelmingly in the poorest segments of the world population, and is thereby generating increasingly serious problems of social equity. If it turns out that the globalizing process concentrates growth in already advanced economic sectors and does not naturally broaden participation to the poorer sectors where the growth surge is occurring, then the problem of legal disintegration might well become unmanageably serious. Even under more benign projections it seems almost certain to require far more serious international management than is currently occurring.

How to Restore Legal Order

As with a lethal infection or any other exponential process such as a fire or an explosion, prevention of radical legal disintegration and of the violence that naturally emerges from it is vastly more effective than containment. In thinking about the problem, however, there is some reason to begin with the more extreme instances where prevention has failed. Unless the international community engages itself with the problem of acute phase intervention, it is unlikely to master the more important process of prevention. A strong sense of potential pathology is probably required to motivate systematic prevention.

With that thought in mind, let me briefly outline what the international community would have to do to restore legal order in an instance of radical breakdown, such as has occurred in Bosnia, for example, or in Tajikistan or Somalia or Rwanda. There are three basic requirements:

• First, we would have to develop a consistent rationale defining the objectives of intervention. At the moment when we think about intervention, we are invariably thinking "Who's the evil character here that we can go in and defeat?" We want to take sides, we want to define good and bad guys, align with the good guys, and defeat the bad guys. In almost all these instances, I would argue, that is not the way to think of it. If you think that way you are likely to make serious mistakes. I imagine instead a rationale that asserts an international community interest in legal order and sets standards for fundamental human rights - that is, life itself, as distinct from political speech. Out of this common interest in having legal order defended, the international community will impose these standards on all sovereign entities. States forfeit sovereignty if they do not or cannot execute these basic legal standards.

This first task, to set and to justify an objective, has virtually no recent precedent and does not fit the established political arguments. Restoring legal order is a very different mission than the more familiar purposes of defeating an aggressor, defending a victim, or delivering humanitarian assistance. It is not a matter of establishing democracy, undertaking economic reform, protecting dissidents, taking sides or assigning blame. The objective inherently amends a core principle of the international community. It involves overriding the normal prerogatives of sovereignty on behalf of values that are yet more fundamental.

Clearly it is not an easy matter to advance a rationale for that objective that would sustain a serious enforcement effort, but neither is it inconceivably difficult. There are established conceptions of fundamental human rights - those associated with the preservation of life and family integrity, for example - that have serious potential to command universal acceptance and could be advanced as an obligatory international standard.

• Second, we need a comprehensive coalition standing behind the rationale of the conditions for intervention. This means something approaching universal acceptance. To be sufficiently credible, the standards of legal order that any state or combination of states proposes to enforce would have to be set by a comprehensive political coalition. I legal order that any state or combination of states proposes to enforce would have to be set by a comprehensive political coalition. I believe such a coalition would have to include all of the industrial states, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and the leading states of the developing world. This would include China, and probably India if we have any hope of pulling it off. Any major defection would undermine the universality of the objective and thereby undermine the feasibility of enforcement.

• Third, we would have to have a concept of operations for enforcing these principles in acute conditions of breakdown. The concept would give it seriousness of purpose, the main point of which is to motivate intervention in earlier phases. Opportunities for preventing recent conflicts, or at least for containing them at much lower levels, have been regularly missed, primarily because the international community is not taking these things seriously.

The concept of operations that I have in mind would not be a standard military operation designed to seize territory and/or destroy an opposing force, though in the harder instances it might well include violent combar. Since there is no established design or historical precedent for an operation to restore legal order, I will be presumptuous enough to imagine some of the main features and operational principles it would have to have.

In acute instances, such as currently presented in Bosnia, an international operation to restore basic legal order would have two distinct phases. The first would be a very assertive operation - a combination of assault and intimidation - to neutralize militia units with heavy weapons. Some would undoubtedly have to be attacked and destroyed in order to establish the seriousness of the objective. With a judicious use of active force, others could probably be induced to surrender their weapons. In the actual Bosnian situation such an operation would be demanding but not infeasible. The militias operating there are no match for a well-planned operation initiated by advanced military establishments. They do not have the mobility, communications, tactical information, logistical coordination, or concentrated firepower to resist for very long.

The second phase - establishing basic physical security for civilian populations - would be more difficult and more important. That involves suppressing small arms assaults and establishing basic police functions. Legitimacy - that is, acceptance by all major segments of the population - is the most critical determining matter for this phase of the operation, and that means that the first phase must be done in a manner that does not compromise it. For that reason it would be vital for the same commander to be responsible for both phases, vital that the details of the operation be designed and controlled to provide credible reassurance to the civilian population, and vital as well that the participating forces have broad international character. If there is one supreme rule of intervention to restore legal order, it would be that legitimacy is the most critical, asset, and a corollary would hold that no single intervening state or regional coalition can expect to command adequate legitimacy.

There are some hard facts related to this bit of imagination. At the moment, no national military establishment has designed an operation of this sort and trained for it to the extent that would be required to execute it. Such an operation could be assembled from existing forces but it would take many months to redesign standard combat configurations and to work out a detailed concept of operations. That would have to be Whatever coalition was assembled, the United States would have to be intimately involved, since no other state has the full range of capability likely to be considered necessary. All of this is to say that the international community is very far at the moment from having the basic operational capability to intervene sensibly to restore legal order.

The Current International Situation and Bosnia

I argue that the international community as a whole and its member states actually have a greater stake in breakdowns in legal order than they yet recognize. As we look at recent experience, we can observe that neither the states nor the community even remotely have coherent policies, nor are they appropriately responding to these cases. They don't have an adequate rationale for what they are trying to do, they don't have the coalition that would be required to actually do it, and they can't undertake the kind of operations that would have to be designed to enforce it. This worrisome situation is not even remotely under control, and we are not going to remain partially disengaged as we currently are.

Bosnia is very deep trouble coming in fairly short order. First of all, there are a series of monumental historical misjudgments, beginning with the early and essentially unconditional recognition of Slovenia and Croatia. The Germans are primarily responsible, but everybody went along with their recognition. That mishap was compounded by the U.S. insisting on extending recognition to Bosnia as an entity, despite the fact that everbody recognized that such recognition was very likely to produce a civil war in Bosnia. If ample warning was given at the time that this was a disaster, why did the U.S. proceed? Because practicing inter-alliance politics, the U.S., like the international community, followed the German lead down this road of recognition. Next, the U.S. allowed a UN operation to be mounted with a rationale that obviously was inadequate or inappropriate. To send in the UN to deliver humanitarian aid under these circumstances was guaranteeing exactly the unhappy experience we have had. It has subjected the UN forces to being held hostage, and it does not give them either the rules of engagement or the capacity to master the situation. They have been put into an impossible situation from which they may have to be forcefully extracted.

The third blunder was the disastrous "lift-and-strike" gambit. The United States invented it as a way of taking the side of the Muslims, who we thought were the victims, against the Serbs - the principal aggressors. There is no way that we can defend the Muslims from the air while trying to get more arms into their hands. That is a good way of getting a lot of Muslims slaughtered and escalating the fighting. It is not to going to produce a stabilizing balance. It also guarantees that the UNPROFOR forces will become active hostages.

Currently, as I understand it, we are retreating from the lift-and-strike gambit, acknowledging that it will not work, and are trying to secure a stable result by taking whatever deal the Serbs and Croats will accept and imposing it on the Muslims. In theory, if this succeeds, the UN forces will not have to be pulled out, because they will not be as vulnerable under those new circumstances. There will have to be territorial exchanges to get that deal, and we will have to put up with ratifying ethnic expulsion, a massive violation of our principles. Further, imposing the plan on the Muslims is unlikely to work without a fight. Apparently, the U.S. and the contact group have not systematically understood that this is a logic of abandoning the lift-and-strike option without really engaging in the conflict - while hoping that if the Muslims do not accept the plan and cannot the lift-and-strike option without really engaging in the conflict - while hoping that if the Muslims do not accept the plan and cannot win the military conflict, they can at least keep the Serbs from comfortably consolidating their position. This means fighting will continue. If the U.S. then tries to pull out the forces, it will get this conflict dumped on it unilaterally - exactly the worst outcome.

The Issue of Realism

Although the U.S. political system is currently displaying no intention whatsoever of engaging in an intervention of the sort I have imagined (the Haiti operation does not qualify), and political fashion is running, indeed racing in the other direction, I am very much afraid that this prevailing attitude will not be the end of the story. The situation in Bosnia is not under control, and the consequences are more serious and more difficult to ignore than is currently believed.

Remarks by George Kenney

In my remarks, I want to discuss intervention in the former Yugoslavia, particularly U.S. errors in decision making, and to briefly outline how we can improve the process for deciding whether and how to intervene in future conflicts. I believe that early on the West could have intervened effectively and at a politically supportable cost to prevent or stop the war in the former Yugoslavia. The West might still be able to intervene effectively.

