“How do you explain the success orfailure

of U.S. military interventionin attaining foreign policy objectives

from 1898 to the present?”

Brian R. Croteau903-07-9278December 15, 2004History 511

1

The United States has deemed it appropriate and necessary on

numerous occasions to intervene in the affairs of other nations

in pursuit of U.S. foreign policy objectives. Sometimes these

interventions were successful, sometimes not. Sometimes they

were viewed, if not favorably, at least with an appreciation of

necessity, at home and abroad, and sometimes not. Sometimes the

United States clearly accomplished what it at least seemed to aim

for, many times not, and many more times concluded the

interventions with no discernable outcome.

This convoluted series of sometimes related and sometimes

unrelated events must be understood within a framework of

carefully defined terms. Intervention is action of any kind by

one nation intended to influence the actions or policies of, or

conditions in, another nation. Military intervention is action

by military forces of one nation, whether actual, implied, or

threatened, intended to influence the actions or policies of, or

conditions in, another nation. Foreign policy objectives are the

goals and desired outcomes of a nation in its dealings with other

nations, aligned to its various interests.

2

These definitions are purposefully general. To make them

more specific is to limit their meaning to one or some small

number of interventions, military or otherwise, thus requiring

new definitions as conditions or situations change. By using a

more generic definition we can use the same throughout and simply

explain the motives behind a specific intervention.

The concept of intervening in conditions or situations short

of war with other nations is not something invented by the United

States. The mother country, Great Britain, in turn used piracy

by Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh in the late sixteenth

century against Spain and was the victim of it by Algerian

pirates during the early seventeenth century.1 Modern

international law gives any nation the right and responsibility

to intervene to suppress piracy on the high seas.2 By our own

Constitution the United States established for itself the right

“To define and Punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high

Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations.”3 The first

portion of the clause is the historical (and future) connection

with the accepted practice of dealing with piracy whenever found.

Of particular interest then, is the ending portion of the clause,

3

“and Offenses against the Laws of Nations.” Without further

definition, the Constitution left to others to decide what this

would mean and to determine how this was to be accomplished.

By the early 1800s the pattern of piracy along the Barbary

coast of North Africa and the resulting depredations on U.S.

merchant shipping reached a point that President Thomas Jefferson

sent the small “mosquito fleet” of the U.S. Navy to deal with the

most recalcitrant offender, the Pasha of Tripoli. Concurrently,

the U.S. Consul to Tunis, William Eaton, convinced the Pasha’s

brother, Hamid Karamanli, to lead an army of Berber tribesman in

revolt against the Pasha. After Eaton and Hamid captured the

fort at Derna, along the Mediterranean coast, and withstood two

assaults by the Pasha’s army, the USS Constellation brought word

that the war was over, by a negotiated peace.4

The United States achieved foreign policy objectives of

maintaining freedom of the seas for trade, established a

tradition of naval action, as well as made a name for itself

among the family of nations. Despite this outward action, the

years following were primarily inward ones, as the United States

consolidated its “sea to shining sea” settlement and control.

4

Some several mostly naval-oriented actions notwithstanding,

American intervention began for our purposes at the end of the

nineteenth century with the Spanish-American War.

U.S. interventions after 1898 occurred in three distinct

phases. The first was the American Imperialist Phase, and lasted

from 1898 to 1941. It was marked by a series of actions that

established the United States as an emerging world power. The

interventions reflected a desire to order and control the affairs

of surrounding nations, especially those in Latin America. With

political and economic stability thus ensured locally, far-flung

outposts such as Hawaii and the Philippines took on greater

importance to protect access to world markets.5

The second phase was the World War/Cold War Phase, and

lasted from 1941 to 1989. Beginning with the direct challenge of

the Axis nations to American democracy and the economic affront

of closed markets (the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,

for example), the United States responded in concert with other

challenged nations. In 1945 the United States transitioned to

confrontation with the economic and political challenge of

communism as embodied and espoused by the Soviet Union. The

5

post-1945 period was marked by lesser confrontations, none

directly with the primary “foe.” The development of nuclear

weaponry made such confrontation too potentially devastating.

Rather, a series of smaller interventions, aimed toward

containment instead of elimination, changed the method of

intervention.

