Oddthoughtsfromanoddmind: May 2014

Firstly, the term “armed intervention” needs to be clarified. The US Department of Defence defines it as: The deliberate act of a nation or a group of nations to introduce its military forces into the course of an existing controversy. (US Department of Defence, 2014). This distinguishes it from the other main type of interventions that are more passive in nature, such as censure motions, sanctions and boycotts. The other operative word is mitigate. It can mean prevent or to make less severe.

Armed intervention has been absolutely effective as a tool in mitigating future conflict between states and in particular between blocs of states where there is a sense of collective identity and interdependence. Where armed intervention into intra-state conflict possesses clear goals and competent leadership, it is an effective tool in mitigating potential future conflict. In the instances where the armed intervention has lacked clear goals or competent leadership or both, it has failed catastrophically.

Armed intervention as a tool in international relations is perfectly legal and is found in Chapter Seven, Articles 39 - 54 of the UN Charter (Tanca, 1993). The idea is that the threat of armed intervention by outside forces into an existing or potential conflict acts as a conflict deterrent. A potential aggressor does their sums and then decides that the ultimate cost of aggression outweighs the benefits of the planned aggression, thus a potential future conflict is mitigated.

Armed intervention as a conflict mitigation tool has its simplest and most effective expression in collective security agreements such as NATO and the now defunct Warsaw Pact. An attack on one member state was and is treated as if it is an attack on all member states. So instead of fighting just Poland or West Germany, you end up fighting their friends as well. The North Atlantic Treaty, which is the basis for NATO, expresses this quite clearly (NATO, 1949).

Armed intervention as a tool in mitigating potential conflict between states can be at the request of the UN or it can be a unilateral act. Whilst it is preferred that armed intervention happens at the behest of the UN, there are examples where armed intervention has happened without active UN participation. The 2003 US and its “Coalition of the Willing” invasion of Iraq being perhaps the best known example of where armed intervention to mitigate a potential future inter-state conflict took place outside of, and at times with the active opposition of, the UN.

The Russians are more frequent exponents of unilateral armed intervention to mitigate conflict and have intervened militarily into conflicts within states that lie along the southern border of modern Russia, with: 2014 Crimea, 2008 Georgia, and 1979 Afghanistan making a short list of recent Soviet/Russian unilateral armed interventions.

In this regard, armed intervention has absolutely mitigated future inter-state conflict. NATO as a collective security organisation has historically used and continues to use the threat armed intervention to deter aggression. Clearly because World War Three wasn’t fought out in Europe the deterrent was successful. This is the simplest and most successful form of armed intervention serving as an effective tool to mitigate conflict.

Furthermore, NATO as an organisation has proven so successful at mitigating conflict that a number of former Warsaw Pact member nations such as Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine have either joined it or have established close ties with NATO. These nations clearly view membership of or established diplomatic ties with NATO as mitigating future aggression from Russia (Government, 2014).

Armed intervention to mitigate conflict within a state is considerably more fraught. The definition of what is and isn’t a successful mitigation of conflict is harder to achieve. Is an armed intervention successful at mitigating future conflict if it simply reduces the amount of violence already occurring, and thus prevents an all out civil war from happening? Or does the definition of success only apply when conflict is brought to an end and thus all future conflict is mitigated by the armed intervention? Armed interventions have fulfilled both definitions of mitigating future intra-state conflict.

The use of armed intervention within states often involves a more complex sequence of events, in that ideally there has to be a request for intervention made by one or both of the parties involved in either an existing or potential conflict (Tanca, 1993). With a number of factors to be considered, amongst them humanitarian issues, the question of sovereignty and whether or not it is appropriate to intervene at all,the entire doctrine and ethics behind armedintervention as a tool for mitigating intra-state conflict very quickly becomes very complicatedas the quote below illustrates. (Coady, 2002)^{(Daniel Rice & John Dehn, 2007)}

“As each new conflict appears in the in-boxes of policymakers, the first question is whether this particular crisis warrants international engagement. The answer is a measure of "political will," a complex calculation of national security, political, economic and diplomatic interests; moral values; public support for action; and capacity for effective engagement - all filtered through policymakers' individual perspectives. (Steinburg, 2009).

However, the practice of armed intervention into intra-state conflict to mitigate future conflict is another creature entirely. As I said in my introduction: If the intervention is well planned, has competent commanders and has clear goals it is more often than not successful as a tool in mitigating conflict.