Unfortunately, the debate over intervening in the former Yugoslavia has tended to get mired in the wrong questions. Academics have approached the crisis from a theoretical, indeed a sterile, viewpoint. They have shown extreme naiveté in taking at face value Western governments' public statements and then imputing some intentional policy logic to these proclamations. Academics have failed - in virtually every analysis I have seen - to grasp the politics driving a policy concerned more with appearance than with results. For their part, policy-makers have failed to even begin to think about the larger picture. Short-term damage-control so dominates the internal debate that policy-makers have often been unaware of the fundamental contradictions in their efforts, contradictions that will become quite obvious in historical hindsight. Academics and policy-makers mirror each other. If only the former were more sensitive to political realities and the latter to critical thought, we might have had a better chance to develop the intellectual framework for a policy to bring this war to some kind of conclusion. (I will ignore the press' role in these remarks about policy formation; that subject deserves separate treatment.)

In this crisis, as in most international crises, it would have been sensible to follow four basic, somewhat recursive, steps in developing a policy: First, define the problem. If we get the problem wrong, chances are we will come up with the wrong solution. Of course, sometimes even after defining the problem the wrong way, we get the right answer. However, we do not deserve credit for such serendipity, and, in any case, cannot count on it. Second, assess the stakes involved. Third, articulate general goals to be achieved. And fourth, decide on tactics to achieve those goals. Although, theoretically, there may be a kind of pure goal, to be achieved at any price, so far as I am aware, there has never been a policy goal that was not significantly contingent on cost. So, naturally, as we work through these steps, we would want to use a kind of cost-benefit paradigm (but not an inflexible one) to help us refine our notions of stakes, goals, and tactics.

When considering intervening in Bosnia, the United States did not follow these four basic steps in their logical order. The debates over intervention have centered around wildly distorted arguments over tactics. We jumped straight to the end of the process, rather than starting at the beginning. As Lawrence Eagleburger often asked, should we send in 400,000 ground troops? Would bombing "work"? Would any intervention become a "new Vietnam"? Would lifting the arms embargo against the Muslims be cheap and effective? We lost sight of the prior questions and thus the ability to understand what we were doing, what our constraints were, and what other possibilities needed exploration.

Understanding the Problem and the Stakes Involved

Complicating matters, the nature of the problem and the stakes involved changed quite dramatically - a development all but unnoticed by policy makers, and academics, I suspect, as well. What started as a clear-cut war of Serbian aggression degenerated into a bloody struggle where the "moral" differences among combatants became differences of degree rather than kind. Early on, this war was not about territory, ancient ethnic hatreds, or any type of deeply rooted divisions in Yugoslav society. It was about power. Milosevic's program was to destroy the Yugoslav Federation and create a new Serbia, with him as leader. Not only the CIA, but most objective ex-Yugoslav analysts agree: Milosevic had no firm ideological commitment - all his destructive efforts had their sole aim of maintaining his political dominance.

Early in the conflict, one could have argued that the war involved two broad categories of interests: traditional geopolitical interests in European stability and humanitarian interests. A lot of people, including myself, argued from the beginning that the break up of the former Yugoslavia and particularly Serbian aggression against its neighbors constituted a fundamental threat to European security; that it was a breakdown of the European security system which had held more or less since the end of World War II. We do not want an example for the Russians. We do not want a wholesale assault against the Muslims or even to sour relations between the Western world and the Islamic world. Humanitarian questions have raised a lot of discussion. A lot of people have argued that if for no other reason we should have gone in to prevent mass slaughter and mass rape.

As the conflict continued, the nature of both the strategic and humanitarian stakes, and our understanding of them, has changed. Earlier fears that the conflict would spread outside the borders of the former Yugoslavia have largely proven wrong. I wouldn't completely discount it now but it seems to me that the chances of the conflict spreading and, for example, bringing in Greece and Turkey on opposite sides are much less today that they were at earlier stages. Similarly, I think that the chances of outside powers lining up are perhaps somewhat less than we originally thought. The risk of Milosevic being a major threat to his neighbors is also probably less than I thought it was in 1992. It seems that in the course of the war he has realized that he cannot really dominate the neighborhood. He wants some kind of a settlement, to play the role of the peacemaker, and to bring some reconstruction to Serbia.

As with the geopolitical reasons, many of the humanitarian reasons for intervention have proven unjustified. A host of interventionists talk about the imperative to halt genocide, or at least mass murder. In the early stages of the war, western reporters saw a wholesale attack by Serb forces on Muslims in Bosnia and earlier attack against Croatians in Croatia. The media often uses a figure of 250,000 killed. People write books, based on the theme that this is genocide against the Muslims. However, there are not any bodies to prove these claims. It is not a situation like Rwanda or Cambodia or others where there is evidence of genocide. Nobody in Bosnia has accurate statistics. Neither the UN peacekeeping operation nor the UNHCR keeps track of Bosnian fatalities. My friends in the U.S. intelligence community give me a best guess of tens of thousands of fatalities. What has happened, I think, is that people have approached the crisis with a view that genocide is the logical consequence of Serbian fascism. Yet there is no evidence for mass murder. In short, it is premature to talk about genocide.

Policy-making in the U.S. State Department

It is instructive to perform a "post mortem" on the Bush administration's initial failure to define the problem. When I came on to the Yugoslav desk, one of the first things that I did was to go around and talk to all the people in the intelligence community to find out what they thought of the situation. Virtually all thought the Bosnian situation was explosive. However, when I went back to my office and talked to people in the European bureau, saying that it would be prudent to develop some sort of a contingent strategy in the event the Bosnian situation did explode, none were interested. A lot of the senior officers at State believed that we could somehow forestall conflict by recognizing Bosnia, and that the Serbs would never dare to do anything that would violate the sanctity of an internationally recognized state. But the CIA analysts had correctly predicted the breakdown of Serbian civic culture. Milosevic used traditional tools of propaganda and state coercion to bring about a kind of fascist psychosis in Serbian society. The CIA also correctly predicted the emergence of a parallel, but less energetic, resurgent Croatian fascism. Western policymakers, however, chose to ignore the prediction.

The U.S. decision not to intervene resulted in large part from the style of the Baker State Department. Just as happened in the lead up to the Gulf War, the Yugoslav crisis slipped through the cracks. Within the Department, when Baker was not interested in a problem, his inner circle also lost interest. State professionals, highly politicized to respond to the interests of their political masters, were bureaucratically unable to force issues on the Secretary against his will. Making things worse, Eagleburger, who had served two tours in ex- Yugoslavia, the last (in the seventies) as Ambassador, tended to see things through a Belgrade lens. From the beginning, Eagleburger believed the crisis was a civil war. Baker's first few contacts with the Yugoslavs convinced him that they were even more irrational than his friends in the Middle East. As a result, the State Department was only too happy to hand the crisis over to the Europeans, who wished to prove that European unity could result in effective management of European security. The Europeans never defined the problem as aggression, either. Thus, the West lost all of its opportunities to pressure the original aggressors.

The Clinton Administration and the Current Situation in Bosnia

Beginning with his campaign, Bill Clinton has become so accustomed to describing the Bosnians as victims of aggression that he has missed two important changes: the once fairly pluralistic Bosnian government became a hard-line Muslim dominated entity; and as weapons flowed into Bosnia, Bosnian government aims shifted from defensive survival to long-term planning for "national liberation" from the Serbs. Clinton has also ignored basic arithmetic: in a long war, and without massive outside assistance, one million plus Bosnian Muslims do not stand a good chance of defeating nine million Serbians.

By mid-1994, Western policy finally coalesced around the priority of preventing the war from spreading beyond the former Yugoslavia's borders while keeping alliance actions more or less unified. However, the alliance still lacked consensus on how to end the war. As a result, the alliance did not do much at all. Meanwhile, aid, which began mainly as a Western effort to avoid military entanglement rather than as a purely humanitarian effort, became a significant factor in prolonging the war. Although the alliance finally accepted a realistically achievable policy goal - ending the war mainly on Serbian terms - the alliance found it could not back away easily (if at all) from earlier rhetoric. Specifically, to date, the West has not found a formula that allows it to "derecognize" Bosnia, although it should be obvious that "derecognition" is what will eventually happen.

Clinton wavers on the notion of lifting the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims. He is against it, he says, because he does not want to lift it unilaterally and rupture alliance unity. But he has not admitted that it simply will not work. Many Republicans, led by Senator Dole, continue their insistence that lifting the embargo on the Muslims is the "moral" thing to do - but I question whether they are thinking about what would actually happen if we did. Recall that a couple of months ago the Bosnian government said, in effect, that it did not want the arms embargo lifted right away, preferring that the West wait for six months or so. That entity has now gone back to a preference for an immediate lift, but there is a significant difference of view within the Bosnian government. Further, we have to wonder how, as a practical matter, the Bosnian Muslims can get arms. It is not trivial. While the Croats have let through light weapons, they do not like to allow transit of heavy weapons, fearing that the Muslims could turn those on the Croats.

The Muslims are in a bind because they cannot win a long-term war without some sort of massive western assistance. Nevertheless, they are dependent for their political support on a large number of young men, displaced from northern and eastern Bosnia, who are serving in the military. It is very difficult for the Bosnian Muslim politicans to say: "we have lost, and cannot continue fighting this war." So, if the West is going to get the Muslims to recognize reality, we have to be very clear ourselves that what we are advocating is some sort of brokered surrender. It is also very difficult for the West to ease itself off of these earlier strongly-worded rhetorical positions in support of the Bosnian government.

