"A Problem from Hell" America and the Age of Genocide By Samantha Power. Basic Books, 610 pages, $30.00
Early in 1942 Jan Karski, a young Polish diplomat,smuggled himself into the Warsaw ghetto, where he witnessed Nazi atrocities inprogress. He saw mass graves, starving children, and the killing of Jews in broaddaylight. He then made his way to Belzec, a death camp near Poland's border withUkraine. When he escaped later that year, he carried miniature microfilmdocuments describing the horrors he had seen. Karski, a Roman Catholic, joinedinternational efforts to spread news of what was taking place -- to get the restof the world to "believe the unbelievable," as one urgent telegram put it.Traveling to the United States, Karski managed to get a meeting with SupremeCourt Justice Felix Frankfurter, who responded to his eyewitness accounts bysaying, "I don't believe you." He then clarified: "I do not mean that you arelying. I simply said I cannot believe you."
This became the position of the U.S. State Department, which notedthat it had information about concentration camps but "no ability to confirm thereports." As the war dragged on and the evidence became harder to ignore, theUnited States still did too little, refusing to bomb railway tracks leading tothe death camps lest this move "provoke even more vindictive action by theGermans." It was not until the end of the war that skeptics were forced tobelieve the unbelievable. The United States and its allies resolutely declaredthat the Nazis' crime -- for which a new name, "genocide," emerged -- would neverhappen again.
The searing conclusion of "A Problem from Hell" is that the simplicity of "never again" is matched only by the consistency with which this promise has been abandoned by the United States. Samantha Power argues that the disbelief, obfuscation, and inaction that characterized the American response to the Holocaust is part of a pattern that existed before World War II and that has repeated itself with alarming regularity since.
Power's compelling account of the genocides of the twentieth century beginswith the slaughter of the Armenians in Turkey during World War I. Despitewarnings about what was happening, this time from the American ambassador inTurkey, the U.S. government looked the other way, in a manner prefiguring theresponse to nearly every subsequent instance of mass killing. The book thenfocuses on the sometimes quixotic Raphael Lemkin, a Polish refugee andinternational lawyer who coined the term genocide to describe the attempteddestruction of a people and their culture. Beginning in the 1930s, Lemkin laboredfor years, alone and uncompensated, to secure the passage of an international lawoutlawing genocide, which the United Nations finally adopted in 1948. But theUnited States was not one of the countries that signed the resolution, and Powerchronicles the efforts of Senator William Proxmire over nearly 20 years topersuade the United States to ratify the treaty. The rest of her work examinesthe major postwar genocides -- in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda, as well asthe sole instance of an early intervention against genocide, in Kosovo.
The case studies of genocide are the core of the book. It is in theseretellings that Power's argument comes through most forcefully. While thenarratives tell us little that is new about what happened on the ground --indeed, her accounts draw primarily on an exhaustive trawling of published mediareports -- she puts the reporting skills she honed as a correspondent in Bosniato excellent use in unveiling what American officials did while the killingsraged. Her studies are extended answers to the questions, "What did the U.S.government know, and when did it know it?" And the results are not pretty.
Power does give some credence to the claim that policy makers often did notunderstand that genocide was occurring. A depressing but nevertheless fascinatingtheme in "A Problem from Hell" is the failure of imagination that outsiders and even victims display in reckoning with evil. One might understand how Frankfurter could tell Karski that he could not conceive of Nazi atrocities, but how to explain such reluctance in the decades after the Holocaust? U.S. officials have time and again taken at their word despots who deny genocide is happening. Slobodan Milosevic's polish and apparent reasonableness as he claimed not to know of massacres by Serbs charmed numerous Western emissaries. And when survivors managed to get out and tell stories of their suffering, the reports were discounted as uncorroborated or exaggerated. For most people, genocide is simply an abstraction, merely a word that is thrown about, and so they are unprepared to believe it when they hear of it. Only such an utter lack of comprehension could allow a U.S. State Department official to say that "these people do this from time to time" at the start of the Rwandan genocide.
Most often, though, U.S. officials at some level have known about masskillings. During the Serb advance in Bosnia, State Department desk officers andCIA analysts not only documented in overwhelming detail the aims and methods ofSerb paramilitaries, but even predicted massacres before they happened. Yetsenior officials strove to stay uninvolved, initially only issuing appeals for"both sides" to reduce the violence. Power recounts internal debates about whythe United States would not invoke what came to be known as the "g-word."Elaborate exchanges took place on Capitol Hill in which State Departmentofficials spoke of "acts tantamount to genocide" in response to persistentquestioning by members of Congress.
