See No Evil: Why America Doesn't Stop Genocide

The causal chain, though frustrating, is reasonably straightforward. The rest of the world does not act because the United States does not. The United States does not act, in turn, because public support for humanitarian intervention is diffuse and rarely mobilized. Absent clear demonstrations that the public supports intervention, the military is unwilling. Partly because of the military's position, the political right is opposed. Because the political right is opposed, presidents are cautious and believe that pushing for action cannot benefit them politically but can only cost them. Because presidents do not favor humanitarian action, finally, career foreign policy and national security officials learn that strong advocacy of it is both unlikely to succeed and bad for their job prospects. The result is that humanitarian disasters have a hard time even getting on an administration's agenda, let alone generating momentum for action.

The domestic pressures against humanitarian intervention lead to what political scientist Stephen Van Evera calls "non-evaluation": analyses of humanitarian crises are either not conducted at all or are conducted under distorted standards that prevent serious assessments that could provide ammunition for pro-intervention positions. Institutions and individual analysts either learn to play the game or are suppressed. Misapplied "lessons of history" can also play a role. As political scientists Robert Jervis and Yuen Foong Khong have explained, these lessons are often quite simplistically applied: past policies judged successes tend to be repeated, while those judged failures are avoided -- often without serious consideration of differences between the original case and the present problem. Power reports, for example, that every U.S. official she spoke to named the disastrous U.S. intervention in Somalia as the main barrier to action on Rwanda -- but few if any considered whether the emergencies were similar or whether the requirements for intervention would be harder or easier in the latter case.

THE PERFECT FAILURE

The Rwandan case is the key to understanding the systematic failure to prevent mass killing. With the emergency so clear and so vast and the effort required so minimal, the United States still did not act, and this failure should serve as a powerful warning to anyone hoping to see a substantial altruistic dimension to U.S. foreign policy any time soon. Power shows that the underlying reason for ducking the issue was the Clinton administration's domestic political calculus. Crucial government decisions were driven less by the situation in Rwanda than by the situation in Washington -- and since the same factors can be expected to operate in the future, the same outcome is likely.

Although some have argued that the failure in Rwanda was due to a lack of timely information, Power shows that senior administration officials quickly understood the magnitude of the emergency but deliberately shut off consideration of virtually any action. In the absence of mobilized domestic pressure, officials sought to hoard their political capital for future crises and avoid any steps that could potentially draw the United States into the conflict. Some officials continued to focus on resurrecting the 1993 Arusha accords between the Hutus and the Tutsis, a project comparable to arranging a truce between the Turks and the Armenians or the Nazis and the Jews. Most important, no high-level meeting of foreign policy principals was ever held, with the result that no one demanded any serious analyses of the crisis. This fact alone virtually assured that no rescue plans could be developed, and mid-level officials who attempted to raise this issue were branded naive or alarmist. The U.S. response to Rwanda, in short, constituted a classic case of non-evaluation.

Because nearly all genocides occur during ongoing wars, non-evaluation exacerbates the fog of war in ways that give credence to the standard excuses for inaction. Apologists for passivity regularly claim that outsiders can never tell until it is too late whether genocide is actually occurring: they cannot know soon enough how many are being killed or how far killers intend to go, and in an ongoing war it takes time to figure out whether the massacres are one-sided or mutual. Therefore nothing can be done because by the time enough is known there are no longer any military options that can be carried out fast enough to matter.

Power shows that such blocking tactics are further assisted by confusion over the concept of genocide. Although the international legal standard requires no particular level of deaths, both the public and policymakers usually take the term "genocide" to apply only to the actual extermination of a very large fraction, often more than half, of the target group. Such a standard makes it virtually impossible to determine that "genocide" is occurring until it is virtually over and there are few survivors who can still be helped. In Rwanda, the U.S. administration carefully avoided using the word "genocide" in order to dampen pressure to act, and even human rights organizations avoided the word for the first two weeks of the killing for fear of being dismissed from mainstream debate. As Power points out, however, this should be merely a semantic issue; large-scale mass killing is a crime against humanity regardless of whether or not most or all of the target community is likely to be wiped out.