Lecciones del proyecto y recomendaciones

For the purposes of explaining how I used my method, in this section I foreshadow the three main findings comprising my analytical framework. First I linked the normative expectations of intervention found in presidential discourse with the implications they have for presidential decision-making about exit strategies. In this way, I could show how the normative expectations functioned as Toulmin’s “data”, and the exit strategy frames as “conclusions”. Table 4.4 details these connections.

Table 4.4: Normative concepts and exit strategy implications

Normative because it has been chosen by God and it has a duty to help other countries follow the US example;

Consistent with national role conception of US as a moral foreign policy actor and US vision for a

‘good war’; Country subject to intervention is a failed state and the US has a responsibility to help build a better state

US troops will leave when country has been transformed in a manner consistent with American ideals, values and interests but US will not be an occupying power;

handover to local authorities or UN; US troops will leave if heroism questioned

Fighting evil America is fighting to defeat an identifiable evil

Parties to conflict are committing (or will commit) extreme acts of violence and human rights abuses that require US intervention

America is fighting a just war sanctioned by the international community and its exit strategy is consistent with international

US troops will leave when all objectives are achieved and enemy is neutralised

Costs limited Limit the risk to American troops and reduce potential American casualty numbers

US troops will leave when the risk to American lives becomes unacceptably high Exit assured Every sensible military operation

should have an exit strategy; US government has an exit strategy and it is being implemented; this

intervention is not like other operations where a successful exit strategy was not implemented

Timetable for US troop withdrawal demonstrating US soldiers will not be occupiers and costs will be limited

Continuing with Toulmin’s approach, I found those conclusions revealed a series of warrants about an American audience’s normative expectations for an exit in humanitarian interventions. These three warrants are:

(a) Victory achieved.

(b) Moral duty fulfilled.

(c) Troop withdrawal assured.

I re-framed the three warrants as exit strategy expectations. The warrants/exit strat-egy expectations highlight the assumptions and taken-for-granted ideas underpinning presidential exit strategy justifications. Through the course of my analysis it became clear that these exit strategy expectations are difficult to fulfil simultaneously. At the same time, not meeting these expectations is beyond the realm of imagined pos-sibilities for foreign policy action. To not meet these expectations has consequences for the narrative about the humanitarian intervention and the collective narrative about how the US uses military force. It can potentially undermine the legitimacy, and assessment of the wisdom of a humanitarian intervention. It also challenges the collective belief systems of the American body politic, threatening a collective cognitive dissonance. Figure 4.3 represents these connections. It shows that if any one of these groups of normative expectations are not met, questions about the moral rightness and legitimacy of the humanitarian intervention arise.

Figure 4.1: Expectations for a publicly justifiable exit strategy

When it comes to implementing an exit strategy in humanitarian interventions, presidential rhetoric about exit is self-reinforcing and constraining but not always determinative. In each case there are examples of presidents engaging in rhetorical manoeuvring; presidents craft strategic narratives, attempting to reshape the meaning of normative expectations. Table 4.5 shows the space presidents have for rhetorical manoeuvre; to make strategic narrative choices. In the case study chapters that follow I demonstrate the relationships between normative concepts, exit strategy requirements and strategic narratives in presidential justifications for withdrawing troops.

Table 4.5: Presidential justifications for exit strategies

Strategic narrative choices to meet exit strategy expectations

How far and for how long does the US responsibility last? What counts as transformation in intervention country?

Democratic elections? Removal of dictator?

Liberal institutions? Security of civilian populations?

Fight evil What does it mean to defeat the enemy? Is deterrence sufficient? Is regime change required?

Is a peace settlement required or is transition to civilian, peaceable, democratic government needed?

Stop/ prevent atrocities

How long should the period of peace last before US will be held responsible for any resurgence in violence? How many people should be saved?

How many people are intervention forces permitted to kill in order to justify saving other lives? Should US troops only stop currently occurring or impending atrocities or should the threat of atrocities be eliminated?

Prosecute a just war

How many people should be saved? How many people are intervention forces permitted to kill in order to justify saving other lives? What kinds of operational approaches and tactics are

permissible? What risks should US soldiers be asked to bear? Is regime change permissible?

Achieve victory

Win What does it mean to win a humanitarian operation? How many civilians can be justifiably killed? How much damage to infrastructure is justifiable? Is regime change required?

Limit cost How much risk is reasonable to expect US soldiers and the American public to bear? How can American lives be balanced against lives of those to be saved?

How specific should the timetable be? Should there be dates or benchmarks? Can transition to the UN or NATO be classified as an exit if US forces remain engaged?

4.4 Conclusion

In my thesis I examine how US presidents have justified their decisions to terminate humanitarian interventions since the end of the Cold War, noting in the majority of instances, the president must justify decisions not to terminate an intervention in the manner proposed at the outset of the troop deployment. My research approach follows discourse-historical approach (DHA) and the related methods of normative concepts analysis (NoCA) and discourse tracing.

My thesis is the first comparative discourse study of public justifications for exit strategies in humanitarian interventions. I demonstrate that although not a complete explanation for the process of exiting intervention, discourse is a necessary component in understanding the challenges of exit strategy development, articulation and implementation. Consequently it adds a new perspective on intervention exit strategy development and implementation that should be incorporated into future research on humanitarian intervention and the dynamics of end state planning.

My research contributes to the development of normative concepts analysis for exploring public justification and strategic narrative practices of US presidents including during military operations. My research also expands the study of the rhetorical presidency using these methods beyond justifications for starting wars to include the conduct and conclusion of military operations. More specifically, my study is the first comparative discursive analysis of exit strategies in armed humanitarian interventions, further demonstrating the utility of discourse analysis for understanding questions of decision-making in war time.

In the following chapter I apply the methodology I outlined in this chapter to the first US humanitarian intervention following the end of the Cold War: the intervention to assist the Kurds in northern Iraq following the 1991 US Gulf War.

Providing Comfort in Northern Iraq (1991–1996)

Q. You said before that you didn’t like the idea of a protected enclave within Iraq itself. But doesn’t this, in effect, establish for months and the foreseeable future the United States military protecting Kurdish refugees in that area? And do you want to continue to leave it ambiguous what the US would do in case there is any effort by the Iraqis against the Kurdish refugees?

President Bush. I hope we’re not talking about a long-term effort.

White House press conference 16 April 1991

5.1 Introduction

Scholars generally do not consider America’s 41^st president George Herbert Walker Bush to be a particularly coherent orator, let alone an inspiring one.¹ The former congressman, ambassador, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and vice-president eschewed advisors’ efforts to tailor messaging or craft public relations

1. Wynton C. Hall, ““Reflections of Yesterday”: George H. W. Bush’s Instrumental Use of Research in Presidential Discourse,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2002): 540.

strategies.² Bush was suspicious of scripted speech-making as disingenuous. While he did not avoid the press, he preferred ‘plain-speaking’ to making visionary pro-nouncements.³ And yet as America’s first post-Cold War president, Bush had to explain how America should navigate the post-Cold War world. It was up to Bush to demonstrate how the US, as the world’s only superpower in the final decade of the 20^th century, would continue meeting the normative expectations for its foreign policy behaviour.⁴

As is often the case for American presidents, a war defined Bush’s presidency and his foreign policy legacy.⁵ No sooner was the Cold War over when Bush launched the Gulf War on 2 August 1990. The US led 35 countries in a UN-authorised mission to force Iraq to withdraw its military forces from neighbouring Kuwait. The spectacular military victory delivered predominantly by US forces was followed by humanitarian crises across Iraq, spreading into neighbouring Iran and Turkey.

Bush initially resisted sending troops to Iraq. His arguments ran counter to the foreign policy expectations of fulfilling moral responsibility I outlined in Chapter 3 as well as Bush’s own commitment to defeat evil and fulfil the demands of American exceptionalism. Bush then reluctantly commenced what would become the first humanitarian intervention of the post-Cold War era: Operation Provide Comfort to assist the Kurds in northern Iraq. The intervention began in April 1991 as an exclusively air operation enforcing a no-fly zone (NFZ) and dropping aid parcels to stranded refugees. A few weeks later, Bush deployed ground troops to build and protect a safe haven for the Kurds inside Iraq. Four months later responsibility for the intervention was formally handed over to the UN but rather than ending the intervention, Bush moved US troops across the border to Turkey. He maintained

2. James Addison Baker and Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989-1992 (New York: Putnam, 1995).

3. Bush’s press secretary Marlin Fitzwater and deputy chief-of-staff Andy Corin quoted in Hall,

““Reflections of Yesterday”: George H. W. Bush’s Instrumental Use of Research in Presidential Discourse,” 531–33.