The dissembling was motivated in part by a fear that admitting the occurrenceof genocide would force the United States to actually do something. This fear ofgetting involved manifested itself in Rwanda, where the U.S. government refusedto jam radio signals broadcasting the names and addresses of Tutsi citizens tothe murdering Hutu mobs. Moreover, the United States insisted on reducing thepeacekeeping force already there and prevented other countries from sendingtroops -- all out of a concern that any problems with another nation'sintervention could drag the United States into the conflict. In short, Powercastigates the American government for its unwillingness to take even the mostelementary steps -- far short of military action -- to try to stop genocide.
At the end of Power's narrative, the reader is left wondering, what can we do?The author has produced a towering history of the inadequacy of Americanresponses to genocide, one with which all further studies of the subject willhave to contend. It is a troubling story not just for its description of repeatedfailure, but also because it offers precious little guidance as to how Americacan break this dismal cycle. This, of course, is the hardest question of all, andanswering it could easily fill another book. But Power's slim concluding sectionreveals how difficult it is even to begin. She acknowledges that Americanpoliticians do not demand a halt to genocide because there is no domesticpolitical cost for allowing it to occur. This should come as no surprise. Indeed,a foreignpolicy "realist" may be tempted to say that the question is not whyAmerica hasn't stopped genocide, but why it ever would. Such realism is perhapstoo clever by half, because, as Power argues, the United States affords a uniqueimportance to values in its foreign policy and "because we happen to be theleader of the world," in the words of Bob Dole, no starry-eyed liberal. America'sideological self-conception and its immense power create an expectation bothamong its own citizens and around the world that it will act to stop the gravestassaults on humanity.
But even on Power's own terms the direction for action isunclear. Her goal is to raise the domestic political price for U.S. leaders whofail to stand against genocide. She notes that America finally moved in Bosniawhen President Clinton -- hounded by Dole and others for his inaction -- grewuneasy over dropping approval ratings. Yet can public pressure be counted on? Incontemporary American politics there are no natural constituencies that willstand up for distant strangers. Power points to the role that nongovernmentalorganizations and the press can play in raising public consciousness, but noobvious strategy emerges for translating outrage into action. The challenge is tomake genocide real for the American public. Power's own work is an importantcontribution to that effort, and deserves a wide reading for that reason alone.But ultimately it is hard to see how things can change when the political costsare in fact so low for ignoring genocide, and potentially so high forintervening.
Power does not concede that intervention necessarily means the loss ofAmerican lives. She is entirely correct to excoriate the U.S. government fordancing around the term genocide and for refusing to issue simple condemnationsof mass slaughter. And she is right to say that there are nonmilitary actionsthat America could take to try to give pause to murderers -- the United Statescould have frozen Serbian foreign assets or jammed Hutu hate radio, for example.But when full-scale efforts are under way to eliminate an ethnic group, it isdifficult to imagine any successful intervention short of military action.
Power suggests that genocide can often be stopped militarily at relativelylittle cost. That argument, however, hinges on the definitions of "relatively,""little," and "cost." A hotly and legitimately contested question is how manysoldiers the United States can -- and should -- be expected to sacrifice to savepotentially thousands of Rwandans or Bosnians or Kurds. Power, for instance,feels that the U.S. campaign in Kosovo was less effective than it could have beenbecause of its insistence on zero casualties, but there is no indication of howthis priority could shift; indeed, Osama bin Laden may have escaped fromAfghanistan precisely because of worries about losing ground troops. Chroniclersof recent military interventions, such as William Shawcross in Deliver Us fromEvil, have shown them to be a messy, bloody business. We must therefore take seriously Shawcross's warning that the first step to effective action is for Western political leaders to tell their publics honestly that intervention cannot be painless.
It may not be long before they are again called on to do so. One of the mostchilling observations in "A Problem from Hell" was made by Lemkin, who pointed out that mass killing takes place with "biological regularity." Genocide will happen again. What, if anything, the United States will do remains unclear. Samantha Power's book, however, at least makes it harder for us to fool ourselves when the killing begins.
