Good luck with finding a successful military intervention (from a human rights standpoint, at least). I’m dubious, but open to the possibility, I guess.

In the meantime, rather than searching for the rare exceptions to the rule, might I suggest it would currently make a lot more sense to look into the completely awful interventions which the U.S. is already involved in or ones that they are pushing to engage in.

And neither of those links is even about Iraq!

Antigone, I’m very glad you wrote this post, even if it’s just you, me, and the crickets in here. It’s very good sometimes to think about how to make a better tomorrow. But it’s good to remember, too, that tomorrow begins today.

I’ll get back to you on the sucessful example. I’m by no means an expert myself.

But the kind of purely defensive military action you just described is not what I’m talking about when I say I’m against “military interventionism”. I’m all for defense that is really just defensive. It’s the “The best defence is a good offence” kind of thinking that I’m against.

The tricky part is keeping the peacekeeping non-euphimistic, if you get my meaning. The UN’s intervention in Somalia started out as a purely humanitarian effort as well– but within two years, it had turned into Blackhawk Down, with international forces complicit in hundred of innocent civilian deaths.

Anyway, I understand your point of view that Rwanda would have been a justified case of military intervention. But it still can’t be used as a good argument for military interventionism, because the fact is, the UN *didn’t* stick around long enough for us to tell if it really would have worked. They may well have come to discover that the true scale of the effort was more than they bargained for. Certainly this has been the case in many other places.

Once again, I ask: Show me the case of an actually successful military-based humanitarian intervention, and then I’ll think about being a little bit less dogmatic on the issue. (It may not be hard to do — I’m certainly painfully aware of my lack of knowledge of world affairs.) But Rwanda is not it.

Even barring that, if the international community had just stepped in and did things like jamming the radio stations (Hutu extremist did things like broadcast where “known Tutsi” lived) and if they would have evacuated refugees with them it would have helped save lives.

I’m not very well versed in the details of the Rwandan genocide– please correct me if I’ve got it wrong– but my understanding was that it was being committed on a country-wide level, by loosely-knit Hutu militia groups and spontaneous bands of overexcited young Hutu men. So there was no enemy to fight in one convenient place. If so, then I don’t understand how the UN could have possibly gone in with an objective of protecting a million-plus people without turning it into a wide-scale occupation. I don’t see any way the military intervention could possibly have stayed limited in scope if it was to be effective at all.

(I am certainly no military specialist, so somebody please feel free to educate me as to why I’m wrong about that if they can.)

But I will continue to distrust any military interventions abroad — even with the nicest of intentions– until such time as I learn of one that actually worked. And if I ever do, I’ll certainly want to study that case to try to figure out what the hell went right there when it goes wrong nearly everywhere else.

Supposing we did try those kinds of things, and nothing was working. Would anything short of a full occupation have really made a difference?

Hell, all the UN forces needed to do was STAY THERE with their machine guns pointed at people with machetes and feed some people, until the crisis could be resolved.

I’m certainly no expert, but I’m not convinced that standing there with guns but not actually using them would have been enough. The UN tried that for a while at the beginning of the civil war in Somalia, but the local factions soon just ignored them and kept on killing each other anyway. To actually get people to stop killing each other, I’m not sure there’s any way for international forces to do that — militarily, at least — without flat-out occupying the country. Which involves killing many of the same people you’re intending to save to get in there. And if you bite the bullet and plunge in there, impose curfews and all that– exactly when will it be okay to leave?

Why thank you.

I think I’ll have to disagree with you a little bit on one point. International consensus is not enough for me to accept armed intervention, even in the case of genocide. Note I said *armed* intervention. Now I’ll be a little bit radical here and suggest that “interventions”, even to stop genocide, are generally a bad idea. At the very least, before running half-cocked into every country with a humanitarian crisis, why not require a simple checklist first, for instance:

I was right there with you at the beginning of the semester. Then I learned about Rwanda. It was a textbook example of military intervention being enough to stop a genocide. Hell, all the UN forces needed to do was STAY THERE with their machine guns pointed at people with machetes and feed some people, until the crisis could be resolved. So why I tend to agree with your points, I have found that military intervention can be effective.