The Price of Power

The Bush administration is leading the United States into catastrophe. Its abstention from the Middle East peace process has led to all-out warfare between the Israelis and Palestinians. No less feckless are its plans for an invasion of Iraq, which would lead to a military quagmire and the likely collapse of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Indeed, the extravagant commitments that the United States has made around the globe--it has military bases in 40 countries--suggest that, like all empires, it is headed for a crash.

Such a doomsday scenario might be presented by the American left against the war on terrorism being conducted by the Bush administration, but there has been hardly a peep of dissent. Though European leaders suffer heartburn over the idea of an “axis of evil,” President Bush’s high approval ratings have cowed the leadership of the Democratic Party into silence. The attacks that do come are from within the ranks of the left for not being patriotic enough. “Damn the doves,” Christopher Hitchens declared in the London Spectator. Todd Gitlin decries the fact that “the negative faith is America the ugly.” Michael Walzer, writing in the spring issue of Dissent, denounces his brethren for being “stupid, overwrought, grossly inaccurate.” They should, Walzer declares, accept America’s imperial status and model any responsible opposition on the example of the Little Englanders during the Boer War. Even Paul Kennedy, who earned fame for predicting the demise of the U.S. in the 1980s, now lavishes praise on it for shouldering the burden of empire.

What has developed, in short, is a new consensus about our aims abroad that is utterly unprecedented in American history. Imperialism has gone from being a term of opprobrium to an idea that America’s foreign policy elite is embracing. Not since the onset of the Vietnam War has there been such unanimity of opinion about America’s power and aims. But can this unusual state of affairs last? Will the United States descend back into bickering over its foreign policy, with Democrats questioning Bush’s war and the Republicans accusing them of being soft, not on communism, but on terrorism?

Samantha Power’s and Max Boot’s books suggest that there’s no turning back. Anyone who wants to understand why America has permanently entered a new era in international relations must read “‘A Problem From Hell’” and “The Savage Wars of Peace.” Both are vividly written and thoroughly researched. Power, a former Balkans correspondent, and Boot, the editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, are at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, but they show the extent to which the humanitarian left and the interventionist right converged to embrace Wilsonian ends and means before Sept. 11, even as U.S. administrations remained wary of becoming entangled in ethnic conflict. Power demands that the United States intervene militarily whenever and wherever genocidal acts are taking place; Boot demands that it don the 21st century equivalent of jodhpurs and pith helmets to bring the rest of the world to heel.

Drawing on U.S. government documents, private papers and numerous interviews, Power seeks to show that American policymakers have knowingly turned a blind eye to massacres. In her view, the United States’ policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide has not been a failure but precisely what diplomats wanted. According to Power, the pattern of American diplomatic indolence was set during World War I In Turkey, where Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador, cabled back to Washington in July 1915 that a program of annihilation of the Armenian people was occurring. But Morgenthau’s superiors remained coldly indifferent. The State Department declared, “However much we may deplore the suffering of the Armenians, we cannot take any active steps to come to their assistance at the present time.” The United States wished to remain isolationist and had no desire to become embroiled in internal Turkish affairs. “Time and again,” writes Power, “the U.S. government would be reluctant to cast aside its neutrality and formally denounce a fellow state for its atrocities.” Indeed, the Turkish horrors set the stage for the Nazi Holocaust. As Hitler reportedly bragged to his henchmen, “Who remembers the Armenians?”

It was only after the Holocaust that the term “genocide” came into existence. Power devotes an entire chapter to chronicling the attempts of the Polish emigre lawyer Raphael Lemkin to create an international law that would make the destruction of ethnic and religious groups a crime. Lemkin’s tireless efforts resulted in the adoption by the fledgling United Nations of the Genocide Convention in 1948, which the United States refused to ratify for 40 years, fearing that the language was open-ended enough so that unfriendly states would be tempted to apply the convention’s statutes against it. Not until the 1970s did genocide again impose itself upon the world’s consciousness.

Indeed, it was the memory of the Holocaust that human rights activists invoked during Pol Pot’s massacre of Cambodians. “By 1977,” Power says, “because it had become widely accepted that a bloodbath was indeed taking place in Cambodia, advocates of U.S. engagement tried to jar decision makers and ordinary citizens by likening Pol Pot’s atrocities to those of Hitler.” But with the U.S. having emerged from Vietnam, the last thing the Carter administration wanted to do was intervene in Cambodia. William F. Buckley Jr. and George McGovern, of all people, both called for intervention. It was a harbinger of the unlikely alliances that would form over Bosnia.

Focusing as she does on the humanitarian case for intervention, Power might have made more of the fact that it is often in the national interest of the United States to arrest the slide toward, or prosecution of, genocide. Bosnia, where Power limns the passivity and outright lies of Clinton administration officials, provides one case where Europe and the United States needed to stop the Serbs to prevent violence from spreading through southeastern Europe. But Iraq would perhaps have provided Power’s most telling example. The equivocations and falsehoods that Power describes in Reagan and Bush administration policy toward Iraq are devastating. Though it has been consigned to the memory hole, the United States was quite partial to Saddam Hussein during his war against Iran. Despite Hussein’s use of poison gas against the Iranians and, later, the Kurds, U.S. officials steadfastly insisted that the evidence was uncertain. Power correctly observes that the Bush administration also betrayed the Kurds during their uprising in 1991 by failing to support them against Hussein. She focuses on the grievous loss of life and the failure of American officials to ever seek to prosecute any Iraqis for their crimes.

To be sure, she notes that “the United States now has reason to fear that the poisonous potions Hussein tried out on the Kurds will be used next on Americans.” But she might have noted that failing to assist the Kurds was also a strategic calamity for the United States. It was in the U.S. national interest to support a revolt that would have helped drive Hussein from power. Above all, Power never considers whether humanitarian intervention could also serve as a smoke screen for expanding American power. Should American objectives always be humanitarian, or do the exigencies of world politics mean that, however noble our professed goals, at best a queasy mix of power politics and human rights will always prevail?

Enter Boot. If Power is rather vague about how she would deploy military power, Boot is ruthlessly hard-nosed. Not for him namby-pamby talk about international institutions. The United States, as he notes, has been engaged in military operations against foreign adversaries. Boot offers a conspectus of America’s small wars, beginning with its forays against Mediterranean pirates in the 18th century down to the Clinton administration’s operations in the Balkans. Along the way, he explodes a number of myths about the military such as the beliefs that the United States has always had exit strategies and never engaged in what Republicans dismissively termed the Clinton administration’s “social work.” On the contrary, he notes that the U.S. military “stayed continuously in Haiti for 19 years, in Nicaragua for 23 years, in the Philippines for 44 years, in China for almost 100 years.” Boot’s only concern is whether Americans have lost their nerve. He likens America to the British empire, pointing out that the British army, in the course of Queen Victoria’s little wars, suffered major defeats before bouncing back: “If Americans cannot adopt a similarly bloody-minded attitude, then they have no business undertaking imperial policing.”

With their survival at stake, Americans have indeed become bloody-minded again. The change began in the Balkans, where everyone from David Rieff and Hitchens to William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz insisted that the United States had a moral and strategic obligation not to stand by passively. Now the Bush administration, which entered office declaring that the United States had to refrain from nation-building, has shed its isolationist impulses. The administration has moved from scoffing at intervention in ethnic conflict to listing everything up to genocide as justification. No longer can Americans occlude the grim realities they tried to ignore during the 1990s. The United States may not be imperialist, but it is acting imperially. The question is not whether, but to what extent, it will attack its foes.