Croatia is a bit of a wild card here. The Croats certainly don't have clean hands in any of this conflict, not since the early stages when Tudjman was reviving Croat fascist symbols. At the same time that Milosevic was building up Serb nationalism, the Croats were denying Serbs human and civil rights, creating an atmosphere of fear. The Croats have never figured out how to have operating democratic institutions or a free press. To this day, the government rather routinely violates the human rights of non-Croats.

I think that the U.S. has a fair amount of influence over the West's response, but we are not a leading factor in determining a solution principally because we do not have troops on the ground participating in the UN exercise. I think that for some time now the Europeans have been calling the shots, and that will probably continue to be the case. I would not be excessively confident that the Europeans will be able to come up with a solution to this, but it seems to me that the ball is clearly in their court and that the U.S. will more or less go along with whatever initiatives the Europeans make.

Conclusion

To sum up, if we had gotten the problem and the stakes right throughout the crisis, we would have been in a better position to judge the cost effectiveness of potential tactics for intervention. In the early stages of the crisis, for example, we collectively overlooked our considerable leverage over the Yugoslav army, many of whose officers were trained in the West. Coerced and co-opted, the army went along with Milosevic's program in large measure because it saw no outside opposition to him and, within Serbia, there was simply no political alternative. If the West had early on sent the Yugoslav military a strong signal that there would be costs to aggression, it is possible they would have resisted orders to attack civilians. Of course, once those attacks established a pattern, not only did the military see that the West would not respond with force, it also became ever more implicated in atrocities.

Given the constraints of the situation, our options today are very limited. They boil down to either trying to get some sort of a stable cease-fire on the ground, or just calling it quits, getting out, and trying to contain the conflict in the region. We are losing opportunities to bring about a cease-fire that could last. Fundamentally, we are failing because our political leaders will not admit their past failures or their current position of weakness. Yet the problem will not go away. In many ways, politicians' and policymakers' failures throw the crisis back to academics and intellectuals for the light of understanding. I would suggest a good starting point in the analysis is the set of incentives operating on a political level.

Remarks by Michael Klare

The decisions of whether and when to intervence in ethnic and sectarian conflicts is one of the most important and difficult issues facing U.S. policymakers in the post-Cold War era. Although deeply vexing, the decision of whether or not to intervene cannot be avoided: first, because such conflicts have emerged as the greatest threat to international security in the current era, and second because the United States - as the world's preeminent military power and arguably the most important player in the UN Security Council - will be called upon time and again to lead such efforts or at least to support them in some fashion. It is essential, therefore, that U.S. policymakers develop a clear policy on intervention - one that balances fairly the national interest with America's international obligations; that reflects the practical limits on what the United States can do; and that is concordant with our basic moral and humanitarian values.

For purposes of discussion, let me make it clear that we mean here intervention on behalf of humanitarian principle or world peace - not the pursuit of ideological, territorial, or economic benefit. While interventions of these types have indeed been conducted by the United States in the past, it is not likely that the U.S. public would countenance such actions in the current international environment. Rather, we here consider the use of military force by the United States for essentially humanitarian or moral purposes: to avert the indiscriminate slaughter or starvation of civilians, to prevent "ethnic cleansing" or outright genocide, or to restore order in areas of total anarchy. In addition, in such cases U.S. forces should be employed as part of a UN peacekeeping operation, or otherwise sanctioned by the United Nations (and/or the regional organization most directly involved).

Considerations for Intervention

It is argued that the United States should be prepared to intervene in ethnic and sectarian conflicts for a variety of reasons: out of a moral duty to aid the innocent victims of catastrophic violence; to prevent the spread and escalation of armed conflict; to enhance the credibility of international law (particularly the prohibition of genocide and other "crimes against humanity"); to strengthen the United Nations and other multilateral institutions; to promote the spread of democracy and respect for human rights; and to demonstrate America's commitment to a just and durable world order.

These are all commendable objectives and should be viewed as major considerations when deciding on possible intervention in ethnic and sectarian conflicts. But these are not, of course, the only key considerations that must be taken into account when deciding on such action.

There are also many political and strategic considerations, such as whether an American presence, however well-meaning, would be resented on religious or racial grounds by the inhabitants of the region; would entail interfering in the affairs of close allies (such as, say, Israel, Turkey, or Indonesia); would tread on the immediate interests of other great powers (such as Russia, China, or India) that seek to monopolize peacekeeping activities in what they regard as their sphere of influence; or would otherwise fail to receive the support of the international community, broadly speaking.

Likewise, there are also many practical considerations of a military and resource nature, such as whether the operation can be successfully mounted and conducted with the military resources available; whether outside intervention can be mounted in sufficient time and strength to make a difference on the ground; whether other states are willing to contribute forces of their own to the operation; and whether the proposed operation can be adequately financed.

It is these last two groups of considerations - political and practical - that most often determine the outcome of the decision making process regarding possible U.S. intervention in ethnic conflicts, especially in those cases where the outcome entails a "no go" decision. Thus, while one can think of many cases in which the moral considerations described above would appear to argue in favor of intervention - for example, in Kashmir, Chechnya, East Timor, Angola, Mozambique, Tibet - U.S. policymakers decided otherwise. This, of course, is the cause of the "selectivity" or "double standard" identified by certain critics of U.S. intervention policy - that is, the charge that the United States engages in humanitarian intervention only when it is convenient, uncontroversial, and advantageous to do so. ₁

Obviously, much of our discussion here could focus on how much weight to give to each of these various considerations when deciding on particular instances of possible intervention. Before jumping into that fray, however, I would like to introduce another set of considerations of a moral and political nature that would tend to argue against intervention in all but the most extreme cases. These derive from concerns about the use of violence per se in the pursuit of peace and justice, over the risk of hubris or miscalculation arising from the use of military force by the very strong; over the risk of neocolonial involvement in the governance of countries subjected to U.S. intervention; and over the process entalied in U.S. decision-making over intervention abroad. I will discuss each of these in turn.

Violence Begets Violence

To begin with, there is the problem that the use of lethal force in the pursuit of peace and stability inevitably entails a significant risk of producing the opposite. Given the intense passions unleashed by ethnic violence, and the erosion of any clear distinction between combatants and civilians (as seen, most recently, in Groznyy), it is likely that the intervening forces will be met by at least some resistance - either from those on the winning side who wish to continue fighting, or from those on the losing side who seek revenge against the winners - and thus will be forced to employ violence on their own, quite possibly against nominal civilians who might be allied with one side or the other (as has occurred in Somalia and Haiti). This, in turn, creates fresh victims of war, often hardening the position of one side or the other and depriving the peacekeepers of their "neutral" status. In extreme cases, this can lead the population (or parts thereof) to turn against the peacekeepers, producing a new round of fighting. In this situation, Adam Roberts asks, "Does it make sense to call an intervention in a country `humanitarian' when the troops involved may have to fight and kill those who, for whatever reasons, seek to obstruct them?" ₂

This risk is particularly great in situations where the continuation of fighting by the original belligerents would, in all likelihood, lead to the triumph of one side over the other. In such situations, any effort by the intervening forces to prevent further fighting will be seen by the apparent victors as an attempt to deprive them of their rightful spoils, and thus cause them to view the peacekeepers as the de facto allies of their enemies, making them legitimate targets of combat. This, evidently, was the response of General Aideed to what he viewed as U.S. efforts to freeze the division of turf in Mogadishu at a time when Aideed's faction was on the ascendancy - leading to the initiation of hostilities against U.S. soldiers. The United States could, at this point, have responded by taking the field against Aideed and attempting to suppress his faction through force (as suggested by some policymakers at the time), but this would have entailed a major military effort in a built-up urban area, leading no doubt to heavy civilian if not American casualties, and making the United States a belligerent in a bloody civil war - an outcome far removed from the peaceful intent of the original U.S. intervention.

In saying all this, I do not mean to imply that there are never situations in which the use of military intervention is justified. There are, I believe, certain situations in which the risk of producing and receiving casualties outweighs the cost of doing nothing - as, for instance, when the result of inaction would be uninterrupted genocide. What I do want to argue, however, is that the use of force does carry with it the risk of producing more rather than less of the same, and thus should be countenanced only when all other, non-military measures have been exhausted and it is clear beyond reasonable doubt that intervention will save far more lives than it could possibly take (even under the worst of worst-case assumptions).

Miscalculation and Hubris

Second, it is important to recognize that any intervention involving the forces of the major powers (even when sanctioned by the United Nations) inevitably entails an assertion of power by the strong in the affairs of weak (and quite often ex-colonial) countries. This has two attendant consequences. First, it is likely to generate resentment against the intervening powers by the resident population, especially if the intervening forces are associated with past conquest or occupation and/or if they enjoy privileges (e.g., access to food and shelter, or an ability to escape the region) denied to the local inhabitants. Second, it could lead the intervening powers to overestimate their capacity to restore peace and produce beneficial change and/or to underestimate the capacity of local forces to resist or evade the intervening forces and to prolong the fighting. Both tendencies can be fatal to humanitarian intervention.

