Word: humanitarianism
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...just Germany, however, where the political will to fight is lacking. Spain, which has some 750 troops in Afghanistan, is not expected to up that contribution substantially any time soon. "[The Spanish] supported Afghanistan when they understood the mission as humanitarian," Robert Matthews, a researcher at Madrid's Foundation for International Relations and Foreign Dialogue, explains. "But as the operation has become more military in nature, support has dropped." Even in France, which has superb armed forces held in high regard by the public, and which is on the verge of cementing its "reintegration" into NATO's command structure, there...
...strategy is most effective - and that isn't always going into battle," says the Bundestag's Polenz. "The problem," says the ISAF source in Afghanistan, "is that there are those who did not sign up for this. They signed up for something else; for a nation-building, peacekeeping and humanitarian mission. So it's no good saying you have to go down south and fight. They just aren't going to do it. They can't. Their governments would fall...
...possible in cases like Darfur is more conventional peacekeeping based on an agreement between the parties, but trying to do peacekeeping plus protection plus justice is too demanding for the system to bear and it ends up succeeding at none of its goals." Others contend that in cases of humanitarian crisis, the moral imperative to intervene remains, but acknowledge Darfur has exposed shameful limits to international will, and unity, in the service of those concerns. "It's incredibly depressing," says David Mozersky, Horn of Africa director for the International Crisis Group. "The international system has failed...
...emergencies. Bassam al-Wahedi, 26, a tall, soft-spoken journalist, was one of them. He had gone blind in one eye because of a retinal illness, and surgery at a Jerusalem hospital was his only hope of regaining sight in that eye. Since Gaza is denied all but basic humanitarian needs under an international boycott of Hamas, many complicated surgeries are no longer done there...
This gulf between moralism and militarism narrowed in the 1980s and '90s. Under Ronald Reagan, conservatives grew more optimistic about exporting American values as they saw democracy spread in the Third World. And under Bill Clinton, liberals became more warlike, backing humanitarian interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo...