On Justifying Intervention (Page 4)

About ten years later, the Indonesian Frankenstein that Washington had helped to create decided to invade Indonesia's tiny neighbor of East Timor. Rather than just looking away, as Power incorrectly reports in her one reference to East Timor, Washington aided and abetted an international crime of aggression. While this has long been alleged, the recent release of formerly classified documents by the Washington-based National Security Archive now proves that then-President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, his foreign policy czar, gave Suharto the green light for the December 7, 1975, invasion while meeting with him the previous day. Over the following quarter-century, various US administrations provided billions of dollars in weaponry, military training and economic assistance to Jakarta during its more than two decades of occupation. And in the early years of the slaughter, a time described by an Australian government body as "indiscriminate killing on a scale unprecedented in post-World War II history," Washington took concerted steps to insure that the UN did not take effective action to end Indonesia's annexation. The result was the death of well over 200,000 East Timorese, about one-third of the preinvasion population.

And, finally, Guatemala. There, more than 200,000, most of them indigenous Mayans, lost their lives in the context of a brutal conflict between a US-backed military oligarchy and a guerrilla force during the 1970s and '80s. The 1999 report of the internationally supported Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification concluded that the state was responsible for over 90 percent of the deaths and had committed "acts of genocide." The commission also found that American training of members of Guatemala's intelligence apparatus and officer corps in counterinsurgency "had significant bearing on human rights violations."

Because Samantha Power excludes cases like these from her analysis, she seems to have little problem endorsing American global dominance and, on the basis of such, calling for the United States to take the lead in battling genocide. At the very end of an excellent chapter on the grisly slaughter by Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, for example, Power lets Senator Bob Dole explain why the United States finally became involved in helping to end the terror in Bosnia. "Because we happen to be the leader of the world," Dole stated.

Clearly there is a problem with Washington taking the lead in fighting something it has helped to perpetrate on numerous occasions, and for which it has never atoned, apart from a halfhearted admission of wrongdoing (but not an apology, by Clinton in the case of Guatemala).

Simply because the United States has been complicit in gross atrocities in the past does not mean, of course, that it is therefore incapable of doing good, if even for the wrong reasons. But it does mean that we should remain extremely skeptical of American leadership on the global stage. As the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict painfully demonstrates, what Washington calls American leadership is, as often as not, unilateralist, bullying, obstructionist. All of these manifest themselves in Washington's acceptance of Israel's flouting of international law regarding its ongoing occupation and dispossession of the Palestinian people. The United States has long been a principal obstacle to an internationally acceptable solution, and it has done what it can to prevent a multilateral approach to resolving the conflict. Such antipathy toward international law and political institutions means that "genocide prevention" could turn out to be just another instrument in Washington's empire-maintenance tool kit.

If one of the main objectives of Power's book is to get the United States to take a more active role in ending mass slaughter, surely it would seem to be more efficacious--as well as principled--to begin by scrutinizing cases in which the United States has been directly involved. In this regard, her appeal to the American political establishment on the basis of morality and enlightened self-interest (genocide, she argues, causes regional and international instability, something bad for the United States) is ill conceived. Ending Washington's role in the slaughter of innocents requires struggling against American militarism and unilateralism, as well as against Washington's refusal to submit to international security and legal mechanisms that would have even a remote possibility of holding US officials accountable. The US refusal to sign on to the recently established International Criminal Court and to cooperate with efforts by a number of countries to question Henry Kissinger regarding various international crimes is merely the latest manifestation of such obstructionism.

This is not to suggest that if we could get the American house in order, the world would be fine. As Power's book shows, there are plenty of "evildoers" to go around. Something must be done to stop them, yes, but it should be a truly international project. The best place to start is at home, but not by first and foremost asking Washington to intercede abroad. Demanding a US foreign policy consistent with international law and human rights standards, as well as international accountability for American officials who may have engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity, is the first step. Doing so will also increase the likelihood of international cooperation in cases championed by Washington.

Finally, it is not obvious why mass killing that falls under the rubric of genocide should be paramount in terms of international prevention and adjudication. Power does not claim this explicitly, but it is a fair conclusion to draw given that she does not discuss other terrible crimes against humanity that result in massive loss of life. Why, for example, should Serbian crimes in Bosnia be more worthy of scrutiny and demands for accountability than, say, the US war against Vietnam, which caused the deaths of 2-3 million civilians? In this regard, we must be careful that the need to suppress and seek justice for genocide does not prevent us from seeing all mass killings of civilians, no matter who commits them, as unacceptable, and from acting accordingly.

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