Overseas Interventions of The United States - After The Cold War

After The Cold War

The US intervened in Kuwait in 1991 to expel an invading Iraqi army in the Gulf War.

In the 1990s, the US intervened in Somalia as part of UNOSOM I, a United Nations humanitarian relief operation. The mission saved hundreds of thousands of lives. During the Battle of Mogadishu, two U.S. helicopters were shot down by rocket-propelled grenade attacks to their tail rotors, trapping soldiers behind enemy lines. This resulted in an urban battle that killed 18 American soldiers, wounded 73 others, and one was taken prisoner. There were many more Somali casualties. Some of the American bodies were dragged through the streets – a spectacle broadcast on television news programs. In response, U.S. forces were withdrawn from Somalia and later conflicts were approached with fewer soldiers on the ground.

Under President Bill Clinton, the US participated in Operation Uphold Democracy, a UN mission to reinstate the elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, after a military coup. In 1995, Clinton ordered US and NATO aircraft to attack Bosnian Serb targets to halt attacks on UN safe zones and to pressure them into a peace accord. Clinton deployed U.S. peacekeepers to Bosnia in late 1995, to uphold the subsequent Dayton Agreement. In response to the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa that killed a dozen Americans and hundreds of Africans, Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. First was a Sudanese Pharmaceutical company suspected of assisting Osama Bin Laden in making chemical weapons. The second was Bin Laden's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. To stop the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Albanians by nationalist Serbians in the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's province of Kosovo, Clinton authorized the use of American troops in a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, named Operation Allied Force. The CIA was involved in the failed 1996 coup attempt against Saddam Hussein.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, under President George W. Bush, the US and NATO intervened to depose the Taliban government in the Afghan war. In 2003, the US and a multi-national coalition invaded Iraq to depose Saddam. Aghanistan remains under military occupation, while the Iraq war officially ended on December 15, 2011. The US has launched drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen against suspected terrorist targets. The US has used large amounts of aid and counter-insurgency training to enhance stability and reduce violence in war-ravaged Colombia, in what has been called "the most successful nation-building exercise by the United States in this century".

In 2011, the US intervened, by providing air power, in the 2011 Libyan civil war. There was also speculation in The Washington Post that President Barack Obama issued a covert action finding in March 2011 that authorized the CIA to carry out a clandestine effort to provide arms and support to the Libyan opposition. Muammar Gaddafi was ultimately overthrown.