The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 11 | Issue 24 | Number 1 | Article ID 4132 | Jun 16, 2013

1

The Responsibility of Intellectuals Redux: HumanitarianIntervention and the Liberal Embrace of War in the Age ofClinton, Bush and Obama 改めて知識人の責任を問う　クリントン、ブッシュ、オバマの時代における人道的介入とリベラル派の戦争承認

Jeremy Kuzmarov

In a New York Times op-ed following thepublic’s rejection of president Barack Obama’scall for air strikes on Syria, Michael Ignatieff, aprofessor at the Harvard Kennedy School andformer leader of the Canadian liberal party,sought to reaffirm the doctrine of humanitarianintervention, stating that while the public hadbecome weary over the failure of wars in Iraq,Afghanistan and Libya, Western democracieshad a responsibility to protect civilians whenthey are threatened with mass killing. In hisview, the use or threat of force may be “illegalbut legitimate,” and the US sometimes needs to“ g o a t i t a l o n e t o s t o p a t r o c i t ycrimes…..Rebuilding popular democraticsupport for the idea of our duty to protectcivilians when no one else can or will,” thusrepresents “a critical challenge in the yearsahead.”1

Samantha Power at the United Nations

With colleagues such as Nicholas Kristof of theNew York Times and Samantha Power, USambassador to the UN and author of the book,“A Problem From Hell,” which criticizes the USfor failing to intervene historically to haltgenocide, Ignatieff has for years been aninfluential liberal intellectual championingmilitary intervention on humanitarian grounds.He and his associates in the “cruise missileleft,” as Edward S. Herman labeled them, haveo f ten been more hawkish than neo -conservatives, championing wars in Libya,Syria and initially Iraq as well as escalation inAfghanistan-Pakistan. In their race to “protect,”they seem oblivious to the mass killing thatinevitably accompanies each of theseinterventions. Their analysis is deeply flawedfurthermore in that it grossly oversimplifies thenature of international conflicts, alwayspainting one side (the US side) as good and theother evil. They ignore the legacy of colonialismand the structural and economic variablesunderlying Western military interventionthroughout history, including desire to accessmilitary bases and raw materials and toundercut challenges to Western hegemony.They also ignore US and Western complicity inmajor human rights violations through armssales, and military and police trainingprograms.

This essay seeks to critically scrutinize thedoctrine of humanitarian intervention,

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

2

discussing how Ignatieff and colleaguesseeking a useable past distorted history andserved a useful function for what C. WrightMills termed the “power elite” by allowingthem to appropriate a human rights rhetoricthat in the 1960s was adopted by liberalantiwar activists to condemn Americaaggression in Vietnam.2 Replicating the roleplayed by their predecessors in World War I,liberal interventionists helped to save the USmilitary-industrial complex from oblivion bybuilding public consensus for dubious militaryinterventions that Ignatieff now lamentsthreaten to reinvigorate the pacifist andisolationist sentiments of the 1930s.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In 1917, Randolph Bourne penned a critique ofprogressive intellectuals including his mentorJohn Dewey who had aligned with the country’sworst reactionaries in supporting USinvolvement in World War I. Applying theinsights of Sigmund Freud, Bourne analyzedhow support for the war brought a primitivekind of psychological gratification and gavethese intellectuals a feeling of purpose andconnection to power. They were naïve in theirbelief that violence could be controlled andcould lead to democratic outcomes, accepting“with little question, the ends as announcedfrom above.”3

Fifty years later, in another landmark essay,“The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” NoamChomsky invoked Bourne’s insights in pointingto the complicity of liberal social scientists withthe crimes against humanity committed by theUnited States in Vietnam. The responsibility ofintellectuals, Chomsky wrote, was to “speaktruth to power” but these intellectualmandarins, among them Samuel Huntington ofHarvard, were doing just the opposite, as theyundertook studies, often funded by thegovernment, designed to improve managementof the war and assist in population control and

counter-insurgency efforts. Under the guise ofobjectivity, their writings furthermore providedideological support for America’s drive forhegemony in the Asia Pacific and the counter-revolutionary bloodbaths that accompanied it.4

In the 1990s, Chomsky published a follow-upbook called A New Generation Draws the Line,which took aim at a new generation ofintellectual mandarins who now sought toprovide rationalization for the persistence ofthe permanent warfare state following the endof the Cold War. Motivated in part by the samekinds of psychological drives and access topower described by Bourne, the newgeneration, writing in The New York Review ofBooks and other liberal establishment journals,helped to uphold the myth of American self-righteousness and good intentions in foreignaffairs, calling for the necessity of militaryintervention in trouble spots around the worldto halt human rights violations and genocide.

Chomsky asks a simple question in his book –why did the liberal intelligentsia fixate on thecrimes of Slobodan Milosevic when the UnitedStates was abetting parallel or worse atrocitiesin Turkey, where the US supplied 80 percent ofthe arms used to crush Kurdish rebels,Colombia, and East Timor, whose people werebeing slaughtered by the Indonesian military.The answer for Chomsky was simple – theseintellectuals were ideologists not interestedprimarily in truth but illusory access to power,which could be obtained by focusing on thevictims of American government enemies, andnot allies, and by embracing the state religionthat the US role in the world was benign and itsintentions well meaning.5

Ignatieff and Samantha Power, both formerly ofthe Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’sKennedy School, fit right into Chomsky’scritique. They were influential in championingthe doctrine of humanitarian interventionwhich argued, in an updating of the “whiteman’s burden,” that the United States as the

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

3

dominant global power had the responsibility toprotect civilians from oppressive governments’and that this imperative trumped the bedrockof international law mandating the protectionof state sovereignty. Resolution 688 of the UNcharter, which passed on April 5, 1991, hadcondemned the repression of the Iraqipopulation, including the Kurds by SaddamHussein after the f irst Gulf War, theconsequences of which were said to threateninternational peace. The UN charter in turnallowed the Security Council to take measuresin response to threats to peace, a reversal ofthe previous standard that the internal affairsof a nation were inviolable.6

Although the majority of US interventions werestill subsequently carried out extra-legally, theresolution provided a basis for supporting“humanitarian intervention” in an era followingthe collapse of the Soviet Union where therewas no countervailing superpower and whereneoconservatives were calling for full-spectrummilitary dominance including over outer space.7

“Humanitarian intervention” was first advancedunder Operation Provide Comfort, where UNtroops pushed the Iraqi army out of Kurdishterritory and helped to ensure the safe passageof refugees, and then in Somalia to help extendfamine relief, though the latter culminated inthe infamous Black Hawk down incident whereUS soldiers were ambushed and their bodiesdragged through the streets by clan fighters.8

In a 1999 address to the UN General Assembly,Secretary-General Kofi Annan spoke of thefailure of the UN to subsequently stop large-scale killings in Kosovo and Rwanda, notingthat “if humanitarian intervention is indeed anunacceptable assault on sovereignty…..howshould we respond to gross and systematicviolations of human rights that offend everyprecept of our common humanity?”

In 2001, the government of Canada establishedan International Commission on Interventionand State Sovereignty (ICISS), which drafted areport co-authored by Ignatieff calling on the

international community to protect vulnerablepopulations from human rights abuses andgenocide through force.9 The Responsibility toProtect (R2P) was codified in a 2005 UNresolution supported by George W. Bush, andhas been used to justify repeated militaryinterventions at a time when the United Stateshas established what military intellectual JohnNagl called an “industrial scale counter-terrorism killing machine” in over 100countries, with the ICISS supporting the Waron Terror.10

In the abstract, R2P`s goal of protectingvulnerable populations is a noble one,accompanied by efforts to establish aframework for prosecuting human rightsoffenders through the International CriminalCourt (ICC) and to promote post-conflictreconciliation.11 The ICISS report is deeplyflawed, however, in failing to consider globaleconomic inequalities and Western interventionas a source of “failed states.”12 There are nosafeguards, furthermore, against the dominantpowers using humanitarian pretexts to trampleon the sovereignty of weaker states and toapply R2P`s standards selectively in theirinterest. Ramesh Thakur of the ICISSacknowledged that for many non-westernpeople, “[humanitarian intervention] conjureshistorical memories of the strong imposingtheir will on the weak in the name of spreadingChristianity to the cultivation and promotion ofhuman rights.”13

Both Ignatieff and Samantha Power, as USambassador to the UN, invoked R2P inpromoting air strikes against Syria aftercharging President Bashar al-Assad with

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

4

deploying chemical weapons “and poisoningover 1,000 men, women and children withchemical agents, some in their sleep,” as Powerclaimed before the UN.1 4 When Britishintelligence obtained a sample of Sarin gasused in the August 21 s t attack, analysisdemonstrated, however, that the gas useddidn’t match the batches known to exist in theSyrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal.Actual exposure to Sarin appears to have beenminimal or non-existent for 31 of the 36 peoplesampled (88%) in a UN probe.15 These factsepitomize how R2P has been used to championwars based on deception in a country longtargeted for regime change by imperialplanners seeking to remake the Middle East.16

In making the case for attacking Syria, Ignatieffand Power disregarded the brutality of the al-Qaeda affiliated Free Syrian Army (FSA), whichhas carried out torture, assassinations andcivilian massacres.17 Far from being neutral,the US, with the Saudis and other allies,covertly armed and trained the FSA, giving atleast some credence to President Assad’scharacterizat ion of i t as a “terroristorganization backed by foreign powers.”18 TheSyrian conflict fits a pattern in whichproponents of R2P make it seem like one side isevil and the other is comprised of saintlyvictims crying out for foreign support, whenboth sides have their hands dirty. And ratherthan being reluctant bystanders, the US and itsallies often play an important role behind thescenes in fomenting conflict and backing majoratrocities, using a human rights rhetoric to sellruthless intervention and to consolidate thepermanent warfare state.19

In only a few cases in recent history have warsled to humanitarian outcomes, notably theallied-Russian liberation of Europe fromNazism, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodiaterminating Pol Pot’s atrocities, and Tanzania’sinvasion of Uganda ending Idi Amin’s rule. NewYork Times columnist Nicholas Kristofpredicted in September 2001 that “our invasion

of Afghanistan may end up saving one millionlives over the next decade,” and that “troopscan advance humanitarian goals just as muchas doctors or aid workers.” The reality howeverhas been different, with US forces and theirproxies responsible for “cowboy-like excessiveforce” in night-time raids, civilian killings,torture and acts of body mutilation. Bombershave killed thousands, striking at least fourwedding parties.20

This outcome is not surprising as soldiers aretrained with one goal in mind: to defeat and killtheir enemy. They undergo a conditioningprocess in boot camp that desensitizes themfrom human suffering. Vietnam veteranstestified about being given a rabbit to care for,only to have its neck snapped on the day oftheir graduation.2 1 Once in country, acounterfeit universe developed in whichdeviant behavior became socially accepted.One soldier wrote that “a very sad thinghappened while we were there…there were somany deaths and so many wounded, we startedto treat death and loss of l imbs withcallousness, and it happens because the humanmind can’t hold that much suffering andsurvive.”22

Since World War II, American militaryinterventions have been consistently based onfraudulent pretexts and have resulted in thedeaths of hundreds of thousands of civilianswhile empowering brutal and corrupt regimes.They have yielded unintended consequences,blowback and resistance and have made theworld a more violent and dangerous place.23

Proponents of R2P consistently sanitize anddistort this history and discount the moralbreakdown that occurs in war. Americans canbest try to advance human rights not throughmore war but by promoting an end to armssales to oppressive regimes like Saudi Arabia,Uganda and Colombia, by urging the signing onto UN human rights treaties and the ICC, andby demanding the closure of Guantanamo Bay,the end of drone strikes and assassination