Examples of both tendencies can be discerned in recent peacekeeping can be discerned in recent peacekeeping endeavors. The Japanese forces in Cambodia, for instance, appear to have provoked some resentment from Cambodians because of their alleged unwillingness to venture into hotly contested (and dangerous) areas, and because of their being housed in self-contained, luxurious quarters. ₃ Similar complaints have been registered against British and French forces in the former Yugoslavia. The fact that these forces are free to leave the war zone when they wish, while the residents of Sarajevo and other besieged towns are not, is also a source of friction. How much effect this has on the success of UNPROFOR operations in Bosnia cannot be ascertained at this point, but surely it is not negligible.

Far more apparent are the risks arising from overconfidence on the part of intervening forces, especially when the perceived gap in firepower and technology is so great. As the United States discovered in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, lightly-equipped irregular forces are often capable of holding even major powers at bay when their determination is great and their fighting skills are highly developed - a lesson that is often forgotten when great powers intervene in the affairs of seemingly weak states. Hence, both Presidents Bush and Clinton greatly overestimated the ability of American forces to bring peace and stability to Somalia, and seriously underestimated the ability of General Aideed's forces to sabotage the U.S. game plan. The result, of course, was battlefield disaster and ignoble retreat, followed by the resumption of factional warfare. Similarly, the Reagan Administration badly miscalculated in Lebanon in 1983, greatly underestimating the desire and ability of radical Islamic forces to inflict significant pain on U.S. forces. Again, the result was tragedy and retreat, with no end to the internecine fighting.

As with the dangers arising from the use of force, the risks associated with overconfidence can be minimized through careful planning and an unvarnished assessment of one's capabilities and limitations. This is true in all wars, of course, but is especially true in ethnic warfare because the passions aroused by such fighting are so powerful - often leading the belligerents to continue fighting long past the time when a conventional force might surrender or retreat (as witnessed, for example, in the fighting for Groznyy) - and because the intervening forces are almost always endowed with superior firepower and technology. The risk of hubris and miscalculation will always be great in such cases, and thus policymakers should be extremely wary of intervention in ethnic conflict.

Quagmires and Mission Creep

A third danger arising from intervention in ethnic conflict is the danger that the United States will be tempted or feel compelled to assume a kingmaker's role in the countries involved, leading to a protracted involvement in those countries' internal affairs and the assumption of what amounts to a neocolonial role.

As Richard Betts reminds us in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, most ethnic conflicts erupt when the various groups that inhabit an area cannot agree on who should control it, and attempt to resolve the matter through force of arms. Outside intervention at this point can stop the fighting, but not resolve the jurisdictional dispute at the core of the conflict; should the intervening forces leave, the fighting is likely to resume until one side or the other prevails on the battlefield. ₄ In this situation, the intervening powers have few options. They can choose to occupy the area indefinitely, hoping somehow to inspire negotiations between the warring parties, or they can attempt to resolve the problem themselves, by installing a government of their own choosing or by deciding who can participate in the forming of a government. The first choice leads all too readily to permanent military occupation, with all the risks and anguish that entails; the second can lead to a paternalistic situation in which the outside powers assume control over domestic political arrangements. Neither approach is likely to resolve the underlying dispute, and both entail worrisome long-term implications for the intervening powers.

The risk of permanent military occupation is all too evident from the experience of UN peacekeeping forces in Cyprus and Croatia. Although the peacekeepers in Cyprus have preserved an uneasy peace for twenty years, they have not been able to induce the warring parties to negotiate a permanent solution to the conflict. As a result, the peacekeepers are growing weary and threatening to withdraw; but since any such move would in all probability lead to the resumption of fighting, they are reluctant to leave. A very similar situation appears to be developing in Serbian-controlled areas of Croatia. At this point, Croatia and Serbia are no closer than they were three years ago to resolving the status of these areas, and there is a very real danger that UNPROFOR forces will need to be stationed there for a very long time, lest their departure lead to a new outbreak of fighting.

More worrisome, from a U.S. point of view, is the risk that Washington - when itself confronted with such a situation in the course of peacekeeping operations - will choose to use its superior strength and resources to impose a political solution on the country involved or seek to influence the outcome of political negotiations between the warring parties. Such a move might seem benign at the time - as a well-intentioned effort to restore peace and stability - but it entails enormous risks, both for the occupied country and the United States itself. On one hand, such action carries the risk of producing a political outcome that is unacceptable to significant segments of the indigenous population, leading to renewed ethnic and sectarian fighting at some point along the line. This appears to be the way things were headed in Somalia, when the United States sought to limit the role of General Aideed in a UN-sponsored coalition government and then found itself under attack from Aideed's forces. On the other hand, this could lead to continuing involvement by the United States in the internal affairs of the country so affected, involving direct or indirect forms of military action on behalf of the leaders favored by Washington. This, of course, is the danger in Haiti, where any government loyal to President Aristide or his followers is certain to come under attack from surviving elements of the ancien regime as soon as U.S. peacekeepers depart. History - particularly the Vietnam experience - suggests that it is very difficult to promote democracy and protect basic human rights under such conditions, and that the need to sustain a permanent and intrusive U.S. presence in these countries can provoke opposition at home - leading, in some cases, to efforts by the executive to mislead the public or to silence dissent.

Given the present state of expertise (or lack thereof) regarding the resolution of ethnic conflicts, the risk that intervention will lead to semi-permanent military occupation and/or the assumption of a neocolonial role has to be rated as very great. Because these outcomes entail so many dangerous and unappealing side-effects, it is essential that policymakers include the risks and costs of a long-term U.S. involvement when making decisions about intervention in ethnic conflicts.

Faulty Decision Making

Finally, when assessing the risks of intervention, it is important to recognize that decisions regarding such operations are most likely to be made by the president and his/her senior advisers with little public discussion or consultation with the Congress. This is so because presidents have tended to view interventionary operations as an extension of their exclusive foreign policy responsibility, rather than as a constitutional question of war and peace. In making such decisions, moreover, presidents are likely to be influenced as much by their perception of the national interest and their own personal interest (and that of their party) as by their sense of America's international obligations. This is natural and understandable, but can serve to arouse suspicions about U.S. objectives and to diminish the perceived legitimacy with which U.S. forces engage in internationally-sanctioned humanitarian action; it can also lead to ill-advised interventions.

This problem is compounded by the fact that decisions regarding U.S. participation in humanitarian intervention are normally made in secret, by the president and a handful of senior advisers and fellow politicians. This naturally leads to the suspicion that parochial interests - whether those of the president, the party in power, or certain bureaucracies and special interests - determine the timing and nature of U.S. participation in international peacekeeping. This is certainly evident in the media's speculation over the Clinton Administration's internal deliberations regarding U.S. intervention in Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia, and is certain to figure in the thinking of other international actors. And while viewed as perfectly natural in Washington, this mode of decisionmaking does have serious consequences. By shielding the process from public view, U.S. leaders inevitably fuel the suspicions of those who resent American power and feel that any U.S. intervention abroad is motivated by imperial instinct rather than by humanitarian impulse.

The fact that U.S. motives regarding participation in international peacekeeping are viewed with suspicion by many foreign observers is evident in the claims of some Islamic fundamentalists that the U.S. intervention in Somalia was motivated by Washington's desire to acquire a military beachhead in the Muslim world, and in those of some Latin American leftists (and committed anti-imperialists) that the U.S. intervention in Haiti was motivated by a desire to restore Washington's traditional hegemonic role in the Caribbean. And while one can scoff at these responses, they do have resonance for many figures in the Second and Third Worlds, who view the United States as a modern incarnation of the former imperial powers. The result, I fear, is that at least some of these actors will feel compelled to respond to U.S. intervention by undertaking counter moves of a hostile and dangerous sort. I see signs of such a response in reports of covert Russian arms shipments to the Serbian military and of arms shipments to the various Somali factions by groups of Islamic fundamentalists. Such action should be expected in future peacekeeping operations, as well.

Finally, there is the danger that the U.S. mode of decisionmaking will result in premature or ill-advised intervention in ethnic conflicts, with dangerous and unpleasant consequences. This is where hubris tends to rear its ugly head, producing inflated assumptions of what the United States can accomplish - whether in the short term, in terms of stopping the fighting, or in the long term, in terms of inserting a stable political system. U.S. leaders clearly entertained such exaggerated expectations in Beirut in 1983, and again in Somalia in 1992-1993. This could lead, of course, to a separate discussion of how we might improve the decisionmaking process with respect to intervention - a topic with much to recommend it. At this point, however, I only mean to suggest that the flaws in this process constitute yet one more reason for being extremely cautious about military intervention in ethnic conflicts abroad.

Each of these concerns - the risk of escalating violence, the risk of miscalculation and hubris, the risk of extended involvement, and the flawed nature of the decisionmaking process - strike me as posing sufficient ground for eschewing intervention in almost all circumstances; together, they constitute a very powerful argument for repudiating such action altogether. No doubt situations will arise in which it might appear necessary to override these considerations, but it would be extremely dangerous to minimize their significance. Perhaps ways can be found in the future to diminish the risks described above, and to ensure the success of military intervention in ethnic conflict, but for now the only prudent course would be to avoid such involvement as much as possible.

