Arm Intervention - Essay Example

"Even actions that seem to aim only at the establishment or restoration of order have implications for justice." (Hoffman) The decision to intervene poses a perplexing set of questions. It is observed that the United States has no vivid guidelines to decide where and when to intervene. For example, the Clinton administration had to face many problems regarding arm intervention in Somalia, Haiti, and in Bosnia. Which was termed p. 21. ) as "Provisional, fragile, and reversible." Mandelbaum, 1996).

It is imperative for the Administration and Congress both to adopt certain criteria to follow before approving the military intervention. There are several factors that make the intervention difficult for the administration. Now the world has become volatile and unpredictable which poses a hindrance to drafting out a strategy that is clear and attainable. Then there is a dilemma for the Americans to decide about the military intervention. Henry Kissinger has described this dilemma. Then there is a dilemma for the Americans to decide about the military intervention.

Henry Kissinger has described this dilemma. "America's dominant task is to strike a balance between the twin temptations inherent in its exceptionalism: the notion that America must remedy every wrong and stabilize every dislocation, and the latent instinct to withdraw into itself. Indiscriminate involvement in all the ethnic turmoil and civil wars of the post-Cold War world would drain a crusading America. Yet an America that confines itself to the refinement of its domestic virtues would, in the end, abdicate America's security and prosperity to decisions made by other societies in faraway places and over which America would progressively lose control.

Not every evil can be combated by America, even less by America alone. But some monsters need to be if not slain, at least resisted. What is most needed are criteria for selectivity." (Kissinger, 1994), There is no doubt that the U.S is in desperate need of military intervention policy which is The United States needs a military intervention policy that is unswerving with America's role as the greatest power of today's world. It requires safeguarding the national security interests of the U.S. by keeping in mind many military options which include preventive attacks, deterrence, diplomacy, and sometimes peace operations.

"An intervention policy should discriminate between America's interests and how best to defend them so that America's limited military resources will be used where they are most needed and most effective and not wasted on inconsequential operations of little lasting significance" ReferencesCoady, C.A.J. (2002).The Ethics of Armed Humanitarian Intervention.