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

5

programs and the removal of all troops andmercenaries from Afghanistan. Thirteen yearsof the War on Terrorism should teach us thatviolence only begets more violence and doesnot address the underlying grievances fuelingthe rise of political extremism in our time.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Michael Ignatieff, doyen of the liberal warhawks, actually marched against the VietnamWar as a student and began his academiccareer with a Foucauldian history of the prisonsystem in England and its importance as amechanism of social control. As the politicalwinds shifted, he reinvented himself in the1990s as a proponent of humanitarianintervention, capturing the prevailing post-ColdWar triumphalist mood in a series of essaysthat landed him appointment to Harvard’sKennedy School. From 1993-1997, as he detailsin his book, The Warriors’ Honor: Ethnic Warand the Modern Conscience, Ignatieff traveledthrough the landscapes of modern ethnic war –to Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundiand Afghanistan. His experiences affirmed hisown faith in the “universalistic ethic of theWest based on multi-culturalism and concernfor human rights,” over the “particularisticethic that defines the tribe or nation,” andmanifested in the ethnic cleansings andviolence he attempted to chronicle. InIgna t i e f f ’ s v i ew , Serb a t t empts a taggrandizement were to blame for the outbreakof war in the Balkans. He disapproved of UNSecretary Boutros-Boutros Ghali visiting Africawhile corpses mounted in Srebrenica, thelargest ethnic cleansing on European soil sinceWor ld War I I , and laments the UN’sineffectiveness in halting genocide and ethniccleansing.24

Ignatieff notes his excitement that a communityof human rights and development activistswhich had emerged since the early 1960s hadacquired a dominant constituency of support

and sufficient institutional power to influencethe foreign policies of major states in positiveways, including the “Gulf War to reverse adictator’s conquest of a neighboring state,international humanitarian efforts to rescue theKurds and provide a safe haven for them andintervention in Somalia to put down factionalfighting and get food to famine victims.” Hebelieves that “had we been more ruthlesslyimperial, we might have been a trifle moreeffective…..If General Schwarzkopf had allowedhimself to become the General MacArthur of aconquered Iraq, the Iraqi opposition abroadmight now be rebuilding the country; if theMarines were still patrolling the streets ofMogadishu, the prospects of moving Somaliaforward from the world of Hobbes to the worldof Locke might be significantly brighter; and ifNATO had defended the Bosnian governmentwith a ir s tr ikes against the Serbianinsurrection in April 1992, it is possible thatEurope might not have had to witness thereturn of the concentration camp.”25

Ignatieff expanded on this analysis in a nowfamous essay for the New York Review ofBooks in January 2003 entitled “The AmericanEmpire: The Burden,” in which he voicedsupport for an invasion of Iraq. Characterizingthe United States as an “’empire light’ whosegrace notes are free-markets, human rights anddemocracy enforced by the most awesomemilitary power the world has ever known,” hewrote that “multilateral solutions to the world’sproblems are all very well, but they have noteeth unless America bares its fangs.”Considering “regime change” an “imperial taskpar excellence,” he said it “remains a fact – asdisagreeable to those left-wingers who regardAmerican imperialism as the root of all evil as itis to right-wing isolationists who believe thatthe world beyond our shores is none of ourbusiness – that there are many people who owetheir freedom to an exercise of Americanmilitary power,” including most recently“Bosnians whose nation survived becauseAmerican air power and diplomacy forced an

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

6

end to a war the Europeans couldn’t stop,Kosovars who would still be imprisoned inSerbia if not for General Wesley Clark and theAir Force [and] Afghan and Iraqis whosefreedom depends on US air power.”26

Ignatieff is an eloquent writer capable of sharpinsights (for example he writes in Warrior’sHonor that Bosnia became a “theater ofdisplacement in which political energies thatmight otherwise have been expended indefending multi-ethnic society at home weredirected instead at defending mythicmulticulturalism far away; the bête noir of ageneration that had tried ecology, socialismand civil rights only to watch all these losetheir romantic momentum.”) His judgmenthowever, has proven with time to have beencircumspect. While acknowledging the imperialpremise behind nation building efforts in which“wealthy strangers are taking upon themselvesthe right to rule over those too poor, tooconflict ridden to rule themselves,” he sanitizesthe history of American foreign policy andcreates the false dichotomy of an enlightenedWest needing to go in and save backward, anti-modern peoples. Underplaying the wide socialinequality and divisions in US society, hiswritings mirror government officials in theirconcern for individual rights only when theyare being violated by anti-Western leaders, andhe callously disregards the civilian atrocitiesthat are an inevitable product of modern totalwar.27

Supporting indefinite detention and torture asa “lesser evil” in the fight against terrorism,Ignatieff’s analysis of the 1st Gulf War evadesIraq’s importance to US energy interests andthe legacy of previous British and Americanintervention in provoking and exacerbatingsectarian divisions and helping to empowerSaddam Hussein and the Baath Party. He payslittle heed to the slaughter of an estimated100,000 Iraqis compared to 133 Americans inwhat one critic referred to as the “the mostcowardly war ever fought on this planet,” and

expresses concern for the plight of the Kurdsonly in Iraq and not US ally Turkey.28 ForSomalia, Ignatieff disregards the US role incontributing to the Hobbesian state by pouringaid to Dictator Siad Barre following theEthiopian revolution and killing of an estimated600 to 1,500 Somalis, half of them women andchildren.29 He does not tell us that Americanenvoy Robert Oakley had close relations withthe Continental Oil Company (Conoco) whichprovided military intelligence and helped planlogistics for the Marine landing.30

Ignatieff’s analysis of the Bosnian conflict31 asGibbs has demonstrated in First Do No Harm:Humanitarian Intervention and the Destructionof Yugoslavia, is equally disingenuous. Holdingthe underlying goal of preserving NATO andestablishing new military bases, the UnitedStates along with several European countries,most notably Germany, contributed to thebreakup of the Yugoslav federation by blockingdiplomatic settlements such as the Vance-Owenplan capable of unifying the different ethnicfactions. They promoted neoliberal structuraladjustment programs through the InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF) that aggravatedeconomic difficulty and helped fuel the rise ofnationalist demagogues like Milosevic, who wasnot the only brutal one.32

Croatia’s Franjo Tudjiman, for example,extolled the virtues of the pro-Nazi Ustasamovement and sponsored ethnic cleansingcampaigns against the Serbs, while Bosnianleader Alija Izetbegovic was an Islamistsupported by Tehran and Osama bin Laden. Hisarmies employed paramilitary gangs whichcommitted atrocities against Croats after theiranti-Serb alliance broke down.33 The StateDepartment established an arms pipeline thatviolated an international embargo andcontracted private mercenary companies suchas MPRI and DynCorp to train Islamicfundamentalists and the Croat military whoresponded to the Srebrenica massacre byshelling the Serb-controlled Krajina region with

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

7

the “tacit blessing of the United States,” killingseveral thousand Serbs and expelling between150,000 and 200,000 in the war’s largest act ofethnic cleansing.34

The bombing of Kosovo meanwhile causedbetween 500 and 2,000 civilian deaths whilekilling 10,000 Yugoslav soldiers. The US usedcluster bombs and pioneered the use of dronesurveillance. The attacks triggered anintensification of Serb ethnic cleansing andthen reprisal killings by the Kosovo LiberationArmy (KLA), which had t ies to herointraffickers and Al Qaeda and was branded aterrorist organization by the State Departmentonly months before the invasion.35 PrimeMinister Hashim Thaci allegedly ran a criminalorganization which sent more than 400captured Serbs to Albania to be killed so theirorgans could be extracted and sold fortransplants, while another key US military andintelligence asset, Ramush Haradinaj, wasaccused of rape and murder.36

These kinds of facts were suppressed ordismissed as inconsequential by Ignatieff andother pro-war intellectuals who failed toelucidate on the structural imperatives thatdrive military intervention – promoting insteadthe myth of a virtuous America that needed tointervene more to halt human rights abusesand genocide. His analysis dovetailed nicelywith the agenda of the foreign-policy makingelite, which was looking for new pretexts andrationalizations for war, and the maintenanceof high military budgets after the end of theCold War. And liberal left sectors could be wonover by Ignatieff’s arguments which played intopublic concern for human rights that hademerged in the 1960s movements.

-----------------------------------------------------

Perry Anderson in a special issue of New LeftReview entitled “American Foreign Policy andits Thinkers” points to a tradition in whichinternational relations specialists, some of themwith direct ties to the Pentagon, develop their

own version of an American grand strategy inwhich they frequently emphasize the necessityof military control of the Persian Gulf andaccess to Southeast Asian markets. Evadingdiscussion of the violence and corruption bredby US interventions, or comparisons withprevious colonial powers, and neglecting theinfluence of special interest groups, authorssuch as Zbigniew Brzezinski, George Kennanand Robert Art assume that US worldwidehegemony serves the universal interests ofhumanity and suggest that the alternativewould be genocide, depression, famine andwar.37 British imperial apologists dating to theera of John Stuart Mill felt the same way.38

There is a counter-tradition to the phenomenonAnderson describes that dates to at least therevisionist literature on World War I, which hastended to come from history rather thanpolitical science departments. In 1959,influenced by Charles A. Beard, William A.Williams published his classic, The Tragedy ofAmerican Diplomacy focused on the economicunderpinnings of American global expansion.39

Dovetailing with the analysis of pan-Africanthinkers like W.E. B. DuBois and later MalcolmX., Williams inspired student activists andscholars who considered the Vietnam War to bea product of an imperialist foreign policy.Books on the warfare state and militaryindustrial complex and on covert deception andgovernment collusion with corporate interestsand organized criminals proliferatedthroughout the 1960s and 1970s.40 Students fora Democratic Society (SDS) president CarlOglesby in Containment and Change linkedVietnam to CIA coups in Guatemala and Iran,the revival of gunboat diplomacy in theDominican Republic, and toppling of Guiana’ssocialist government.41 Fred Branfman’s book,Voices from the Plain of Jars, as another iconicbook of the era, recorded the voices of Laotianpeasants subjected to the largest bombingcampaign in history. The author foresaw a newkind of automated warfare “fought not by menbut machines and which could erase distant

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

8

and unseen societies clandestinely, unknown toand even unsuspected by the world outside.”42

The anti-Vietnam war movement led toconcrete reforms, including the War PowersAct limiting executive ability to wage war andhelped to spawn a human rights consciousnessamong the public, which wanted to reign in themilitary establishment. Jimmy Carter wonelection in 1976 calling for a human rightsbased foreign policy. Particularly in his firsttwo years, Carter took some concrete measuresthat could satisfy new leftists – cutting the CIAbudget and halting funding to some oppressiveregimes, like Chile and Guatemala. Staffed byadvisors who served in the elite Trilateralcommission bent on restoring US economic andmilitary power after Vietnam, the Carteradministration was also crucial, as James Peckshows in his important book, Ideal Illusions:How the US Government Co-Opted HumanRights, in channeling public concerns forhuman rights away from US backed clientregimes, and towards its enemies, primarilycondemning violations of human rights in theSoviet Union and in Soviet clients states.Vietnam was re-imagined as a war of equals,with Carter stating that “we owe Hanoi no debtbecause the destruction [from the war]…wasmutual.” The media and liberal intellegensiafollowed the administration’s lead, focusing atlength on Soviet dissident writers like AndreiSakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn and onthe plight of people living behind the IronCurtain, while paying little heed to dissidents inUS client regimes or the backing of staterepression in countries like Indonesia, SaudiArabia, El Salvador and Iran (where Cartertoasted the Shah in 1977). Peck writes that“the media fixated on the Soviet dissidents,giving them a huge platform for their views,while few Americans could name any dissidentsfrom Latin America, South Korea or thePhilippines.”43

