Samantha Power and the weaponization of human rights
By Chase Madar
September 01,2009
American liberals rejoiced at Samantha Power’s appointment to the
National Security Council. After so many dreary Clintonites were
stacked into top State Department positions – Dennis Ross, Richard
Holbrooke, Hillary herself – here was new blood: a dynamic idealist, an
inspiring public intellectual, a bestselling author of a book against
genocide, a professor at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights. And
she hasn’t even turned 40. The blogosphere buzzed. Surely Samantha
Power was the paladin, the conscience, the senior director for
multilateral affairs to bring human rights back into U.S. foreign
policy.
Don’t count on it. `Human rights,’ a term once coterminous with
freeing prisoners of conscience and documenting crimes against
humanity, has taken on a broader, more conflicted definition. It can
now mean helping the Marine Corps formulate counterinsurgency
techniques; pounding the drums for air strikes (of a strictly surgical
nature, of course); lobbying for troop escalations in various
conquered nations – all for noble humanitarian ends.
The intellectual career of Samantha Power is a richly instructive
example of the weaponization of human rights. She made her name in
2002 with A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. In
this surprise global bestseller, she argues that when confronted with
20th-century genocides, the United States sat on the sidelines as the
blood flowed. Look at Bosnia or Rwanda. `Why does the US stand so idly
by?’ she asks. Powers allows that overall America `has made modest
progress in its responses to genocide.’ That’s not good enough. We
must be bolder in deploying our armed forces to prevent human-rights
catastrophes – to engage in `humanitarian intervention’ in the patois of
our foreign-policy elite.
In nearly 600 pages of text, Power barely mentions those postwar
genocides in which the U.S. government, far from sitting idle, took a
robust role in the slaughter. Indonesia’s genocidal conquest of East
Timor, for instance, expressly green-lighted by President Ford and
Secretary of State Kissinger, who met with Suharto the night before
the invasion was launched and carried out with American-supplied
weapons. Over the next quarter century, the Indonesian army saw U.S.
military aid and training rise as it killed between 100,000 and
200,000 East Timorese. (The figures and the designation of `genocide’
come from a UN-formed investigative body.) This whole bloody business
gets exactly one sentence in Power’s book.
What about the genocide of Mayan peasants in Guatemala – another
decades-long massacre carried out with American armaments by a
military dictatorship with tacit U.S. backing, officer training at
Fort Benning, and covert CIA support? A truth commission sponsored by
the Catholic Church and the UN designated this programmatic slaughter
genocide and set the death toll at approximately 200,000. But
apparently this isn’t a problem from hell.
The selective omissions compound. Not a word about the CIA’s role in
facilitating the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian
Communists in 1965-66. (Perhaps on legalistic grounds: Since it was a
political group being massacred, does it not meet the quirky criteria
in the flawed UN Convention on Genocide?) Nothing about the vital
debate as to whether the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths
attributable to U.S.-led economic sanctions in the 1990s count as
genocide. The book is primarily a vigorous act of historical
cleansing. Its portrait of a `consistent policy of non-intervention in
the face of genocide’ is fiction. (Those who think that pointing out
Power’s deliberate blind spots about America’s active role in genocide
is nitpicking should remember that every moral tradition the earth has
known, from the Babylonian Talmud to St. Thomas Aquinas, sees sins of
commission as far worse than sins of omission.)
Power’s willful historical ignorance is the inevitable product of her
professional milieu: the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of Government. One simply cannot hold down a job at the
KSG by pointing out the active role of the U.S. government in various
postwar genocides. That is the kind of impolitic whining best left to
youthful anarchists like Andrew Bacevich or Noam Chomsky and, really,
one wouldn’t want to offend the retired Guatemalan colonel down the
hall. (The KSG has an abiding tradition of taking on war criminals as
visiting fellows.) On the other hand, to cast the U.S. as a passive,
benign giant that must assume its rightful role on the world stage by
vanquishing evil – this is most flattering to American amour propre and
consonant with attitudes in Washington, even if it doesn’t map onto
reality. A country doesn’t acquire a vast network of military bases in
dozens of sovereign nations across the world by standing on the
sidelines, and for the past hundred years the U.S. has, by any
standard, been a hyperactive world presence.
For Samantha Power, the United States can by its very nature only be a
force for virtue abroad. In this sense, the outlook of Obama’s
human-rights advocate is no different from Donald Rumsfeld’s.
Power’s faith in the therapeutic possibilities of military force was
formed by her experience as a correspondent in the Balkans, whose wars
throughout the ’90s she seems to view as the alpha and omega of ethnic
conflict, indeed of all genocide. For her, NATO’s bombing of Belgrade
in 1999 was a stunning success that `likely saved hundreds of
thousands of lives’ in Kosovo. Yet this assertion seems to crumble a
little more each year: estimates of the number of Kosovars slain by
the province’s Serb minority have shrunk from 100,000 to at most
5,000. And it is far from clear whether NATO’s air strikes prevented
more killing or intensified the bloodshed. Even so, it is the NATO
attack on Belgrade – including civilian targets, which Amnesty
International has recently, belatedly, deemed a war crime – that informs
Power’s belief that the U.S. military possesses nearly unlimited
capability to save civilians by means of aerial bombardment, and all
we need is the courage to launch the sorties. Power has recently
admitted, perhaps a little ruefully, that `the Kosovo war helped build
support for the invasion of Iraq by contributing to the false
impression that the US military was invincible.’ But no intellectual
has worked harder than Samantha Power to propagate this impression.
A Problem From Hell won a Pulitzer in early 2003. America’s book
reviewers, eager to be team players, were relieved to be reminded of
the upbeat side of military force during the build-up to Operation
Iraqi Freedom. Surely Saddam Hussein, who had perpetrated acts of
genocide against the Kurds, needed to be smashed by military force.