4. Jeffrey A. Engel, “When George Bush Believed the Cold War Ended and Why That Mattered,”

in Inside the Presidency of George H. W. Bush, ed. Michael Nelson and Barbara A. Perry (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2014), 100–122.

5. Tucker Spencer, US Leadership in Wartime: Clashes, Controversy and Compromise (New York: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 905.

patrols of Iraqi airspace and committed US soldiers to responding militarily if the Iraqi government resumed attacking the Kurds.

The story of Provide Comfort is often recounted as a humanitarian intervention that helped save the lives of millions of Kurds;⁶ the first UNSC-authorised foreign military operation to successfully halt a mass atrocity within the borders of a sovereign state.

These narratives often ignore the reality that Provide Comfort ended in name only.⁷ Despite ostensibly ‘handing over’ the operation to the UN and Bush’s hope the mission would not be “a long-term effort”, US intervention in northern Iraq lasted five-and-a-half years and was gradually subsumed into wider US military operations in Iraq conducted for almost a quarter of a century. Conventional narratives also focus on the legality and practicalities of conducting the intervention. By contrast, in this chapter I draw attention to the discursive framework affecting how the Commanders-in-Chief imagined intervention possibilities and expectations and how this in turn constrained strategic narrative choices for exit strategies.⁸

I tell a story about how Bush and his successor Bill Clinton justified their exit strategies for Provide Comfort to the American people. Mine is an attempt to understand how Bush, despite his fears of a Vietnam War-style quagmire, deployed US soldiers in an open-ended operation to protect the Kurdish people in northern Iraq.

I explain how Bush set aside his commitment to only begin operations involving US troops when victory and rapid withdrawal was assured; how he ended up justifying an exit strategy that was ultimately not an exit strategy at all, but a series of undertakings progressively deepening and widening US obligations to the Kurdish people. Even though the presidency changed hands and parties from Republican Bush to Democrat Clinton, I show how Bush’s rhetorical parameters constrained

6. Gordon W. Rudd, Humanitarian Intervention: Assisting the Iraqi Kurds in Operation Provide Comfort, 1991 (Washington D.C.: Department of the Army, 2004); James L. Jones, “Operation Provide Comfort: Humanitarian and Security Assistance in Northern Iraq,” Marine Corps Gazette 75, no. 11 (1991): 98–107; Seybolt, Humanitarian Military Intervention: The Conditions for Success and Failure; Philip A. Meek, “Operation Provide Comfort: A Case Study in Humanitarian Relief and Foreign Assistance,” Air Force Law Review 37 (1994): 225–39.

7. Michael E. Harrington, “Operation Provide Comfort: A Perspective in International Law,”

Connecticut Journal of International Law 8 (1992–1993): 188.

8. Ibid., 636.

Clinton’s imagined exit strategy options.

I begin with an overview of the rhetorical context and the humanitarian crisis in northern Iraq. I divide the rest of the chapter into each of the three phases of the intervention: Provide Comfort as a no-fly zone (NFZ) with aid drops; Provide Comfort involving ground troops; and Provide Comfort II. This case study is

impor-tant because as the first post-Cold War humanitarian intervention, Iraq became the template for future interventions. Bush also introduced the idea of a UN transition as an exit strategy; an option adopted in subsequent interventions. In addition, the Iraq case demonstrates the power of moral responsibilities to constrain intervention exit strategies. Bush and Clinton emphasised America’s moral duty to the Kurds throughout the intervention and this defined victory. Paradoxically, both presidents expanded the scope of America’s moral duty to achieve victory, but in so doing, made it more difficult for the intervention to be ‘won’ or to place a time limit on US troop deployment.