Remarks by Michael J. Mazarr

The Military Perspective on Peacekeeping

Few would now deny that peace support operations, broadly defined, will pose a substantial and growing challenge to the U.S. military in coming years. The at least temporary decline of major war and the limited occurrence of regional conflicts has left operations short of war - from humanitarian deliveries of food and supplies to enforced peacekeeping operations - as the dominant near-term missions for the U.S. armed forces. Leaders of the U.S. military recognize that they will increasingly be involved in such operations.

All the key statements of U.S. defense and foreign policy reflect the increasing prominence of peace support operations. The 1993 Defense Department Report on the Bottom Up Review explained that, while major regional contingencies are the "most demanding requirement of the new defense strategy," in fact "U.S. military forces are more likely to be involved in operations short of declared or intense warfare." ₅ Such operations have become so commonplace that the president's national security strategy document felt it necessary to insist that "the primary mission of the Armed Forces is not peace operations; it is to deter and, if necessary, to fight and win conflicts in which our most important interests are threatened." ₆

Just what kind of role the military can play in peace support operations, however, and what peacetime efforts are required to prepare it for such a role, have yet to be decided. Most military officers have assumed that traditional military roles, missions, and capabilities - from logistics to command and control to area security to combat operations - are perfectly applicable, without major modification, to peace support missions. There has thus been little impetus within the Department of Defense to create specialized units for peace support missions, or to devote particular units almost exclusively to such missions for long periods of time.

I take issue with that conclusion. I argue that the most meaningful dividing line on the hazy spectrum of operations short of war is between purely humanitarian and peacekeeping/monitoring operations, which do not require specialized training, and peace enforcement missions, which do. The best solution to the enforced peacekeeping problem, I will argue, would be a standing United Nations force of dedicated, specially-trained volunteer units donated by member states.

Definitions

Finding clear, meaningful definitions for the various kinds of activities at issue here is perhaps the most critical phase of any analysis of the subject. Because the distinctions between various kinds of operations carry crucial implications for military planning, making those distinctions - the exercise of definition - must be at the cornerstone of thinking about peace support missions.

In Figure One, I offer one scheme for defining the various forms of operations short of war. I have used the broad term "peace support operations" to refer to the category as a whole. I have tried to mold together official UN terminology and the more common understanding of various terms. ₇

As the typology should make clear, the most important distinction is between pure humanitarian and peacekeeping operations on the one hand, and nation building and enforced peacekeeping on the other. (In this scheme, "peace enforcement" refers essentially to conventional military operations, and therefore is off the scale, so to speak, of unconventional operations.) Nation-building and enforced peacekeeping constitute the gray area between traditional peacekeeping missions and full-scale combat. The term "nation-building" is used advisedly, and itself encompasses a wide range of activities. In one sense, it might refer to the provision of any economic assistance. But I use it here to signify something more - an active effort, in a hostile environment, to rebuild the basic political and economic institutions of a country. As I use the term, therefore, it is much more ambitious than rudimentary peacekeeping, and often goes hand-in-hand with enforced peacekeeping.

This essay does not use the related term of "preventive diplomacy." In most cases, such efforts to stem conflicts before they begin will not involve the direct use of military force. In cases where forces are employed to prevent conflict, such missions would fall under the general category of peacekeeping.

Figure 1: Peace Support Operations: A Typology

Category I

Humanitarian. The simple delivery of food supplies, medical care, or other provision of basic human needs in a non-threatening environment. Can also encompass certain elements of nation-building if the context is benign.

Examples: Operation Sea Angel in Bangladesh; Operation Provide Relief in Somalia (first phase airlift only); Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq; domestic relief operations.

Peacekeeping. The use of military personnel to observe and monitor peace agreements, cease-fires, and boundary accords. UN forces have a neutral character, usually carry only light firearms, and operate under strict rules of engagement prohibiting them from engaging in hostilities except in self-defense. These missions fall under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, and can also include "peace making" as the UN defines it - mediation and negotiation.

Examples: The U.S. Observer Force in the Sinai; the UN Observer Missions in El Salvador and the Western Sahara; the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia; a proposed UN force on the Golan Heights.

Category II

Nation-Building. Also described as "peache-building." Going beyond the provision of food and medicine to the actual reconstruction of institutions and infrastructure within a target country in a violent or hostile atmosphere. Seldom employed on its own; often used in conjunction with enforced peacekeeping.

Examples: Elements of this approach were used in Vietnam, during Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, and in Operation Restore Democracy in Haiti.

Enforced Peacekeeping. The use of UN forces to control and limit the scope of violence without taking sides; the protection of safe-havens and humanitarian efforts against military or criminal activity. Such actions, sometimes called "protective engagement," fall between Chapters VI and VII of the UN Charter; they are sometimes referred to as "Chapter VI-1/2" operations. (Also known as "aggravated peacekeeping.")

Examples: Operation Restore Hope in Somalia (after December 1992); United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia; Operation Restore Democracy in Haiti.

Category III

Peace Enforcement. Actual combat operations undertaken under authority of the UN Security Council or General Assembly to resist aggression or otherwise terminate hostilities. These missions fall under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.

Examples: The Korean War; the Persian Gulf War; the proposal for the UN to take sides in the Bosnian war against Serb aggression.

Regarding various military issues relevant to all peace support operations and how they relate to Category I versus Category II missions, the military requirements and challenges of the two kinds of operations are drastically different - so different that the two kinds of missions might call for very different military capabilities.

Military Issues: The Distinction Between Peacekeeping and Enforced Peacekeeping

In the use of military forces to perform these various peace support operations, as the categories in Figure One suggest, there are really three categories of operations: humanitarian and peacekeeping missions; nation-building and enforced peacekeeping; and full-scale conflict under the rubric of peace enforcement.

The last category, peace enforcement, will not be treated at length here. It involves traditional military operations. Military forces are configured as a rule to operate in such an environment.

The basic argument of the rest of the paper is that there is a substantial - indeed fundamental - distinction in the military forces, capabilities, training, and equipment appropriate for Category I operations (humanitarian and pure peacekeeping) and those appropriate for Category II (nation-building and enforced peacekeeping). Conventional military forces can, of course, be assigned to perform both categories of mission with a minimum of retraining and reequipping. With the growth of peace support operations, such assignments are increasingly common. And in the case of Category I operations, traditional military units can perform these missions perfectly well, and have performed them for decades.

Category II missions, on the other hand, are much tougher propositions, involving a range of political, military, economic, and social issues. ₈ Many such conflicts pose the same vexing challenge as counterinsurgency operations - and the West's experience with this form of warfare has not been a successful one.

The dramatic distinctions between Category I and Category II missions are evident in the fundamental areas of military planning and operations.

Basic Mindset and Capabilities. Broadly speaking, the capabilities of the U.S. military render it capable of Category I missions. Humanitarian and nation-building efforts require vast logistical operations and area security, both very familiar tasks to the military. ₉ Simple peacekeeping involves security, patrolling, and the like - basically a light infantry mission, again jobs which every American GI is trained to do. As one recent study concluded about peace support operations (PSOs),

...basic combat capabilities were regarded [in the workshop] as being readily compatible with the force structure requirements of peace support operations ... [I]n recent U.S. planning for actual or potential PSOs, the initial foundation for force package development has been, and will continue to be, the Services' basic combat structures. For instance, the force originally deployed in Somalia was essentially a light divisionólikewise, a potential Bosnian deployment would involve a force package based on a reinforced mechanized division. ₁₀

Thus the Bottom Up Review estimated the force requirements for "a major intervention or peace enforcement operation" (by which they meant, in the terminology used here, a peace support operation) in very traditional military terms: elements of one air assault division, one light infantry division, one mechanized infantry division, one marine expeditionary brigade, one or two carrier battle groups, one or two composite air force wings; and civil affairs, special operations, combat support, and combat service support units. ₁₁

As the quote above suggests, an established consensus among military professionals hold that traditional military structures and capabilities are perfectly relevant to Category II missions. ₁₂ With a small amount of retraining, this consensus suggests, conventional military units can perform the entire spectrum of peace support operations, including nation-building and enforced peacekeeping.

A close examination of the lessons of recent peace support operations indicates that this claim is incorrect, or at best exaggerated. There is a substantial difference between Category I and Category II missions, so much so that the same sort of units ideally should not perform both. And nowhere is this fact more evident than in the basic mindset and capabilities of conventional military forces.

The basic requirement in a Category II operation is not the application of military force in conventional terms. Instead, nation-building and enforced peacekeeping demand two very different capabilities: nonmilitary efforts, including reconstruction of infrastructure, general economic assistance, civil affairs and democracy-building, intensive mediation and diplomacy, and the like; and the application of military force in a strictly unconventional manner, more akin to police tactics than military ones. Such unconventional military efforts include such actions as disbanding armed groups, as in Somalia and Haiti; deterring and punishing one or more major combatants without taking sides, as in Bosnia; and engaging in full-scale counterinsurgency operations, as in Vietnam.

