Somalia And US Essays - Military Operations Other Than War, Peace

Somalia And US The desire for an organization that would help the international community"avoid future conflicts" and the recognized need for a global body that would "promote international economic and social cooperation" led the powerful states emerging from the rubble of WWII to develop the United Nations. The newly formed United Nations "represented an expression of hope for the possibilities of a new global security arrangement and for fostering the social and economic conditions necessary for peace to prevail" (Mingst and Karns 2). The need for mutual cooperation amongst the states following the second of the global wars was vital to the reconstruction of war-torn Europe, and for the development of a new world order. This attempt at cooperation was not the first of its kind. According to Mingst and Karns, "The UN's Charter built on lessons learned from the failed League of Nations created at the end of World War I and earlier experiments with international unions, conference diplomacy, and dispute settlements mechanisms" (2). Despite this "experience" in mutual cooperation, the founding states still faced many problems in the security arena due to the advent of the Cold War. In order to effectively deal with security issues facing the UN, the Security Council turned to "peace- Mulligan 2 keeping" as an alternative to armed aggression. According to the United Nations Department of Public Information, "Peacekeeping was pioneered and developed by the United Nations as one of the means for maintaining international peace and security" (1998), and the UN deals with particular problems through "the prevention, containment, and moderation of hostilities between or within states through the use of multinational forces of soldiers, police, and civilians" (Mingst and Karns 3). This was a very different approach to quelling conflicts that had never before been practiced. Peacekeeping was "a creative response to the breakdown of great-power unity and the spread of East-West tensions to regional conflicts" (Mingst and Karns 3). Before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate, John R. Bolton, Senior Vice President of the American Enterprise Institute, stated further reasoning for the evolution of peacekeeping. He notes: ?Traditional' U.N. peacekeeping evolved when it became clear that the broad intentions of the Framers of the U.N. Charter were rendered largely meaningless by the onset of the Cold War. U.N. involvement in international crises, far from being the central dispute-resolution mechanism envisioned by the Framers in Chapters VI and VII, became episodic and incidental to the main global confrontation between East and West. Since "Cold War tensions have subsided, peace has been threatened by resurgent ethnic and nationalist conflicts in Mulligan 3 many regions. As a result, U.N. peacekeeping operations have grown rapidly in number and complexity in recent years. While 13 operations were established in the first forty years of U.N. peacekeeping, 28 new operations have been launched since 1988" (UNDPI 1998). The following map shows the many regions of the world in which the United Nations has become involved in a peacekeeping mission: Mulligan 4 Due in part because of the extraordinarily limited dimensions within which U.N. peacekeeping was feasible, a clear set of principles evolved to describe the elements necessary for successful U.N. operations. These rules would become the standard from which future U.N. peace-keeping missions would be drawn. The first criterion for a U.N. peacekeeping mission was consent. According to Bolton, "All of the relevant parties to a dispute had to agree to the participation of U.N. peacekeepers in monitoring, observing or policing a truce, cease fire, or disengagement of combatants" (2000). This agreement must not only grant the U.N. the right to intervene in the state's internal affairs, but also detail the "scope of its mission and the operational requirements for carrying out that mission" (Bolton 2000). A nation-state, at any time, could withdraw its consent at which point the U.N. forces would withdraw. One example of revoking consent occurred in "May, 1967, when Egypt insisted on the withdrawal of the U.N. Expeditionary Force (established after the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956) from its territory along the border with Israel" (Bolton 2000). U.N. forces were forced to leave, and as a result, the Six Day War followed. Mulligan 5 A second requirement was the notion that the U.N. forces would not take sides in the conflict. Bolton states that ...U.N. peacekeepers were [to be] neutral [amongst] the parties to the conflict, not favoring one or another of them. It was understood to be elemental that the United Nations could not ?take sides' in a conflict without itself becoming involved in the very situation it was trying to