Richard Fontaine
90 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
limited the Áow o foreign Äghters, and liberated cities from depravity.
Then there are other, harder-to-measure eects o U.S. intervention,
such as enforcing norms against ethnic cleansing and deterring coun-
tries from oering terrorists sanctuary or engaging in wars o aggres-
sion. To get an accurate picture o intervention’s mixed track record,
one cannot cherry-pick the disastrous cases or the successful ones.
The third argument against intervention points to the slippery
slope involved in such eorts: start a military campaign, and the
United States will never get out. After the 1995 Dayton peace accords
formally ended the ethnic conÁict in Bosnia, U.S. troops stayed in the
area for ten years, and £¬¡¢ retains a presence in Kosovo to this day.
The United States seems to be stuck in Afghanistan, too, because
without a peace deal with the Taliban, the U.S.-backed government
could fall. In Iraq, Obama removed all U.S. troops, only to send them
back in when established a vast presence there. Check in to a
military intervention, and it often seems like you can never leave.
Once deployed, American troops often do stay a long time. But stay-
ing is not the same as Äghting, and it is wrong to think o troops who
are largely advising local forces the same way as one thinks about those
who are actively engaged in combat. There is a stark dierence between
what it meant to have U.S. forces in Iraq during the peak o the war and
what it means to have U.S. troops there now to train Iraqi forces—just
as there is a massive gul between deploying troops to Afghanistan dur-
ing the troop surge there and keeping a residual presence to strengthen
the government and its security forces. Some American interests are
worth the price o continued military deployments, and the aim should
be to diminish those costs in blood and treasure as the conditions stabi-
lize. Even once they do, there may remain a case for an enduring role,
particularly when the U.S. troop presence is the only thing maintaining
the domestic political equilibrium, as was the case in Iraq before the
2011 withdrawal and as is true in Afghanistan today.
The fourth argument can be boiled down to the plea, “Why us?”
Why must the United States always run to the sound o the guns,
especially when other countries are capable o taking on such burdens
and may have more skin in the game? Europe is geographically closer
to Libya and Syria, at far greater risk from terrorism and refugee
Áows, and possesses capable military forces o its own. Middle East-
ern allies have their own resources, too. The American role might not
be so indispensable after all.