What we have before us, then, is a co-written work--in effect, a debate between Rieff's interventionist self and his anti-interventionist self. In this very personal back-and-forth, both parties are exceptionally courteous and forbearing. Neither side accuses the other of abetting genocide or promoting futile wars, for example. The errors Rieff acknowledges are few and relatively minor, moreover. But the unresolved disagreement is no less serious for that.

Rieff valiantly presents his inner dissonance as intellectual and moral virtue: "If this book argues for anything, I suppose it is against consistency, against ideology and utopia." This candid admission of incoherence is meant to be, and is, disarming. Nor can we dismiss it as the fruit of laziness or sloppy thinking. It reflects, instead, a genuine moral dilemma.Powerful considerations point simultaneously in contrary directions. Anguished memories of Rwanda make it hard to renounce humanitarian intervention in principle, while sickening reports from Iraq make one hesitate to embrace the idea outright. Rieff's book vividly documents this apparent moral dilemma. That is its most valuable contribution.

On the other hand, his renunciation of consistency, ideology and utopia raises some serious questions, especially concerning his understanding of the origins of the Iraq War. By publicly renouncing utopianism, ideology and dogmatic humanitarianism, he seems to be implying that these factors influenced the calamitous decision to invade Iraq. But is this true? Doesn't Paul Berman, champion of the very idealism that Rieff now scorns, have a more realistic understanding of the influence of intellectuals when he laments the negligible role played by Kouchner's humanitarian considerations in shaping America's Iraq policy?

During the 1990s, according to Rieff, the "human rights revolution" provided "an over-arching moral context for the exercise of power by Western countries." A new international consensus emerged around the idea that "certain conduct by nations within their borders should not be tolerated." What happened, allegedly, was that "half a century of campaigning by human rights activists" had "a profound effect on the conduct of international affairs." Indeed, human rights activism produced nothing less than a "post-Cold War moralization of international politics." The willingness of the West to intervene in Kosovo signaled "a radical change in international affairs." And this was all a direct result of "people's faith in the idea of armed intervention in the name of democracy, human rights, and humanitarian need."

But Rieff's account of a human rights revolution is more fantasy than reality. Not even in the 1990s was the moral duty "to right the world's wrongs" an especially powerful driver of American foreign policy. Rieff is therefore exaggerating when he says, "Human rights became an organizing principle for action in the 1990s the way anticommunism had been throughout the Cold War." During the cold war, anticommunism was virtually America's public philosophy. It was an irresistibly powerful force, reorganizing government, commandeering vast resources, sanctioning brutalities committed by US allies in Africa, Latin America and Asia, and even provoking suppression of domestic dissent. Nothing similar could be said during the 1990s about human rights. The dignity of all people everywhere may have been celebrated from podiums, but in the field human rights were defended only fitfully and selectively. They filled a rhetorical gap but did not mobilize the community the way lethal enmity did during the cold war and has done again during the war on terror. After 9/11 rescue missions became even more of a luxury than before, making it difficult, even impossible, to believe that the Iraq War sprang from a "hypermoralization of international political action."

Did the Kosovo campaign, undertaken outside the UN system to rescue potential victims of genocide, set the table for the invasion of Iraq? To be sure, Republican publicists like William Kristol shrewdly played the genocide card in the run-up to the Iraq War to embarrass antiwar liberals and split the left. But did a utopian desire to rescue the oppressed have any influence on the actual decision to invade Iraq? Does it make sense, when discussing the war party inside the Administration, to speak of the "Carterization" of the American right? The fact that a majority of Republicans strongly opposed an active military role for the United States in the Balkan wars suggests not. Genocide in distant lands, these Republicans argued, had nothing to do with American national security. The existence of a handful of advocates of the Iraq War who had earlier favored the Kosovo campaign, like Paul Wolfowitz, is not decisive here. The questions that must be asked are: Did such thinking have much influence in the inner circles of the Administration? Did Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld lose sleep over Rwanda? Had their closest Republican allies supported the dispatch of American troops to protect Kosovar Albanians on moral grounds? Was their principal objective in toppling Saddam to create a decent society for Iraqis? These questions bear directly on what Rieff considers the central revelation of his book, namely the marriage of the human rights left and the imperialist right. And the answer to every one of them is a resounding no.

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