Word: vitalness
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Perry is struggling to come up with workable new guidelines. He has been thinking about separating the country's interests abroad into three categories: vital, important and humanitarian. This would roughly match the three main types of intervention the U.S. ponders most often: peacemaking, in which warring parties must be forced to stop fighting; peacekeeping, where the parties have accepted a peace agreement; and emergency humanitarian aid, often in warlike conditions. All of them are potentially bloody. "Our level of military involvement must reflect our stakes," says Perry. The Gulf War fell into the first category, and Bosnia the second...
...this straight: Bosnia is not a vital interest; it's an "important" interest. NATO is a vital interest. NATO is mixed up in Bosnia, so to defend our vital interest in NATO we have to fight in Bosnia. By this logic, it would make no difference whether Bosnia were an "important" interest or a "somewhat important" or an "utterly trivial" interest; we'd still have to send troops there because of our desire to preserve NATO. Bacon's explanation skips over the really hard question raised by Perry's comment: Is the defense of merely "important" interests worth the lives...
...interests abroad. Even the prudent George Bush, who ordered U.S. troops to Somalia in the first place, was rethinking the old guidelines just before he left office. He suggested that "military force might be the best way to protect an interest that qualifies as important but less than vital." Force is a key adjunct to diplomacy, he argued, and "real leadership requires a willingness to use military force." Richard Haas, the former White House aide who wrote that speech, explains, "It was an attempt to come up with a slightly more flexible rationale for using force. It was also...
...approaches to intervention, suggesting that the world might have a right to take action against a government that was committing atrocities or genocide against its own people. But experiments in collective security so far have simply proved the old rule: the U.S. will act when it sees that its vital interests are at stake--as in the gulf--but feels no compulsion to send in the Marines without a very good reason. The public demanded a pullout from Somalia but said nothing about abandoning overflights in Iraq when two U.S. helicopters were mistakenly shot down in April...
...Americans rejected intervention in Somalia because their vital interests were not at stake, will they accept intervention in Bosnia? One way to persuade them to go along with the deployment, of course, is to argue that America's vital interests are at stake in Bosnia. The Administration has tried that approach, with limited success. Clinton has another alternative, which is to acknowledge that the fate of Bosnia is not crucial to the national security of the U.S., but add that we still have an interest in peace and stability there, and that our interest merits the loss of some troops...