Military intervention has been a tool at the disposal of the U. government to achieve its political goals since the mid-nineteenth century with the forced relocation of Native Americans. However, it is not until around 1890 that military intervention hit an international scale with the deployment of troops to Nicaragua. .
Our government has become accustomed to solving our foreign policy disputes through military force rather than diplomacy. The legitimacy of this political ideology is that it makes us safer through a command of fear and up to date intelligence of the battle space; however, there is evidence to disprove this method of enforcing our policies. .
One common argument heard from the policy makers in Washington is that military intervention, and more specifically pre-emptive military intervention, eliminates threats before they become an issue. Sadly, this is perhaps the exact opposite of the truth. One example commonly cited was the failure of the Carter and Clinton administrations failure of assassinating Osama bin-Laden, the leading figure in the terrorist cell al-Qaeda, thus leading to the September 11th attacks on New York City, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania. Radical Islam is an ideology of hate, something we can never eradicate. Had Osama bin-Laden have been assassinated, he would have been a martyr to the cause and that course of action may have acted as a catalyst, advancing the time frame of a September 11th style attack on U.S. soil. In fact, the Defense Science Board's 1997 Summer Study Task Force on DoD (Department of Defense) Responses to Transnational Threats sated that, "Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States". Clearly our policy of nit-picking world affairs caused nothing but hate towards the United States, inciting violence against our government.