Can anyone name a successful humanitarian military intervention by a western power in the last 50 years?

@WoodyAq 1) Maybe
2) The against ISIS thing is a heavy caveat. ISIS wouldn't even exist without the original intervention and the country is still an absolute mess.
3) and 4) I'm less familiar with and will look them up.

Thanks for the reply.

@Burnley123 The original intervention in Iraq wasn't primarily humanitarian.

One of the problems with judging humanitarian intervention is: what is the counterfactual?

E.g. was Libya a successful case or not? Because things haven't been that great since the West intervened. But would they have been better if Qaddafi had been allowed to do what Assad has been allowed to do in Syria?

Also, look at Britain's intervention in Sierra Leone and the UN in East Timor.

@WoodyAq I did define terms quite clearly tbf. Libya and Iraq were disasters and I don't think we can say that they are not a lot worse than they would have been. Even now, Libya especially is in total chaos and the choice between living there or under a dictator is a grim lesser evil question but one with an obvious answer.

Should they be allowed to do that? Who is allowing, who should decide and who is responsible if greater atrocities happen after? This isn't bout condoning, say Asad, it's about criticising a would be solution which makes it worse.

@Burnley123 Qaddafi had lost control in Libya, just like Assad lost control in Syria. Reasserting his authority would have been really bloody. Is that better than what Libya has now? I'm not sure. It wouldn't be for many of his victims.

It is hard to imagine a worse outcome for Syria than the current one, in which the West has tried to stay out. I would say we are as much on the hook for what we didn't do in Syria as we are for what we did do in Libya.

And think of what we didn't do in Rwanda. Feel good about that outcome?

@WoodyAq [quote]E.g. was Libya a successful case or not? Because things haven't been that great since the West intervened. But would they have been better if Qaddafi had been allowed to do what Assad has been allowed to do in Syria?[/quote]Qaddafi didn't actually order anything especially heinous such as bombing crowds of protestors, etc, it seems that for the most part we acted on a lie - as in Iraq, taking words of dissidents with an axe to grind as truth. It's convenient for us to not do a lot of due diligence in these matters, when information aligns with our strategic imperatives.

For that matter, Assad was curiously light-touch in the beginning as well. We've seen what happens when armed forces put down protests with prejudice, and the sort of casualties that result. Incidents like Tiananmen Square, etc come to mind. Nothing of the sort happened in Syria - and as heartless as it is, had he'd gone that way, it would have nipped all of this in the bud.

@WoodyAq The Rwanda thing is a bit of a cheap shot and no, of course I don't. UN intervention might have prevented that genocide.

The West has not stayed out of Syria and had been involved for years with bombing and special ops. Before that is was arming rebels against Asad and many, if not most, of those weapons ended up with ISIS.

Its also hard to imagine a worse outcome than Libya is right now. What was the objective there and how has it been achieved?

@Burnley123 The current western involvement in Syria is out of self-interest, not humanitarian. I'm saying a humanitarian mission to preserve Syrian lives could have made things better, and not much worse.

Qaddafi didn't bomb his people (much) because we grounded his planes. What has been achieved is that he wasn't permitted to massacre his way back into control of swaths of the country he had lost.

But consider: Libya is what happens when we try to protect local populations, Rwanda and Syria are what happen when we don't.

I don't know if Libya is better or worse than it would have been. It is difficult to imagine a worse case for Syria and Rwanda than what happened.

@Burnley123 BTW, no, the weapons that the West provided to the Syrian rebels didn't end up with ISIS, although they did manage to steal a considerable amount from the Iraqi army. But that's a different story.

If you are confusing ISIS with the al-Qaeda affiliated portion of the Syrian rebels, the latter got their arms from the Gulf states, and from battlefield victories.

The non-ISIS Islamic radicals got as strong as they did because we didn't give enough support to the moderates fighting Assad.

@WoodyAq I agree Syria is out of self interest but then all wars are sold for humanitarian purposes. The current thing with Trump here and now included.

My information on ISIS getting weapons is correct and ISIS came out of Al qaeda. Yes, western a Saudi Arabia has backed them heavily also and they are a western ally.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/isis-syria-assad-iraq-benghazi/

The principle objective at the time was beating the Russian backed Asad.

@Burnley123 Selling self-interest as humanitarian is really a western thing. Nominal ally or not, the Saudis have their own objectives which they are cynical enough as is.

Your information on how ISIS built its arsenal is not correct. It was a combination of free market purchase and military victory, primarily over Iraqi and Syrian government forces. ISIS did have its genesis with al-Qaeda, but is a competitor, not an ally.

The Saudi objective was beating the [u]Iranian-backed[/u] Assad. Our objective should have been to force negotiations between the Syrian regime and the rebels, preventing the massacre that has ensued. Displacing the Russians in Syria has no obvious benefit to us.

If only the Russians hadn't fucked things up so bad ...

@WoodyAq
- Iraq 1991 (protecting the Kurds)

Wouldn't exactly call that 'successful' since it was the Bush administration that screwed up and put the Kurds in that horrible position to begin with after General Schwarzkopf gave permission to the Iraqis to use their military helicopters during the cease-fire talks.

@beckyromero That's true. I won't say the entire endeavor was successful. But whole endeavor wasn't a humanitarian mission. It was actually a mission to uphold international law.

However, given the chaos created by the first mission, the second mission was humanitarian and successful in its own right.

@WoodyAq [quote]However, given the chaos created by the first mission, the second mission was humanitarian and successful in its own right.[/quote]

Successful in the same way of rendering aid to the bicyclist you just ran over.

Politicians shouldn't be given credit for responding to a disaster of their own making.

@beckyromero The disaster was Iraq invading Kuwait. Saddam made that. The world intervened to safeguard international law.

The world community (not just the Americans) were naive in dealing with Saddam in the aftermath.

The Americans intervened to correct the world's mistake for humanitarian reasons.

Not the course I would have chosen ... but I didn't make the rules.