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Five ‘problems from hell’

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

She pays particular attention to the role of politicians from both parties and government officials who strongly opposed State Department stances on humanitarian grounds.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, 1915
Henry Morganthau Sr., the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the outset of World War I, briefed his government in increasingly desperate cables about what he called the “race murder” of Armenians by the Turks. The Turkish onslaught was widely reported on as it was happening. The New York Times, whose publisher, Adolph Ochs, was a friend of Morganthau, ran 145 stories on the subject in 1915. In October, a Times headline read: “800,000 Armenians counted destroyed.” In early 1916, Morganthau resigned in despair, unable to use America’s moral authority to save lives.
President Theodore Roosevelt, a proponent of aid to the Armenians and more generally of entry into the Great War, condemned those who believed in the “safety first” motto, which “could be appropriately used by the men on a sinking steamer who jump into boats ahead of the women and children.”
The U.S. never condemned the destruction of the Armenians and maintained diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire even after America entered the war against Germany. Eventually, Turkey cut ties with the U.S.

CAMBODIA, 1975-78
When Sen. George McGovern, the South Dakota Democrat, called in 1978 for American intervention against Pol Pot’s government, he was roundly condemned. The Wall Street Journal called the position of the Democratic Party’s 1972 anti-war presidential candidate “truly mind-boggling.”
At hearings, the senator said, “One would think that the international community would at least be considering the possibility of intervening in what seems to be a clear case of genocide.”
McGovern later that year supported Communist Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and the removal of the Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. America’s policy, however, was to continue to favor the Khmer Rouge, even after the full horror of its genocide was known.
On this issue, Power writes: “In choosing between a genocidal state and a country hostile to the United States, the Carter administration chose what it thought to be the lesser evil, though there could not have been a greater one.”

IRAQ, 1988
For Power, in the annals of 20th century genocide, America’s darkest hour morally was the administration’s active support for Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship at the height of its war of destruction against the Kurds.
She writes: “Despite its recent ratification of the genocide convention, when the opportunity arose for the United States to send a strong message that genocide would not be tolerated — that the destruction of Iraq’s rural population would have to stop — special interests, economic profit, and a geopolitical tilt toward Iraq thwarted humanitarian concerns. The Reagan administration punted on genocide, and the Kurds (and later the United States) paid the price.”
The Iraqi dictator first used banned weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilians, with little protest from the West. “Nothing in U.S. behavior signaled Hussein that he should think twice about now attempting to wipe out the Kurds using whatever means he chose,” Power said.
The American hero, for Power, in this episode is Peter Galbraith, the son of economist John Kenneth Galbraith and a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who investigated at firsthand the plight of the Iraqi Kurds.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan praised Galbraith on the floor on the Senate, noting it was almost unknown for politicians to mention staffers. “This is no dereliction on our part,” the New York Democrat said. “It is simply that in two and more centuries we have not seen the likes of young Galbraith: the indifference to his own welfare and safety; the all-consuming concern for the welfare and safety of an oppressed people caught up in a ghastly travail.”

BOSNIA, 1992-95
In August 1992, George Kenney, the acting Yugoslav desk officer, did something highly unusual for a career State Department official — he resigned. He was a supporter of U.S. military intervention to prevent genocide in Bosnia. The following year Marshall Harris, the Bosnia desk officer, wrote to Warren Christopher, saying: “I can no longer serve in a Department of State that accepts the forceful dismemberment of a European state and that will not act against genocide and the Serbian officials who perpetrate it.” Another official said he could not sleep nights after reading accounts of fathers forced to castrate sons, and vice versa, and parents made to watch preteen daughters being raped.
The resignations were part of what Power calls “the most bitter cleft within the U.S. government since the Vietnam War.”
The first President Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, said: “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” The Clinton administration described the violence as a civil war based on ancient enmities. For others, though, this was clearly an international issue and the Bosnian Muslims had to be protected.
If the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was signed in 1948 for anything, then this was it. American Jewish leaders and Holocaust survivors were among those who argued strongly for military intervention.
However, over a 3 1/2-year period, the United States, Europe and the United Nations “stood by,” in Power’s phrase, while 200,000 Bosnians were killed and 2 million were displaced.

RWANDA, 1994
In the three months during which Rwandan Tutsis were being killed at a rate of 8,000 per day, President Clinton’s top advisors did not discuss the genocide.
Power writes that, back in Rwanda, “If the major powers had reconfigured the 1,000-man European evacuation force and the 300 U.S. Marines on standby in Burundi and contributed them to [Major General Romeo] Dallaire’s mission, he would finally have had the numbers to stage rescue operations and to confront the killers.”
Dallaire, the Canadian head of the UN peacekeepers, tells Power: “Mass slaughter was happening, and suddenly here in Kigali we had the forces to contain it, and maybe even stop it. Yet they picked up their people and turned and walked away.”
One U.S. army officer told Dallaire they had done calculations to the effect that “one American casualty is worth about 85,000 Rwandan dead.”
On a visit to Rwanda in 1998, Clinton said: “We in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred.”
(” ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide,” by Samantha Power, is published in paperback by Harper Collins. 620 pp., $17.95.)

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