Didn’t we owe it to the Iraqis to invade? Hasn’t America played
spectator for too long? Power, to her credit, did not support the war,
but she has been mighty careful not to raise her voice against it.
After all, is speaking out at an antiwar demonstration or joining a
peace group like Code Pink really `constructive’? It is certainly no
way to get a seat on the National Security Council.
The failed marriage of warfare and humanitarian work is also the
subject of Power’s most recent book, Chasing the Flame, a biography of
Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN humanitarian worker who was killed,
with 21 others, by a suicide bomber in Baghdad just months after the
U.S. invasion. Most of the book is a sensitive and rather gripping
account of Vieira’s partial successes and heroic efforts in refugee
resettlement in Thailand, Lebanon, and the Balkans. He eventually rose
to become the UN’s high commissioner on human rights – a position he
left when asked by George W. Bush to lead a UN `presence’ in Iraq.
That the UN’s top human-rights official would rush to help with the
clean-up after an American invasion that contravened international law
may strike some observers as strange. (One can imagine the puzzlement
and outrage if the UN’s high commissioner on human rights had trailed
the Soviets into Afghanistan in 1979 to help build civil society.) But
for Vieira, and for Samantha Power, there is nothing unseemly about
human-rights professionals serving as adjuncts to a conquering army,
especially when the prestige of the UN – scorned and flouted during the
run-up to the war – is on the line. Besides, Vieira had the personal
assurances of the U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer – a simply charming
American: he even speaks a foreign language – that the UN taskforce
would have a great deal of sway in how a new Iraq was built.
In June 2003, Vieira arrived in Baghdad and was surprised to find
himself completely powerless. That Vieira and company believed the UN
insignia would be more than a hood ornament on Blackwater’s Humvees
bespeaks not tough-minded idealism but wishful thinking. Power herself
claims that Kofi Annan’s main reason for sending Vieira off to Baghdad
was to remind the world of the UN’s `relevance’ by getting a piece of
the action. But for him and his colleagues, this confusion of means
and ends proved deadly, one of tens of thousands of blood-soaked
tragedies that this war has wrought. The clear lesson is that
humanitarian work is always fatally compromised if it’s part of a
militarized pacification campaign: NGO workers wield no real power and
serve mostly as window dressing for the conquering army.
But this isn’t the moral that Power draws. She is still looking for
Mr. Good War. Today, her preferred human-rights adventure is an
escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
For the past seven years Afghanistan has been the `right’ war for
American liberals, but this carte blanche is fast expiring, as more
civilians and soldiers die, as the Taliban resurges, and as the
carnage whirlwinds into Pakistan. The numerous humanitarian nonprofits
in Afghanistan are no longer backed up by the military; it is they who
are backing the armed forces, having morphed into helpmeets to a
counterinsurgency campaign. This transformation has, according to one
knowledgeable veteran of such work in Afghanistan, rendered
humanitarian work unsustainable. But Power, like so many American
liberals, remains committed to `success’ in Afghanistan – whatever that
means.
As a human-rights entrepreneur who is also a tireless advocate of war,
Samantha Power is not aberrant. Elite factions of the human-rights
industry were long ago normalized within the tightly corseted spectrum
of American foreign policy. Sarah Sewell, the recent head of the Carr
Center for Human Rights at Harvard, has written a slavering
introduction to the new Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field
Manual: human-rights tools can help the U.S. armed forces run better
pacification campaigns in conquered territory. The Save Darfur
campaign, more organized than any bloc of the peace movement in the
U.S., continues to call for some inchoate military strike against
Sudan (with Power’s vocal support) even though this disaster’s
genocide status is doubtful and despite an expert consensus that
bombing Khartoum would do less than nothing for the suffering
refugees. Meanwhile, the influential liberal think tank the Center for
American Progress also appeals to human rights in its call for troop
escalations in Afghanistan – the better to `engage’ the enemy.
Nor is the imperialist current within the human-rights industry a
purely American phenomenon: the conquest of Iraq found whooping
proponents in Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins Sans Frontières,
now Sarkozy’s foreign minister, and Michael Ignatieff, also a former
head of the Harvard’s Carr Center and poised to become Canada’s next
prime minister. Gareth Evans, Australia’s former foreign minister and
a grinning soft-peddler of Indonesia’s massacres in East Timor, is
perhaps the leading intellectual proponent of the Responsibility to
Protect, or R2P as it is cutely called, an attempt to embed
humanitarian intervention into international law. Evans, who recently
stepped down from leading the International Crisis Group, laments the
Iraq War chiefly for the way it has soiled the credibility of his pet
idea.
To be sure, the human-rights industry is not all armed missionaries
and laptop bombardiers. Human Rights Watch, for example, is one of few
prestigious institutions in the U.S. to have criticized Israel’s
assault on Gaza, for which its Middle East and North Africa division
has endured much bashing not just from right-wing media but from its
own board of directors. That said, HRW’s rebuke was limited to
Israel’s manner of making war, rather than Israel’s decision to launch
the attack in the first place – the jus in bello, not the jus ad bellum.
Human-rights organizations can do a splendid job of exposing and
criticizing abuses, but they are constitutionally incapable of taking
stands on larger political issues. No major human-rights NGO opposed
the invasion of Iraq. With their legitimacy and funding dependent on a
carefully cultivated perception of neutrality, human-rights nonprofits
will never be any substitute for an explicitly anti-imperialist
political force. In the meantime, America’s best and brightest will
continue to explore innovative ways for human rights to serve a
thoroughly militarized foreign policy.
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Chase Madar is a civil-rights lawyer in New York.
From: A. Papazian
http://amconmag.com/article/2009/sep/01/00028/