LRB: Stephen Holmes on the ethic of responsibility

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Nov 18 02:52:04 PST 2002


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.

copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2002



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