USA foreign policy and intervention

USA Foreign Policy and Intervention

Introduction

During the first half of the 1990s , many intervention operations were launched , including in Somalia . In general , their main aim of intervention in Somalia was to alleviate the conflict . Notwithstanding the instruments that were used to achieve this goal were mainly military . The reaction of the Western military establishment , asked to intervene in armed conflicts in the developing world , has been to look at familiar concepts used in military training and operations (Deutsch 12 . It has been argued that their outlook on armed conflict , dominated

br by Cold War inter-state war thinking , was at the heart of the many difficulties the intervening states faced in these interventions . What has gone wrong in Somalia , what could have been done differently and how to change approach ? Answers to these problems range from instituting a different emphasis in the training of soldiers , to reform of the United Nations to deal with armed conflicts

Background and Overview

At the beginning of 1992 , Mohammed Siad Barre , who had ruled Somalia for two decades , was overthrown . At this time civil war and starvation grasped Somalia . In January of 1992 , the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution . This resolution called to cease fire a political settlement of the conflict (Duyvesteyn 78 . In March this cease-fire went into effect . However , already by August as many as 1 .5 million of an estimated Somali population of 6 million were threatened with starvation , with approximately 300 ,000 Somalis already having died including roughly 25 percent of all children under the age of five (Duyvesteyn 80 . In April , the Security Council created a modest military operation . However , negotiations with Somali factions detained the implementation of the operation . On July 27 , the Security Council voted to airlift food to Somalia , and on August 12 the U .N . announced plans to send 500 troops to protect the international relief effort . On August 14 , the White House announced that the United States would take charge of the airlift (Duyvesteyn 90

The 500 troops arrived in September - with the support of four U .S warships carrying 2 ,100 Marines ' - but proved unable to do much to protect the relief effort (Duyvesteyn 78 . In November , U .N . secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared the Security Council that the relief measures were not working . On November 26 , the Bush administration decided that the United States to send troops to Somalia For this the Security Council had to pass an authorizing resolution . On December 3 the Security Council passed the resolution

On October 3-4 , 1993 , eighteen U .S . soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in a fierce firefight in Mogadishu , Somalia . Their deaths were the direct result of U .S . leadership in a series of United Nations -sanctioned military interventions in Somalia that . With the Cable News Network (CNN ) providing almost instantaneous transmission to audiences in the U .S . and abroad , the victorious Somali forces not only paraded a captured U .S . helicopter pilot , Corporal William Durant , through the streets of...