MILITARY INTERVENTION IN MIDDLE EAST

Military Intervention in Middle East

Military Intervention in Middle East

Introduction

This paper highlights military intervention on a political front in two of the selected Middle Eastern countries. Concept that addresses the characteristics, causes, and purposes of the act of interfering with another state's attitudes, policies, and behavior. Political or military intervention into another state's affairs, regardless of the motivation, is a highly volatile undertaking whose merits have long been debated by philosophers and politicians (Zucchino, 2006).

Intervention Defined

To be considered interventionism, an act needs to be coercive in nature. In other words, an interventionist act is, by definition, a threatening act that is not welcomed by the target of one's intervention. Aggressiveness is also central to the application of interventionism in foreign affairs: an interventionist action always operates under the threat of violence (Thorpe, 2006). However, not all aggressive acts on the part of a government are interventionist. Defensive warfare within one's legal jurisdiction is not interventionist in nature, even if it involves employing violence to alter someone else's behavior (Shuckborough, 2007). One needs to both step outside one's boundaries and operate under the threat of force in order to be an agent of interventionism (Noorani, 2005).

On the international level, a state can engage in a variety of interventionist activities, but the kind of intervention that takes the spotlight most often is military intervention. In turn, military interventions can take many forms depending on their stated goals. A state may invade another country to overthrow a bad regime, although what constitutes a bad regime is also a traditional source of contention. It may also intervene to force a nation to change its domestic or foreign policies (Kunz, 2007).

Middle East Intervention Cases

The modern history of the Middle East begins with World War I, when the Ottoman Empire dissolved in October 1918. The Ottoman Turks had entered the war on the side of the Germans in October 1914. During the war, both Arabs and Jews had played significant roles in the victory of British General Sir Edmund Allenby (Kelly, 2006). The Arab Revolt of June 1916 tied down thousands of Turkish troops and made possible a bitter guerrilla war against them (Hersh, 2004). T.E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, had fought with the Arabs under Prince Faisal. The Jews helped with high-level intelligence-gathering and the efforts of the Jewish Legion allied with the British Army (David, 2006). The resulting postwar situation left a power vacuum in which many progressive reforms could have been made in a region that had been crippled by centuries of lax and corrupt Turkish rule (Cordesman, 2004).

Iraq War of 2003

The Iraq War was the first major demonstration of the so-called Bush Doctrine, named for Pres. George W. Bush. Initially laid out in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that doctrine implicitly repudiated the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, which had taken a very cautious view of the use of American military ...