The British intervention in 2000 into the Sierra Leonean Civil War is almost a textbook example of how to intervene militarily to mitigate an intra-state conflict. The British gave their intervention the name Operation Palliser, which was a rescue of United Nations peacekeeping personnel after they were trapped by rebel forces. The UN had deployed peacekeeping forces UNAMSIL (United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone) which were less than competently lead and had manifestly failed to mitigate the conflict.

Once British forces under the command of Brigadier Sir David Richards were in Sierra Leone, the interventions goal changed into an event that brought about the ending of the Sierra Leonean Civil War (Evoe, 2008). A UN led armed intervention had failed as a tool to mitigate conflict, whereas a British armed intervention that was competently led, which was initially limited to rescuing UN peacekeepers contributed substantially to the ending of the conflict. The change in goals was not a factor because of the competency of the British armed interventions leadership.

The goals of the intervention morphed into conflict resolution once British forces were on the ground and engaged in combat with the Sierra Leonean rebels. The presence of British forces supporting the Sierra Leonean government and UNAMSIL tipped the balance in favour of the government enabling it to win the conflict. Post-intervention Sierra Leone whilst not entirely without conflict has been a significantly more stable nation than it was before. The potential for future intra-state conflict was effectively mitigated by the armed intervention of British forces.

Another example of armed intervention being extremely useful as a tool to mitigate future intra-state conflict is the Australian led and commanded intervention in 1999-2000 under UN auspices into East Timor (Della=Coma, 2012). The East Timorese had expressed a desire to form their own nation. After a process discussed by Della Coma, and coinciding with the fall of the Indonesian dictator Suharto, this was granted following a vote that over 80% of the population had supported.

The goal of the intervention was to ensure the transition of East Timor (Timor Leste) from being a province of Indonesia (Central Intelligence Agency, 2014) to a fully functioning sovereign state. To achieve this Australia intervened militarily at the request of the UN. The title of this intervention is: International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) it was led by General Peter Cosgrove.

There was at face value the potential in Timor Leste for an intra-state conflict occurring with pro-Indonesian militia and rogue elements of the Indonesian military opposing independence. The goal of the intervention was to prevent an intra-state conflict from occurring and to assist the Timorese to achieve their goal of self- determination. In this regard, INTERFET has been an unambiguous success. Since formal independence from Indonesia in 2002, Timor Leste has become a member of the UN and enjoyed relative peace and stability.

There are times where an armed intervention has simply failed. Invariably, failure has occurred because the intervention had unclear goals and poor leadership. In Rwanda the poor leadership was shown to extend all the way to the UN General Secretary. The UN had troops on the ground when the Rwandan Genocide occurred in 1994. They had been there to help implement a peace agreement between the Rwandan government and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front. The UN apparently “knew something was up”. With the genocide in progress and the ability to intervene militarily to mitigate if not halt the genocide, a vote was taken by the UN to do nothing. At least 10 Belgian peacekeepers died trying and failing to protect Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana (Harsch, 2004).

A UN investigation into the genocide was scathing in its findings: "The responsibility for the failings of the United Nations to prevent and stop the genocide in Rwanda lies with a number of actors, in particular the Secretary-General(Kofi Annan), the [UN] Secretariat, the Security Council, UNAMIR and the broader membership of the United Nations" (Harsch, 2004).

There is the saying: Failure is an orphan. In the case of the failure of the Rwandan intervention to achieve conflict mitigation, failure wasn’t an orphan at all. In fact if anything, it seems to have had collective parenting in terms of those who had helped create the failure which resulted in genocide.

There is an armed intervention that, to me, doesn’t really fit into either category as a success or a failure and in fact seems to be both, depending on your politics. The US 2003 invasion of Iraq as an armed intervention had the stated aim of destroying Iraqi capacity to wage war on its neighbours e.g. repeat the invasions of Kuwait and or Iran and thus mitigate future inter-state conflict. In this regard the intervention has been wildly effective as a tool to mitigate future conflict in that Iraq in 2014 is not even remotely a military threat to its neighbours.

The quagmire opens when we consider events post-intervention when, depending on your parameters, intra-state conflict has broken out and the armed intervention instead of mitigating the conflict, has caused it.

Having said this, and to give background to the intervention, we must remember that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had an undeniable history of chemical weapons use both in intra-state conflict against the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs, and in inter-state conflict against Iran. Iraq was also known to have been in possession of Scud tactical ballistic missiles, which it had used on Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, and on Israel and Saudi Arabia during the successful intervention by the US and its allies in a UN sanctioned armed intervention to remove it from Kuwait some ten years earlier. These weapons are known as Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD’s).

The official definition of a WMD is: Chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons capable of a high order of destruction or causing mass casualties and exclude the means of transporting or propelling the weapon where such means is a separable and divisible part from the weapon (US Department of Defence, 2014) (United Nations, 2003).

