U.S. action necessary to end conflict

Carter is a student at the School of Law.

By Phillip Carter

Diplomacy has failed in the Middle East. Suicide bombers and
snipers now duel over pockmarked streets while ambassadors and
envoys wait helplessly in their hotels. Just as American soldiers
were employed to stop the killing in Bosnia, the time has come for
the United States to propose a military solution to the current war
between Israel and Palestine.

The turning point in Bosnia came in 1995 when a mortar shell
landed in a crowded Sarajevo market. CNN beamed bloody images
of wounded civilians and blown-apart storefronts into our
consciousness. This event forced the American public and its
politicians to realize that something had to be done. America
decided to commit U.S. troops because the government decided that
peace could not be reached in any other way: Years of shuttle
diplomacy and special-envoy missions had failed and a new type of
action was necessary.

American soldiers crossed the Sava River in December 1995 to
implement the Dayton Accords by force if necessary. An entire
armored division rolled southward into Bosnia, establishing a zone
of separation and other boundaries required by the Dayton Accords.
Slowly, American and NATO soldiers established order where before
there had only been chaos ““ setting up checkpoints, mine-free
roads, safe zones, and other measures designed to assure the
Bosnian population that peace would be permanent.

If anything, our success in stopping the killing in Bosnia and
Kosovo should serve as a poignant lesson. Ten years ago, who
would have thought that American peacekeepers would be so
successful? Indeed, the image of American soldiers as
peacekeepers was not publicly popular.

Despite the images of starving Bosnian men in concentration
camps or the images of mass killings at Srebenica, Americans
initially shut their eyes and declared that the problem was too
intractable to solve.

Fortunately, history proved those critics wrong. American
soldiers have stopped the killing and created a lasting peace in
the Balkans. Our troops may remain there for some time yet, but the
benefits to human rights and international security far outweigh
the costs of this preventative deployment.

As in Bosnia, we now deal with parties at an impasse in the
Middle East. Neither party will trust the other to implement any
peace agreement on its own. Neither the Israelis nor the
Palestinians will back down, disarm, or return to pre-uprising
postures without some larger intervening force.

That force must be the U.S. military. No other force has the
full-spectrum capability of the

See CARTER, page 18

American Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

Implementing a peace agreement in the Middle East will require
every option we have in our arsenal.

At times, a target may have to be struck with pinpoint accuracy.
In other situations, our soldiers may have to mediate disputes over
the price of produce. The known capability of our military to
succeed in diverse circumstances gives U.S. soldiers substantial
credibility on the street, where it counts.

Partisans on both sides will know that the average American
soldier has the ability to call in powerful armored response
forces, devastating airstrikes or anything else necessary to
resolve a military confrontation.

Of course, this deployment cannot take place in
isolation. We must also commit the resources of the United
States to the redevelopment of Palestine, as the economy in the
territories is inextricably linked to the current conflict.

It makes a grim sense that young Palestinians who face a total
lack of economic, social and political opportunity would turn to
rebellion as a way of creating those opportunities. 

We must fundamentally change the opportunities for these young
men and women and give them hope that their lives may be better
than their parents’ lives. Only then will we dry up the
supply of young Palestinians willing to become suicide bombers.

But in the end, peace will depend on the individual American
soldier. American soldiers stepped into the war in Bosnia and
stopped the killing. They have subsequently built a lasting peace
through a combination of military diplomacy and military
intimidation.

What makes our forces so successful in Bosnia is the ability of
the average American soldier to carry out his or her job with
precision, professionalism and compassion. 

Peacekeeping requires a special blend of skills, from basic
soldier training to conflict-mediation skills. Our soldiers ““
who represent the best in American society ““ have proven
their ability to do it all.