Terry Lynn Karl is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University.
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The United Nations and the United States continue to intervene in wars without forthrightly taking sides. Impartiality may sound sensible enough, but it has hamstrung would-be peacekeepers and worsened conflicts in Bosnia, Somalia, and, to some degree, Haiti. War is about who rules. If military intervention occurs, outsiders should ensure someone is in charge at the end of the day. Interventions that avoid the root issue and aim to be evenhanded become compromises that kill. They prevent the very peace they seek to create.
Its diplomatic debacles in the past few years demonstrate one thing: the United Nations cannot mediate. It has too many mouths to speak with one voice, lacks the resources needed for political leverage, and diminishes the credibility of its own promises by its incoherence. Those problems are ingrained in the nature of international organizations, and no amount of revamping the United Nations will correct them. Instead, the United Nations should encourage self-interested states to mediate those conflicts they have the best chances of resolving. That is the best way to salvage the organization's steadily diminishing prestige.
The intervention in Somalia was not an abject failure; an estimated 100,000 lives were saved. But its mismanagement should be an object lesson for peacekeepers in Bosnia and on other such missions. No large intervention, military or humanitarian, can remain neutral or assuredly brief in a strife-torn failed state. Nation-building, the rebuilding of a state's basic civil institutions, is required in fashioning a self-sustaining body politic out of anarchy. In the future, the United States, the United Nations, and other intervenors should be able to declare a state "bankrupt" and go in to restore civic order and foster reconciliation.
