Word: interventionism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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A human rights activist and a scholar clashed yesterday in a discussion at the Law School on humanitarian intervention in Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia.
Before turning to intervention, "we have to ensure that other possibilities are exhausted," Alston said. "The current mania of interventions doesn't do that."
"Where sovereignty is dissolved sufficiently, it devolves on the international community," Anderson said of Somalia. He said the use of starvation as a weapon and the dissolution of civil society justify intervention in that nation.
Alston said each of the three instances of intervention could be presented in a "very cynical light" to which he was partly sympathetic.
This is not to say that the situations in Bosnia and Vietnam are identical. Vietnam was a civil war. The conflict in Bosnia is not a civil war; it is genocide. In Bosnia, the horrendous policies of "ethnic cleansing" are being used to achieve political aims. While intervention in Vietnam...