Around this time, liberal intellectuals andneoconservatives began an offensive against

the antiwar movement and New Left, claimingthey were naïve about communism and wereapologists for human rights abuses in Vietnamafter the war ended (Solzhenitsyn made thischarge). Post-revisionists like John L. Gaddis,who blamed the Soviet Union for the outbreakof the Cold War and attacked New Left“revisionists” received choice appointments,their star rising in the academy.44 The samewas true of neo-realist scholars, many of themPentagon-sponsored, whose writing lentsupport to large-scale military appropriationsand covert interventions.45 C. Wright Mills oncecalled these kinds of scholars “crackpotrealists….[who know of] no solutions to theparadoxes of the Middle East and Europe, theFar East and Africa except the landing ofMarines. [They] prefer the bright, clearproblems of war…for they still believe that‘winning’ means something, although theynever tell us what.”46

During the Reagan years, the Global South,Peck notes, was portrayed as a “world ofdespots, torturers, and terrorists, a veritablewasteland of backward cultures and brutalregimes….Such portrayal of the South servedpowerful interests in Washington and Europe,for an atrocity ridden South seemed tolegitimize a Western helping hand withoutcalling for any transformation of the Westernstructures of wealth and control.”47 It in turnhelped to lay the groundwork for thehumanitarian intervention doctrine whichfollowed the drug war as the main basis formilitary aggression after the end of the ColdWar and justified the rewriting of internationallegal norms mandating the protection of statesovereignty. This even though the UnitedStates had one of the worst records among theWestern democracies when it came to theratification of multilateral human rightsorganizations and treaties and had replacedapartheid South Africa as the world’s leadingcarcerial state.48

Failing to note these latter paradoxes or the

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

9

connection between imperial pursuits and thegrowth of domestic inequality, racism andviolence,49 public intellectuals in the 1990s, asNoam Chomsky pointed out, fulfilled theirtraditional function as mandarins to the elite byproviding ideological justification for theexpansion of American military power. Thosewho critiqued the American thrust for empirehad long been marginalized, losing theirplatform with the New York Review of Books(which in the early 1970s published radicalcritiques by Chomsky and scholars like PeterDale Scott) and mainstream media. Prominenceinstead was given to neoconservatives likeFrancis Fukuyama who gained fame for hisessay The End of History and the Last Man,which argued that the fall of the Berlin Wallconfirmed the superiority of liberal capitalism.“What we may be witnessing was not just theend of the Cold War,” he wrote, “but the end ofhistory as such: That is the end point ofmankind’s ideological evolution and theuniversalization of Western liberal democracyas the final form of human government.”50

Another influential voice of the time, Thomas L.Friedman, argued that a strong military wasnecessary to protect the sea lanes and stabilize“failed states,” enabling their integration intothe global marketplace. “The hidden hand ofthe market will never work without a hiddenfist,” he wrote. “McDonald's cannot flourishwithout McDonnell Douglas, the designer of theF-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the worldsafe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourishis called the US Army, Air Force, Navy andMarine Corps.”51

The 1990s saw a revival of just war theory andits premise that any means of destruction couldbe warranted under emergency conditions andin the face of moral evil.52 Robert Kaplan’sintellectual star rose after writing a series ofdispatches for The Atlantic Magazine fromAfrica, Central Asia and the Balkans depictingthese regions as cauldrons of ethnic violence,poverty and savagery which called out forenl ightened Western leadership and

intervention. In Imperial Grunts, he celebratedthe US military as an heir to the Indian fightersand frontiersmen of the past.53 Like Ignatieff,Samantha Power fit right into the intellectualmilieu of the times. She emerged as aproponent of “humanitarian intervention” as ajournalist covering conflicts in Bosnia and sub-Saharan Africa. A piece on Zimbabwe for TheAtlantic echoed Kaplan in pointing to the needfor more Western intervention in order tosecure “majori ty rule” and stabi l izeZimbabwe’s economy.54 Power won the PulitzerPrize for her 2002 book, “A Problem FromHell:” America in the Age of Genocide, whichpurports to show that America did nothing toprevent genocides in the past. In her view, U.S.policymakers should learn from this disgracefulhistory and intervene more readily to preventhuman rights crimes. Even when they don’thave perfect information, a president musthave a “bias towards belief” that massacres areimminent, justifying in turn preemptive war.55

Reviewers hailed Power’s book as “one of thedecade’s most important” on US foreign policyand a standard text on genocide prevention,”with The New Republic calling it a “book fromheaven.” Richard Holbrooke of the StateDepartment passed out copies to co-workersand President Bush, after being read asummary of the chapter on Rwanda, wrote inthe margins: “NOT ON MY WATCH.”56

Then-Senator Barack Obama Jr. hired Power asan aide, meanwhile, after reading the wholething.57

In reality, studying US foreign policy throughresponse to genocide is problematic becausethe term genocide is sometimes applied todescribe war-time atrocities during counter-insurgency operations and is often politicized,and because it avoids critical scrutiny intopolitical economy and imperialism.58 Mostinternational relations specialists recognizethat states are not moral agents; they interveneonly when it is deemed to be in the national

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

10

interest by dominant groups who control thegoverning structure, and the United States isno exception.59 Assuming that complex regionalconflicts can only be solved by outsiders, “AProblem From Hell” disregards the structuralvariables underlying most US militaryinterventions in the 20th century, notably thequest for overseas military bases, access tomineral resources, and the imperatives of themilitary industrial complex. Power pays noheed to the fact that the United States wasfounded in genocide as a settler colonial state.60

She presents wide-scale Turkish killing ofArmenians as the first genocide of the 20th

century that the US supposedly could haveprevented, though ignores the US pacificationof the Philippines which resulted in anywherefrom 200,000 to upwards of a million deaths,and the exterminatory campaign by theMarines under the Wilson administration inHaiti whose discussion would invariablychallenge the book’s main thesis.61 Identifyingwith war hawk Theodore Roosevelt and hisexcoriation of an Armenian lobby group for its“peace at any price” attitude when “peoplewere being murdered and their women raped,”Power fails to provide proper historical contextfor the Armenian massacres, neglecting thatroughly two hundred thousand Armeniansfought with the allies in World War I and werecredited with keeping the Turks out of the Bakuoil fields, hence depriving the Central Powersof much needed fuels, which German AdmiralErich Von Ludendorff believed was a key causeof their military defeat.62

Horrendous wartime atrocities were committedby the Turks resulting in an estimated 600,000deaths (40% of the population) from disease,famine and massacre, with burning of villagesand to r ture , bu t the ex i s tence o f apremeditated plan of extermination has beendifficult to prove. The large Armeniancommunities of Constantinople, Smyrna andAleppo survived the war largely intact,probably because they were not in a position to

assist the invading Russians.63 According to aneyewitness, eight hundred defenceless Turkswere slaughtered in Erzincam, with Armeniansoldiers stuffing the corpses in hastily dugtrenches.64 In a memoir, Armenian HaigShiroyan recalled the sad fate of his hometownof Bitlis: “The Turks had killed or exiled allArmenians, looted …or burned their houses.The Russian victorious armies, reinforced withArmenian volunteers, had slaughtered everyTurk they could find, destroyed every housethey entered. The once beautiful Bitlis city wasleft in fire and ruins.”65 Such accounts point toboth sides committing terrible atrocities,making Power’s account misleading.

Undertaking no primary research of her own,and failing to master the secondary literature,much of Power’s chapter is based around theghost-written memoirs of Ambassador HenryMorgenthau Sr., which as he acknowledged ina letter to Woodrow Wilson, were written as anappeal to “the mass of Americans in smalltowns and country districts… to convince themof the necessity of carrying the Great War to avictorious conclusion.”66 Dismissing allegationsof allied atrocities known to have happened,Morgenthau blames the Germans forsupporting the Turks as part of a scheme forworld conquest (thwarted heroically in LatinAmerica in his view by US intervention underthe Monroe doctrine). He fabricated a story,based on a mythic conversation with Germanambassador Baron Hans Von Wagenheim of ameeting where the Kaiser allegedly gaveGerman financiers two weeks to unload theirWall Street securities before a plannedoffensive against Britain and France, which waslater introduced as primary evidence forimposing a punitive peace at the Versaillesconference.67

Written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalistBurton Hendrick Jr. with the unacknowledgedassistance of Armenian staff and Secretary ofState Robert Lansing, Morgenthau’s bookalleged that two million Armenians were

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

11

deported when this was less than the numberliving under Ottoman rule. Lacking knowledgeof the local languages and failing to visit theaffected areas, Morgenthau relied on luridmissionary and refugee reports and made-upconversations with Young Turk leaders EnverPasha and Talaat Bey and Baron VonWagenheim different from those recorded inhis diary. The book was colored by derogatoryand racist characterizations of the Turks as“psychologically primitive” “bloodthirstysavages” and “Mohammedan fanatics” and byhis ignorant claim that “the Koran instructedMuslims to kill Christians.”68 Morgenthau laterappealed for an American mandate overConstantinople, Armenia and Anatolia andhoped to secure for the United States rights tothe Straits of Gibraltar.69

Disregarding his prejudice and the politicalcalculation underlying his championing of theArmenian cause, Power considers Morgenthaua hero, claiming that earlier Americanintervention in World War I would have savedthe Armenians. The Wilson administration hadlimited military and diplomatic options to stopthe killing, however, with US armed forcesbeing small and not particularly adept. One ofthe few American journalists who witnessed thedeportations, George Schreiner felt thatMorgenthau’s exaggerations and Westernmeddling actually made the plight of theArmenians worse, with Lord James Bryce, co-author of a propagandistic tract on Turkishatrocities, noting “better it would have been forthe Christians of the East [Armenians] if no[Western] diplomatist had ever signed aprotocol or written a dispatch on theirbehalf.”70 Applying equally to other oppressedgroups supported then abandoned when theylost their strategic utility71, Bryce’s remarksundermine Power’s analysis which sidestepsthe fact that American intervention in the GreatWar caused the death of an estimated 460,000Americans and contributed because of thepostwar settlement to the rise of Nazism.Power ought to read Dalton Trumbo’s novel

Johnny Got His Gun about a soldier who returnswithout arms or legs and with his face blownoff, as it voiced the anguish of a generationwho felt the war had been instigated by armsmerchants and bankers and that the waste inhuman life was in vain.72

At one point, Power falsely suggests thatpropaganda about systematic rape by Germansoldiers in Belgium during World War I wasmostly accurate, leaving the impression thatantiwar critics were “genocide apologists,” justl ike today. 7 3 Distrust for governmentmanipulation of the media was a key factoraccounting in her view for a lackadaisicalresponse to the Jewish Holocaust. She ignoresthe scholarship, however, detailing howanticommunist ideology combined withlongstanding preference for right-wingdictatorship among corporate elites resulted inthe FDR administration’s “neutrality” in theSpanish civil war and support for Adolph Hitlerand Benito Mussolini until a late date.74 Poweralso fails to consider that the beginning ofwide-scale commemoration of the Holocaust inthe late 1960s was largely political, coincidingwith the solidification of America’s ties to Israelafter the six-day war.75