The third phase was the Post-Cold War Phase, and began in

1986. There is overlap with the previous phase, done on purpose,

with explanation provided later. It is premature to name a

closing date, though the events of September 11th give credence

to using the year 2001. While some of what has been done in

terms of intervention since 9/11 fits the general model of Post-

Cold War, much does not. It remains for future historians to

pinpoint the closing date of the Post-Cold War Phase and name the

next one. Like the shift from imperialism to Cold War world

power, the change from Cold War world power to sole superpower

again forced a shift in methodology. The United States in Post-

Cold War was more selective about where and when it chose

military intervention over any other type.

6

American Imperialism did not magically begin with a

flippant, “Gee, I think we should go to war with Spain today.”

Nor with the mysterious explosion that destroyed the USS Maine in

Havana harbor in February 1898. Rather, a combination of events,

of realizations, gave rise to an increasingly obvious concept

that America had a place in the world.

U.S. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, in the summer of 1884

while commanding the sloop Wachusett, came to the conclusion “from

within…that the control of the sea was an historic factor which

had never been systematically appreciated and expounded.”6 Mahan

“concentrated on the elements that combined to make a nation

1 Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ War (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 20.

2 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, “Convention on the Law of the Sea.”

(http://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/convention_historicalperspective.htm), accessed 11

Dec 2004, par. 1.

3 ___, Constitution of the United States (1787), Art. I, Sec. 8.

4 Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. (New York: Basic Books,

2002), 18-25.

5 Ivan Musicant, Empire by Default: The Spanish American War and the Dawn of the American Century. (New

York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), 656-7.

6 Musicant, 6.

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powerful at sea: trade, geography, natural resources, diplomacy

and naval policy, the character of the people and their

government” and delivered his ideas in a series of lectures to

student officers at the Naval War College in 1886.7 He

consolidated his lectures into his 1890 work, The Influence of Sea

Power upon History, 1660-1783.8

In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner addressed the Columbian

Exposition in Chicago with “The Significance of the Frontier in

American History.”9 He drew his conclusion, that the frontier in

America was closed, “from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Bulletin No.

12, of April 1891.”10 Turner had noticed the Bureau’s conclusion

that while as late as 1880 there was a discernable line of

frontier, beyond which settlement was inconsequential or non-

existent, by 1890 there was no discernable line…there was no

frontier. By Turner’s conclusion, “America must expand or

die.”11 Mahan had come to the same conclusion as Turner, that

7 Musicant, 7.

8 Musicant, 7.

8

the frontier was closed, but extended Turner’s argument with a

follow-on piece to his (Mahan’s) book, stating “America must now

begin to look outward.”12

The work of Turner and Mahan set America thinking,

especially the political leadership. By the mid-1890s America

was ready to move onto the international scene. Turner’s closed

frontier and Mahan’s outward look were possible only with the

ending of America’s Indian wars and the achievements of industry.

Sioux Chief Sitting Bull’s death in 1890 and major congressional

appropriations for a steel navy in 1888 were signal events. The

Samoan Crisis of 1888-89 proved to Congress that the clashes in

the South Pacific over coaling stations held the potential for

war with nations, such as Germany, better prepared to maintain a

global presence.13 Thus, when the crumbling Spanish empire

continued to abuse its hapless citizens in nearby Cuba, the hue

9 Musicant, 4.

10 Musicant, 4.

11 Musicant, 4.

12 Musicant, 9.

13 Musicant, 14.

9

and cry against the abuses appeared as a neat cover for the

opportunity to obtain coaling stations (Cuba and Puerto Rico) in

the Caribbean in anticipation of an isthmusian canal and in the

Pacific (Guam and the Philippines) for the Asian markets in China

and Japan. Cuba in particular had been an annexationist goal of

America since before the Civil War, the Southern hope of several

slave states on one island.14 Graham A. Cosmas, in his book An

Army for Empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American War, stated,

“During five hectic months in the spring and summer of 1898, the

United States liquidated Spain’s colonial empire in the Caribbean

and the Far East and began her march to world power.”15

Three interventions during the American Imperialist Phase

between 1898 and 1941 are particularly illustrative of this

period’s pattern of military interventions: the Philippines, 1898

to 1902; Veracruz in 1914; and Haiti in 1915. Brian McAllister

Linn, in his book The Philippine War, 1899-1902, observed that

President William McKinley’s “unwillingness to confide his

14 Musicant, 38-39.

15 Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American War. (College

Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1994), 322.