So Iraq had “form” as an international problem; a rogue state. President George W. Bush had included Iraq in his “Axis of Evil”, alongside Iran and North Korea as states supporting terrorism and seeking to proliferate the possession and use of WMD’s. The US and its allies, Britain and Australia, claimed to have evidence that Iraq was in possession of WMD’s (Sweiringa, 2013) and this was in breach of UN Resolution 1441 (United Nations, 2002). The case for an armed intervention to mitigate future conflict between Iraq and her neighbours seemed quite simple. And it is undeniable that the armed intervention has been an effective tool in mitigating future inter-state conflict. Iraq is unlikely in the extreme to invade anyone for quite a long time.

The problems and arguably failure began once Saddam and his regime were removed. The Iraqi WMD’s that were the justification for the armed intervention were never found. Mistakes were made in terms of troop strength, and the goals of the intervention changed once it emerged that Iraq was depauperate in terms of WMD’s (Thompson, 2011). Iraq always admitted to having had WMD’s prior to the Kuwaiti invasion, but denied their possession in 2003 (Thompson, 2012).

With no WMD’s having been found in Iraq post intervention, the goals changed to “bringing democracy” to the Iraqi people, whether they wanted or even needed it. (Robert H. Reid and Rebecca Santana, 2011). Echoes of the Vietnam War “In order to save the village we had to destroy it”. In order to protect Iraq from a despot the US and its allies had to destroy it as a functioning state.

The US and its allies very quickly found themselves participants in an intra-state conflict. Not only were they participants in an intra-state conflict that the armed intervention was clearly not mitigating, there was the very real fact that in removing the regime of Saddam Hussein, the armed intervention had actually caused the intra-state conflict in the first place. Causing a conflict is clearly a failure to mitigate it.

Whether the armed intervention to mitigate the Iraqi potential for conflict in any shape or form is successful, I think depends on where you draw the line. Iraq has no offensive capacity. I think that given the stated objective of the armed intervention was to mitigate Iraqi offensive potential for inter-state conflict, then by these parameters, the armed intervention has been a success. However, it does have ongoing and unmitigated intra-state conflict. Sectarian and ethnic conflicts that the Hussein regime had succeeded in mitigating are now being resolved on the battlefield of intra-state conflict.

If we take a standpoint of overall collective effectiveness, armed intervention when it is competently led and has clear goals is an effective tool for mitigating future conflict in both inter and intra-state conflicts. Had NATO and its threat of armed intervention on behalf of member states not been an effective response to potential conflict originating in the Soviet dominated Warsaw Pact, then arguably World War Three would have occurred. Even unilateral armed interventions such as the US and its Coalition of the Willing armed intervention into Iraq in order to permanently mitigate Iraqi offensive potential, work.

We have seen armed intervention mitigate potential future conflict in intra-state conflicts in places as diverse as Sierra Leone and Timor Leste. Whilst the conflicts and the armed interventions were very different in nature, they worked for the identical reasons that I have repeated throughout this essay: competent leadership and clarity of goals. With Rwanda as an example of an armed intervention failing, both of these essential qualities were absent.

So to answer the question: Can armed intervention serve as an effective tool of mitigating future conflict either between states or within states? Armed intervention can and does serve as an effective tool of mitigating future conflict either between states or within states.

References

http://mfa.gov.ua/en/about-ukraine/euroatlantic-cooperation/ukraine-nato Accessed May 13 2014

http://nation.time.com/2012/09/06/iraq-how-the-cia-says-it-blew-it-on-saddams-wmd/ Accessed May 15 2014

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2011/12/17/iraq_a_war_of_muddled_goals_painful_sacrifice/ Accessed May 16 2014

http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/publication-type/commentary/stopping-mass-atrocities-responsibility-to-protect-in-action.aspx Accessed May 15 2014

http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south-east-asia/op-eds/della-giacoma-timor-leste-everybody-needs-good-neighbours.aspx Accessed May 12 2014

http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/dod_dictionary/?zoom_query=intervention&zoom_sort=0&zoom_per_page=10&zoom_and=1 Accessed May 15 2014

http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/dod_dictionary/data/w/7970.html Accessed May 9 2014

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2011/12/15/the-biggest-mistake-in-american-military-history/ Accessed May 20 2014

http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_59378.htm?selectedLocale=en Accessed April 24 2014

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/howard-ignored-official-advice-on-iraqs-weapons-and-chose-war-20130411-2hogn.html Accessed May 15 2014

http://www.un.org/depts/unmovic/new/documents/cluster_document.pdf Accessed May 16 2014