BOOK REVIEW: WHITEWASHING WESTERN INTERVENTION
by Dimitri Oram
Swans, CA
Feb 26 2007
Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell
(Swans – February 26, 2007) Samantha Power, an advocacy journalist,
professor at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, and leading figure
in the Save Darfur movement, is one of the best examples of a crusader
against genocide who has been involved in denying, condoning, or
trivializing US war crimes. Right out of college, Samantha Power began
her career as an intern with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace under
then President Morton Abramowitz, who had quit the State Department
in order to lobby for military intervention in Bosnia. Having been
told that the situation in Bosnia was "genocide," Power went off to
the former Yugoslavia in 1993 where she worked for several years as
a reporter serving up the familiar (if oversimplified and factually
inaccurate) tale of "genocidal" Serbian aggression against Bosnia. As
she tells it, she and her colleagues questioned "how the United
States and its allies might have responded if the same crimes had
been committed in a different place…against different victims…at a
different time" (p. xv) This prompted her to undertake an investigation
of US responses to previous cases of genocide and write her 2002 book,
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a book that
has been widely read and often respectfully reviewed.
The book’s premise is essentially as follows: "We have all been
bystanders to genocide" (xvii), the US government time and again has
failed to exercise its power in order to stop genocide. Power tries
to show over the course of more than 500 pages the US reaction (or
failure to react) to different cases of genocide over the twentieth
century. She begins with the Turkish genocide against the Armenians
during World War I, then moves on to the Holocaust in World War II,
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Iraq’s attacks on the northern Kurds,
Serb atrocities in Bosnia, the Hutu massacres of Tutsi in Rwanda
in 1994, Kosovo and NATO’s "humanitarian" bombing campaign. With
the exception of the Armenian genocide, all the genocides (real and
alleged) to which Power devotes serious attention involve enemies of
the U.S. The genocides in which the U.S. and its client states are
directly implicated (including Vietnam, Iraq after Saddam Hussein
became an enemy, Guatemala, Indonesia, East Timor, El Salvador)
receive only passing mention when discussed at all.
Power’s book has a few good points: She presents an interesting and
sympathetic portrait of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew who coined
the word genocide and played a leading role in getting the Genocide
Convention passed. (To her credit, she does also reproduce the actual
text of the 1948 Genocide Convention on p. 62-63) She notes that the
US government was late to ratify the Genocide Convention, doing so
only in the late 1980s in order to counter domestic criticism stemming
from the President Reagan’s 1985 visit to the Bitburg cemetery in West
Germany, which included the graves of SS soldiers, and his appalling
equation of SS soldiers with concentration camp victims. Even so,
the ratification only passed with added resolutions that made it
essentially inapplicable to the U.S. Power allows enough challenging
of the official line to appear critical of the U.S. government: She
criticizes US failure to help or save the various victims as well as
US support for the Khmer Rouge, Saddam Hussein’s government during the
1980s, and the US role in pushing for withdrawal of UN peacekeepers in
Rwanda. And, of course, she is critical of the U.S. for its failure
to state that "genocide" was occurring in Bosnia and intervene
even sooner.
This may sound like harsh criticism but, in fact, her complaints only
serve to underscore the evil of our current enemies. The true villains
always lie elsewhere and the real trouble is, as she said about the
alleged failure to confront Yugoslav President Milosevic, that "Western
officials … [were/are] engaged in a wishful thinking, failing to
imagine evil and presuming rational actors." The U.S. and the other
First World countries may have done some not so very nice things
in the past but the basic moral supremacy of the West is presumed;
only its refusal to do more about the crimes of others is questioned.
Our Crimes Don’t Count
In order to make her case that the U.S. is derelict in its duty
to stop genocide Ms. Power presents a warped and decontextualized
version of events, relying largely on the say-so of of various
interventionists and hawkish US officials, omitting key facts and
distorting others. Events are reduced to simple tales of bad leaders
who do bad things and need to be stopped or countered by the U.S. and
its allies. As a result of this the reader is left with a wildly flawed
but typically American view of the designated enemy as "irrational" or
"evil," with war or US intervention as a positive thing or at least
the lesser evil. Most disturbing is Power’s refusal to deal honestly
with the crimes of the United States and hold her government to an
equal level of accountability as the various enemy states she decries.
