Intervene or not Intervene - Case Study Example

Intervene or not intervene. The U.S. intervention to different countries is interrupted in different way by various critics according to their perception about the world. It is no doubt that U.S. is known for its richness for natural wealth, technology superiority, and best democracy in the whole world. It is justifiable for U.S. to intervene in the other countries affairs and politics as long as it does well for that country and to the whole world. Any dispute comes within as well as between countries arises due to greediness of a leader or misunderstanding of world matters and regionally thinking of any problem. Today's world is different from the earlier ones, now the world leaders need to be more diplomatic and polite in dealing with other countries and leaders of the world in order to avoid any dispute. Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, most people in the world agree that the perpetrators need to be brought to justice, without killing many thousands of civilians in the process. But unfortunately, the U.S. military has always accepted massive civilian deaths as part of the cost of war. The military is now poised to kill thousands of foreign civilians, in order to prove that killing U.S. civilians is wrong. It is said in the media repeatedly that some Middle Easterners hate the U.S. only because of their "freedom" and "prosperity." Is it right The U.S. deployed forces in the Persian Gulf after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which turned Washington against its former Iraqi ally Saddam Hussein. U.S. supported the Kuwaiti monarchy and the Muslim fundamentalist monarchy in neighboring Saudi Arabia against the secular nationalist Iraq regime. In January 1991, the U.S. and its allies unleashed a massive bombing assault against Iraqi government and military targets, in intensity beyond the raids of World War II and Vietnam. Up to 200,000 Iraqis were killed in the war and its immediate aftermath of rebellion and disease, including many civilians who died in their villages, neighborhoods, and bomb shelters. The U.S. continued economic sanctions that denied health and energy to Iraqi civilians, who died by the hundreds of thousands, according to United Nations agencies. The U.S. also instituted "no-fly zones" and virtually continuous bombing raids, yet Saddam was politically bolstered as he was militarily weakened. Other so-called "humanitarian interventions" were centered in the Balkan region of Europe, after the 1992 breakup of the multiethnic federation of Yugoslavia. The U.S. watched for three years as Serb forces killed Muslim civilians in Bosnia, before its launched decisive bombing raids in 1995. Even then, it never intervened to stop atrocities by Croatian forces against Muslim and Serb civilians, because those forces were aided by the U.S. In 1999, the U.S. bombed Serbia to force President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw forces from the ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo, which was torn a brutal ethnic war. The bombing intensified Serbian expulsions and killings of Albanian civilians from Kosovo, and caused the deaths of thousands of Serbian civilians, even in cities that had voted strongly against Milosevic. When a NATO occupation force enabled Albanians to move back, U.S. forces did little or nothing to prevent similar atrocities against Serb and other non-Albanian civilians. The U.S. was viewed as a biased player, even by the Serbian democratic opposition that overthrew Milosevic the following year. Even when the U.S. military had apparently defensive motives, it ended up attacking the wrong targets. After the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, the U.S. "retaliated" not only against Osama Bin Lad en's training camps in Afghanistan, but a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was mistakenly said to be a chemical warfare installation. Bin Laden retaliated by attacking a U.S. Navy ship docked in Yemen in 2000. After the 2001 terror attacks on the United States, the U.S. military is poised to again bomb Afghanistan, and possibly move against other states it accuses of promoting anti-U.S. "terrorism," such as Iraq and Sudan. Such a campaign will certainly ratchet up the cycle of violence, in an escalating series of retaliations that is the hallmark of Middle East conflicts. Afghanistan, like Yugoslavia, is a multiethnic state that could easily break apart in a new catastrophic regional war. Almost certainly more civilians would lose their lives in this tit-for-tat war on "terrorism" than the 3,000 civilians who died on September 11. The unilateral U.S. military intervention in Vietnam began in 1954, immediately following the humiliating French defeat in early May 1954. The July 21, 1954 Geneva Agreement concluded the French war against the Vietnamese and promised them a unifying election, mandated for July 1956. The U.S. government knew that fair elections would, in effect, ensure a genuine democratic victory for revered Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. This was unacceptable. In June 1954, prior to the signing of the historic Geneva agreement, the U.S. began CIA-directed internal sabotage operations against the Vietnamese while setting up the puppet Ngo Dinh Diem (brought to Vietnam from the U.S.) as "our" political leader. No electrons were ever held. This set the stage for yet another war for Vietnamese independence -- this time against U.S. forces and their South Vietnamese puppets. There was a historically unprecedented level of chemical warfare in Vietnam, including the indiscriminate spraying of nearly 20 million gallons of defoliants on one-seventh the area of South Vietnam. The vestigial effects of chemical warfare poisoning continue to plague the health of adult Vietnamese (and ex-GIs) while causing escalated birth defects. Samples of soil, water, food and body fat of Vietnamese citizens continue to reveal dangerously elevated levels of dioxin to the present day. The consensus today is that more than 3 million Vietnamese were killed, with 300,000 additional missing in action and presumed dead. In the process the U.S. lost nearly 59,000 of her own men and women, with about 2,000 additional missing, while combatants from four U.S. allies lost over 6,000 more. The South Vietnamese military accounted for nearly 225,000 dead. All of this carnage was justified in order to destroy the basic rights and capacity of the Vietnamese to construct their own independent, sovereign society. None of the victims deserved to die in such a war. Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and U.S. military "grunts" were all victims. The main reason for non- intervention in their affairs of the countries like Rwanda, Darfur, Armenia is the human rights violation. In May 2006, the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur organized by United Nations "concluded that the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide ... [though] international offences such as the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide." researcher and frequent commentator on Darfur, has questioned the methodology of the commission's report. The United States government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individual world leaders have chosen to use the word "genocide" for what is taking place in Darfur. Most notably, in passing the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act of 2006, the US government codified specific economic and legal sanctions on the government of Sudan as a result of its findings of genocide. Genocide has been practiced around the world throughout history. In this century alone, the world has witnessed but failed to intervene. Significantly many cases of genocide have been found among Armenians, Jews, Ukrainians, the Jewish Holocaust, and in the people of Rwanda, Darfur. It is said that Arab militants have killed more than 30,000 black Africans and displaced over a million more in Darfur region of Sudan since late 2003.Oservers say the Arab- dominated Sudanese government has tolerated and possibly even supported the delivery of humanitarian relief to Darfur. The United Nations has called the situation in Darfur the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, yet the response from the international community has been muted, the intervention is denied ten years ago. The international community was complicit in allowing the genocide to occur ten years ago in Rwanda, and it is complicit in allowing the genocide to occur today in Darfur. The world's failure to act decisively in both cases must be attributed to lack of interest, no ignorance. Unless the international community takes quick action in ending the attacks on Darfur, the atrocities may ultimately surpass those from Rwanda. The main reasons for the U.S. intervention can be explained in the following ways: First, they were explained to the U.S. public as defending the lives and rights of civilian populations. Yet the military tactics employed often left behind massive civilian "collateral damage." War planners made little distinction between rebels and the civilians who lived in rebel zones of control, or between military assets and civilian infrastructure, such as train lines, water plants, agricultural factories, medicine supplies, etc. Second, although nearly all the post-World War II interventions were carried out in the name of "freedom" and "democracy," nearly all of them in fact defended dictatorships controlled by pro-U.S. elites. Whether in Vietnam, Central America, or the Persian Gulf, the U.S. was not defending "freedom" but an ideological agenda (such as defending capitalism) or an economic agenda (such as protecting oil company investments). In the few cases when U.S. military forces toppled a dictatorship--such as in Grenada or Panama--they did so in a way that prevented the country's people from overthrowing their own dictator first, and installing a new democratic government more to their liking. Third, the U.S. always attacked violence by its opponents as "terrorism," "atrocities against civilians," or "ethnic cleansing," but minimized or defended the same actions by the U.S. or its allies. If a country has the right to "end" a state that trains or harbors terrorists, would Cuba or Nicaragua have had the right to launch defensive bombing raids on U.S. targets to take out exile terrorists Washington's double standard maintains that an U.S. ally's action by definition "defensive," but that an enemy's retaliation is by definition "offensive." Fourth, the U.S. often portrays itself as a neutral peacekeeper, with nothing but the purest humanitarian motives. After deploying forces in a country, however, it quickly divides the country or region into "friends" and "foes," and takes one side against another. This strategy tends to enflame rather than dampens a war or civil conflict, as shown in the cases of Somalia and Bosnia, and deepens resentment of the U.S. role. Fifth, U.S. military intervention is often counterproductive even if one accepts U.S. goals and rationales. Rather than solving the root political or economic roots of the conflict, it tends to polarize factions and further destabilize the country. The same countries tend to reappear again and again on the list of 20th century interventions. Sixth, U.S. deionization of an enemy leader, or military action against him, tends to strengthen rather than weaken his hold on power. Take the list of current regimes most singled out for U.S. attack, and put it alongside of the list of regimes that have had the longest hold on power, and you will find they have the same names. Qaddafi, Castro, Saddam, Kim, and others may have faced greater internal criticism if they could not portray themselves as David's standing up to the American Goliath, and (accurately) blaming many of their countries' internal problems on U.S. economic sanctions. An examination of the American conduct of its wars since World War II shows the US to be in violation of the Nuremberg Principles, the 1949 Geneva Convention relating to protection of civilian prisoners of war, the wounded and sick, and the amended Nuremberg Principles as formulated by the International Law Commission in 1950 proscribing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The massive murder and destruction of civilian infrastructure through the use of biological, chemical and depleted uranium weapons violates not only international laws but the moral and humanitarian standards expected in modern civilization. We can conclude this essay by saying that the U.S. intervention can be minimized because it only results in human loss and property. It is high time that U.S. look into the problem of this world in a broader perspective that every ethnic community has got its own differences historically .It's differences can be rectified only through mass education takes place in every part of the world. The world population should be civilized in order to be free from internal as well as external conflicts. The country like U.S. can provide guidance and help to the humanity of the third world countries to come forward economically and socially in order to avoid future destruction to the world at large. Work Cited 1. Ward Churchill, A little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas,1942 to the present. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977, p. 371. 2. William Blum, Killing hope: US Military and CIA Intervention since World War II, Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995, p. 17. 3. Gabriel Kollo, A War Crimes and the Nature of the Vietnam War, Bertrand Russell Foundation, http:www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk/littleton/br7006gk.htm 4. Dimitri Orem, "Whitewashing Western Intervention: Samantha power's A Problem from Hell. Common Courage Press, 1995. 5. Noam Chomsky& Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, South End Press, 1979 6 Mitchell Dykstra, Rwanda: Tracing the Roots of Genocide, Peace Magazine, Nov/Dec, 1997, p.25. Read More