Making War to Keep Peace Read Free

perhaps naïve, have set the course for U.S. foreign policy and, inadvertently, guided us into some of the difficult challenges we face today.
    When President George H. W. Bush spoke eloquently of a “new world order,” he sought to demonstrate how collective security could produce peace. Toward the end of the Gulf War, he explained why he believed it had become realistic to think of such a new order and what it might look like. Its principal characteristic would be a long period of peace. Conflicts would be few, and they would be managed by peacekeepers operating on the basis of collective security and multinational effort.
    No one expected that the end of the cold war would be a preface to something so far from this century-long dream. Americans expected global peace, but what did follow the fall of the Berlin Wall were multiple, small wars closely resembling the wars of the past, with the United States being drawn into military conflicts, sometimes unilaterally and other times in tandem with the United Nations, as it pursued its ends of peace again and again. This book reviews the process by which the U.S. government found itself embroiled in one conflict after another, confronting escalating costs in economic and human terms while examining our critical mistakes, our successes, and how they directly affect our future and our accountability to the world community.
    Twelve years after the Wall tumbled down, on September 11, 2001, a threat long simmering in the margins of global events violently thrust its fury on America’s soil and into the forefront of foreign policy. Again Americans were shaken out of the false sense that war as foreign policy had been retired because all strongmen had been defeated. Now we were confronted by yet another coercive ideology wearing yet another face. Today, more than ever, understanding the lessons learned and not learned from the past is crucial if we are to chart a wise foreign policy course for the future of our nation.
    As President George W. Bush has said, “Freedom is once again assaulted by enemies determined to roll back generations of democratic progress. Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. 3 This global threat confronting us today tests and weakens the fragile foundation of the idyllic and hopeful dream that peace can be kept without making war.”

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IRAQ INVADES KUWAIT
    On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait shattered the peace and optimism of the summer. This was the first clear act of international aggression after the dramatic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had ended the cold war. The United States, the Gulf States, and their allies were not ready for the invasion. To some Americans, it recalled Hitler’s swift moves across Europe at the start of World War II and the consequences of appeasing an aggressor. To others, it recalled the Soviet Union’s surprise invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the long, terrible war that followed.
    The story of how President George H.W. Bush and the United States responded to this foreign policy challenge is a chronicle of the birth of the new world order. It raises the fundamental questions of how the United States decides what is in its national interest, when it should use military force, the nature of our relationship with the United Nations and the world, and how long our responsibilities to a nation or people persist after military intervention. The crisis also offers an object lesson on the danger of waiting for international consensus when time is of the essence.
    President Bush’s initial response resembled that of Harry Truman when North Korean forces attacked South Korea in 1950. “By God,” Truman said, “I’m going to let them have it!” Later, more introspectively, Truman wrote: “If the Communists were permitted to force their wayinto the Republic of Korea without opposition