There are several scenarios in which governments decide to invade another country, with ‘boots on the ground’, in order to protect groups of people:
· A government might try to protect its own citizens by making a pre-emptive invasion of another country, to neutralise a threat of attack by regime change. The most dramatic recent example, according to one interpretation of that action, was the decision by America and others to invade Iraq in 2003 – as described in the next chapter.
· Governments have tried to protect their citizens by attacking terrorist bases in other countries to neutralise a threat and to deter further aggression. For example, Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006 in what was described by the Economist as A surge of anger, in response to provocation by Hezbollah.
· America’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was also intended as an attack against terrorist bases, operated by the Taliban, but it transitioned into a protracted and ultimately futile attempt to impose a regime-change, as described earlier (6.7.7.5).
· Some armed interventions are intended to prop up vulnerable ‘friendly’ governments. America has intervened in several such cases: Noam Chomsky, in his 1987 book The Chomsky Reader, lists Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, East Timor, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala as countries in which America had used military force since World War Two.
· A country might intervene in the affairs of another in order to protect a group of vulnerable people. That was the quoted reason why, as reported by the BBC, Russian tanks enter South Ossetia (which is a province of Georgia) in 2008.
In all these examples, the invader’s population is keenly aware of the action. They see it as a 'foreign war', which might be popular for a while if the cause is seen as just, so the politicians who make the decision to invade enjoy a temporary political legitimacy (6.3.6) – but such wars become increasingly unpopular if they drag on.
None of the above interventions was sanctioned by the UN, calling into question their legitimacy and undermining the rule of international law. They were all examples of realpolitik (6.7.7.4).
(This is an archived page: a later version than the one published in Patterns of Power Edition 3a. The latest versions are at book contents).