Operation Restore Hope in Somalia was next. America tends not to look too closely at its military reverses, and many misconceptions about the Somalia operation have gone uncorrected over the last fifteen years. Space does not permit a thorough analysis here, but several need to be highlighted. One accepted wisdom is that the early, “humanitarian” phase of the operation was a success, and the later, political national building phase under the UN, went wrong. The truth is that no intervention can be apolitical, and humanitarian action cannot substitute for political strategy. The political decisions that led to the urban war against General Mohamed Aidid, whose militia shot down Black Hawk helicopters on October 3, 1993, were taken during the “humanitarian” phase. A second truth from Somalia is that once an intervening force begins to fight, it can do nothing else. The moment the UN and the United States went to war against General Aidid, the international forces ceased to have any humanitarian role. And from the beginning, the soldiers did not behave like humanitarian workers. There were innumerable cases of misconduct, including torture, rape, and summary killing. Violations by Canadian Special Forces were but the tip of the iceberg. The level of resentment among ordinary Somalis at these abuses should not be underestimated, nor should the implications for the failure of the mission.

The National Security Council was more interested in pointing the finger of blame than truly analyzing why the Somali intervention went wrong. Presidential Decision Directive 25 was issued on March 31, 1994; not only did this commit the United States to not dispatch its forces anywhere except for reasons of the gravest national interest, but it instructed opposition to any intervention by other countries. But the worst thing about PDD 25 was its timing: one week before the genocide was launched in Rwanda.

General Romeo Dallaire, the embattled UN commander in Kigali, did his best to save a few thousand Tutsis from certain death. With more troops he could have done more; with the right instructions from UN headquarters he could perhaps have prevented the genocide altogether. Dallaire’s advocacy of intervention commands respect. But the case of Rwanda is more complex and troubling. At the time, humanitarians called for an intervention to stop both the massacres and the war. Had this gone ahead, the UN Security Council would certainly have insisted on a ceasefire and made protecting civilians contingent on this precondition. Given that the advance of the rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front was stopping the massacres, such an intervention could easily have had the perverse effect of prolonging the killing.

This skepticism is borne out by what happened when France did obtain a UN Security Council resolution in the last days of the genocide authorizing its Operation Turquoise – a supposed humanitarian intervention in western Rwanda which was transparently a political act aimed at securing a territorial foothold for the defeated genocidal regime. This showed how intervention can easily be manipulated for strategic purposes and discredited the very idea of humanitarian intervention in central Africa. The same theme was reprised in November 1996, when the RPF invaded eastern Zaire (now Congo) to remove the remnants of the genocidal regime, and France again got UN Security Council authorization for its troops to intervene (this time with Canadian diplomatic cover). As far as the RPF was concerned, this was an act of war, and it acted decisively to destroy the camps of its enemies before the legionnaires could arrive. The breakdown in trust between the RPF and the international community left the UN with no leverage at all as Rwandese forces rampaged through Congo, setting in motion an extraordinarily destructive civil war.

Debating “Success” and the Use of Force

The next examples from the Balkans and West Africa have more positive outcomes. One was the NATO intervention that helped bring an end to the Bosnian war. This came after several years of failed engagements in the war, the most dismal of which was the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR), a misleadingly-named operation whose mandate was to provide protection to UN relief operations, not to civilians. The Bosnian Serb assaults on the so-called “safe areas” such as Srebenica dramatically revealed the hollowness of the promises of protection—a shaming that helped spark the more forceful NATO attacks on Bosnian Serb artillery positions around Sarajevo in 1995.

A combination of circumstances ended this bloody and genocidal conflict. These included the fact that the Bosnian Serbs had achieved most of their war aims (ethnic cleansing of large parts of Bosnia); that the Bosnian-Croat coalition had mounted an effective counter-offensive; that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was ready to sell out his Bosnian clients – and that the US had finally decided to take military action. These achieved an outcome that Bosnian President Alia Izetbegovic described as not just, but “more just than continuing the war.” The bombing was, in short, an act of war (politics by other means) that succeeded in bringing about a better (or at least less bad) state of affairs.

In Kosovo in 1999, military action was again undertaken by NATO. As with Bosnia, there was no UN Security Council authorization – politics overrode law. The Serbs were bombed into submission. There were casualties and collateral damage in both Kosovo and Belgrade and the campaign took much longer than expected. It was, arguably, a just war.

In Liberia, the Economic Community of West African States sent a “military observer group” (ECOMOG) to the country in 1990. This began as a Nigerian initiative to stop the rebel leader Charles Taylor from taking power. This group stayed the course, fought battles, became notoriously corrupt while its soldiers fathered many thousands of children and spread and contracted HIV, and in the end presided over a transition to relative peace and democracy. It was a forcible political engagement which ultimately succeeded. In next-door Sierra Leone, the dynamic was somewhat different, with British Special Forces playing a leading role. But the overall framework was the same: the objective, successfully achieved, was to prevent the complete collapse of the state and to rebuild its basic administration and political institutions, at times using lethal force. These operations are of the species of colonial counter-insurgency and illustrate the diversity of activities that can be described as “war.” The military likes to call such missions “peace support” to distinguish them from classic peacekeeping: this is a useful euphemism akin to the colonial powers’ language of “pacification.” But the real parallel is counter-insurgency – best conducted as minimum-force policing.