The architects of the convention understood the danger of making Hitler's crimes the standard by which to determine future genocides. States must be able to identify as genocide acts aimed at destroying "in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group"--the legal definition of the crime--well before they have the chance to reach such a scale in order to trigger appropriate actions. (The convention enjoins its signatories to take measures to prevent and punish the crime.) Despite such intentions, the link between genocide and Hitler's so-called Final Solution "would cause endless confusion for policy-makers and ordinary people who assumed that genocide occurred only where the perpetrator of atrocity could be shown, like Hitler, to possess an intent to exterminate every last member of an ethnic, national or religious group."

While the Hitler-standard problem did help to undermine effective responses by American officials and opinion-makers to various post-World War II genocides, there were other dilemmas as well, including the difficulty of believing reports of horrific slaughter. Even in the face of extensive and graphic media coverage, Power writes, "American policymakers, journalists and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil." In addition, there is a tendency to assume, before the fact, that the would-be perpetrators of genocide are rational actors who will not engage in horrific terror; that traditional diplomacy can resolve the crisis; and that civilians who keep a low profile during the conflict will survive. At the same time, cold geopolitical calculations underlie official reactions, and they often spin the violence as two-sided, a result of age-old hatreds and thus inevitable, while arguing that any type of serious intervention would be futile and even counterproductive. Thus, not only does Washington abstain from sending troops but it also takes very few steps along a continuum of potential interventions to deter genocide.

This nonresponse, Power demonstrates, is not something unique to the presidencies of George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, who emerge looking especially bad. It manifested itself to varying degrees in all the cases she examines, beginning with the Ottoman Turks' slaughter of almost a million Armenians in 1915. The United States under Woodrow Wilson--despite being well informed of Turkey's crimes--did not support the Allies' condemnation of Turkey's crimes against humanity, lest such support undermine American neutrality. Disregarding the pleas of Washington's ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, the Wilson Administration refused even to issue a direct government-to-government appeal to cease the killings or to pressure the Turkish authorities to allow humanitarian aid deliveries to Armenians driven from their homes and on the brink of starvation. For Power, Wilson's nonresponse "established patterns that would be repeated."

But as Power illustrates, it was not simply that the United States did nothing. Often Washington indirectly and directly aided the genocidaires. In Cambodia, for example, the US bombing that preceded Pol Pot's seizure of power "killed tens of thousands of civilians." While horrific in its own right, "it also indirectly helped give rise to a monstrous regime" responsible for the deaths of upwards of an estimated 2 million Cambodians. And in the case of Iraq's slaughter of the Kurds, the Reagan White House dismissed reports of Saddam Hussein's gassings and other atrocities while maintaining aid to his regime, preferring to maintain its unholy alliance with Iraq in its war with Iran. The year after Saddam's forces decimated several thousand Iraqi Kurdish villages and killed close to 100,000 Kurdish civilians (1987-88), Washington, now under Bush Sr., actually doubled the amount of agricultural credit it had been providing to Saddam's regime, increasing it to more than $1 billion.

In other cases, the United States helped to undermine effective international responses to genocide. Perhaps the most shameful case was that involving the Clinton Administration during the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda, which involved the killing of approximately 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the span of 100 days, making it the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century. Clinton, whom Power inexplicably refers to as "a committed multilateralist," one with "faith in the United Nations," did everything he could to avoid doing something constructive. Throughout, and similar to their conduct through much of the Serb-perpetrated atrocities in Bosnia, Administration officials feigned ignorance of what was going on. US intelligence reports had warned Washington of the likelihood of mass killings in Rwanda. Nevertheless, Clinton refused Belgium's request to reinforce the small UN peacekeeping mission to the country. And once the killing started, the Administration denied almost until the end that genocide was taking place, despite full knowledge to the contrary. To do otherwise would have required that Washington take appropriate action. Instead, the Administration insisted that UN peacekeepers withdraw from Rwanda and then refused to authorize the deployment of a stronger UN force. It was not until the Rwandan Patriotic Front had driven most of the perpetrators out of the country and seized power in the capital that Clinton ordered the closing of the Rwandan Embassy in Washington and the seizure of its assets.

In her investigation, Power justifies her choice of case studies by two key criteria: that each meets the terms of the 1948 genocide convention; and that it presented the United States with the options for meaningful diplomatic, economic, legal or military intervention. But as we shall see, it is questionable whether all her cases satisfy the criteria.

In terms of the first, to suggest that what took place in Kosovo was a genocide, or would have been had NATO not intervened, is a highly contentious issue in the international legal and human rights community. As for the Khmer Rouge, while they were guilty of killing large percentages of the country's Muslim Chams, Vietnamese and Buddhist monks, the bulk of their human targets were alleged political enemies. In this regard, these killings would not form part of a genocide, at least through the narrow criteria of the 1948 convention.

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