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The United Nations was established in 1945 in the aftermath of the Second World War as replacement for the failed League of Nations. Some of its primary aims were to intervene in conflicts between states and prevent war while protecting human rights. The United Nations soon proved itself to be as toothless and lacking in military means as its predecessor with its ineffectual attempt to recapture North Korea during the conflict between 1950-1953.

The failings of the United Nations continued throughout the Twentieth Century, particularly in the past decade. These failings often resulted in huge losses of life and horrific human rights violations, especially during the civil wars in Sierra Leone 1991-2002, Rwanda 1994,
Bosnia 1992-1995 and Darfur in Sudan 2003-present. While in all of these cases the United Nations has attempted some form of intervention, the result has been at huge delay and with questionable results.

The war in Bosnia began in March 1992 as a culmination of tension in the region between Bosnian-Croats in the south and Serbs and Muslims dispersed throughout the country. The war was brought to an end by peace negotiations concluded on 21 December resulting in the accords known as the Dayton Agreement. The war claimed more than 200,000 lives and left six million people homeless.

The United Nation's response to the conflict was to establish safe areas' where Bosniaks could take refuge from Bosnian-Serb forces under the protection of UN troops and to use airpower in isolation as a deterrent against Bosnian-Serb aggression. The safe areas' made the task of ethnic cleansing somewhat easier for the Bosnian-Serbs. The massacre of unarmed civilians is a simple endeavour compared to locating and tracking the civilian population fleeing from the reign of terror and destruction. By accumulating large numbers of Bosniaks in the safe areas' without adequate protection, the most challenging and time-consuming element of ethnic cleansing was inadvertently carried out for the Bosnian-Serbs by the United Nations. This was demonstrated with the most infamous event during the war with the massacre at Srebrenica in 1998 which claimed the lives of almost 8,000 Muslim men, making it the worst act of genocide in Europe since World War Two.

The decision to use airstrikes to deter Bosnian-Serb aggression was flawed on a number of levels. Airstrikes provide what the Americans have recently labelled shock and awe' measures or what was referred to at the time by the Western press

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