See No Evil: Why America Doesn't Stop Genocide

The moral poverty of foreign policy is, along with war itself, one of the most enduring and intractable problems in international relations. In recent years, the conventional wisdom on international moral action has been that it

requires a cosmopolitan consensus, a shared understanding of the dignity and equal worth of every human being. Short of achieving a global cosmopolitan majority, the more that Western elites, and especially officials of the world's strongest power, subscribe to this world-view, the easier it should be to achieve effective international action to resolve humanitarian crises, the most important of which are mass killing and genocide.

Samantha Power's disturbing book suggests that the question is more complex. Through a series of careful historical case studies, Power, a former Balkan war correspondent, traces the development of the concept of genocide from the Turkish campaign against the Armenians in 1915 to the present -- along with the repeated failure of the world, and particularly the United States, to prevent such horrors. She argues that this pattern is due not to public or elite indifference to the idea of moral responsibility, nor to a lack of timely warning or feasible intervention options, but rather to structural features of the American political system. Under normal circumstances, she shows, American officials face stronger incentives

to avoid action against genocide than to stop it. Power's book will likely become the standard text on genocide prevention because it thoroughly debunks the usual excuses for past failures, while offering a persuasive framework that can help predict future outcomes and suggest policy responses. It is also engaging and well written; together with the awful fascination of the subject, this should be enough to guarantee that it will be widely read by both students and policymakers.

RWANDANS DON'T VOTE

The crucial puzzle at the heart of Power's book is why the Clinton administration, which entered office more committed to humanitarian intervention and a moral foreign policy than any U.S. administration since World War II, wound up standing by and watching two genocides. Bill Clinton campaigned on the first Bush administration's failure to contain the genocide in Bosnia and staffed his foreign policy bureaucracies with long-standing advocates of "moralpolitik." Yet for more than two years his administration did little about Bosnia until it was embarrassed into stronger action after the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims in 1995. And in opposing Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, U.S. action was fairly prompt but woefully inadequate until British Prime Minister Tony Blair dragged Clinton into committing to defeat the Serbian army on the ground.

The most egregious failure, however, was the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Of all genocides since World War II this would perhaps have been the easiest to stop, and yet the United States not only did not halt the killing but actively prevented other willing powers from taking effective action. After Hutu soldiers murdered ten Belgian peacekeepers on April 7, 1994, the Belgian government made it clear to the United States that it would pull its troops out unless the un presence in Rwanda was reinforced. The United States advised pulling out and also

played a decisive role in persuading the un Security Council to cut the strength of the un Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) from 2,500 to 500 just two weeks after the genocide began. As a result, more than 800,000 people died between April and July 1994. Continuing civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Rwanda, partly sparked by the Rwandan genocide, have led to at least another two million deaths.

Power's cases demonstrate, of course, that the record of inaction is not limited to the Clinton administration. Despite abundant warning, the United States took no action during the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust. Although the United States led the drafting of the Convention on Genocide from 1946 to 1948, Washington took 40 years to ratify it -- and then did so with reservations so crippling that it is effectively barred from ever invoking the treaty against anyone. The United States did not act against genocides by the Khmer Rouge against Cambodians in the 1970s or by Iraq against the Kurds in the 1980s. And after 47 years of intermittent ethnic cleansing and genocide in Sudan, the United States still has done nothing there.

Historically, the critical factor in obtaining energetic action in pursuit of morally based foreign policy goals has been not the strength of cosmopolitan feeling, but the balance of domestic political power; Power's findings are broadly consistent with this pattern. She shows that American inaction in the face of genocide has not stemmed from an absence of cosmopolitan values among the public or elites. Depending on how the question is phrased, polls have found majorities as high as 80 percent in favor of at least some intervention to prevent genocide. Nor is feasibility the major hurdle. Although the world almost certainly could not prevent genocide in a strong country -- for instance, China or Russia -- most genocides are perpetrated in very poor countries by very weak regimes. In policy contests over particular interventions it is routinely claimed that the United States lacked enough information to act in time or that genocide prevention was militarily impractical. But these positions often reflect more the interests of those making the arguments than they do genuine, real-world constraints. Rather, Power finds, the central obstacles to humanitarian intervention in general and genocide prevention in particular lie in the organization of the American political system.