http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n22/holm01_.html
[The two books Holmes reviews in this essay are unbelievably naive and stupid. (Well, I wish it were unbelievable.) His arguments about them on the other hand, are quite good. It's worth wading through the long summaries of the books to get to his stuff, a large part of which I've excerpted below.]
London Review of Books
Vol. 24 No. 22 dated 14 November 2002
Looking Away
Stephen Holmes
<snipped>
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by
Samantha Power | Basic, 640 pp, £21.99
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals by
David Halberstam | Bloomsbury, 540 pp, £20.00
<snip>
Why have the keenest protests against Bush's strategically
unnecessary unilateralism come from the internationalist wing of the
Republican Party (Brent Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the
Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set
out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an
important part of the answer.
Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US responses
to genocide by her indignation at the Clinton Administration's belated
reaction to mass killings in Bosnia, where she worked in the early
1990s as a young freelance reporter. She was understandably appalled
by what happened after the carnage began in 1992: 'Despite
unprecedented public outcry about foreign brutality, for the next
three and a half years the United States, Europe and the United
Nations stood by while some 200,000 Bosnians were killed.' The book's
bitterly ironic title distils her feelings about this period of
inaction.
<snip>
All this is fascinating and disturbing. But the most eye-catching
feature of 'A Problem from Hell' is Power's palpable frustration with
multilateralism and legalism. An important clue to this aspect of her
thinking is the approval with which she cites Paul Wolfowitz and
Richard Perle, two unilateralist hawks associated with the current
Bush Administration. During the 1990s, they both urged US military
intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo outside the framework of the UN and
contrary to its Charter. Power thinks they were perfectly right. The
Rwanda debacle was partly a result of UN dithering and incoherence.
Indeed, the UN's credibility had earlier been severely damaged on the
streets of Mogadishu. In the 1990s, therefore, human rights advocates
did not speak deferentially about the UN. On the contrary. Uncertain
of their mandate in Rwanda and focused on self-protection, the hapless
Blue Helmets allowed themselves to be disarmed before ten of their
number were brutally murdered. Referring to the passivity of the US as
the catastrophe unfolded in Rwanda, Power remarks: 'The United States
could also have acted without the UN's blessing, as it would do five
years later in Kosovo.' Formulated more pungently, acting decisively
sometimes requires a great power to extricate itself from the hopeless
mishmash of multilateralism.
Liberals now lambast Bush daily for failing to act through
multilateral institutions and in accord with international law. He is
thereby gratuitously alienating potential partners from America's just
anti-terrorist cause, they explain. But that is not the way they felt
in the 1990s. In those days, liberals were the ones calling
multilateralism a formula for paralysis and inaction. They pointed
out, for example, that the exquisitely multilateral EU, left to its
own devices, was pitifully unable to mount a serious operation in the
Balkans. Recently, when Morocco tried to seize a bit of Spanish
territory, the EU proved unable to act decisively for the simple
reason that its member states could not agree among themselves. (Colin
Powell resolved the crisis by phone.) Today, on the question of Iraq,
the three leading members of the EU have taken three mutually
inconsistent positions. One could even argue that the US's turn to
unilateralism is a natural consequence of Europe's embrace of
dysfunctional multilateralism. For how can Washington act in concert
with allies who are fused at the hip but cannot settle internal
differences in a timely fashion? And how wrong was Bush when he
suggested to the General Assembly in September that without US
leadership and law enforcement capacity the UN risks becoming another
League of Nations?
Be this as it may, the proponents of humanitarian intervention, in the
1990s, were among multilateralism's least forgiving critics. Power
writes in this spirit. Clinton embraced 'consultation', she tells us,
whenever his Administration lacked a clear policy of its own. In that
sense, too, multilateralism is a sign of weakness. When it comes to
atrocities, she implies, the US should simply have told its allies
what it was going to do. From the same perspective, she also comments
unflatteringly on the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. The tribunal was
initially established, she correctly explains, in order to avoid
taking military action. In emergency situations, more generally,
legalism can prove as debilitating as multilateralism. Due process can
get in the way of an adequate response to genocide. We need to move
swiftly and flexibly against the worst international villains even if
this means unleashing lethal force on the basis of hearsay testimony
and circumstantial evidence: 'an authoritative diagnosis of genocide
would be impossible to make during the Serb campaign of terror.'
