decision makers are not always providing a lot of guidance to militaries on these questions. We
as civilians are supposed to be controlling our militaries, which means providing guidance, but
we have not thought through this problem politically or ethically. We want militaries to “enforce
peace” but at the same time we do not want them to mess up possibilities for a political
settlement by making anyone mad. Situations such as the reluctance of IFOR troops to arrest
war criminals in Bosnia, even though they intervened precisely to stop this kind of criminal
behavior, are one logical outcome of this. Such action is the product of this underlying tension
between the need for political settlement and the “enforcement” of law and justice.
A second consequence for militaries of having settlement, rather than victory, as a goal is
that it makes it difficult or impossible to enter these operations with a clear “exit strategy”
already mapped out. Americans, perhaps because they have been scarred by the Vietnam
experience, have been particularly fearful of military “quagmires” and have put pressure on those
proposing humanitarian interventions to demonstrate that US forces can get in and get out again
in a tidy and timely fashion. Increasingly, it appears politically impossible to put US troops into
a humanitarian crisis for assistance purposes without a clear plan for getting them out again. The
problem is that, if the goal is settlement and reconciliation among the local belligerents, US
commanders do not control that outcome; other people do. If you do not control achievement of
the goal (settlement), it is difficult to plan for an exit after achieving it since you cannot know
how long settlement will take or the terms on which it will be achieved. Often, the terms of
settlement involve prolonged stays by intervening troops to guarantee the agreement and provide
a secure environment in which reconciliation and rebuilding processes can begin. The more of
these interventions we do, the more we are learning that the political requirements within
intervening states for deploying troops in these crises (quick in, quick out, home by Christmas)
Revised June 2006
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Convention