Amman, Jordan -- I doubt that American military intervention in Hungary 50 years ago would have produced results much different than the chaos we are now seeing in Iraq. Foreign military intervention in domestic issues should be done with extreme care, after the genuine exhaustion of all other means and only with international support and legitimacy.
External forces are rarely able to change the internal conflict of a single group. When change comes as a result of intervention, it is neither stable nor lasting.
On the other hand, countries that have experienced change coming from the peoples' power and peoples' struggle for justice -- like South Africa, the Philippines and Ukraine -- can be proud of having overcome the odds without risking the chaos and disunity that usually results from external interventions.
But military interventions could work in conflicts where two groups of people are pitted against one other as in the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For such interventions to work, the intervening party (and it need not always be America) must have legitimacy and must base its intervention on solid international backing.
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