Indeed, pre-emptive deployment of troops on the basis of clues
collected by operatives in the field might be the only way to stave
off a Rwanda-style massacre. The very idea of a war against genocide
probably implies a relaxed attitude towards mens rea: 'Proving intent
to exterminate an entire people would usually be impossible until the
bulk of the group had already been wiped out.' Careful observance of
procedural niceties will impede any speedy response to an unfolding
massacre.
Deference to public opinion is equally inappropriate, Power continues,
especially when the electorate is self-absorbed, parochial and fixated
on body-bags. One wonders if her lack of sympathy with the widely
reported public aversion to military casualties might have anything to
do with the infrequent human contact between human rights activists
and the families of the grunts who would be asked to die to uphold
vaguely worded international laws. In any case, she also suggests that
chronically reticent military should be rolled over by morally attuned
civilian leaders in order to confront wicked forces in the world.
Faced with humanitarian atrocities in distant lands, any American
official or citizen who claims to see shades of grey or two sides of
the story, or who claims not to know exactly what is happening in the
interior of a distant country, is probably feigning ignorance to
deflect calls for action and to get the US off the hook. Some of those
who declare murderous situations inside closed societies to be
indecipherable by distant foreign observers are simply liars, while
others are accomplices to genocide. If Power does not say exactly
this, she comes close.
Needless to say, the 1990s advocates of humanitarian intervention are
marginal actors on today's political scene, with little or no
influence on current policy. But that does not mean that their way of
thinking has been without effect. They have, on the contrary,
unwittingly muffled the voices of Bush's critics. This is the
principal relevance of 'A Problem from Hell' to contemporary political
debates. Power helps us understand a neglected reason for the near
paralysis of the American Left in the face of the pre-emptive and
unilateralist turn in American foreign policy. The Democrats'
embarrassingly weak grasp of the differences between al-Qaida and
Saddam Hussein and their election-year fear of being branded
unpatriotic are not the only pertinent factors. Having supported
unilateralist intervention outside the UN framework during the 1990s,
liberals and progressives are simply unable to make a credible case
against Bush today.
Formulated differently, the 1990s advocates of humanitarian
intervention have unintentionally bequeathed a risky legacy to George
W. Bush. They have helped rescue from the ashes of Vietnam the ideal
of America as a global policeman, undaunted by other countries'
borders, defending civilisation against the forces of 'evil'. By
denouncing the US primarily for standing idly by when atrocity abroad
occurs, they have helped repopularise the idea of America as a
potentially benign imperial power. They have breathed new life into
old messianic fantasies. And they have suggested strongly that America
is shirking its moral responsibility when it refuses to venture abroad
in search of monsters to destroy. By focusing predominantly on
grievous harms caused by American inaction, finally, they have
obscured public memory of grievous harms caused by American action.
To be sure, Power discusses the petty complicities of the US with
various wicked regimes. The generous aid that Bush père provided to
Iraq has already been mentioned. For similar reasons, to please China
and displease Vietnam, 'Carter sided with the dislodged Khmer Rouge
regime,' orchestrating a vote in their favour in the UN credentials
committee. She also mentions other cases in which, for geopolitical
and economic reasons, the US cynically consorted with the perpetrators
of mass killing, including Nigeria in 1968 (one million Christian Ibo
killed) and Pakistan in 1971 (almost two million Bengalis killed). But
her principal stress throughout is on the immorality of the bystander
who does nothing to prevent other peoples' crimes. In 1975, for
example, 'when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia,
invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the
United States looked away.' It is typical that she gives greater
attention to this 'looking away' than to the weaponry and other active
support that the US supplied, say, to Suharto ten years earlier, when
he killed perhaps a million people in his campaign against the KPI.