Overall, despite the book being advertised as acomprehensive account of response to genocidein the twentieth century, “A Problem FromHell” is selective in its case studies, leaving outmass killings in which the US government wasnot s imply a bystander, but act ivelycollaborated with the perpetrators or directedthe slaughter. She neglects the Americansponsored massacres in Cheju-do island on theeve of the Korean War where whole familiesand villages were wiped out simply becauseone relative or villager supported insurgentrebels76, and the killings that followed a CIAbacked coup and decade-long destabilizationcampaign in Indonesia. After seizing power in1965, General Suharto ordered army officers,including allegedly Obama's stepfather LoloSoetoro, and Muslim gangs to attack members

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

12

of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI)identified through lists provided by US militaryintelligence. The CIA channeled weapons to thenew regime while US corporations likeLockheed Martin and Stanvac (later Exxon-Mobil) also provided covert support. Between250,000 to a million people were slaughtered,including thousands of ethnic Chinese, withthousands more imprisoned and tortured.77 ACIA report boasted that the PKI had “suffered amassive defeat” and that “reverence forSukarno [previous socialist leader]” was finally“broken. . . . Suharto is now inviting the IMF[International Monetary Fund] to help developpolicies and restoring to foreign owners someplantat ions and mines taken over bySukarno.” 7 8

Ten years later, Suharto's government invadedEast Timor with the support of the Fordadministration, killing 200,000 civilians. Onlybriefly mentioning East Timor, Power claims“the US looked away” (147) but declassifiedgovernment records reveal that US complicitywent much further as Secretary of State HenryKissinger gave Suharto a green light for theinvasion and the US continuously suppliedarms and training to elite army battalionsthrough the Clinton era.79

Guatemala is another case ignored by Power.From 1981-1983, the Reagan administrationprovided nearly a billion dollars in assistance toGen. Efrain Rios Montt while he carried outscorched earth campaigns targeted againstMayan Indians who supported left-wingguerrillas. Montt's word for the peasants wasallegedly simple: “if you're with us, we'll feedyou, if not we'll kill you.” In 2012, the Christianfundamentalist was convicted by a Guatemalancourt of genocide and crimes against humanity,though the case was overturned undersuspicious circumstances. Journalist ChaseMader noted that Power “may not have wantedto offend the retired Guatemalan Colonel downthe hall,” referring to Hector Gramajo,architect of the counterinsurgency who was

given a fellowship at the Kennedy School. 80

In another egregious omission, “A ProblemFrom Hell” fails to discuss the wide-scalekilling that resulted from American militarypacification campaigns in Vietnam. As NickTurse shows in Kill Anything That Moves,during Operation Speedy Express fromDecember 1968 through May 1969, the NinthInfantry Division under the command of JulianEwell and Ira Hunt claimed an enemy bodycount of 10,899 at a cost of 267 American lives,while only 748 weapons were seized. GeneralDavid Hackworth acknowledged that “a lot ofinnocent Vietnamese civilians got slaughteredbecause of the Ewell-Hunt drive to have thehighest count in the land.” In May 1970, a“grunt” who participated in Speedy Expresswrote a confidential letter to Will iamWestmoreland, then Army Chief of Staff, sayingthat the Ninth Division's atrocities amounted to“a My Ly” each month for over a year.”81 Large-scale carpet bombing meanwhile promptedmilitary analyst Bernard B. Fall to warn thatSouth Vietnam as a “cultural and historicalentity” was threatened with “extinction…[as]…the countryside literally dies under theblows of the largest military machine everunleashed on an area of this size.”82

Similar devastation was inflicted on Laos andCambodia, which Power also disregards. In herchapter on Cambodia, Power fails to addressthe circumstances in which the Khmer Rougecame to power fo l l owing the N ixonadministration’s secret bombing and a CIAbacked coup that overthrew the neutralistPrince Norodom Sihanouk and installed abrutal right wing regime. Taylor Owen and BenKiernan write that “civilian casualties [from theUS bombing] drove an enraged population intothe arms of an insurgency that had enjoyedrelatively little support until the bombingbegan, setting in motion the...rapid rise of theKhmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodiangenocide.” It was not by coincidence that aFinish commission referred to the 1970s as a

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

13

“decade of genocide” in Cambodia, though youwould not learn this from reading Power.83

Showing her conservative colors and disdainfor the New Left, Power at one point refers toMalcolm Caldwell, a professor at the Universityof London’s School of Oriental Studiesmurdered during a visit to Cambodia as “anideologue” and “communist true believer”duped by Khmer Rouge propagandists.84 Sheleaves the impression that communistrevolutionary regimes were genocidal in natureand that anti-imperialists were somehowcomplicit in their crimes.

Power's chapter on Iraq has some goodmaterial on Saddam Hussein’s killing of theKurds and American support for him in theIran-Iraq war, though avoids discussing thegeopolitical and economic imperativesunderlying US policy in the Middle East, sayingerroneously that the US has a “tendency towrite off the region.” (p. 178). She mentionsthe Persian Gulf War in only one sentence,finding it unimportant that the US Air Forcelaunched 11,160 strikes and over 88,000 tonsof explosives (greater than that in all of WorldWar II), with 70 percent of bombs missing theirtargets. Paul W. Roberts testified at Montrealcommission hearing that the air attack wasunlike anything that he had witnessed as a warcorrespondent in Vietnam: “after 20 minutes ofthis carpet bombing there would be a silenceand you would hear screaming of children andpeople, and then the wounded would bedragged out. I found myself with everyone elsetrying to treat injuries, but the state of thepeople generally was one of pure shock. Theywere walking around like zombies and I wastoo.”85 Sanctions after the war prevented Iraqfrom repairing its water, sanitation andelectrical systems. On 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahlasked UN ambassador and later secretary ofstate Madeline Albright whether she believedthe price of a reported half million Iraqi deathswas worth it; she replied: “I think it’s a veryhard choice but the price – we think the price isworth it.”86 Power obviously thinks so too,

championing sanctions against countries likeZimbabwe and Iran under R2P, which mainlypunished the civilian population while failing toadvance the goal of “regime change.”

Power’s analysis of the Bosnian and Kosovo waradopts superficial Nazi analogies andsimplistically blames Slobodan Milosevicexclusively for “stoking nationalist flames” andigniting the conflict whose historical origins gounexplored. She lambastes the Bush andClinton administrations for “failing to saveBosnia” through military intervention, ignoringtheir role in covertly arming Croat rebels and alQaeda-backed Islamists whom she compareswith antifascists in the Spanish civil war. Likeher Harvard colleague, Power also fails tomention the criminal nature of the KosovoLiberation Army (KLA) and humanitarianconsequences of the bombing, including use ofcluster bombs that continue to cripple andmaim farmers, and its role in exacerbatingethnic violence. In her view, the NATO war wasa “stunning success” which saved hundreds ofthousands of lives,” though proof of this islacking.87

Power’s discussion of Rwanda promotes themyth that the Clinton administration stood byidly while Hutu extremists slaughtered theTutsi in one of the world’s worst genocides.88

She relies on the partisan reporting of PhilipGourevitch89 which caricatures the conflict asone of good versus evil, the Tutsi-led RwandanPatriotic Front (RPF) being the good guys, andthe Hutu the bad. The mass killings of 1994ensued following a civil war however,instigated by the RPF’s invasion from Uganda,and evidence of an exterminatory plan by Hutuhardliners has been difficult to authenticate. Analleged “genocide fax” sent by Gen. RomeoDallaire, commander of UN peacekeepingforces, was proven to have been a fabrication.The number of deaths has also been disputedand more Hutu may have died than Tutsi.90

Power takes little account of the fact that the

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

14

conflict in Rwanda is a product of the country’scolonial history. The 1959 Hutu powerrevolution resulted in the expulsion ofthousands of Tutsi who had been elevatedunder the Belgians. Treated badly in exile, theylonged for return and were repeatedlymassacred by the Hutu after organizing small-scale guerrilla raids.91 Following the 1990invasion, backed by the US and UK, the RPFcommitted myriad atrocities extending intoBurundi, killing an estimated 10,000 Hutucivilians per months in campaigns designed toclear areas for Tutsi habitation. A Frenchcommission along with other independentinvestigations found RPF commander andcurrent president Paul Kagame culpable in theshooting of Hutu leader Juvenal Habyarimana'saircraft following his return from peace talks inArusha, Tanzania in April 1994, an act whichprecipitated the mass killing and whichKagame considered essential to an RPFtakeover following previous destabilizationmeasures.

The Clinton and Major administrations backedKagame as a means of reestablishing Anglo-American supremacy in mineral-rich CentralAfrica over the French who supportedHabyarimana (also a former CIA asset) andailing Congolese leader Joseph Mobutu.According to a former government official, theRPF served as the “cat’s paw of the Britishgovernment,” having been groomed by them totake power for years. Strategic considerationsexplain why the US-UK failed to support theUN peacekeeping mission. A UN reportdetermined that the CIA sold Soviet-madesurface to air missiles confiscated from Iraq toan elite RPF strike force team to shoot downthe presidential aircraft and that a companylinked to the CIA leased the warehouse used toassemble the launchers.92 Kagame trained inFort Leavenworth, Kansas and received large-scale American assistance after consolidatinghis power. American aid and covert supportcontinued even after his armies invaded Congoand helped install client rulers (Laurent and

then Joseph Kabila), killed tens of thousands ofrefugees and sponsored militias which rapedand plundered Congo’s diamond wealth.Kagame’s regime also murdered manydissidents including those who threatened toreveal the truth about Habyarimana’sassassination.93

Ignoring these facts and simplifying Rwanda’shistory, Power's book, “A Problem From Hell”is more fiction than history. Power hasadvanced to the highest reaches of power noton the strength of her scholarship but rather onthe ideological serviceability of her message towhat C. Wright Mills termed the “power elite.”The US political economy is dominated bydefense industries who command billions ofdollars for the manufacture of arms andweapons. Their profitability depends on apermanent war footing.94 When Cold Warpretexts for intervention lost their viability,government officials began to claim thatmilitary intervention was necessary onhumanitarian grounds, appropriating some ofthe language used by the 1960s protestors.Power's book came just at the right time tohelp advance the message that America had notdone enough to prevent genocide and neededto intervene militarily to save people. She wasan inspiration behind the Save Darfurmovement which channeled student activistenergy away from the illegal war in Iraq, wherethe death toll was far greater.95

Power herself supported air strikes in Darfurand has been a proponent of mil i taryintervention in Africa, including in Ugandawhere she has championed the government’swar against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA),whose crimes she has sought to broadcast. Herfirst speech as US ambassador to the UN wasat a conference organized by Invisible Children,an evangelical organization behind thepropaganda film Kony 2012, which wasdistributed over the internet to help engendersupport for the sending of US Special Forcesinto Uganda. Power leaves out that the

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

15

insurgency in northern Uganda developedlargely in response to campaigns of “murder,intimidation, bombing and the burning of entirevillages” by the Ugandan military with the aimof driving the Acholi population into refugeecamps (The Acholi supported previous leaderMilton Obote, a socialist opposed by the West).If carried out by official government enemies,Uganda’s actions would have no doubt earnedthe moniker genocide , as they werecharacterized by the UN Secretary General’sSpecial Representative for Children in ArmedConflict, though Ugandan leader YoweriMuseveni is a long-standing US ally oncecharacterized by Bill Clinton as part of the“new face of democracy in Africa.”96