10

opinions or plans either to paper or to his advisers” make it all

but impossible for historians to state with accuracy what

McKinley’s foreign policy was regarding the Philippines.16 Linn

concluded that the “accidental and incremental” nature of our

involvement in the Philippines was both an expression of our

unarticulated policy and the driving force in creating what

policy there was.17 McKinley’s “policy statement” response to

Major General Wesley Merritt’s request for clarification of his

(Merritt’s) role as commander of the Philippine expedition read

as it did, “to send an army of occupation…[to] reduce…Spanish

power…and give order and security to the islands while in the

possession of the United States,” as the source image of Linn’s

reflective description of McKinley as an opportunist.18

McKinley’s statement retained ultimate flexibility of action and

allowed the United States to head in two directions

simultaneously, that of empire and of temporary caretaker.

McKinley finally articulated a position statement in late 16 Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899-1902. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 3.

17 Linn, 5.

18 Linn, 5.

11

December 1898 that did nothing to provide Merritt with military

instructions although it did make clearer the intent of the

United States to retain control of the Philippines. By

“benevolent assimilation”19 then was Merritt to assume military

and civil control of the islands, with emphasis on civic action

programs.

The work of the U.S. Army in the Philippines under Merritt

and the commanders who followed him was distinguished by its

civic actions—maintaining public order, initiating public health

measures including garbage collection, establishing schools, and

reestablishing agriculture such that villages and regions were

lifted from subsistence level to a market economy.20 Most local

commanders saw civic action as the easiest way to secure the

popular support necessary to make American soldiers safe and

American government secure. But not all military actions were

benevolent or helpful. Racial tensions appeared early on, along

with a building sense of superiority. Foraging turned into

pillaging and looting all too easily. More serious were the

19 Linn, 30.

20 Linn, 230.

12

coercive acts to deprive insurgents of support, or torture of

captives to gain information, or rape of women in a village

suspected of supporting insurgents, or the burning of an entire

village. Local commanders sometimes prohibited the transport of

food outside towns or villages in quantities beyond that

necessary to feed one’s family, effectively cutting off support

to insurgents. The Philippine War was an extension of the effort

to consolidate the new American empire, albeit without the

agreement of the Filipinos led by Emilio Aguinaldo. What made

this intervention different from others was the efforts at

education, something that did not occur in any other, in this

phase or any subsequent.

The Veracruz intervention of 1914 was an overreaction to a

minor slight, and allowed President Woodrow Wilson to capitalize

on an opportunity to influence the downfall of Mexican President

Victoriano Huerta.21 It didn’t work. Once the city was secured,

American military occupiers forced citizens and released

prisoners to clean up the streets of garbage and the languishing

21 Lester D. Langley, The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934. (Wilmington,

DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2002), 104.

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dead. When the American occupation ended after only a few short

months the vericruzanos reverted to old habits.22 The ultimately

failed civic actions were the best the military accomplished. As

author Lester D. Langley stated in The Banana Wars: United States

Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934, “Wilson realized that an

American drive on the Mexican capital [such as Marine Major

Smedley Butler’s proposed use of the Mexican railroad to carry

assault troops into Mexico City to force Huerta’s downfall23]

would have turned the [civil-warring] Mexicans against the United

States and plunged the two countries into a second Mexican-

American war.”24 Wilson was disinclined to expand the

intervention into war, and so the occupation of Veracruz

accomplished nothing.

American military forces intervened in Haiti in July 1915,

in the face of yet another bloody presidential overthrow, and to

prevent both the French and the Germans from interfering in this

22 Langley, 107.

23 Hans Schmidt, Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military

History. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 69.

24 Langley, 108.

14

island nation in the “American lake” that was the Caribbean.25

U.S. Marine civic actions were limited to public health, building

or rebuilding roads, training and establishing police forces, and

eliminating the cacos, the hill-country rebels. There was some

effort to establish schools, but none to teach democracy as had

been done in the Philippines. Most telling was the utter lack of

understanding of the Haitian caste system, defined by skin tone.

