Abstract
Foreign policy literature concerning United States military interventions often discusses “syndromes,” or collective anti-interventionist sentiments among Americans stemming from failed interventions. Such syndromes are most commonly associated with the backlash to the U.S. interventions in Vietnam (1955-75), Somalia (1992-94), and Iraq (2003-11). In this paper, atrocity cases are analyzed through the lens of the syndromes to determine the factors that drive the U.S. military to carry out humanitarian interventions. The Yazidi genocide (2014) is discussed as a case study of a humanitarian atrocity that was met with U.S. military intervention in the form of a rescue mission in Sinjar, Iraq that morphed into Operation Inherent Resolve, a campaign to destroy the Islamist terrorist organization ISIS. Whereas the Sinjar rescue mission relied on a strategy of U.S. air support in combination with the arming of local allies on the ground, Operation Inherent Resolve gradually evolved into a war waged by U.S. ground troops in Iraq and Syria. The Rwandan genocide (1994) is discussed as a case study of a humanitarian atrocity that the U.S. government opted not to militarily intervene in. Despite extensive knowledge of the atrocities committed by Hutu supremacists against the Tutsi people in Rwanda, the U.S. military took no forceful measures to halt the genocide. This paper considers numerous potential factors, including the long shadow of the syndromes, domestic political pressures on the Clinton and Obama administrations, perceived threats against Americans, backlash against military casualties, and the impact of news media.