The second criteria in contrast has not been met in these three cases. In none of these interventions has the United States left the parties to their own devices. In the Balkans, six years after peacekeepers went into Bosnia with the promise from the President that they would only be there for a year and a promise from congress that the funds would be cut off if they were not, the majority of the troops remain. The reason is not some change of heart on the part of Western leaders; rather it is the judgment of all that if the peacekeepers left, there is no reason to think that the fighting would not resume. Little has been done to solve the underlying issues, and politics still functions along almost exclusively ethnic lines. In Kosovo, the troops remain in order to prevent a descent back into conflict after refugees from both ethnic groups begin to return home. Questions about Kosovo’s future remain unanswered. Furthermore, the peacekeepers stand ready to enter Macedonia in the event that the fighting there escalates. There is no reason to believe that the peacekeepers will leave the Balkans anytime soon, and therefore the interventions can not be considered successful even though they ended the fighting. For just war theory, we have to further have to ask whether this failure was foreseeable. To Langan and others, the answer is clearly yes, given the history of the Balkans and the nature of the conflict. Any optimism about a lasting peace was unrealistic. These interventions, therefore, do not meet the criteria for going to war. The Gulf War provides another variation of a failure to leave. This is less obviously the case in the Gulf than in the Balkans, but the maintenance of the no-fly zones and the continuing sanctions on Iraq constitute a continuing involvement that precludes judging the Gulf War a success. Furthermore, the effects of the sanctions and the new popularity of sanctions since the end of the Cold War make Iraq a particularly interesting case. Sanctions are a government sponsored application of force, and as such they should be subject to the same moral requirements as war. The purpose of sanctions, after all, is to do harm. Broad sanctions are in a sense more unjust than conventional wars have been in that they specifically target noncombatants. Unless sanctions are designed with very specific anti-military provisions, the civilian population bears the brunt of the force. The WHO, which calls for the banning of sanctions, estimates that 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five have died as a result of the sanctions. Even beyond the discrimination problems of sanctions, there is a question of right intention when sanctions are left on so long. In the Iraqi case, they were originally adopted by the Security Council to force Iraq out of Kuwait. After the Gulf War, however, they were retained at the insistence of the United States who wanted them to remain in place until after Saddam Hussein was deposed. When this did not happen quickly, they were justified on the basis of nonproliferation. Right intention requires that governments undertake violent action only in the pursuit of peace and further that the goals must be clear and unambiguous. Surely keeping them in place simply until something better comes along to deal with Iraq is morally unacceptable, especially since there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s rule has been weakened by them. None of these interventions, then, qualify as successes as I have defined it. Just war theory is not kind in general to the notion of limited war. There is a sense that if the goal is limited, the cause may not be just. This problem is exacerbated by the nature of American dominance, which allows it to accomplish much in a military success without accomplishing anything politically. What Elliott Abrams cynically calls the “Lesson of Kosovo” could be called the “Lesson of the 1990s”: “Humanitarian intervention is pretty cheap, mora

Some topics in this essay:
St Thomas, Se Soldiers, Gulf War, Kenneth Waltz, Macro- Proportionality, Revolution Whatever, Jenny Teichman's, Moreover Christian, Eliot Engel, International Covenants, war theory, jus ad, jus ad bellum, ad bellum, jus bello, gulf war, human rights, resorting war, post bellum, jus post, resort war, jus post bellum, bellum concerns justice, absurd condemn mission, war st thomas,