Ethiopian crimes also amounted to possiblegenocide against the Anuak minority in theresource-rich Gambella district and in Somaliawhere its troops “slaughtered men and womenlike goats” by slitting their throats and went on“rampages of looting and gang rapes” in 2006.Power and the media paid no attention becauseMeles Zenawi was another key US ally andAmerica provided gunships while launching itsown commando raids and strikes into Somaliato dislodge the Islamic Courts Union (ICU).97

An elitist who scorns domestic policy, Powergenerally sees war as “an instrument to achieveher liberal, even radical values.”98 She faultedthe Bush administration in a 2007 New YorkTimes article for tactical and strategic blundersin Iraq but writes that “just because Bushhyped the threat [of Islamic terrorism], doesn’tmean the threat should be played down.”Power then went on to praise the re-release ofthe Army Counterinsurgency manual, with aforeword by David Petraeus and Harvardcolleague Sarah Sewall, which she thinksprovides a blueprint for limiting civiliancasualties and winning back hearts and mindsthrough renewed commitment to civic actionand nation building.99 Power however fails ton o t e t h a t s i m i l a r r h e t o r i c a b o u tcounterinsurgency was adopted by the military

in Vietnam and that the US cannot win popularlegitimacy while propping up corrupt regimesand launching assassination campaigns anddrone attacks that have terrorized and killedthousands of civilians.100

During her time in Washington, the “femmefatale of the humanitarian assistance world,”has done little to push for the signing ofinternational human rights treaties barringunlawful killings and torture and showed noconcern for the victims of US-trained forcessuch as Congolese units in Nigeria accused ofmass rapes and killing.101 She championedinstead the troop surge in Af-Pak, war in Syriaand French intervention in the Central AfricaRepublic (CAR) to halt atrocities by radicalIslamists, through Christian militias alsocarried out sweeping ethnic cleansing, withviolence escalating after the French invasion.102

Power was a chief architect of the war in Libyawhere US-NATO forces committed significantwar crimes in “liberating” the country, backingrebel leaders bent on opening Libya’s economyto foreign exploitation and who were linked toIslamic fundamentalist groups, including Al-Qaeda. Claiming that failure to intervene wouldhave been a “stain on our conscience,” Powerand colleagues helped to spread disinformationthat Qaddafi was giving his soldiers Viagra tocarry out rape and was employing black foreignmercenaries when many in Libya’s blackpopulation supported Qaddafi as he had longchampioned their interests.1 0 3 Qaddafiimprisoned dissidents, some for decades, andhad suppressed anti-regime demonstrators inthe wake of the Arab Spring, though theprotests were of a different character to thosein Tun i s i a and Egypt , a s they werepredominantly regional and sectarian incharacter, were backed by the CIA and Britishand French intelligence and were violent fromthe outset.

The London Daily Telegraph reported thatunder rebel control “Benghazi residents are

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

16

terrorized, many too frightened to drivethrough the dark streets at night fearing ashakedown or worse at prol i ferat ingcheckpoints…Moreover about 15 million blackAfrican migrants feel trapped under suspicionof supporting the wrong side. Numbers havebeen attacked, some hunted down, draggedfrom apartments beaten and killed. So-called‘revolutionaries and ‘freedom fighters’ are infact rampaging gunmen committing atrocitiesairbrushed from mainstream reports.” Qaddafiand his family were eventually lynched in agross violation of international law. Powerthough considered the whole operation a greatsuccess even as Libya descended into chaosand fighters loyal to Qaddafi destabilizedMali.104 The Libyan war was fought in violationof the War Powers resolution limiting theexecutive branch’s ability to wage war withoutthe consent of Congress, and in violation of UNprovisions mandating the protection ofcivilians, which Power evidently cared littleabout. The United States carried out roughly 20percent of over 26,000 bombing sorties in theseven month NATO mission, which resulted inhigh “collateral damage,” epitomized by thebombing of refugees in Zlitan causing the deathof 33 children, and destruction of Sirte, aQaddafi stronghold.105

Like with Syria, Power’s role in the Obamaadministration was to convince the public thatthe US-NATO onslaught was designed forhumanitarian motives and to stop “genocide”when in reality there were deeper geopoliticalcalculations. The Nixon administration had firstconsidered assassinating Qaddafi in 1969 afterhe had overthrown the Sanussi King Idris, astaunch US and British ally who brokered anagreement allowing for an American militarybase at Wheelock and granted concessions toWestern oil companies. Qaddafi’s regimekicked out the US military and nationalizedLibya’s oil industry, whose profits he reinvestedin health, education and infrastructure, leadingto marked decline in poverty and illiteracy anda huge rise in life expectancy.106 In the 1980s,

after falsely claiming he had sent hit teams tokill President Reagan and had bombed a WestBerlin discotheque, the US dropped 60 tons ofordnance in an attempt to assassinate Qaddafi,killing instead his adopted daughter. JournalistHaynes Johnson noted at the time that thedemonization of Qaddafi was “reminiscent ofthe talk about Castro in the days when theUnited States was planning the Bay of Pigsinvasion and commissioning assassinationschemes against Castro,” with the sameformula repeated by Power and her associatesin 2011.107

To the dismay of Gulf State monarchies backinghis ouster, Qaddafi had recently picked up themantle of Ghana’s late-president KwameNkrumah, an advocate of African unityoverthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1965. Aschairman of the African Union (AU), Qaddafiprovided 15 percent of its operating budget andpromoted an African Court of Justice andCentral Bank capable of lessening Africans’dependency on the ICC, IMF and World Bank.Much like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Qaddaficalled for economic integration as a means ofundercutting Western exploitation of labor andmineral resources and invested millions ofdollars in building up Africa’s industrialinfrastructure in order to raise the price of itsexports. He planned to renationalize significantparts of the oil sector (after a period where itwas privatized) and refused to cooperate withthe expansion of the US military’s Africancommand (AFRICOM), stating that hepreferred the giant military base to remain“headquartered in Europe.”108

In Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, historian VijayPrashad shows the double standards of the USin backing the repression of pro-democracydemonstrators in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain andhow the Arab Spring turned sour in Libya. TheWestern powers successfully exploited growingdisaffection with Qaddafi’s autocratic methodsto pry open Libya’s oil markets and advanceneo-liberalism in a former socialist bastion. He

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

17

writes that “behind the new electoral process,the technocrats who demonstrated their fealtyto the international bond markets and the IMFwill control the central bank and the oilcompany… the section of the old guardbeholden to the revolution of 1969 has nowexited from power.” On the day Tripoli fell, headds, the New York Times ran a story with theheadline, “The Scramble for Access to Libya’sOil Wealth Begins.” (August 22, 2011). This isthe same word used to describe the scramblefor Africa in the 1890s, when Bismarck hadsaid that the “map of Africa is Europe.”109

It is no surprise that Power and other liberalintellectuals would support neocolonial wars ofthe 21st century. With the exception of theWestern trained technocrats and a few favoreddictators whom they admire (eg. Kagame andMuseveni), their worldview considers ThirdWorld peoples mainly as victims of diabolicalrulers incapable of resolving political conflicton their own. They have to be saved by theWest.110 Those who resist are branded asterrorists and extremists, hence deserving oftheir fate. Like their forbearers in the WorldWar I era, the liberal war hawks have beenproven wrong time and again in their beliefthat war could be antiseptic and state violencecontrolled. Playing off public concern forhuman rights that developed in the 1960s, theirwriting has provided important ideologicalrationalization that has enabled the expansionof America’s permanent warfare state after thecollapse of the Soviet Union. And they havebeen richly rewarded for doing so, whileserious humanistic scholars toil in obscurity. InNovember 1965, speaking at the secondnational antiwar demonstration against theVietnam War, Carl Oglesby said that “theindustrial war apparatus was the creation of agovernment that since 1932 had considereditself to be fundamentally liberal. Truman,Eisenhower, Kennedy - they were all liberals.And leading policy makers in the Johnsonadministration - McGeorge Bundy, RobertMcNamara, Dean Rusk, Henry Cabot Lodge,

Arthur Goldberg and Johnson himself were notmoral monsters. They are all honorable men.They are all liberals.”111 Sadly, Oglesby'scomments are applicable in the present wherethe most brazen champions of war are men andwomen like Power serving conservativeadministrations who consider themselvesliberal. They exemplify what Chris Hedges hascalled the “death of the liberal class” inAmerica, which has been accompanied by theatrophying of democratic debate and acatastrophic growth of the national securitycomplex.112

Jeremy Kuzmarov is Jay P. Walker AssistantProfessor of History at the University of Tulsa.He is the author of Modernizing Repression:Police Training and Nation-Building in theA m e r i c a n C e n t u r y(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1558499172/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) and The Myth of theAddicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern Waro n D r u g s(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1558497056/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20).

Recommended Citation: Jeremy Kuzmarov,"The Responsibility of Intellectuals Redux:Humanitarian Intervention and the LiberalEmbrace of War in the Age of Clinton, Bushand Obama", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11,Issue 24, No. 1, June 16, 2014.

Related articles

•Peter Dale Scott, America’s UncheckedSecurity State: Part II: The Continuity of COGD e t e n t i o n P l a n n i n g , 1 9 4 8 - 2 0 0 1(https://apjjf.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3933).

•Jeremy Kuzmarov, Bomb After Bomb: US AirPower and Crimes of War From World War II tot h e P r e s e n t(https://apjjf.org/-Jeremy-Kuzmarov/3855).

•Jeremy Kuzmarov, American Police Trainingand Political Violence: From the PhilippinesConquest to the Killing Fields of Afghanistan

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

18

a n d I r a q(https://apjjf.org/-Jeremy-Kuzmarov/3319).

Notes

* The author wishes to thank Mark Selden,Osama Khalil and the anonymous reviewer.

1Michael Ignatieff, “The Duty to Protect StillUrgent,” New York Times, September 13, 2013.See also Ignatieff, “With Syria, DiplomacyNeeds Force,” New York Times, February 25,2014.

2 For a history of distortions that oftenaccompany the politicization of the past andresult from the ingrained prejudices ofhistorians, see Peter Novick, That NobleDream: The Objectivity Question and theAmerican Historical Profession (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1988).

3 Rando lph S . Bourne , War and theIntellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915-1919,edited and with an introduction, by Carl Resek(Indianapolis, Hacket Publishing, 1964).

4Noam Chomsky, American Power and the NewMandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1967). ArthurSchlesinger Jr., Cold War liberal and Kennedyadvisor was another main target of Chomsky’scritique.

5Noam Chomsky, A New Generation Draws theLine: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards ofthe West (London: Verso, 1999).

6 Strobe Talbott, ‘Birth of the Global Nation’,Time, 20 July 1992; John Laughland, Travesty:The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and Corruptionof International Justice (London: Pluto, 2007),39.

7See e.g. Patrick Tyler, “U.S. Strategy PlanCalls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” NewYork Times, March 8, 1992; US Department ofDefense, “Defense Planning Guidance, FY1 9 9 4 - 1 9 9 9 , ”

(http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/doc03_full.pdf) February 18, 1992; NoamChomsky, World Orders Old and New (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1994), 7; JohnStockwell, The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Rolein the New World Order (Boston: South EndPress, 1991).

8 Taylor B. Sebolt, Humanitarian MilitaryIntervention: The Conditions for Successes andFailure (New York: Oxford University Press,2007), 49; Cristina Gabriela Badescu,Humanitarian Intervention and the R2P:Security and Human Rights (New York:Routeledge, 2011).

9 “The Responsibility to Protect,” Report of theInternational Commission on Intervention andState Sovereignty (Ottawa: InternationalDevelopment Research Center, 2001), VII, 3.

