The Perils of Peacekeeping for the US: Relearning Lessons from Beirut for Bosnia

Abstract

The US has used military force abroad on a number of occasions since the end of the Second World War. While many of these interventions have been the direct application of military force into a conflict which it wished to end or keep from spreading (Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Kuwait), they have also been for peacekeeping operations. These have increased more recently with the end of the Cold War (Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq and Bosnia). Without getting into an extended definitional debate about this often confusing term, suffice it to say the purpose of peacekeeping is the deployment of military forces to promote or preserve peace or some semblance of it. Peacekeeping is not the employment of military force to impose an outcome achieved through force of arms. The first deployment of US ground forces in a peacekeeping operation, and the most costly one in American lives lost, occurred in Lebanon.KeywordsMiddle EastWishful ThinkingMilitary ForceIndirect AggressionSecurity Council ResolutionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.