To the American military coming from a nation with Jim Crow laws,

black was black. One Marine officer commented, “Haiti…is easy

enough to pacify, the trouble is keeping it pacified after we

leave.”26 When U.S. forces left in 1922, control of Haiti fell

to an American-sponsored strongman, Louis Borno, a pattern

followed by the U.S. throughout Latin America.27 Other than

that, Haiti was little different than it was in 1915.

Of these three interventions during the American Imperialist

Phase, only in the Philippines was military intervention

successfully used to achieve foreign policy objectives. As Linn

25 Langley, 127.

26 Langley, 152.

27 Langley, 128.

15

observed, “[The Philippine War was] the most successful

counterinsurgency campaign in U.S. history.”28

The second time period, the World War/Cold War Phase, lasted

from 1941 to 1989. In the initial, transitional period of World

War II, the United States established itself as a world power and

emerged from it as one of only two superpowers in the world. The

polarized nature of the Cold War that followed meant indirect

confrontation, and the United States developed new methods and

reasons for interventions to fit this change. Three

interventions during this phase are illustrative: the Dominican

Republic in 1965; Grenada in 1983; and Panama in 1989.

The 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic did not fit

the pattern of earlier United States military interventions in

this region. There were two distinct differences. First, the

ongoing Cold War and the fear of communism (as with nearby Cuba)

colored the government’s perspective and policy. Since the end

of World War II, U.S. foreign policy was dominated by a fear of

the spread of communism. Secondly, the combination of President

Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy and the United States

28 Linn, 328.

16

as principal signatory of the charter for the Organization of

American States (OAS) in 1948 put the U.S. in a different

position with the Dominican Republic than had existed in 1916,

the year of the last intervention there. The violation of the

Good Neighbor policy “reversed a fundamental policy guideline

[of] more than three decades”, to refrain “from dispatching…

troops to quell…uprisings.”29 Article 17 of the OAS charter

prohibits the “military occupation [of another State] on any

ground whatsoever.”30

The 1962 election of Juan Emilio Bosch Gavino, a member of

the Partido Revolucinario Dominicano (PRD), created such concern

within the Dominican military that they proposed to mount a coup

d’etat even before Bosch took office. While Bosch’s left-leaning

PRD might have been disconcerting to the military on its face,

author Eric Thomas Chester contended in his book, Rag-Tags, Scum,

Riff-Raff, and Commies: The U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965-66,

that however left-leaning the party might be, Bosch’s actions as

29 Eric Thomas Chester, Rag-Tags, Scum, Riff-Raff, and Commies: The U.S. Intervention in the Dominican

Republic, 1965-66. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 253.

30 Chester, 253.

17

president in his early months in office “disappointed

everyone.”31 His fiscal restraint, especially the reduction in

public spending that contributed to a significant increase in

unemployment, disappointed his followers who had expected

sweeping social reforms.32 Although he allowed the formation of

trade unions, he suppressed strikes “citing a law [passed] during

the Trujillo era.”33 Bosch only touched on the issue of land

reform, a critical one among his supporters in a land dominated

by an “aristocratic oligarchy”, settling only six hundred

families on former Trujillo lands after promising seventy

thousand.34 Bosch’s actions did not resemble the great

socialist/communist monster the United States seemed ready to see

everywhere.

Bosch was arrested and removed from office on 25 September

1963 by Dominican air force officers who opposed Bosch’s proposed

removal of General Elias Wessin y Wessin as head of the Armed

31 Chester, 30.

32 Chester, 30.

33 Chester, 30.

34 Chester, 30-31.

18

Forces Training Center.35 A triumvirate of officers led by

Donald Reid Cabral, and supported by the United States,

controlled the government until April 1965.36 Their time in

power was marked by their brutal oppression of all dissent and

opposition and led to the organization of a counter-coup of

younger officers intended to return Bosch to power.37 It was

this counter-coup that led to the military intervention by the

United States, which feared a “return” to leftist policies that

never existed.