History has rendered a clear verdict on the use of conventional military forces in such unconventional missions. They nearly always fail. Militaries organize to fight and win wars, and their doctrine reflects this basic purpose. When they are told to enter a conflict and conduct military operations, but to ration strictly their application of firepower and not to seek victory through decisive means, the result will be confusion. ₁₃ These problems have led two observers to recognize that

[S]ome observers conclude that U.S. forces are ill-suited to conduct general peacekeeping operations - short of Korea-like chapter VII threats to the peace - for several reasons. The nature of UN coalition roles and missions are at variance with American military character, doctrines, traditions, and the concepts of both decisive force and victory. For example, a recent U.S. statement on "Joint Operational Concepts" ....[emphasizes] integrating and synchronizing operations to ensure total and complete application of military force. ₁₄

The concept of decisive force, so dear to U.S. military leaders of the Gulf War generation, simply does not apply to nation-building or enforced peacekeeping operations. And this is just as true of new conventional technologies being developed as part of the Revolution in Military Affairs. ₁₅

Cultural barriers also intrude between conventional military units and Category II operations in the developing world. In Somalia, observers from India noted that French doctors wore gloves while examining patients, perceived as an offense by the Somalis. Indian troops in the country stood up when in the presence of a Somali village elder, a sign of respect, and, having experience with a caste system of their own, were more familiar with the concepts underlying the Somali clan system. ₁₆ Compare this to the complaints of U.S. troops: chasing Somali bandits was a "stupid cat-and-mouse game"; "there are only the crooks and the helpless in this country, "and a trip to Somalia was "like going back to feudal Europe. "One 20-year-old Marine said that

The Americans are fed up with the Somalis, and the Somalis are fed up with us; I just wish the United Nations would take over so we can get out of here. ₁₇

Obviously, nations can provide their military forces with familiarization training in other nations and cultures before deployment. But a unit cannot assimilate an entire culture in a month. And given the speed with which many peace support operations emerge, participating units in many cases have only a few days of basic orientation before deployment.

This distinction in what military forces can do well, and what they do poorly, has been brought out by a number of recent UN efforts. Two recent analyses of the lessons of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia reach strikingly similar conclusions. ₁₈ Among the UN activities that worked well, the reports cite monitoring the election, disseminating information and conducting education in a variety of areas; the repatriation of people dislocated by the war; and the first stages of economic reconstruction - that is to say, missions which fit under narrow, traditional understandings of humanitarian, peacekeeping, or nation-building operations. The areas in which the UN Transitional Authority was not so successful included the disarmament of rival factions, the creation of a civilian police force, and the establishment of a civil administration - activities which begin to encroach into enforced peacekeeping.

Many of these problems stem from the fact that Category II missions are not primarily military tasks. Category III peace enforcement operations certainly have a military character; and one can argue that Category I missions, insofar as they involve logistics efforts and basic light-infantry duties, could be viewed as essentially a military assignment as well. But Category II operations involve a host of political, economic, and social problems, and the application of military force may be irrelevant - indeed counterproductive - to solving them.

Command and Control. A similar distinction emerges when we look at the issue of command and control. Peacekeeping endeavors are generally multilateral missions which also engage the efforts of dozens of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), government agencies in the host country, and perhaps independent political or military actors, such as the Somali warlords. Establishing an effective command and control system for such a diverse network of actors is as exacting as it is indispensable. Yet a number of peace support operations in recent years have produced the same general lesson: the United Nations remains illequipped to conduct such large-scale missions. Its command and control infrastructure is simply not up to the task. ₁₉

The most politically sensitive question for the United States has been whether U.S. forces will be put under "foreign command." Public versions of the Clinton Administration's basic document on peacekeeping, Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25), go to great lengths to insist that this will not take place. ₂₀ The key distinction is between operational control and constitutional command: U.S. forces have served under the temporary operational control of foreign units dozens of times throughout history without even being formally absorbed into those units' constitutional command. ₂₁

In Category I missions, these issues frequently do not cause serious problems. A somewhat looser command structure is appropriate to non-combat missions, which do not place commanders under the same pressures as combat. And because of the avowedly humanitarian character of many Category I operations, national governments and their citizens may be more willing to cede temporary operational control of their forces to a multilateral organization.

On the other hand, nation-building and enforced peacekeeping are more strenuous, violent, and protracted operations. They demand the kind of clear, effective command structure which (as we have learned in Bosnia) may be impossible in UN operations. And the specter of full-scale combat exacerbates the risk that national governments will decline to place their forces under the control of a multinational group.

A Clear Mission Statement. In any sort of military or quasi-military operation, the forces involved need to know their mission. As U.S. forces have discovered time and again, a clear mission statement is critical to help the forces avoid involvement in larger civil or socioeconomic conflicts. The mission statement will in turn influence perhaps the most important instructions given to military units in peace support operations: their rules of engagement. All of this will, of course, be far easier to decide in pure humanitarian or peacekeeping operations than in nation-building or enforced peacekeeping.

The process of changing the mission statement once a force is in place is the well-known phenomenon of "mission creep." It is one of the cardinal dangers of the peacekeeping process, for it involves the peacekeeping forces in missions for which they were not prepared and for which there may be no public support. Virtually every effort in which mission creep has occurred has become a signal failure of U.S. policy.

The distinction between Category I and Category II missions in this context is quite stark. Clear mission statements and well-defined rules come easily in simple humanitarian and peacekeeping operations (and, at the other end of the spectrum, peace enforcement operations as well). They are almost impossible to formulate in nation-building and enforced peacekeeping operations. Time after time, U.S. forces engaged in such missions have been issued ambiguous rules of engagement, and then seen those rules change repeatedly during the course of their deployment.

Force Security. A major concern of any military organization involved in peace support operations will be force security - the protection of troops on the ground and prevention of casualties. Any military unit deployed in an operational mission abroad will take some measures, depending on the circumstances, to safeguard its security. And given the public reaction to casualties in peace support operations, keeping them to a minimum - and, indeed, perhaps avoiding them altogether - may be a precondition for conducting such missions.

In Category I operations, force security will most often be a simple concern. The local actors - either the victims of a natural or man-made disaster or the parties to a dispute - want the foreign forces to be on hand. The disaster or conflict has come to an end, and the local population is looking to the U.S. or UN troops to help avoid a recurrence. The environment is nonviolent and, just as important, non-confrontational.

Category II operations pose a far more serious hazard to U.S. or UN forces. In some cases, the mere existence of conflict, as in Bosnia, will pose the risk that UN peacekeepers will get caught in the cross-fire. In other cases, as again in Bosnia and as in Somalia, some local groups come to resent and oppose the UN presence, and may attempt to evict the peacekeepers by staging harassing raids and imposing casualties. Force security is therefore difficult or impossible to guarantee in Category II missions.

Political Considerations. A military capability is useless in the absence of the political will to employ it. Such might be the case with Category II missions, for which the U.S. public and their representatives in Congress now hold little affection.

Category I and Category III operations do not pose the same problems in most instances. The American public strongly supports simple humanitarian, and in some cases peacekeeping, operations where there is little risk of violence against U.S. troops, and they support major conflicts where clear U.S. interests are at stake. They oppose the murkier area of nation-building and enforced peacekeeping. As two observers of public opinion recently concluded,

American attitudes toward these three crises [in the Gulf, Somalia, and Bosnia] suggest that the public will be clearly disposed to act militarily in two situations: if it feels America's vital interests are at stake, and if American military force can provide humanitarian assistance without becoming engaged in a protracted conflict. The peacekeeping role evokes an ambiguous response, but the public strongly rejects the peacemaker role. ₂₂

Thus, for example, when the U.S. Marines first landed in Somalia under the guise of a purely humanitarian endeavor, 84 percent of the American people supported the action. But as the U.S. became involved in the campaign against the warlords, an example of enforced peacekeeping, the public became divided, and by October 1993, after the death of eighteen U.S. soldiers, roughly 70 percent of Americans called for the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Through the crisis, the public showed a distinct awareness of the dividing line between Category I and Category II: In September 1993, 57 percent of Americans called for an end to the UN attacks on the warlords, and 69 percent said U.S. troops should only be responsible for delivering food. ₂₃

The lesson is clear enough. In most instances, the American people do not approve of the use of their military forces in Category II missions. Continuing to do so risks total public alienation with all peace support operations. Simply put, if national militaries continue to perform Category II operations, those operations will cease to exist because public opinion will reject them. Some alternative to U.S. units is therefore required.

Readiness and Mission Tradeoffs. A final military issue has to do with the effect of peace support operations on military readiness. This has, of course, become a significant political issue in recent months, with critics of the administration charging that its involvement in far-flung peace support missions has drained the Defense Department's operations and maintenance accounts. Partly in response to such concerns, President Clinton announced in December 1994 the addition of $25 billion to the fiveyear defense plan.

In this connection, two critical facts seem undeniable. The first is that the primary mission of the U.S. military - as suggested in the quote at the outset of the paper from the U.S. national security strategy - is to fight and win conventional wars. Major regional contingencies, and perhaps even large-scale great power war, can threaten vital U.S. national interests in a manner that most ethnic wars or humanitarian crises cannot. The second fact is that peace support missions degrade the U.S. military's ability to prepare for major war. By using scarce operations and maintenance dollars, by deploying units to far-flung corners of the globe, and by detracting from training for conventional war, peace support operations make the U.S. military as a whole less prepared for major conflict. The only question is one of degree - how much less prepared for war the military becomes.

Once again, Category II missions pose a far more substantial threat than Category I operations. Pure humanitarian or peacekeeping operations will often be brief and/or involve small numbers of U.S. troops. Their smaller demands on U.S. forces make for less expense, less onerous retraining requirements, and less disruption of units. U.S. forces could also be extricated from such missions more rapidly than Category II operations should a major regional contingency arise.

