Martin Woollacott (Guardian Utd): The failure of intervention

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From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Friday January 16

The failure of intervention demands a new modesty
The west has overestimated its ability as an agency of change
By Martin Woollacott

There is a dispiriting resemblance between recent news about former Yugoslavia and news about Iraq, the two places which bracket the modern era of intervention. The story began properly more than a decade ago when the halting process of persuasion, interference and coercion began which eventually brought a sort of peace to the ex-Yugoslav states. It continued, through some terrible failures and some small successes in Africa and south-east Asia, to culminate in the American descents on Afghanistan and Iraq. What was called humanitarian intervention merged into the campaign against terrorism and then into an assault on a so-called rogue state. Very different interventions, certainly, but some important similarities areevident in the outcomes.
They suggest we should be thinking as much about the sheer difficulty of intervention as about the justification for particular interventions. The Hutton inquiry, straddling these two questions, is only the latest indication that western countries have exaggerated the reliability of the instruments at their disposal. Ineffective diplomacy, overvalued voluntary agencies, armed forces that promise more than they can deliver, and intelligence establishments that deliver more than they should, are all parts of the picture. The weakness of institutions which claim, or are assigned, more competence than they actually possess looms as large as the decisions, right or wrong, of elected governments.
Americans and Iraqis are now arguing over what form elections should take, lurching between the twin dangers of an outcome unacceptable to the majority community and one unacceptable to anybody else. Serbians, meanwhile, voted in large numbers for the extreme nationalist Radical party. The success of the Radicals follows the victory of the nationalist HDZ, or Croatian Democratic Union, in Croatia's December elections, and the earlier success of nationalist parties in Bosnian elections; an obdurate communalism, after all these years of intervention, especially in Serbia.

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1. Nice piece. nt