U.S. Marine Corps units first landed on April 28, 1965, and

U.S. military forces quickly “grew to more than thirty-one

thousand paratroopers, sailors, and marines sent to isolate and

overwhelm a force of less than five thousand rebels.”38 Although

portrayed to the outside world as “humanitarian” and “lifesaving”

and above all neutral, U.S. troops arrayed between the leftist

rebels and the right-wing military often gave direct aid to the

35 Chester, 40.

36 Chester, 41.

37 Chester, 44.

38 Chester, 3.

19

military and attacked the rebels. Long negotiations, replete

with deception and guile, led to elections in 1966, well

engineered by the United States to ensure a strong but compliant

Dominican president, one who would, with the Dominican military,

continue to suppress the leftist movement within the country.39

The Dominican intervention should count as a foreign policy

failure. The blinders of fear led President Johnson and his

administration to see the bogeyman everywhere they looked. The

gain of a compliant puppet administration in the Dominican

Republic seems small compared to the loss of reputation the

intervention also delivered to the United States. Chester wrote,

“When [President] Johnson opted to dispatch troops to the

Dominican Republic, he sent a clear signal to all of Latin

America that the United States was prepared to use its

devastating military power to maintain its tight hold over the

region.”40

In the fall of 1983 a coup overthrew and murdered pro-U.S.

Prime Minister Maurice Bishop of Grenada, putting in place one

39 Chester, 219-49.

40 Chester, 3.

20

that was openly pro-Soviet. Within only a few days of the coup,

the United States sent troops to protect the 600-plus American

medical school students there and to ensure the pro-Soviet

leadership was ousted. Resistance was heavier than expected, and

Cuban troops were discovered protecting the construction of an

airfield of substantially greater capacity than the tiny spice-

and-tourist island needed. The students were rescued without

incident and a new, pro-Western regime established. The

intervention, however, was marked by inter-service rivalries and

technology mismatches that hindered the intended joint

operations.41 Regardless, Grenada was a clear foreign policy

success. The mission was clear before the intervention began; it

fit American historical precedent in the Caribbean, and it fit

United States foreign policy objective of Soviet-bloc

containment.42

41 Richard N. Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post-Cold War World.(Washington:

Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 25-26.

42 National Security Council, “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security.”

(Washington: ___, 1950), Sec VI.A., par. 2-3.

21

The United States invaded Panama in December 1989 in

response to repeated assaults on and depredations of American

military and civilian personnel by Panamanian police and

paramilitary forces, and to remove Panamanian President Manuel

Noriega from power.43 Although supported in his early years by

the United States, Noriega had turned from assisting the United

States in suppressing drug trafficking from Colombia to

participating in it. U.S. courts had indicted Noriega in

February 1988. Additionally, he had used his paramilitary forces

to suppress the results of a popular election in May 1989 that

had given victory to his opponents. Operation Just Cause worked

for several reasons. Noriega apparently misjudged U.S.

willingness to execute such a mission. He had been “numbed” to

reports of U.S. military maneuvering because additional troops

had been in country since May and actively engaged in military

exercises throughout the intervening months.44 Through the use

of overwhelming force, some 25,000 U.S. forces, “within days

organized resistance disappeared and the paramilitary forces

[were] rendered impotent.”45 Capturing Noriega was not as easy,

but was accomplished within an additional two weeks. Panama also

22

counts as a foreign policy success. Even with the egg-on-the-

face embarrassment of having previously supported the man we now

wanted to arrest, we protected American lives, protected the

Panama Canal, ousted a dictatorial regime, and installed the

democratically elected government, all in about two months

time.46

The last time period, the Post-Cold War Phase, began in 1986

and continues to an undecided ending date. There is an overlap

of time with the previous phase. The fall of the Berlin Wall was

a precursor to the end of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc

and is useful as a chronological marker for the ending of the

previous phase. The beginning of this phase is marked by the

passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act. This legislation

drastically changed the way the Department of Defense operates

and how civilian and military leaders interact and maintain

access to the president. Additionally, it reconfigured

43 Haass, 30.

44 Haass, 31.

45 Haass, 31.

46 Haass, 31.

23

responsibility for the world’s regions on a pattern different

from the Cold War era. Consequently, using 1986 as a start date

for this phase more accurately reflects the change in political

approach to Post-Cold War issues.

The three interventions most illustrative of this time

period are Somalia in 1993, Haiti in 1994, and Bosnia in 1995.

Each is distinctly different than the others and each was

approached differently by the United States.