On those occasions when she does mention US crimes it is usually to
downplay them or use them in background to emphasize the greater crimes
of the enemy. She is critical of US conduct during the war on Vietnam,
which she mentions briefly — "American lives were being lost, American
honor was being soiled AND North Vietnam was winning the war." (p. 91,
Power’s emphasis) — and particularly of the bombing of Cambodia, which
she notes killed tens of thousands of people, destroyed Cambodia’s
economy and "did great damage in its own right." (Curiously she never
mentions Laos.) But she never calls US atrocities in Southeast Asia
genocide, or spends much time on them.
Primarily, she writes about the crimes of the Khmer Rouge and US
inaction.
As with the Western media in general she pays far less attention
to the comparable crime of a Western client state occurring at the
same time as the KR rule over Cambodia. She devotes one misleading
sentence to the US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor: "In 1975,
when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-communist Indonesia, invaded
East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United
States looked away." (pp.146-147) But the U.S. did not simply look
away, it supported Indonesia with large amounts of military aid,
blocked UN action and denied atrocities while the "Free Press" put
East Timor in virtual media blackout. (1)
Similarly, Power manages to give the U.S. a war-crimes-free version
of the 1991 Gulf War: "The U.S. bombing of Baghdad began in January
17, 1991. U.S. ground troops routed Iraqi republican guards soon
thereafter." (p. 237) There are no cluster bombs or depleted uranium
or highways of death in this account. The enormous suffering,
death, and damage caused by UN sanctions pushed through, enforced,
and maintained by the U.S. and Britain for over 12 years is not a
subject of discussion anywhere in Power’s book. For Power, like the
neoconservatives, only the US betrayal of Iraq’s Kurds and Shia is
a problem worth dwelling on. Indeed, Ms. Power even does her bit to
present the deeply suffering Iraq as a post-September 11 threat to
the United States:
States that murder and torment their own citizens target citizens
elsewhere. Their appetites become insatiable. Hitler began by
persecuting his own people and then waged war on the rest of Europe
and, in time, the United States. Saddam Hussein wiped out rural Kurdish
life and then turned on Kuwait, sending his genocidal henchman Ali
Hassan al Majid to govern the newly occupied country.
The United States now has reason to fear that the poisonous potions
Hussein tried out on the Kurds will be used next on Americans. (p.
513) If there is any difference between this passage and the rhetoric
of the Bush administration, one is hard pressed to find it. Indeed,
Power and her favored sources mix liberal human rights appeals with
the cold language of US "interests," both of which are supposedly
served by intervening in other countries one way or another, a road
that leads eventually to "bomb[ing] the fuckers" (Richard Holbrooke)
allegedly to prevent atrocities. Naturally, the bad guys are so bad
they deserve it.
Benevolent Atrocities
Certainly this is the way she portrays the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo,
which take up the greatest part of her book. Following the standard
script, which collapses under any serious scrutiny as Diana Johnstone
has shown in her book Fools’ Crusade, (2) she takes all allegations
against the Serbs at face value: Serbs are always the victimizers,
never the victims. Power does reluctantly acknowledge the post-bombing
ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by Albanian extremists (although she ignores
earlier KLA crimes) but attributes it to "revenge" and ignores NATO’s
obligation under international law to protect Kosovo’s Serb, Roma, and
other minority groups. Power actually looks favorably on the largest
ethnic cleansing operation of the Balkan wars, Operation Storm, in
which the Croatian armed forces drove over 200,000 Serbs from the UN
protected areas of Krajina on the eve of a peace agreement: "Croatia’s
success showed that the so-called Serb juggernaut was more of a paper
tiger, a vital piece of news for those who had deferred for years to
alarmist Pentagon warnings of steep US casualties." (p. 438) Ms. Power
does not mention the US support for this operation including training
given to Croatian forces by US private military contractor MPRI or
the US role in blocking a UN resolution condemning the atrocities
then being committed. She hails NATO’s large-scale bombing of the
Bosnian Serbs in 1995 and wholeheartedly supports NATO’s 1999 bombing
campaign against Yugoslavia.