Category II operations, on the other hand, possess an established track-record of undermining military readiness. Because they often evolve into protracted, highly taxing commitments, they use substantial amounts of operations and maintenance funds and exhaust the units involved in them. Because U.S. forces in such missions may constitute the major barrier to a resumption of violent conflict, their rapid withdrawal may not be feasible if a major conflict develops elsewhere. In short, all peace support operations will impact U.S. military readiness, but Category II operations will do so to a far greater degree than Category I.

Conclusion: The Need for a UN Force

A standing United Nations peacekeeping force can and should provide such an alternative to national military forces in the narrow spectrum of Category II operations.

As I have suggested, the vast differences between the two categories of mission point to different requirements for the forces that will conduct them. Regular military forces, with little or no retraining and using standard operating procedures, can perform Category I missions - humanitarian and peacekeeping operations - perfectly well. But Category II operations call for something else, a specially-trained and equipped political-military organization. Indeed the single greatest conclusion to be drawn from recent peacekeeping efforts is the need for a standing UN force to accomplish the tougher, gray-area missions - nation-building and enforced peacekeeping. ₂₄ Indeed, if there is one area of consensus in recent writings on peace support operations, it is that a stronger institutional framework for such missions in the United Nations is badly needed. ₂₅

This analysis therefore points to an arrangement in which national military forces, operating in ad-hoc "coalitions of the willing" led by one or more major UN member-state, would perform both Category I and Category III operations. Examples of this approach would include the early, humanitarian stages of the Somalia operation and the Persian Gulf War, both led by the United States. A standing UN force of specially-trained volunteers, many drawn from national military organizations, would be established to handle the more complex tasks of nation-building and enforced peacekeeping.

Such an organization, of course, will require years to create, and will demand a far better command and control structure than currently exists. Already, however, the UN is planting the first seeds of such an approach. The UN has been soliciting commitments of troops for a fast response peacekeeping force. The units would not be assigned to the UN on a permanent basis, but they would be designated for assignment in a crisis. Presumably, this would allow the units to train together in peacetime and become familiar with the UN command structure they would face in a mission. As of the spring of 1994, 18 countries had committed over 50,000 troops to the force, and another 12 to 13 countries were expected to add between 20,000 and 30,000 additional personnel. The United States had not made a decision on participating. ₂₆

An alternative to a global force for this purpose would be the establishment of a series of regional forces constructed by regional security organizations. In Europe, for example, NATO could build its own force for Category II missions; the Organization of American States could develop one for Central and South America; the Organization of African Unity could take responsibility for Africa; and so on. In the end, a combination of such groups might be the most promising approach: a large UN force for big challenges, such as enforced peacekeeping in Cambodia or Angola; and smaller regional forces for somewhat more manageable missions, such as enforced peacekeeping and nation building in Rwanda or Liberia.

The important point is that, in the long run, national military forces cannot continue to perform Category II operations. To do so would be to apply the wrong tool for the job, to risk exhausting public support for all peace support operations, and to render the military unprepared for the more important Category III missions should they arise. The only question now is whether the UN, or another organization, can develop a positive alternative to national militaries for nation-building and enforced peacekeeping. The United States should throw its considerable weight behind the process already underway and help make such a UN force a reality.

Summary of Discussion

by Kathleen Hancock

The discussion following the panelist's presentations centered around what types of rules the international community might agree to regarding when to intervene in the domestic affairs of other states, whether intervening states can remain neutral toward competing domestic powers in the subject state, the U.S. military's ability to effectively intervene, and various types of intervention and possible prevention. Throughout the discussion, participants explored how the general principles and ideas have played out and continue to play out in the former Yugoslavia.

When and How to Intervene

In his opening comments, Steinbruner suggested that the international community could agree on a set of rules for intervening in other states' domestic affairs. During the discussion, a participant asked, "Who would decide on the rules about when states should intervene?" Steinbruner suggested that the rules would be set by the international community with substantial consensus required. He argued that some international rules are more robust than we generally acknowledge, such as a general agreement that states cannot cross the borders of another state. Steinbruner stated that we would need similarly minimum rules for actions within states. For example, states might agree to intervene if several hundred thousand people die from a breakdown of legal order.

Several participants countered that this type of rule would not be viable in the international community. One participant suggested that the community might agree that states would intervene to prevent genocide. Another asked, "But how do you define genocide?" Another participant noted that the problem with talking about hundreds of thousands dead is that we want anticipatory action, not to wait for a half-million people to die. We want to prevent political collapse through deterrence. Preventive diplomacy can work, but we often do not listen to early warnings. Steinbruner countered that effective diplomacy requires leverage, and leverage often comes from a clearly developed plan and mechanisms for intervention.

In his presentation, Steinbruner argued that the international community could intervene in states' domestic affairs without necessarily supporting a particular regime or its opponents. The workshop participants spent considerable time debating whether this is indeed possible. Several participants argued forcefully that when a state intervenes in another state's internal affairs, it is necessarily taking a position. The very goal of peace means that the intervening state, or group of states, is taking sides in the conflict. Steinbruner countered that the intervening powers would not debate the political outcome that arises. The intervening states would simply enforce the rule of law.

In a related discussion, one of the participants questioned the wisdom of the United States engaging in nation-building. A participant noted that the term "nation-building" brings Vietnam to mind. Another responded that, under Mazarr's definition, it is not the United States or the United Nations doing the nation-building. Rather the intervening states create the enabling conditions so that local leaders can build the nation. In response, a third participant argued that there will always be a temptation to select the leaders to build the nation. For example, in Somalia, the military thought they were building the necessary institutions, such as a police force. But these institutions quickly became politicized, showing that it may be more difficult to build these institutions than some discussants imply. In addition, nation-building is not a very sexy issue, so the U.S. government is likely to pull back its forces before the job is done.

Further exploring Mazarr's category II, participants discussed how well prepared the military is to conduct missions and the domestic politics surrounding such missions. Mazarr reasserted that the military was not prepared to conduct category II missions, even though it is necessary for the United States to conduct these types of missions. No one else will do it if the United States does not, and we cannot do it alone, Mazarr argued. The U.S. military knows they are not equipped to conduct these missions, but they will have to learn how to do them.

In response to Mazarr's statement, a participant countered that the problem is not simply one of needing to train the military. Rather, there is a domestic political problem as well. U.S. politicians do not want to advocate systematic training for category II missions because it is not a politically popular position. Mazarr doubted that resolving the political problem in the United States and then going to the United Nations will work either. The United States needs to work simultaneously at the international level and in the United States. However, if the problem is primarily a political one, then Mazarr's solution of using multilateral forces will not solve the problem, argued another participant. Returning to the issue of the military's preparedness, another participant noted that category II missions can easily slip into more costly and challenging category III missions. Thus, the United States needs to train forces for both operations.

In discussing types of intervention, one participant wondered about the efficacy of mediation, such as that of Jimmy Carter or the UN representatives in Bosnia. A participant stated that mediation works in some places, but may give the advantage to the stronger party at the expense of the weaker party, as is happening in Bosnia. Someone else noted that economic leverage offers another means of intervention. However, we often lack the economic access to intervene effectively.

Regarding prevention, a few participants argued that the best way to prevent these problems, such as genocide and the general collapse of legal order, is to eliminate the causes, which are global inequities. Unfortunately, as Steinbruner said, we don't know how to handle inequities and have no way to measure them. Another participant stated that prevention may go all the way back to the emergence of nation-states as the primary international unit. States borders that were defined by colonial powers may be at the root of the problem in Africa.

Taking a different tack, a participant suggested that we must accept that violence is often a necessary component to bringing groups to the table. A deterrent strategy does not exist that can prevent this, especially if genocide is on the agenda. Because ethnic groups do not have structured means to air and settle their grievances, they will often resort to violence.

Intervening in Bosnia

The discussion about the principles the major powers would agree to before intervening evolved into a more targeted exchange about why the West is engated in Bosnia and not in other places where humanitarian concerns are perhaps more urgent, such as in the Sudan. Participants offered numerous explanations for Western involvement in Bosnia and not other nations, including the potential for conflict spreading to other areas; Western guilt over having recognized Croatia as a legitimate state, thus sparking the war n Bosnia; and concern over the reported policy of ethnic cleansing. Participants disagreed about the likelihood of the conflict spreading into Macedonia and subsequently involving Greece and Turkey. One argued that "alarm bells" are going off in Macedonia. Others, however, seriously doubted that the conflict would spread, arguing that the Bosnian situation today is not the same as in 1914. Macedonia is not about to explode, and Greece and Turkey will not go to war over Macedonia.

According to Kenney, defining the situation in the former Yugoslavia as an ethnic conflict rather than a civil war was critical for gaining the West's interest. As long as a conflict is defined as a civil war, the Europeans will not support intervention. In a civil war, the aims are limited, and there is no obvious aggressor. But in the case of ethnic cleansing, there is an aggressor and the international community can clearly decide on whose side it should intervene.