10Mary Kaldor, “A Decade of the ‘War on Terrorand the Responsibility to Protect: The GlobalDebate About Military Intervention,” in GlobalCivil Society 2012: Ten Years of CriticalReflection(Basingstoke, UK: PalgraveMacmillan, 2012); Michael Mandel, HowAmerica Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars,Collateral Damage and Crimes AgainstHumanity (London: Pluto Press, 2004); NickTurse, The Changing Face of Empire: SpecialOps, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, SecretBases, and Cyberwarfare (Chicago: HaymarketBooks, 2012), 13.

11 “The Responsibility to Protect,” Report of theInternational Commission on Intervention andState Sovereignty, VII, 19, 29, 31, 39.

12 Antony Fenton, “Finally a Real Debate onR 2 P ”(http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-responsibility-to-protect/14537) Global Research July 26,2009. For examples of how Cold Warinterventions produced failed states, see OddArne Westad, The Global Cold War: ThirdWorld Intervention and the Making of Our Time(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

19

13 In Introduction, Critical Perspectives on theResponsibility to Protect: Interrogating Theoryand Practice, ed. Philip Cunliffe (New York:Routeledge, 2011); Ramesh Thakur, The UN,Peace and Security: From Collective Security tothe Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2006), 250-251.

14 Michael Ignatieff, `How to Save the Syrians,”New York Review of Books blog, September 13,2013; Samantha Power, “Statement byAmbassador Samantha Power, U.S. PermanentRepresentative to the United Nations, U.S.M i s s i o n t o t h e U n i t e d N a t i o n s , ”(http://usun.state.gov/briefing/statements/214066.htm) New York, NY, September 11, 2013.

15 See Seymour M. Hersh, “The Red Line andthe Rat Line: Seymour Hersh on Obama,E r d o g e n a n d t h e S y r i a n r e b e l s , ”(http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line) London Reviewof Books, April 17, 2014; D. Gareth Porter, “InSearch of Truth: U.N. Probe Chief Doubtful onSyria Sarin Exposure Claims,” May 7, 2014,Counterpunch, www.counterpunch.org.

16 D. Gareth Porter, “Yes, the Pentagon DidW a n t t o H i t I r a n , ”(http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JE07Ak01.html) The Asia Times, May 7, 2008;Douglas Feith, War and Decision: Inside thePentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism(New York: Harper, 2009).

17 Laura Smith-Spark and Saad Abedine,“Syrian Rebel Fighters Guilty of Serious AbusesS a y s h u m a n R i g h t s W a t c h , ”(http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/11/world/meast/syria-civil-war/) CNN, October 11, 2012. In oneincident, the FSA attacked an Allawite villagenear Latekia, killing 190.

18 Eric Schmitt, “CIA Said to Aid in SteeringArms to Syrian Opposition,” New York Times,June 21, 2012.

19 Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism:

Using Human Rights to Sell War (New York:Monthly Review Press, 2006).

20 Jeremy Kuzmarov, ““You Have to Not MindKilling Innocents:” American COIN operationsin Afghanistan and the Violence of Empire,” inA People’s History of Counterinsurgency, ed.Hannah Gurman (New York: The New Press,2013), 186-187; Anand Gopal, No Good MenAmong the Living: America, The Taliban andthe War Through Afghan Eyes (New York:Metropolitan Books, 2014).

21 See Robert Jay Lifton, Home From War:Vietnam Veterans Neither Victims NorExecutioners (New York: Simon & Schuster,1973); Winter Soldier (Millarium Zero andWinterfilm in Association with VietnamVeterans Against the War, 1972); ChrisHedges, War is a Force That Gives us Meaning(New York: Anchor Books, 2003).

22 Lifton, Home From War, 109.

23 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs andConsequences of the American Empire (NewYork: Metropolitan Books, 2002); William Blum,Killing Hope: CIA and US Military InterventionsSince World War II (Monroe, ME: CommonCourage Press, 1998); John Tirman, The Deathsof Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’sWars (New York: Oxford University Press,2011). On deception, see Peter Dale Scott,American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIAGlobal Drug Connection, and the Road toAfghanistan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield,2011).

24Michael Ignatieff, The Warriors’ Honor:Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (NewYork: Metropolitan Books, 1997). See alsoIgnatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys intothe New Nationalism (New York: Farrar,Strauss & Giroux, 1995).

25Ignatieff, The Warriors’ Honor, 94.

26Michael Ignatieff, “The American Empire: The

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

20

Burden,” New York Review of Books, January 5,2003.

27 For a critical view of Ignatieff’s career, seeDerrick O’Keefe, Michael Ignatieff, The LesserEvil? (London: Verso, 2011); Neda Atanasoski,Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deploymentof Diversity (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2013), and Jeanne Morefield,Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-AmericanDecline and the Politics of Deflection (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2014).

28 See Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire:Western Footprints and America’s PerilousPath in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press,2005); Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: U.S.War Crimes in the Gulf (New York: Thunder’sMouth Press, 1992). On Ignatieff’s support fortorture in the War on Terror, see his book, TheLesser Evil: Politics and Ethics in an Age ofTerror (Princeton: University of PrincetonPress, 2004).

29 On Somalia, see Mohammed Diriye Abdullahi,“In the Name of the Cold War: How the WestAided and Abetted the Barre Dictatorship ofSomalia,” in Genocide, War Crimes, and theWest: History and Complicity, ed. Adam Jones(London: Zed Books, 2004), 241–60, and on theBlack Hawk Down fiasco and war crimes, MarkBowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of ModernWar (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999),10; Alex de Waal, “US War Crimes in Somalia,”New Left Review, July-August, 1998; MohamedDiriye Abdullahi, Fiasco in Somalia: U.S.-U.N.Intervention (Pretoria: Africa Institute of SouthAfrica, 1995); Seybolt, Humanitarian MilitaryIntervention, 59. The numbers killed wereprobably more than the lives saved in faminerelief operations. Thousands more werewounded.

3 0 David N. Gibbs, “Realpol i t ick andHumanitarian Intervention: The Case ofSomalia,” International Politics, March 2000.

31 Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and

Beyond (New York: Viking, 2000). See as acounterpart, David Rieff, Slaughterhouse:Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York:Touchstone, 1996); Roy Gutman, A Witness toGenocide (New York: Element Books, 1993).

3 2 D a v i d G i b b s , F i r s t D o N o H a r m :Humanitarian Intervention and the Destructionof Yugoslavia (Vanderbilt University Press,2009).

33 Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 164; Hedges, Waris a Force that Gives us Meaning, 70; John R.Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qaida, andthe Rise of Global Jihad (Zenith Press, 2007).Tony Blair’s former Cabinet Minister MichaelMeacher noted: “For nearly a decade the UShelped Islamist insurgents linked to Chechnya,Iran and Saudi Arabia destabilize formerYugoslavia.”

34 Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and NowLibya: The Human Costs of Washington’sOngoing Collusion with Terrorists,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 9, Issue 31, August 2011;Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 67, 111, 115, 129;Schindler, Unholy Terror; Peter Singer,Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the PrivateMilitary Industry (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 2007), 126; Edward S. Herman andDavid Peterson, The Politics of Genocide,foreword by Noam Chomsky (New York:Monthly Review Press, 2010).

3 5 Robert Fisk, “Serbs Murdered by theHundred since ‘Liberation,’” The Independent,November 24, 1999; Degraded Capability: TheMedia and the Kosovo Crisis, ed. PhilipHammond and Edward S. Herman (London:Pluto Press, 2000), 203.

36Gibbs, First Do No Harm; Peter Dale Scott,American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIAGlobal Drug Connection and the Road toAfghanistan (New York: Rowman andLittlefield, 2011); Paul Lewis, “Report IDsHashim Thaci as Big Fish in Organized Crime,”Guardian, January 24, 2001; Peter Klebnikov,

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

21

“ H e r o i n H e r o e s , ” M o t h e r J o n e s ,January/February 2000; Laughland, Travesty,21.

37Perry Anderson, “American Foreign Policyand Its Thinkers,” New Left Review ,September/October 2013.

38For a recent example, see Niall Ferguson,Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World(New York: Penguin, 2004). On Mill, see MarkTunick, “Tolerant Imperialism: John StuartMill’s Defense of British Rule in India,” Reviewof Politics 68 (2006), 586-611; and Morefield,Empires Without Imperialism.

39William A. Williams, The Tragedy of AmericanDiplomacy, 50th anniversary edition (New York:The New Press, 2009).

40Eg. Fred Cook, The Warfare State, forewordby Bertrand Russell (New York: McMillan,1962); Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism:The Political Economy of War (New York:McGraw Hill, 1970); Peter Dale Scott, The WarConspiracy (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972);Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin inSoutheast Asia, with Leonard P. Adams II andCathleen B. Read (New York: Harper, & Row,1972).

4 1 Car l Oglesby and R ichard Shaul l ,Containment and Change (New York: McMillan,1967); “The New Left and Empire” in DavidBarber, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why itFailed (University of Mississippi Press, 2008).

42Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars:Life under an Air War, rev. ed. (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

43James Peck, Ideal Illusions: How the USGovernment Coopted Human Rights (NewYork: Metropolitan Books, 2010). See alsoNoam Chomsky, “Visions of Righteousness,” inThe Vietnam War in American Culture, ed. JohnCarlos Rowe and Rick Berg (New York:Columbia University Press, 1991). The shift in

the Carter administration’s rhetoric andpriorities in the last two years and influence ofneoconservative lobbies in shaping this shift isskillfully detailed in Jerry Sanders, Peddlers ofCrisis: The Committee on the Present Dangerand the Politics of Containment (Boston: SouthEnd Press, 1983).

44John L. Gaddis, We Now Know: RethinkingCold War History (New York: Oxford, 1997). Onthe transformation of Jewish intellectuals who“made it” in America from l iberals toneoconservatives, see Benjamin Balint,Running Commentary: The ContentiousMagazine that Transformed the Jewish Left intothe Neoconservative Right (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010). The New Left was also accused,without merit, of being anti-Semitic afterpeople like Daniel Berrigan and Noam Chomskybegan voicing criticism of Israeli policies. SeeNoam Chomsky, “The Peace Movement and theMiddle East,” In Middle East Illusions (NewYork: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

45Perry Anderson, “American Foreign Policyand Its Thinkers,” New Left Review ,September-October 2013.

46C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York:Oxford University Press, 1956); AlexanderCockburn, A Colossal Wreck (London: Verso,2013), 348.

47Peck, Ideal Illusions.

48See Noam Chomsky, Failed States: the Abuseof Power and Assault on Democracy (New York:Metropolitan Books, 2006. On the carcerialstate, see Sasha Abramsky, American Furies:Crime, Punishment and Vengeance in the Ageof Mass Incarceration (Boston: Beacon Press,2008).

49Black intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois andPaul Robeson had long made the connection.See Noam Chomsky, The Year 501: TheConquest Continues (Boston: South End Press,1993); James W. Gibson, Warrior Dreams:

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

22

Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America(New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1994);Michael Moore, Bowling for Columbine (UnitedArtists, 2002) which points out that theColumbine killings and rise of right wing militiamovements coincided with the bombing ofKosovo and other violent foreign policies in the1990s.

50Francis Fukuyama, The End of History andthe Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1991);Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of HistoryAfter the Fall of Communism, ed. EllenSchrecker (New York: The New Press, 2004).