Anyone who was alive at that time and had any access to mainstream
Western media will recognize the cliched, overwrought rhetoric and the
gross apologetics for NATO war crimes: "From his time at the Dayton
peace talks, [NATO general Wesley] Clark was well-acquainted with the
spuriousness of Milosevic’s charm, the prevalence of his lies and
the hardness of his heart" (p. 453); "Given the choice, virtually
every Albanian in Kosovo would have preferred to take his or her
chances with the NATO bombing then business as usual under Milosevic"
(p. 454); "NATO planners were especially sensitive about violations
of international humanitarian law"(p. 457) even though there were
"mistakes" and a number of the targets (i.e., Yugoslavia’s civilian
infrastructure), were "controversial" etc. Walter J. Rockler, a former
Prosecutor at the Nuremburg War crimes trials, whom Samantha Power,
despite her numerous references to the Holocaust and the Nuremburg
Tribunal, never cites, demolishes the NATO PR line:
The attack on Yugoslavia constitutes the most brazen act of
international aggression since the Nazis attacked Poland to prevent
"Polish atrocities" against Germans. The United States has discarded
pretensions to international legality and decency. And embarked
on a course of raw imperialism run amok… In reality, when we the
self-appointed rulers of the planet, issue an ultimatum to another
country it is "surrender or die." To maintain our "credibility" we
must crush any resemblance of resistance to our dictate, to that
country." (3) >>From the US government’s recruitment of leading
Nazi war criminals, to Wesley Clark’s attempt to force a military
showdown with Russian troops, there is a great deal Samantha Power
is not telling us. (4) Given the extensive amount of information
available to those who wish to look, it is not believable that
Ms. Power is unaware of these realities. Her allegedly damning look
at US policy provides cover for a much grimmer reality. Namely, that
the U.S. is itself guilty of acts of genocide and numerous other
horrendous crimes and that US intervention abroad (not US inaction)
has been the cause of enormous suffering and devastation for much
of the world’s population. While numerous writers, researchers, and
activists (including William Blum in his excellent book Killing Hope)
(5) have documented the terrible consequences of US intervention,
Ms. Power is not interested in a similarly full and honest look at
the record. She wants to make a case for further US intervention in
the affairs of other countries and limit examination of the past.
Those interested in a serious reform of US policy and a critical
look at the past would spend time examining the crimes that were
and are undertaken or supported by the U.S. They would not engage in
egregious evasions, accepting all allegations of the enemy’s evil at
face value. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide is an
attempt to obscure the real problem from hell: Western intervention,
undertaken by the U.S. and its various imperial partners and rivals
along with the current global economic system that have led to
destruction, war, genocide, the continual globalization of poverty
combined with ever widening disparities in wealth and an increase in
nationalism, racism, and religious fundamentalism worldwide.
[I will address Power’s work on Rwanda, which serves primarily to mask
the crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its Western backers,
in a separate article.]
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Notes
1. On East Timor see among other sources Noam Chomsky and Edward
Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, South End
Press, 1979, pp. 129-204. (back)
2. Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade, Pluto Press, 2002. See
reviews here:
her e and here:
(back)
3. The Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1999
erg.html (back)
4. Among other sources see Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond
Beast (Grove Press, 1993) and Blowback: America’s Recruitment of
Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988).
On Wesley Clark’s attempt to provoke a confrontation with
Russian troops at Pristina airport, an action vetoed by NATO
General Sir Michael Jackson who stated, "I’m not going to start
World War III for your sake," see The Guardian, August 2, 1999:
,,20 8120,00.html
Clark earned the disapproval of the Pentagon and his dismissal for
this kind of hawkishness rather than Power’s claim that "favoring
humanitarian intervention had never been a great career move." (p.
473) (back)
5. William Blum, Killing Hope, Common Courage Press, 1995. (back)
Internal Resources
Book Reviews
The Balkans and Yugoslavia
About the Author
Dimitri Oram is a writer and researcher based in Western
Massachusetts. He was born and raised in Northampton and graduated from
the University of Massachusetts in 2000. He woke up to the realities
of the US Global Empire back in 1999 during the NATO bombing campaign
against Serbia.
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