Some participants suggested that the United States needs to reexamine policies of extending diplomatic recognition. In the case of Bosnia, Kenney reported, the State Department thought the United States and the other Western states would follow through on treating Bosnia as a state. However, the decision as to which parts of the former Yugoslavia would be recognized was made haphazardly. The State Department did not know which regions the White House planned to recognize until the announcement was made. State Department officials had hoped that the United States would recognize all five parts as states.

One participant expressed concern about the legitimacy of breaking up Bosnia along ethnic lines, suggesting that this seems to endorse the idea that ethanic groups cannot live together. While this may not be the intended lesson, there are certainly those who will draw this conclusion.

Miscellaneous Discussion Points

A participant questioned Klare's comment that secrecy in the U.S. decision-making process can be harmful to achieving the goals of intervention. Klare explained that secrecy lends credence to Third World analysts' conspirary theories about U.S. intervention; he noted that the Persian Gulf war debates in Congress shed light on U.S. decision making, whereas the Haiti and Somalia missions lacked this light, opening the way for suspicion about U.S. intentions.

During the discussion, one participant remarked that there is a useful debate regarding the extent to which the United States should concede U.S. primacy to an international institution, such as the United Nations. Another participant concluded that international institutions will not work unless the United States makes them work.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Kathleen Hancock is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science, UC San Diego. Before coming to UCSD, Ms. Hancock analyzed CFE implementation and other security issues at the National Security and International Affairs Division of the U.S. General Accounting Office.

George Kenney, a former Yugoslav desk officer at the U.S. Department of State, is a writer in Washington, DC.

Michael T. Klare, author of many works on American foreign policy and peace studies, is Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies (a joint appointment at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges) and Director of the Five College PAWSS Program.

Michael J. Mazarr is Senior Fellow in International Security Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. A former intelligence officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Dr. Mazarr specializes in nuclear weapons policy, regional security, and U.S. conventional forces.

John D. Steinbruner is Director of the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Academy of Science. The author of numerous books on arms control, deterrence, and nuclear weapons issues, Dr. Steinbruner has served on the faculties of Harvard University, Yale University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Fred L. Wehling is Coordinator of Policy Research at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Formerly a consultant with RAND, Dr. Wehling specializes in regional security, crisis decision making, and Russian foreign policy.

List of Participants

Mr. Alemseged ABBAY

Dept. of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Prof. Rogers BRUBAKER

Dept. of Sociology, UC Los Angeles

Dr. Beverly CRAWFORD

Director of Research, Center for German and European Studies, UC Berkeley

Prof. Scott GARTNER

Dept. of Political Science, UC Davis

Prof. Sandra HALPERIN

Dept. of Political Science, U. of Pittsburgh, PA

Ms. Kathleen HANCOCK

Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, UC San Diego

Prof. Cynthia S. KAPLAN

Political Science Dept., UC Santa Barbara

Prof. Michael T. KLARE

Director, Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies, Hamshire College, Amherst, MA

Mr. George KENNEY

Washington, DC

Prof. Gail KLIGMAN

Dept. of Sociology, UC Los Angeles

Prof. Stephen KRASNER

Dept. of Political Science, Stanford U., CA

Prof. David LAKE

IGCC, UC San Diego

Prof. Ronnie D. LIPSCHUTZ

Adlai Stevenson Program on Global Security, UC Santa Cruz

Dr. Michael MAZARR

Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC

Prof. Will H. MOORE

Political Science Dept., UC Riverside

Ms. Traci PRICE-FAHIMI

Dept. of Political Science, UC Los Angeles

Prof. Philip G. ROEDER

Political Science Dept., UC San Diego

Prof. Donald S. ROTHCHILD

Political Science Dept., UC Davis

Prof. Stephen SAIDEMAN

Dept. of Political Science, U. of Vermont

Prof. Anna SIMONS

Dept. of Anthropoloyg, UC Los Angeles

Dr. John David STEINBRUNER

Director, Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC

Prof. Nirvikar SINGH

Board of Studies in Economics, UC Santa Cruz

Prof. Etel SOLINGEN

Dept. of Politics, UC Irvine

Dr. Fred WEHLING

IGCC, UC San Diego

Notes>

Note 1: See, for example, Adam Roberts, "The Road to Hell: A Critique of Humanitarian Intervention," Harvard International Review, Fall 1993, pp. 10-13, 63 ff. Back.

Note 2: Ibid., p. 13. Back.

Note 3: See Philip Shenon, "Actions of Japanese Peacekeepers in Cambodia Raise Questions and Criticism," New York Times, October 24 1993. Back.

Note 4: Richard Betts, "The Delusion of Impartial Intervention," Foreign Affairs 73/6 (November-December 1994), pp. 20-33. Back.

Note 5: Les Aspin, Report on the Bottom Up Review (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, October 1993), p. 8. Back.

Note 6: A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 1994), p. 14. Back.

Note 7: These terms, and the analysis behind them, are drawn from David Wurmser and Nancy Bearg Dyke, The Professionalization of Peacekeeping (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, August 1993), pp. 14-17; Col. Richard Seitz, "The U.S. Military and UN Peacekeeping, "in Peacemaking and Peacekeeping: Implications for the U.S. Military (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, May 1993), p. 28; William H. Lewis and John O. B. Sewall, "United Nations Peacekeeping: Ends Versus Means," Joint Force Quarterly 1 (Summer 1993), pp. 49-51; and the essays in Dennis J. Quinn, ed., Peace Support Operations and the U.S. Military (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1994), especially pp. 5, 15-26, and 37-38. Back.

Note 8: T. Frank Crigler, "The Peace-Enforcement Dilemma, "Joint Force Quarterly 2 (Autumn 1993), pp. 64-70. Back.

Note 9: Indeed, Samuel P. Huntington, in "New Contingencies, Old Roles," Joint Force Quarterly 2 (Autumn 1993), pp. 39-40, points out that the U.S. military has been conducting humanitarian and nation-building operations, both at home and abroad, since at least early in this century. Back.

Note 10: Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Peace Support Operations and U.S. Military Planning: A Workshop Summary (Washington, DC, and Cambridge, MA: IFPA, June 1994), #p. 7. See also Commander Martha Bills et al., Options for U.S. Military Support to the United Nations (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, December 1992). Back.

Note 11: Report on the Bottom Up Review, pp. 22-23. Back.

Note 12: See also Kjeld G. H. Hillingso, "Peace Support Organization and Training: A Danish Perspective," in Quinn, ed., Peace Support Operations and the U.S. Military, pp. 63, 72-73. Back.

Note 13: See Charles Moskos, Peace Soldiers: The Sociology of a United Nations Military Force (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Back.

Note 14: Lewis and Sewall, "United Nations Peacekeeping," pp. 55-56. Back.

Note 15: Michael J. Mazarr, Principal Author, The Military Technical Revolution: A Structural Framework (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 1993), pp. 45-54. Back.

Note 16: See, for example, the articles on the Indian peacekeeping experience in Somalia in India Abroad 24/45 (August 5, 1994), especially Sidharth Bhatia, "Somalis Get a Taste of Compassion." Back.

Note 17: Cited in Michael J. Mazarr, "The Military Dilemmas of Humanitarian Intervention," Security Dialogue 24/2 (June 1993), pp. 151, 158. Back.

Note 18: These are Judy L. Ledgerwood, "UN Peacekeeping Missions: The Lessons from Cambodia" (Honolulu: East-West Center Issues Paper No. 11, March 1994); and Michael Doyle, "Lessons from Cambodia," in The UN. Peacekeeping. and U.S. Policy in the Post-Cold War World (Queenstown, MD: The Aspen Institute, 1994), pp. 31-43. Back.

Note 19: Barry R. McCaffrey, "U.S. Military Support for Peacekeeping Operations," in Quinn, ed., Peace Support Operations and the U.S. Military, p. 7. Admiral Paul David Miller, writing in the same volume, lays out the essential elements of a sound command structure: a common command concept; unity of authority; unity of command; unity of purpose; and equipment interoperability. See Miller, "The Changing Security Environment: The Atlantic Command Challenge," in Quinn, op. cit., pp. 47-49. One could argue that, as currently constituted, UN operations meet none of these criteria very well. Back.

Note 20: The Clinton Administration's Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations" (Washington, DC: The White House, May 1994). Back.

Note 21: Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Peace Support Operations and U.S. Military Planning, pp. 11-12. Back.

Note 22: Andrew Kohut and Robert C. Toth, "Arms and the People," Foreign Affairs 73/6 (Nov.-Dec. 1994), p. 47. Back.

Note 23: Ibid., p. 52. Back.

Note 24: See Mazarr, "Military Dilemmas of Humanitarian Intervention," p. 160-161. Back.

Note 25: See, for example, the General Accounting Office, UN Peacekeeping: Lessons Learned in Managing Recent Missions (Washington, DC: GAO Report NSIAD-94-9, December 1993), especially pp. 30-48; Working Group on Peacekeeping and the U.S. National Interest, Peacekeeping and the U.S. National Interest (Washington, DC: The Stimson Center, Report No. 11, February 1994), p. iii; and Wurmser and Dyke, The Professionalization of Peacekeeping, p. xii. Back.

Note 26: Eric Schmitt, "15 Nations Offer Troops for UN Force of 54,000," New York Times, April 13 1994, p. A12. Back.