51 Thomas L. Friedman, “A Manifesto for theFast World,” New York Times Magazine, March28, 1999, 65. For a critique of Friedman, seeBelen Fernandez, The Imperial Messenger:Thomas L. Friedman at Work (London: Verso,2011).

52 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (NewYork: Basic Books, 1992); Jean Bethke Elshtained. Just War Theory (New York: NYU Press,1991). For an intellectual statement in supportof the War on Terror, see “What We’re FightingF o r ”(http://www.propositiononline.com/html/fighting_for.html) February 2002.

53 Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A JourneyThroughout History (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1993); Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy”The Atlantic, December 1994; Imperial Grunts:On the Ground with the American Military,from Mongolia, to the Philippines to Iraq andBeyond (New York: Vintage, 2006). Forinsightful analysis of Kaplan’s work and itsimpact, see Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence,66-67.

54 Samantha Power, “How to Kill a Country:Turning a Breadbasket into a Basket case inTen Easy Steps – The Robert Mugabe Way,”The Atlantic, December 1, 2003 which blamed“limited western intervention” for contributingto the country’s catastrophe. She indicts Robert

Mugabe for turning a breadbasket into abasket-case, though failed to discuss the deepsocial divisions bred by colonial rule thatcontributed to the post-colonial violence underMugabe, the effect of Western sanctions thatshe herself championed and wide inequalitiesthat resulted in support for Mugabe’s landreform and seizure pol ic ies among aconsiderable percentage of the population. Formore sophisticated analysis, see MahmoodMamdani, “Lessons of Zimbabwe” LondonReview of Books (December 2008).

55 Samantha Power, “A Problem From Hell:”America in the Age of Genocide (New York:Basic Books, 2002).

56 Celestine Bohlen, “On a Mission to Shine aSpotlight on Genocide,” New York Times,February 5, 2003, E1; Stephen Wertheim, “ASolution From Hell: The United States and theRise of Humanitarian Interventionism,1991-2003,” Journal of Genocide Research, 12(304); September-December 2010, 163. Evenpublications on the progressive-left sang itspraises and the book is often used in collegecourses today.

57 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Still Crusading, butNow on the Inside,” New York Times, March29, 2011.

58 See Mahmood Mamdani, “Responsibility toProtect or Right to Punish,” in CriticalPerspectives on the Responsibility to Protect,ed. Cunliffe, 125-139; Herman and Peterson,The Politics of Genocide.

59 See e.g. Hans Morgenthau et al. Politicsamong Nations, rev ed. (New York: McGrawHill, 2005); John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedyof Great Power Politics (New York: Norton,2014); Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State(New York: Pantheon, 1973).

6 0 See Walter Hixson, American SettlerColonialism: A History (New York: PalgraveMcMillan, 2013); Ward Churchill, A Little

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

23

Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial inthe Americas, 1492-Present (San Francisco:City Light Books, 2001).

61 See Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government:Race, Empire, the United States and thePhilippines (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 2006); Hans Schmidt, TheUnited States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934,rev ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UniversityPress, 1995).

6 2 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game ofGenocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and theDestruction of the Ottoman Armenians (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert L.Daniel, “The Armenian Question and AmericanTurkish Relations, 1914-1927,” MississippiValley Historical Review, 46, 2 (September1959), 254; Guenter Lewy, The ArmenianMassacres in Ottoman Turkey: A DisputedGenocide (Salt Lake City: University of UtahPress, 2005), 116; Herbert Adams Gibbon,“Armenia in the World War,” (ArmenianCommittee Opposed to the Lausanne Treaty,1926). Col. John Price Jackson said that “hadArmenian fighting men not done their duty soheroically at a critical place and time, the warmost likely would have lasted another year,with the result that our losses in men andmoney would have been twice greater.” TurkishGen. Ihsan Pasha said: “Had it not been for theArmenians, we would have conquered theCaucuses.” The Armenians were also creditedwith assisting British Gen. Edmund Allenby’scampaigns in Palestine.

63 Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in OttomanTurkey, 251. See also Raymond Kevorkian, TheArmenian Genocide: A Complete History(London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Michael M. Gunter,‘What is Genocide? The Armenian Case,”Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2013), 37-46;Gunter, Armenian History and the Question ofGenocide (New York: Palgrave McMillan,2011); A Question of Genocide: Armenians andthe Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire,

ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Muge Goçekand Norman M. Naimark (New York: OxfordUniversity Press,, 2011), 9. There is noscholarly consensus that the term genocide isappropriate, and no premeditated plan has everbeen found in archives. Turkish documents,historian Bernard Lewis noted “prove an intentto banish but not to exterminate.”

64 Gunter, Armenian History and the Questionof Genocide, 15-16.

65 Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in OttomanTurkey, 116.

6 6 Henry Morgenthau , AmbassadorMorgenthau’s Story (New York: Doubleday,1918); Heath W. Lowry, The Story BehindAmbassador Morgenthau’s Story (Istanbul: ISISPress, 1990), 2. Morgenthau was a real estatebroker who served as finance committeechairman for Wilson’s 1912 presidentialcampaign. His book was widely publicized, soldwell and there were even plans to turn it into aHollywood movie. For more on Morgenthau,see Henry Morgenthau, with French Strother,All in a Lifetime (New York: Doubleday, 1922).

67 Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory:America in World War I (New York: BasicBooks, 2003), 374. Historians reviewing theevidence have determined that Morgenthauwas lying. As Fleming points out, in the earlymonths of the war, Germany was trying toconvince the United States that hostilities hadbeen forced on it. Wagenheim would havenever thus boasted to an American official thatprecisely the opposite was true. StateDepartment fi les show no report fromMorgenthau of his conversation withWagenheim who conveniently died in 1915. Ifsuch an exchange had taken place, Morgenthaushould have (and would have) instantlyinformed the government.

68Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’sStory, 168, 251; Lowry, The Story BehindAmbassador Morgenthau’s Story; Lewy, The

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

24

Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, 140,141. Morgenthau’s book coincided with Britishpropaganda written by Arnold Toynbee andLord James Bryce, who was also responsible forspreading stories about German rapes inBelgium. Lowry and Lewy scrutinizedMorgenthau’s diaries and found documentspointing to the hidden motives underlying thebooks’ publication. Ronald Grigor Suny,Charles Tilly professor of political science atthe University of Michigan attempts torehabilitate Morgenthau’s reputation withouthaving consulted his papers.

69 “Morgenthau for Turkish Mandate: LaunchesAppeal for US to Take Over Constantinople,Armenia and Anatolia: Thinks Allies Deserve It:Britain Would Grant Equal Rights to Strait ofGibraltar,” New York Times, October 18, 1919,1; Henry Morgenthau, “Mandates or War?World peace Held to be Menaced Unless theUnited States Assumes Control of the Sultan’sFormer Dominions,” New York Times ,November 9, 1919, SM1. Morgenthaucharacterized the Turks as “the habitualcriminal of history” ruling over the “mostrevolting tyranny that history has ever known”and wrote that “we cannot hope sanely forpeace unless America reestablishes atConstantinople a center from which democraticprinciples shall radiate and illuminate that darkregion of the world.”

70 Lowry, The Story Behind AmbassadorMorgenthau’s Story, 62, 63; Lord Bryce quotedin Gunter, Armenian History and the Questionof Genocide, 4. See also George A. Schreiner,“Armenia’s Red Caravan of Sorrow” in FromBerlin to Baghdad: Behind the Scenes in theNear East (New York: Harper & Brothers,1918), 183-214; George A. Schreiner, The CraftSinister: A Diplomatico-Political History of theGreat War and Its Causes (G. Albert Gayer,1920), 110-136. Schreiner wrote a letter toMorgenthau stating: “In the interest of truth,you saw little of the cruelty you fasten upon theTurks. Besides that, you have killed more

Armenians than ever lived in the districts of theuprisings. The fate of those people was sadenough without having to be exaggerated asyou have done. I have probably seen more ofthe Armenian affair than all Armenian attachesof the American embassy together…If we are totake for granted that we of the West are saints,then no Turk is any good…..Of diplomaticevents on the Bosphorus, more will be heard ass o o n a s I c a n g e t m y n o t e s a n ddocuments…Being a newspaper man instead ofa diplomat, I must be careful in what I say.”

71 Examples that come to mind include theHmong in Laos, Miskito Indians in Nicaragua,Tibetans and Kurds. With the Armenians therewas little moral outcry when the Kemalist statecarried out a renewed wave of pogroms in themid 1920s because by that point the US had re-established strong diplomatic relations withAnkara. See Bloxham, The Great Game ofGenocide; Roger Trask, The United StatesResponse to Turkish Nationalism and Reform,1914-1939 (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1971).

72 Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America inWorld War I, 307; Adam Hochschild, To End allWars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion,1914-1918 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011);Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, rev ed.(New York: Bantam Books, 1970).

73 For refutation of this charge, see Fleming,The Illusion of Victory, 494-95. On governmentpropaganda in World War I, see Stewart HalseyRoss, Propaganda for War: How the UnitedStates Was Conditioned to Fight the Great Warof 1914-1918 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996).

74 See David Schmitz, Thank God They’re onOur Side: The United States and Right WingDictatorship, 1921-1965 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1999);Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy,1922-1940, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2009); Stephen Kinzer,

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

25

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dullesand Their Secret World War (New York: TimesBooks 2013); Antony Sutton, Wall Street andHitler (New York: GSG & Associates, 1976).

75 See Norman G. Finkelstein, The HolocaustIndustry: Reflections on the Exploitation ofJewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2003).Finkelstein also details the exploitation ofJewish suffering by Jewish organizationsdemanding victim compensation, whose leadersfleeced the survivors.

76 See Hun Joon Kim, The Massacres at Mt.Halla: Sixty years of Truth Seeking in SouthKorea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014),16; Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the KoreanWar, Vol II: The Roaring of the Cataract,1947-1950, rev ed. (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 2004), 250-259. The Truth commissionfound the South Korean mil i tary andparamilitary youth gangs responsible for 88percent of atrocities, with at least 30,000killed. Tens of thousands more were killed afterconstabulary regiments in Yeosu mutinied,refusing orders to “murder the people of Cheju-do fighting against imperialist policy.”

77 See John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006);Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns(Stanford University Press, 2008); George McT.Kahin and Audrey Kahin, Subversion as ForeignPolicy: The Secret Eisenhower and DullesDebacle in Indonesia (New York: New Press,1995); Bradley R. Simpson, Economists withGuns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Palo Alto:Stanford University Press, 2008); WayneMadsen, The Manufacturing of a President: TheCIAs Insertion of Barrack Obama Jr. Into theWhite House (self-published, 2012); KathyKadane, “Ex-Agents Say CIA Compiled DeathLists for Indonesia, San Francisco Examiner,May 20, 1990; Peter Dale Scott, “The UnitedStates and the Overthrow of Sukarno,” PacificAffairs , 58 (Summer 1985). Based on

confidential sources, Madsen posits thatSoetoro, a Lieutenant-Colonel was recalledfrom a CIA-Pentagon sponsored program at theUniversity of Hawaii prior to Suharto’s coupand later participated in a bloody crackdown ona secessionist movement in West Papua. Ratherthan being a hippie ignorant of Suharto’scrimes as Obama depicts it in his memoir,Obama’s mother Ann Dunham allegedly workedfor the CIA gathering political information onJavanese villagers under the OperationPROSYMS. These allegations appear to havemerit, though are impossible to corroborateunless more information comes to light. Thebook proves at the very least that Obama lied inhis memoir about his mother’s knowledge ofthe genocide, as it was reported in themainstream media at the time, favorably.