Of any intervention the United States has undertaken,

Somalia in 1993 probably comes closest to a purely humanitarian

effort, but did not end that way. The departure in 1960 of

British and Italian colonial governments left a void in a new

nation with no experience of self-government.47 By the end of

the decade the fractious multiparty governmental system had all

but collapsed and a strongman, General Mohamed Siad Barre, had

assumed power.48 While claiming to be working to suppress the

clan-family system in Somalia, Siad Barre was in fact picking

47 Karin von Hippel, Democracy by Force: US Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World. (Cambridge:

University Press, 2000), 57-58.

48 Von Hippel, 58.

24

favorites among them according to whom he was related. Siad

Barre also accepted help from the Soviet Union, but in a war with

Ethiopia (which the Soviet Union was also backing), the United

States supported the set-adrift Somalia. Somalia lost that war

and until the late 1980s was entirely “dependent on western

foreign aid to sustain its economy.”49

In 1991 Siad Barre fled the capitol, Mogadishu, and left the

country in the hands of various war-lord led rebel factions.

These war-lords controlled the distribution of food as power

control over the population. Supporting a particular war-lord

meant getting fed. For the war-lords, controlling the relief

supplies also meant being able to trade them for arms, especially

after the January 1992 arms embargo established by UN

resolution.50 Author T. Frank Crigler explained in his Autumn

1993 Joint Force Quarterly article, “The Peace-Enforcement Dilemma”,

“When the United Nations attempted in mid-1992 to introduce a

peacekeeping force to restore order and safeguard humanitarian

relief operations there, its efforts were thwarted largely by the

49 Von Hippel, 58.

50 Von Hippel, 59.

25

stubborn refusal of one faction to cooperate, namely, the United

Somali Congress headed by General Mohammed Farah Aideed.”51

The United Nations, frustrated by the failure of traditional

peacekeeping operations, turned to the model demonstrated by the

United States in Operation Restore Hope, the relief support of

Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq following the Gulf War in 1991.

In Restore Hope the United States had “showed that a massive

deployment of force could halt factional fighting and safeguard

relief operations, thereby saving thousands of innocent lives

while suffering almost no casualties.”52

But a U.S. deployment begun in December 1992 at the tail end

of the George Bush administration soon turned into a January 1993

Bill Clinton administration “determined not to be distracted from

domestic economic issues by foreign crises where vital U.S.

interests were not at stake.”53 Thus a “massive deployment of

force” under a single nation turned into a partitioned

51 T. Frank Crigler, “The Peace-Enforcement Dilemma”, Joint Force Quarterly, (no. 2,Autumn 1993, pp. 64-70),

65.

52 Crigler, 65.

53 Crigler, 66.

26

responsibility under a newly negotiated UN operation, UNOSOM II,

which gave “unprecedented peace-enforcing authority to intervene,

halt fighting, and impose order [as] U.S.-led forces had enjoyed

during Restore Hope.”54 Disagreements within the UNOSOM structure

and among its workers, and between the UNOSOM officials in

Somalia and the UN Security Council, resulted in Aideed and his

followers mounting with impunity raids and ambushes against UN

troops and in shifting responses and tactics taken against

Aideed.55 The June 5th ambush of Pakistani soldiers led directly

to Resolution 837 “which…called for the detention and trial of

those responsible.”56 Author Karin von Hippel explained:

What started out as an impartial peacekeeping operation to feed starvingwomen and children soon turned into an unsuccessful all-out man-hunt in pursuit of Aideed, culminating on night of 3 October [1993] when 18 U.S.Army Rangers were killed and 77 wounded after an attack on an Aideed meeting place in Mogadishu. [After television coverage of] not starvingchildren but…a dead U.S. soldier…the ‘do something’ cries were rapidly replaced by a rousing chorus of ‘get out.’ [The] U.S. public could not understand why Somalis were killing their troops [sent] on a humanitarian mission.57

All U.S. soldiers were out by March 1994.

54 Crigler, 66.

55 Von Hippel, 60.

56 Von Hippel, 60.

57 Von Hippel, 60-61.

27

Somalia represents a low point in U.S. interventions.

Foreign policy objectives were never clear, the mission changed

as time went on, and forces were restricted as to available

weaponry and equipment. Commanders on the ground were denied

their requests for tanks (by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin) and

for AC-130 gunships (by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General

Colin Powell).58 Somalia was a foreign policy failure.

