The international regime established for refugees has been created and maintained less for their protection than to preserve the prerogatives of powerful states. Many heralded the US aid to Iraqi Kurds at the end of the 1991 Gulf war as a precedent for future interventions in defense of human rights and humanitarian assistance. In retrospect, the US move appears as yet another exercise designed to enhance the prerogatives of state power by a stronger against a weaker state. Britain, France and the US created an occupied military zone in the name of international stability with the intent to destabilize the government of Iraq. This may have been a legitimate political goal, but it misrepresented the intervention under an essentially humanitarian facade. -from Author

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Iraq US intervention humanitarian assistance human rights Refugees