The natural result of focusing on atrocities that the US did nothing
to prevent is to nudge other forms of wrongdoing and miscalculation
into the background. Above all, it helps the current Administration
achieve one of its principal ideological goals - namely, to erase from
public memory the chastening lesson of Vietnam. In a footnote, to be
fair, Power recollects the US's own crimes at Mai Lai: 'Although not
one villager fired on the US troops, the Americans burnt down all the
houses, scalped or disembowelled villagers, and raped women and girls
or, if they were pregnant, slashed open their stomachs.' But the
overall effect of the book is to blur such memories, to obscure how
the use of US military force abroad, perhaps admirable in its original
purpose, sometimes mires America in local struggles that it cannot
master, radically weakens the democratic oversight that a chronically
parochial public can exercise over a secretive military operation,
involves our own soldiers in savage acts, and undermines the country's
capacity to deliver some modest help to distressed peoples elsewhere
in the world.
If we are responsible for our incredulity, as Power claims, are we not
also responsible for the credulity that our good intentions create in
others? If human rights activists push an interventionist policy that
cannot be politically sustained, what have they done? If the
international community coaxes the Bosnian Muslims to sit unarmed in a
'safe area', but does not come through when Srebrenica turns into a
shooting gallery, who is responsible for abandoning those in whom we
have nurtured unrealistic dreams of rescue? Are we responsible when we
awaken false expectations by earnest talk? Are human rights advocates
responsible when they initiate a policy that they know cannot be
sustained politically, given domestic indifference to foreign affairs
and the paralysing array of political forces back home? Power mentions
this problem, to be sure. In fact, she explains that, because the West
had promised bombing, the Muslims of Srebrenica did not reclaim the
tanks and anti-aircraft guns that they had turned over to the UN in
1993 as part of a demilitarisation agreement. But she does not draw
out the implications of this appalling bait-and-switch story for her
depiction of humanitarian intervention as a politically shaky but
morally obligatory cause.
In a battle with 'evil', no means seem impermissible. In the midst of
a humanitarian catastrophe, the downstream consequences of short-term
strategies do not occupy the centre of attention. The ghastly sight of
mutilated corpses disinterred from mass graves is psychologically
incompatible with calculations about scarce resources, opportunity
costs and trade-offs. That is what we mean by moral clarity. Max Weber
called it the ethics of conscience. But a sickened heart does not
necessarily exempt us from taking responsibility for what happens
after we intervene. What if the side on whose behalf we bomb urban
areas subsequently commits ethnic cleansing under our military
protection? Even if it begins with moral clarity, humanitarian
intervention may gutter into moral ambiguity once the interveners find
themselves, as in Kosovo, on the side of ethnic cleansers or propping
up an unseemly local 'elite' infested with gangsters and drug
smugglers.
Putting an end to atrocities is a moral victory. But if the
intervening force is incapable of keeping domestic support back home
for the next phase, for reconstructing what it has shattered, the
morality of its intervention is ephemeral at best. If political
stability could be achieved by toppling a rotten dictator or if
nations could be built at gunpoint, this problem would not be so
pressing. Human rights cannot be reliably protected unless a locally
sustained political authority is in place. But how well prepared is
the United States for rebuilding a domestically supported political
system in, say, Iraq, where a multi-ethnic society has, so far, been
glued together by a regime of fear administered by a minority ethnic
group? A functioning state can be built only with the active
co-operation of well-organised domestic constituencies. It cannot be
imported by an occupying military force. Where are such constituencies
in Iraq? Do we believe that militarily powerful outsiders with minimal
understanding of Iraqi society can conjure well-organised
pro-democratic groupings out of thin air? Or is the Bush
Administration, despite its rhetoric about democracy, planning to
establish a government in postwar Iraq by, of and for the US military?
The failure to think through, in advance, cogent answers to these
questions is part of the dubious legacy bequeathed by genuinely
well-meaning humanitarian interventionists to the considerably less
well-meaning non-humanitarian interventionists who bestride the
Potomac today.
<snip>
Stephen Holmes is a professor of law and political science at New York
University. The Cost of Rights, written with Cass Sunstein, appeared
in 1998.
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