In 1994 the United States convinced Haitian strongman

General Raoul Cedras to step down and allow the return of

democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Von

Hippel lays out a series of reasons that explain the Clinton

administration’s choice of why-Haiti and why-now.59 The

diplomatic effort of former President Jimmy Carter, and others,

was successful “through the…combination of the credible threat of

force with diplomacy.”60 Cedras agreed because the military

might of the United States was poised to compel compliance.

United States military forces occupied Haiti, initiated

58 Boot, 323.

59 Von Hippel, 101-103.

60 Von Hippel, 104.

28

humanitarian relief measures, worked to build or rebuild a police

force, and worked toward the return of a previously elected

official. It is tempting to call the 1994 intervention in Haiti

a foreign policy success, but the only real “success” was that

General Cedras left and the elected president returned. Though

not a clear failure either, not much else in Haiti has changed.

The final intervention in this phase is Bosnia in 1995.

Similarly to Somalia, intervention began because of a breakdown

in governmental systems and widespread depredations and genocidal

ethnic cleansing. Earlier UN measures were insufficient to keep

the warring factions apart. The Bosnian Serbs, backed by

Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, had gained considerable territory

from the Bosnia Croats, backed by Croatia, despite a draft peace

agreement.61 In the summer of 1995 the Bosnian Serbs advanced on

several areas marked as safe zones and shelled the marketplace in

Sarajevo. Author Richard Haass described the response: “Two days

later, NATO initiated Operation Deliberate Force, a large-scale air

campaign that was designed to target Bosnian Serb forces, shift

the military balance in the direction of the Bosnian Croat

Federation, and induce the Bosnia Serbs to settle.”62 A Croat

29

campaign begun just before Deliberate Force combined to push the

Bosnia Serbs back to previously agreed territorial boundaries,

which were formally agreed to in the Dayton Accords in November

1995. Slobodan Milosevic abandoned the Bosnian Serbs in order

“to be free of sanctions and to avoid having to absorb additional

[Bosnia Serb] refugees.”63 The United States began a one-year

commitment of troops under the UN (implementation force—IFOR) in

December 1995 along a very narrowly defined mission—“supervising

a cease-fire, manning de facto borders, monitoring troop

withdrawals, and redeploying weapons.”64 President Clinton

ultimately had to go to Congress for two extensions on the

original time agreement, finally admitting in December 1997 “that

it could not predict how long U.S. troops would be required to

contribute to [the stabilization force] SFOR.”65 The continuing

nature of the Bosnia intervention renders impossible a final

success/failure decision. Regardless, that the United States has

stuck to the continuing narrow definition of its role is by

itself a success. Achieving a stable Balkan region contributes

to a stable Europe, and stability has always been a foreign

policy objective of the United States.

30

Observing patterns of continuity and change contribute to

understanding U.S. interventions. There are three continuities:

we have never entered a country with a clear understanding of the

cultural differences; we have a national impatience to get out or

consider ourselves finished that runs counter to the true time

frame necessary to “fix” whatever we intervened for in the first

place; and, except for the Philippines, we have consistently

failed to educate the people in order to “correct the deficient

thinking” that caused us to intervene. There are two changes

worth noting: since the Good Neighbor Policy we have an

increasing disinclination to act unilaterally, with exceptions;

since the Good Neighbor Policy we have an increasing

disinclination to maintain a presence in nations following an

intervention, preferring to turn over “finishing operations” to

61 Haass, 161.

62 Haass, 161.

63 Haass, 161.

64 Haass, 162.

65 Haass, 162.

31

the UN. The continuities are all factors that work against

success and our changes are ones that contribute to it.

The question around which this article is built invites a

single answer to overarch the time periods, but that is not

possible. Each intervention must be viewed separately, according

to its own reasons, merits, and errors. Similarities among

interventions are often best explained by the historical time

period within which the intervention occurred. Even so, to

attempt to pull more from them than is reasonable invites the

over-generalization that explains nothing. Short-lived successes

are many, and many are distinctly notable. But in the long run,

most are failures, because policy objectives were not pursued,

the intervened nation reverts to form, or the U.S. fails to

“finish” the job by implementing “safeguards”, such as education

in the Philippines. The failures of U.S. military interventions

in attaining foreign policy objectives are attributable to the

failure to adequately prepare or sustain the forces executing the

interventions.

32

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Endnotes

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