78 CIA Director of Intelligence, “Indonesia:Prospects for Economic Stability,” Papers ofLBJ, NSF, Country File, July 1968, box 249, LBJLibrary, Austin Texas. See also Gabriel Kolko,Confronting the Third World (New York:Pantheon, 1989), 182; Noam Chomsky andEdward S. Herman, The Political Economy ofHuman Rights: The Washington Connectionand Third World Fascism (Boston: South EndPress, 1979), 154, 155.

79 Blum, Killing Hope, 197, 198. Obama revivedtraining of units responsible for human rightscrimes as part of his “tilt to Asia” strategy.

80 See Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: TheU.S., Latin America and the Rise of the NewImperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books,2006); Chase Mader, “Samantha Power and theW e a p o n i z a t i o n o f H u m a n R i g h t s , ”Counterpunch, June 6, 2013. On Gramajo’sexploits, see Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide:The United States in Latin America and theStruggle for Peace (Montreal: Black RoseBooks, 1987).

81 Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: TheReal American War in Vietnam (New York:

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

26

Metropolitan Books, 2013). See also BerndGreiner, War without Fronts (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2009); Deborah Nelson, TheWar Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confrontthe Truth About U.S. War Crimes (New York:Basic Books, 2008). Earlier works by anti-waractivists also chronicled the wide scale ofatrocity. See eg. Edward S. Herman, Atrocitiesin Vietnam: Myths and Realities (Boston:Pilgrim Press, 1970) and it is also detailed inthe memoirs of soldiers.

82 Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman,Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economyof the Mass Media , rev ed. (New York:Pantheon Books, 2002), 183; Bernard Fall, LastReflections on a War (New York: Doubleday,1967); James W. Gibson, The Perfect War:Technowar in Vietnam (Atlantic Monthly Press,1986), 225.

83 Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, “Bombs OverCambodia: New Light on US Air War,” JapanFocus, May 12, 2007; Kimmo Kiljunen ed.Kampuchea: Decade of Genocide: Report of theFinish Inquiry Commission (London: Zed Books,1984); Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman,After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and theReconstruction of Imperial Ideology (Boston:South End Press, 1979); Ben Kiernan, How PolPot Came to Power, rev ed. (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2004).

84 Power, “A Problem From Hell,” 148, 149.Aprofessor in the school of Oriental studies atthe University of London who had co-writtenimportant studies of US intervention inCambodia and Indonesia, Caldwell wasprobably murdered by Khmer Rouge cadreswho didn’t want the story of their abusesgetting out to the international left. It remainsin question if Caldwell remained an apologistfor the Khmer Rouge, or as his brothersuggests, he had begun to revise his originalenthusiasm for the revolution they had led.Even if he was an unreconstructed Maoist, whyis Power bent on referring to Caldwell is an

“ideologue” and not neo-Reaganites forexample who willfully sponsored genocidal orquasi-genocidal regimes promoting a marketfundamentalist ideology and in many casesremain proud of doing so?

85 Clark, The Fire This Time, 68; BartonGellman, “US Bombs Missed 70% of the Time,”Washington Post, March 16, 1991, A1; RobertFisk, The Great War for Civilization: TheConquest of the Middle East (New York: AlfredKnopf, 2006).

86 See the volume Iraq Under Siege: The DeadlyImpact of Sanctions and War, ed. AnthonyArnove (Boston: South End Press 2003).

8 7 Mader , “Samantha Power and theWeaponization of Human Rights.”

8 8 For deconstruction of this myth anddiscussion of its political ramifications, seeRobin Philpot, Rwanda and the New Scramblefor Africa: From Tragedy to Useful ImperialFiction (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2013).

89 Philip Gourevitch, ‘We Wish to Inform Youthat Tomorrow You Will be Killed:’ Stories fromRwanda (New York: Harper, 1998). Gourevitchwas married to a top State Department stafferand was a good friend of Kagame.

90 Hazel Cameron, Britain’s Hidden Role in theRwandan Genocide: the Cat’s Paw (London:Routeledge, 2013), 126; Christopher Black,“The Dallaire Genocide Fax: A Fabrication,”(http://www.sandersresearch.com) December 7,2005. The source of the information on thisalleged extermination plot, AbubakarTuratsinze, “AKA” Jean Pierre, was a defectorfrom Habyarimana’s MRND party of dubiousreliability. According to another study byChristian Davenport and Allen Stamm, censusfigures show there were only 600,000 Tutsi inthe whole country and at least 300,000 are saidto have survived. Power’s numbers are thusinflated. Michael McGehee, “New York TimesCoverage of the 20 th Anniversary of the

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

27

Rwandan Genocide,” New York TimesExaminer , February 4, 2014.

91 See Mahmood Mamdani, When VictimsBecome Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, andGenocide in Rwanda (New Jersey: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001).

92 Cameron, Britain`s Hidden Role in theRwanda Genocide, 80; Herman and Peterson,The Politics of Genocide; Wayne Madsen,Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa,1993-1999 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1999);Ellen Ray, “US Military and CorporateRecolonization of the Congo,” Covert ActionQuarterly (Spring-Summer 2000); BoutrosBoutros-Ghali, Unvanquished: A US-UN Saga(New York : Random House , 1999 ) ,129-141.According to Boutros-Ghali, the US is“100 percent responsible for the genocide.” OnCIA support for Habyarimana, see JeremyKuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: PoliceTraining and Nation Building in the AmericanCentury (Amherst, MA: University ofMassachusetts Press, 2012), ch. 8.

93 Marie Beatrice Umutesi, Surviving theSlaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee inZaire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,2004); Madsen, Genocide and CovertOperations in Africa, 1993-1999); GérardPrunier, Africa’s World War (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2009). Prunier had theintegrity to admit that he promoted an overlyromanticized view of the RPF in his first book(The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide.Columbia University Press, 1997).

94 See Nick Turse, The Complex: How theMilitary Invades Our Everyday Lives (NewYork: Metropolitan Books, 2009).

95 Samantha Power, “Dying in Darfur: Can theEthnic Cleansing in Sudan be Stopped?” NewYorker, August 30, 2004. For critical analysis ofthe Save Darfur movement, see MahmoodMamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur,Politics, and the War on Terror (New York:

Pantheon, 2009). Power also championedcovert intervention in Zimbabwe followingRobert Mugabe’s intervention in the Congowar. However, she did not call for similarsanctions against Rwanda or Uganda whocaused the war and looted the country’smineral wealth far more systematically (bothregimes also repressed domestic dissent).

96 See Adam Branch, Displacing Human Rights:War and Intervention in Northern Uganda(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011);Mamdani, “Responsibility to Protect or Right toPunish?” In Critical Perspectives on theResponsibility to Protect, ed. Cunliffe, 130-131.On domestic repression and record numbers ofjournalists imprisoned under Museveni, seeOlive Kobusingye, The Correct Line? UgandaUnder Museveni (New York: Authorhouse,2010). For the double-standards of US rhetoricand policy in sub-Saharan Africa, see alsoSteven Fake and Kevin Funk, The Scramble forAfrica: Darfur – Intervention and the US(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2008).

97 See Mark Mazetti, The Way of the Knife: TheCIA, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends ofthe Earth (New York: Penguin, 2013), 148-149;Scahill, Dirty Wars, 127, 128; Keith HarmonS n o w , “ S t a t e T e r r o r i n E t h i o p i a , ”(http://zcomm.org/zmagazine/state-terror-in-ethiopia-by-keith-harmon-snow/) Z Magazine, June1, 2004.

98 Tom Hayden, “Samantha Power Goes toWar,” The Nation, March 30, 2011.

99 Samantha Power, “Our War on Terror,” NewYork Times, July 29, 2007.

100 For a critical assessment of the armycounterinsurgency manual that draws onhistorical parallels, see Hearts and Minds: APeople’s History of Counterinsurgency, ed.Hannah Gurman (New York: The New Press,2013).

101 L. Michael Hager, “Double Standards? Panel

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

28

Cites US Human Rights Treaty Breaks,”(http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/22803-double-standards-panel-cites-us-human-rights-treaty-breaches) Truthout, March 31, 2014;N ick Turse , “The Terror D iaspora :(http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175714/nick_turse_blowback_central)The U.S. Military andt h e U n r a v e l i n g o f A f r i c a , ”(http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175714/nick_turse_blowback_central) June 18, 2013. Thebrutality of the Nigerian military, financed andtrained for years by the US, has been key to thegrowing extremism of Boko Haram littleconsidered in media discussion following theschoolgirl kidnapping. The crisis theredemands a public commitment to eradicatingpoverty and corruption underlying thealienation of Muslim youth, not furthermilitarization. See Horace Campbell, “TheMenace of Boko Haram and Fundamentalism inN i g e r i a , ”(http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/30/the-menace-of-boko-haram-and-fundamentalism-in-nigeria/) May 30, 2014.

102 Colum Lynch, “Can Samantha Power Wage aWar on Atrocities in Central African Republic,”Foreign Policy, December 19, 2013; NickT u r s e , “(http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175818/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_american_proxy_wars_in_africa)Washington’s Back-to-the-FutureMilitary Policies in Africa: America’s NewModel for Expedi t ionary Warfare ,”(http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175818/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_american_proxy_wars_in_africa) March 13, 2014.

103 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Still Crusading, butNow on the Inside,” New York Times, March29, 2011. On the actual realities of Libya, seeMaximilan Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte:NATO’s War on Libya and Africa (Montreal:Baraka Books, 2012); The Illegal War on Libya,ed. Cynthia McKinney (Atlanta: Clarity Press,2012).

104 Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte; The IllegalWar on Libya, ed. Cynthia McKinney; PeterDale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya:The Human Costs of Washington’s OngoingCollusion with Terrorists,” The Asia-PacificJournal, Vol. 9, Issue 31, August 2011; PatrickCockburn, “Lawlessness and Ruin in Libya,”(http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/05/lawlessness-and-ruin-in-libya) September 5, 2013,Counterpunch.

105 Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte; The IllegalWar on Libya, ed. McKinney; C.J. Chivers, “InStrikes on Libya by NATO, an UnspokenCivilian Toll,” New York Times, December 17,2011.

1 0 6 See Ruth First, Libya: The ElusiveRevolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1974);Geoff Simmons, Libya and the West: FromIndependence to Lockerbie (London: I.B.Taurus, 2003); Blum, Killing Hope, 283. Libyanlife expectancy increased under Qaddafi from54 to 71.

107Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and JaneHunter, The Iran Contra Connection: SecretTeams and Covert Operations in the ReaganEra (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 215. Onthe 1986 bombing and its consequences, seeSeymour Hersh, “Target Qaddafi,” New YorkTimes Magazine, February 22, 1987; NoamChomsky, Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:International Terrorism in the Real World, reved. (Boston: South End Press, 2002), 92.

108 Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte; HoraceCampbell, Global NATO and the CatastrophicFailure in Libya (New York: Monthly ReviewPress, 2012); Peter Dale Scott, “AmericanPower and the Decline of the PetrodollarSystem,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 9, Issue18, May 2, 2011.

109 Vijay Prashad, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter(Oakland: AK Press, 2012).

110For neo-imperialist attitudes in Western

APJ | JF 11 | 24 | 1

29

culture, see Edward W. Said, Culture andImperialism (New York: Pantheon, 1993).

111Quoted in Barber, A Hard Rain Fell, 62.

112Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class

(New York: Nation Books, 2011). See alsoSheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated:Managed Democracy and the Specter ofInverted Totalitarianism (New Jersey: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2010).