by Caleb Carr

About the author: Caleb Carr is a contributing editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and author of The Alienist.

If American leaders glean nothing else from the troubled U.N. adventure in Somalia, they ought at least and at long last to recognize the unattainability of that often-sought grail of U.S. foreign policy, the “purely humanitarian” (or “nonpolitical”) military intervention. Any military action abroad that involves combat is essentially an act of war, and thus governed by Karl von Clausewitz’s axiom that war is policy by different means. The notion of a nonpolitical military intervention is therefore worse than chimerical: it is oxymoronic, carrying with it from the start the seeds of its own eventual frustration.

Political Escalation in Somalia

The U.N. action in Somalia&mdash...