by Stephen Engelberg

About the author: Stephen Engelberg is a staff writer for the New York Times.

If Somalia, why not Bosnia? If Bosnia, why not Rwanda? Or the Sudan? Or Haiti? Or Afghanistan"

After the Cold War

More than five years after the grand retreat of Communism, the list of plausible candidates for military intervention grows ever longer. Yet neither President Clinton nor other Western leaders have articulated a clear standard for distinguishing among victims of brutality and aggression.

The major post–cold war intervention, in the Persian Gulf, was not about Iraqi brutality (the Iraqi dictatorship had been brutal long before it invaded Kuwait), but about oil and alliances. Vital Western interests—the old standard for intervention—would have been at stake even if Iraq had scrupulously observed the Geneva Conventions...