DiPrizio examines the factors that lay behind U.S. decisions to send troops into civil conflicts abroad, analyzing both the decision-making process and the domestic and international constraints placed upon them. Focusing on the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, he shows that the president remains the chief player in such decision making, and through six case studies—northern Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo—he looks in detail at both positive and negative intervention decisions. DiPrizio finds that in each of these cases, motivating factors included a different mix of "soft" security concerns (such as refugee flows, regional stability, alliance credibility, and interalliance tensions), true humanitarian concerns, and domestic politics. DiPrizio concludes with a discussion of the possible impact of America's ongoing antiterrorism campaign on the current Bush administration's policy on humanitarian interventions.