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  • Best Intentions or False Promises:Multilateral Interventions in Darfur, Afghanistan, and Southern Lebanon
  • Richard Rupp (bio)

Fifteen years have passed since the end of the Cold War. During this time the international community has launched nearly two dozen multinational security and humanitarian interventions. The United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, and the African Union (AU) are currently engaged in an array of operations that span the globe. These interventions go by many names, including "peacekeeping," "peace-enforcement," "peace support operations," "stability operations," "counterinsurgency," and "nation building." Each of these operations has been closely scrutinized by the intervening governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and an army of scholars and policy specialists. Countless studies and reports have been disseminated in the hopes of correcting failed intervention strategies and providing roadmaps for successful missions.1 Regardless of an intervention's designation or the rules of engagement, the international community's efforts to stem armed conflicts and ameliorate human suffering have known only modest success in recent [End Page 85] years. Indeed, ongoing conflicts in Darfur, Afghanistan, and southern Lebanon illuminate the daunting challenges confronting Western-led intervention efforts.

As armed conflicts take the lives of thousands of people throughout the world each day, and new failed states and civil wars emerge, demands for Western action will continue. A variety of factors affect a state's decision making when national leaders are called upon to dispatch troops and civilian personnel to countries and regions ravaged by war. Support for multinational interventions may be motivated by the altruistic emotions of enraged public opinion, crass calculations of national interest, or allegiance to international treaties and membership in international organizations. The impetus notwithstanding, Western governments today are overextended and, in many cases, are failing to support effectively their commitments and pledges.

In this essay I critically examine recent trends and developments affecting multilateral interventions, with special attention devoted to the involvement of the UN, NATO, and the US government. Each of these actors is inextricably linked, and yet their leadership has proven largely incapable of designing satisfactory relationships governing the design and management of the missions upon which they have jointly embarked. The conclusions of this essay are sobering but well founded. The international community has been unable to absorb the basic lesson gleaned from fifteen years of multinational interventions: operations that stand the greatest chance of success occur when local warring parties have exhausted military means and genuinely turn to the international community as an honest broker to facilitate cease-fires and foster reconstruction. Interventions designed to impose settlements on local warring factions confront an array of obstacles and have known only limited success. Owing to restricted resources, clashing interests among Western governments, and the defiance of local states and regional actors, multilateral interventions endorsed by the United States, NATO, and the UN are frequently undermined. Recent setbacks notwithstanding, UN interventions continue to grow in number, the US military is devoting considerable resources to new stability operations, and serious policy commentators are urging NATO to "go global." [End Page 86]

Multilateral Interventions: The United Nations

As the Cold War was drawing to a close in the late 1980s, the UN was managing five peacekeeping operations, four of which were located in the Middle East. In the years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, UN interventions have been on a steady rise. Indeed, in August 2006 the Security Council called for the establishment of three new operations, involving Sudan, Lebanon, and Timor-Leste. In December 2006 the Security Council responded to urgent calls from the Horn of Africa and endorsed yet another peacekeeping mission of eight thousand troops for war-torn Somalia. The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations manages global deployments of more than ninety thousand personnel at a cost of $5 billion per annum. If the UN implements current Security Council resolutions the total number of deployed personnel could rise to 140,000 in 2007.2

As UN-sanctioned interventions grew in the 1990s, diplomats and scholars considered the changing nature of armed conflicts and the rules of engagement that would be most appropriate for the international community. During the Cold War years UN peacekeeping operations were relatively limited...

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